With our readings, the one about the students multimedia mapping of their trip to uni and the consequential overlapping of one project with another creating "happy accidents" is one that you have to experience.
In this project we analysed the Owen G Glen building. I was particularly drawn to the sparse terrace space, which in my research is termed "public" space. There wasn't much "public" using the space. The space was also vast, intimidating and also felt sacred and untouchable with its perfect piece of raised grass.
With my design I wanted to make the space for accommodating for use and also make it "touchable" to make people be the activating element to the space, for give them permission to reclaim that space as their own. To do that, I modified the grass element into rolling terrain in order to break the flatness of the site. Grass also has a less formal feel to it, to get the feeling of park space.
In Second Life we HAD to co-operate. No ifs or buts about it. Dian and Jeffrey ended up working in the terrace space also. By working together our designs started to rely on the other to really make it strong. My terrain reacted to the presence of their ideas, sloping up to create drop offs defining the path of Jeffrey's and cutting out off at Dian's. I wanted to place grass on top of Dian's also but once again - time is not my friend...
The presence of their ideas strengthened my design in the way of breaking the space up. It defined small intimate pause areas for people to sit on the slopes and study or relax to their wish. Jeffrey's design incorporated the need for movement of students which try to get to their lectures while also to bring attention to how people are using the plaza space currently and thus encouraging people to move out onto the grass to pause rather than using the space as just a short cut. Lastly Dian's structures which ripped up the ground, became seats on the edge of my grass or a sheltered interior space for rainy days making the space able to be used rain or shine.
In the end our designs became one space with a obvious goal to encourage people to inhabit the plaza space more and to encourage the integration of all which pass this space.
Hey,
ReplyDeleteI really liked this project, and its nice to know that sculpties and starting with a sphere caused you as much frustration as they caused me. I think you did really well in creating a much more in habitable space in the OGGB courtyard area, using sculpties especially well to influence your design rather than sculpties appearing as an after thought or just being there for the sake of having one.
I think your A3 pages for this project are a lot more dynamic and interesting than your presentation pages for previous topics. Although, assuming the white 'lines' on your second page are supposed to be an overlayed plan, you need to use a thicker line weight and straighten all of the lines up a bit so that it is immediately obvious that it is a plan of the building.
In reading the personal statement on your page i was quite impressed with how concise and well explained it was, a huge improvement on your previous project, although maybe have a quick look at some of the grammer.
Otherwise I talked to you about your next project yesterday and thought you had made a really cool development from this project, so maybe just work on your A3 sheets for this project. You could get rid of the avatars in the snapshots and replace them with real people, and maybe photoshop the images a bit just to try and bring a stronger sense of reality into this project.
Hannah