10/01/09 Classrooms, Courtyards, and Lightwells

#.1

Our main concern was to maximize the sunlight on classrooms, creating lightwells between arrays of classrooms so that semi-public spaces underneath them could get decent amount of light as well.

#2.

It is one of the essential skill for architecture student to manage given time.

My thought is that due to the failure of managing time before review (Thinking and discussing for a long time but not executing models/diagrams in better manners), we (I) werent' able to convey the idea of project as a whole. By saying "as a whole", I meant we were still in quite conceptual status not considering enough about secondary matters in design. In a way we succeeded in arranging classrooms to get the greatest amount of sunlight, yet we haven't gotton any clarified suggestion of what circulations might be, how other public area could be arranged, and even how tall this school is going to be.

Ellie recommended me to look those cliff dwellings in Cappadocia, Turkey, to see how to adjust forms into its condition. Our school's monolithic array of classrooms stood out in too extreme way, as opposed to those Cappadocia dwellings carved out of nature. Public area in front of those classrooms should also be harmonized (not making stark difference at least).

It was good to think about the light and the location of entrance though. What I learned from other's presentation is that we also need to consider the light in very constant way. Sunlight is not a section but a gradiation, so it was good to point out that the building should be aware of this gradiant movement rather than thinking only by our shade sections.

In summary, we would have to improve

- How the actual building might work while keeping our concept

- Reconsideration of form

- Parts to whole relationship

- (additionally) clarifying each amount of natural light and artificial light

- (it's personal) presentation skill

09/27/09 a couple alternatives of program distribution

We have 3 issues(parameters) important on our site:
light/darkness, individual/shared, and time

Laura and I have been constructing diagrams- one for the relationship between light/darkness and individual/shared, another for relationship between light/darkness and time ( I think this is what Karl called "designing program", since we are defining programs in our own way).

Of all three important issues we are supposed to take light/darkness as our priority. ( guess it might be as same as the rest of the team) Yet we both agreed that we are putting as much light as possible into our school. And if so, I didn't think we need to worry too much about massing. In a way the building mass can be very similar to "mountain dwellings" in copenhagen. Thus how we can connect shared/individual space in such premise will give us our own specified design.

What I have been doing tonight was some sketches for the program distribution . In the sketch I marked all shared spaces as yellow while individual spaces are white. Light/darkness strategy is shown in the section in which the mass on north is relatively higer than south. shared/individual strategy is shown in diagram in the middle. I tried to make a reasonable connection between individual rooms and shared rooms. (For instance we need to make every student to get to courtyard easily, without having any student to cross other classrooms)

It's always hard to make fast progress from the beginning, yet it seems we could clarify ideas and design strategies faster as time goes by.