Today I created an underlying system of geometry for my building. It's based on a shape found in the collage, simplified and repeated and altered. I'm not 100 percent certain how I am going to use it in the building, but I think these may end up being floor plans.
Also, I decided to drop my second construction class. That gives me two more weeks at home, and more time to work on studio things. More sleep, too.
A lot of this quarter in studio has been focussed on methods for finding a form and an underlying structure for a building. I've been working on a series of pieces to that end: a "junk" sculpture, then some digital collages from photos of the sculpture, and now an attempt to turn those collages into a massing model of a building.
This is the collage (actually, a cropped out piece of a collage) I'm using.
I am designing layers of protection: an arcade, a windowed corridor, then a darkened, sacred inner sanctum. My building is a museum, but also a mausoleum, because it is a repository for discarded taxidermy (something I've been moderately upset about for many years).*
I want to building to have a sort of contemplative nature, one that makes you turn inward and think about how humans relate to nature, but I also want it to be kind of creepy and weird. So over the next few days I will be refining my plans and sections so I can make a flow through the building. Blah blah. Also, I will be thinking a lot about refrigeration units.
*I'm upset about the way people will just throw away the remains of those animals as if they were trash, not that taxidermy happens in the first place. I'm merely confused by the fact that taxidermy happens in the first place.
For research into our studio project, we went around town on Thursday looking at buildings under construction, and some wineries.
Our first stop was at a construction site, where they are putting together a series of office buildings out of tilt-up concrete. The theory with tilt-up is pretty simple: they cast the walls on the floor, then lift them up into place and bolt them together. It's perfectly good construction, and saves the cost and risk of building full-height forms. The thing about concrete buildings is that you end up building them twice: once in formwork and once in concrete. Tilt-up reduces the labour and materials because you don't have much formwork to build at all.
But how to connect the walls to the floor? The way it's done is like this: you can see that they left the floor a bit shy of the wall, and some rebar is arranged to come out of the wall and tie into the floor. Sometime soon they will place concrete in that hole and tie the building together. Although it was pretty well tied together when we were there, already.
Technorati Tags: construction, wineries
We had a little studio field trip today, first to visit the site for our final project, and then to a junkyard to get some things for the next phase of our work.
I'm usually not much of a junkyard person, having been trying to get rid of excess crap in recent years. But this one was very interesting, with piles of scrap and sorted bits and bobs.
Technorati Tags: design, model building, school
