That was tough!! I definitely wasn't as prepared as I could have been. I realized I should have practiced what I was going to say beforehand - I mean I wrote an outline but that wasn't enough.
So from my notes, the issues I wrote down are the following:
- establishing a hierarchy
- owning the initial gestures/ lines from the diagrams
- determining program within the site
- hard vs soft edges
- Defining: transformative and flexible and then putting them in the driver's seat as I further develop my initial parti ideas
1 comment:
Kristin -
I'm transcribing here the notes I took during your presentation and comments, but also As I get into this writing, I expect to add in some more information.
I think overall you had a good site introduction, with time you should focus on concentrating it and polishing it into a quick explanation, but it remains key to all the things you are responding to in your architecture and therefore remains a focal point. Some items that you could add to your introduction and site information are the historical, topographical, and cultural points of interest in all the adjacent site neighborhoods. You also should explain how the Fishtown wall exists, and what it does architecturally as it is now in the site. Other Fishtown wall-esque elements are certainly the El, and the elevation at the old Kensington elevated section of track - while these may not be "walls" per se, they are the boundaries that limit the site, and leave it vacant and separated just as much as the Fishtown wall. You need to know all this information and present it concisely in your initial background information, some of this may very well be conveyed best by some simple drawings in the background that you can briefly mention.
This reminds me, you need a map locating your site in the city and the neighborhoods, indications of where north and where center city are, and titles and scales on all you drawings clearly labeled and in the same way on all drawings. This will speed up your presentation by not needing to answer these questions from jurors.
Overall I think you had a good site introduction but a poor introduction to the architecture and it's the architecture that is most important. The site information identifies the problem you are identifying, but the architecture is your suggested solutions, and therefore the problem only need be defined to the extent that you choose to work with it. What I'm saying is that the architectural solutions will indicate how big a slice of the problem pie you choose to cut for yourself.
And so I think this is much less a scale of urban planning but of real architectural solutions driven by the specific programs you've identified as needed in this place. It is absolutely time that you start putting program on the site and seeing how it interacts, and needs adjustment. Until then it's just playing with form with diagrams across the site.
General questions that the jury asked of you, and I wondered while listening in included:
1. How does the program activate the space?
2. How does the architecture reach into the community / center on the school?
3. How does the circulation function to enliven the deadness of the site / to draw one community into interactions or fruitful trespasses on the ground of their neighbors?
4. How does the existing infrastructure interact with the space? Poorly? Effectively? What needs to be altered? Removed? Or cannot be removed?
TERMS TERMS TERMS
You talked so much about the "TRANSFORMATIVE OBJECT" and yet I'm baffled BAFFLED why you have shied away from it in our past meetings, this term should take the fore front of your statement, because it is (from my understanding) your explicit intent when answering the question "Why this here?" You need to define this statement as well as giving indications of why this program is essential and what exactly it is, how the classrooms will work, etc. This is not done through words alone, as you did last semester in your research. It is now accomplished by applying that research in a meaningful form and interaction of programs.
For studying these interactions, I think your diagrams were good, but you limited yourself by experimenting with too few, too general, too generic diagrams, I think you deserve to really put in the hours trying out different ways of approaching program and site organization and layout.
Possible modes of study could be:
• Centralized
• Bridging scheme(s)
• Scheme which denies the edge
• Scheme which deny the center
• Scheme flung into the neighborhoods
• Reusing building masses
• Building all new masses
But I do know this; you will have a very hard time convincing me that extruding diagrams will be and architecture that will have the meaning you've laid out for yourself. I would stay away from extrusions, and I don't think we need to go over why.
Again more questions I have written down:
1. What does a high school need to have?
2. What does a community structure need to have on this site?
3. Where is the front?
4. What is the appropriate reaction to the EL?
5. Security issues vs. issues of openness?
6. Does this design happen with more satellite like program elements/buildings?
7. When is it useful to fit in? When is it useful to stand out?
8. Where do your diagram gestures come from and how do they develop?*
* I think there are a few possible risks you run with those diagrams -
1. They are massive, and therefore lack a human scale, large gestures are need here, but it may be inappropriate for the human scale to stick to them as absolutes as the design progresses.
2. They only exist in plan, and not in section, as they become sectional; I'm realizing that this scale of study is far too large for the personal touches a school and community building will need to have.
I fully intend on questioning you thoroughly on where and how these forms are arising and how they relate to the grain of your program and the surrounding city fabric. I think your process is working, and I believe the answer is in your following this process, however, there is MUCH work to do on your part to full explore this on larger scales, reacting and interacting with more issues, much more so than we saw last week.
See you Monday.
-Andrew
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