Moving on from mid-review

After meeting with Karl yesterday, I feel like the mid-review has now actually been completed and our group is much more certain of what steps need to be taken between now and the final review. Some of the criticisms of our project from the mid-review:

- Creating a more solid premise for placing the public programs on top of the light-seeking classrooms. For this, the reviewers suggested playing up the idea of our site as a "vibrant public space" that is easily accessible from the street, without having to travel through school spaces to get to our gym, library, etc.

-Look at our sections programmatically and see how we can relate them to each other. Also, creating more cohesive plans that read more clearly from floor to floor (and also since one of our purposes for the project is its construction advantages, the classrooms have to rely on each other for structure).

-Playing with wall/window thicknesses and materials

-Looking at where our public entrance is; is the west alley an ideal place for drop-off/pick up? Perhaps we should look at the space underneath the auditorium, which is lifted up and could provide a protective cantilever.




Yesterday, we presented Karl our work from the review as well as some work we had done over the weekend. One of the items we had was this diagram below, which explains a possible transition in where the main circulation will take place. This could include a skywalk of some sort that would span over our inner courtyard. Karl suggested unifying some of the elements in plan so that they didn't appear to be floating or placed by default, such as our egress stairs on both of the west corners. He also agreed with our assessment that we need to expand our exterior space, but this will be tricky to work out while keeping our classrooms at the minimum size. We'll see how that endeavor goes.




For the final review, we've started thinking about ways in which we can represent our building that will read the most clearly on the wall. For the mid-review, we only had plans, sections, the model and a few diagrams, but we know that renderings, more in-depth diagrams, and perhaps perspectival sections will be that much more helpful to the reviewers and anyone examining our project. We started practicing with V-Ray over the weekend, and now we feel that we know enough of it to make a decent rendering-- just enough to give the viewer a sense of our building at the human scale. Also, we know that having a clean Rhino model will go a long way in producing many informative drawings and diagrams, so that is something that we will strive for in the final push.

A bit of an update on the past week or so of our work:



This was our first physical model that attempted to place all of the public spaces (gym, auditorium, library, administrative center) on top of the classrooms. It was a model that the three of us attempted to work on simultaneously, which was both beneficial and difficult at different times in the process. We liked how we were able to achieve an upward sloping yet disconnected surface running from the southeast to the northwest corner, and using the shapes of the auditorium and gym to help dictate this. Also, we were happy with how the bigger buildings helped to insulate the carved-out exterior spaces against the surrounding trains. Some parts we weren't so happy with, such as the form of the southern facade and the snake-like path of the northwestern region. We also knew that we would have to open up some spaces for light wells once we began inserting program.

At our desk crit, Karl was happy with the folding form occurring on the eastern facade, and suggested we employ it more in order to begin discerning the public program on top from the classrooms and hallways below. He also suggested using the light well cut out of the building directly north of ours as some sort of formal inspiration or influence on our design. We set out to create model 2.0:



We were much happier with this version, and I think also just happy in general to be building on one idea. Previously we had been moving in all different directions, so it was good to start creating iterations of a similar theme. The idea of folding became more prevalent in this model, as we peeled the auditorium up off of the main floor to heighten the sense of separation in programs. The exterior space running through the middle of everything also became more defined in this version, and we think it might be a pretty successful and enjoyable outdoor area, given its environmental circumstances. The southern and northwestern regions became more refined as well when we started picking locations for particular light wells and considered how they would function programmatically. The drawbacks from this model were the symmetrical nature of the gym, which kind of just happened incidentally, and also a few formal details which Karl discussed with us at our desk crit on Thursday. Currently, we are working on some detailed plans and sections to help us hammer out some of the specifics of the program.

On another note, there have been a few projects I've found while browsing the internet which are somewhat relevant to the ideas we've been working through.


(Image from http://archidose.blogspot.com/2008/10/from-mirage-city-to-taekwondo-park.html)

This first one, a proposal for a cultural Taekwando center in Korea, is a very formally reciprocative project which responds to its surrounding landscape while carving out some unique interior spaces. I thought its sloping nature and the way it folds through the site were similar to the angled site we're envisioning, and also the way we've imagined our folds and twists as a response to the imposing urban Chicago site we're building on.



(Image from http://www.inhabitat.com/2009/10/13/acme-united-nations-memorial-space-inspired-by-cells/)

This is a rendering of a proposed building at the site of the United Nations Peace Park in Chungju, South Korea. It was only a contest entry and it didn't win, but I find its use of irregular hexagonal cells to be exciting. We've been looking at ways to change up the normal rectangular cells that are normally used in classrooms, but we don't want it to be an arbitrary move solely for the sake of creating new geometries. In this idea, the method seems to genuinely work, and the subtraction of cells makes for an interesting exterior space that weaves through the building.


(Image taken from http://designshrine.net/2008/06/26/ae5-folding-facades/)

This last image is a restaurant in Vienna, which makes the folding surface an active part of its form. It can either be a completely vertical glass window, or folded up to form an overhang for patrons outside. This variable functionality of the folding surface is something I think would be worth pursuing once we start getting into the details of our building, and it could make our structure much more dynamic and engaging to the public.

That's all for now, but once we finish our plans and sections and our slight re-design of the model in general, I'll post some more images.