3rd year student work: project 02 INTERFACE

documentation of students work in progress....
images of student responses will follow the brief below

Project 02 March 2015
INTERFACE

HISTORY. MEANING. SIGNIFIER. SIGNIFIED

INTRODUCTION

The 2^nd project of this series extends directly from project 1. This brief intends to open investigation into ‘urban semiotics’; Semiotics - the study of signs and symbols and their use or interpretation in the making and expression of meaning. In an urban fabric - The study of ‘meaning’ in urban form as generated (framed/invented) by architecture, images and society. (…where ‘signifier’ is the expression and ‘signified’ the concept.)

 “Not only is the city an object which is perceived (and perhaps enjoyed) by millions of people of widely diverse class and character, but it is the product of many builders who are constantly modifying the structure for reasons of their own. While it may be stable in general outlines for some time, it is ever changing in detail. Only partial control can be exercised over its growth and form. There is no final result, only a continuous succession of phases.”

“The observer—with great adaptability and in the light of his own purposes—selects, organises, and endows with meaning what he sees.” (Kevin Lynch 1960)

This brief adopts these ideas as experimental, observational and representational processes toward generating an understanding and expression of a particular history (or story). And further to translate visual reflections, signs and concepts to a resultant architectural response. An urban ‘interface’ as surface and space, skin and void, sign and museum.

Your site and theory investigations in Project 1 uncovered multiple ‘Johannesburgs’ – stories of origin, hidden secrets, universal and personal – boundaries, barriers, blurs, gaps, thoroughfare, informal, permanence, transience, belonging and disillusion are all realities that have been observed. These conflicting scars of reality begin to tell the story of city and people, a clashing consequence of Johannesburg as a city of invention&industry, struggle&segregation, wealth&wasteland, re-invention&reality. These historical, current and ongoing conditions - complex architectural, urban, historical and socio-political clues and undertones - are what you are called to investigate, unpack and challenge in this project.

This project integrates all programme streams (D+T, R+R, PRAG) serving as a continuation of methods and processes for each (requirements and outcomes outlined below). 

Image: Perry Kulper; Fast twitch

PROJECT BRIEF
“We must consider not just the city as a thing in itself, but the city being perceived by its inhabitants.”
 “The observer himself should play an active role in perceiving the world and have a creative part in developing his image.” (Kevin Lynch 1960)

DESIGN+THEORY
Supporting this brief as an extension of project 2 a series INTERFACES have been identified in an around the site. Throughout the process of this project these selected interfaces should be considered as potential signifiers of a selected or constructed story. The interfaces are specified further on in this brief.

Students’ approaches must incorporate the previous design drivers (topography. topology) as influences to observation, design, representation and realization, engaging with the complex nature of a chosen selected site with an end focus to uncover and communicate history and meaning to (and through) the social and historical conditions of your specific context.

task one

DRAWING: The following list must be explored and executed as a literal list of drawings. You are required to produce a piece of work for each component described. For the purpose of this brief your understanding of ‘drawing’ must be expanded. Consider each drawing (and the process of image making) as an experimental investigation into achieving the expression/representation required.

- 1 - The interface as beacon/testimony situated in a matrix of; perceptions, realities, data, expressions, reactions.
one drawing and one montage

- 2 - The interface as a spatial expression of your/an archispeak term.
A drawing and a model

- 3 - The interface as:
- context
- person
- community/ies
- conflict
- opportunity
- history
- meaning
- skin + void
- place
- landscape (vertical)
Minimum 10 drawings

task two

REPRESENTATION and DESIGN: Your design challenge is to re-imagine an interface between street and site as museum and sign, a symbolic surface and kiosk of collected information. The re-imagining of the ‘edge’ will call for you to transform the divide as an interwoven image of the area, the signifier. Simultaneously you must deal with the ground plane and the invisible volume bound by pavement edge. In this space you are tasked to design a site-specific museum, the signified. This architecture should emerge from the re-reading, analysis, extraction and synthesis of spatial and tectonic concepts evolving in the series of drawings.

Your interface and surrounding components should respond to various realities in the area. The architecture should communicate the complex and diverse nature of this in some legible way (expressed spatially, tectonically or through information). Your interface and site extent should become a place and space that communicates through its experience at varying scales – person, people, neighbourhood, spine, city. Likewise your building programme can range from diverse to singular - refining the programmatic requirements to a more relevant and contextual response.

The outputs for this task are limited to five architectural artifacts:
- Ground floor plan - showing context, street, edges, existing and new architectural and urban landscape.
- Cross-section - showing ground plane space and place, street connection, re-imagined skin/edge.
- Street elevation – showing the re-imagined signifier imbedded in the immediate context.
- Axo – a semiotic expression contextually anchored - a composite layered representation of skin, space,
  content, context, threshold, tectonic… ALL CONSIDERATIONS IN PROCESS
- Process model - tracking explorations, analysis, representation, struggles, discoveries.

design requirements

Your design scheme must deal with the site and edge as a considered extent – addressing the ideas of edges and separation, connectivity, urban amenity, etc. The architectural programme should incorporate;

A museum and archive (information point)

A gathering space

A NEW PUBLIC function/service/opportunity

A parcel on a route

The programmatic ‘footprint’ must include the interior and sidewalk as a spatial and surface extension of the chosen interface.

Image: Chora; Main Plan of the Hoje Tasstrup new suburb city

REPRESENTATION+REALISATION

“The eyes are the window to the soul”
Anonymous

“Choose your corner, pick away at it carefully, intensely and to the best of your ability and that way you might change the world”
Charles Eames

As with project #1.3, you will be documenting the construction process for the resolution of your design project.  We will once again not only focus on the technical resolutions with regards to these connections, but how the technical resolutions reinforce the overall design concept.  We will again consider the technical and poetic resolutions, in terms of form, force, material and connection.

Please note that the act of detailing has a profound impact on design and you must engage with construction considerations during the design process.  While the R & R component of this project is only due after the design component has ‘ended’, it is critical that you engage with issues of construction and detailing, hand-in-hand with the design process.  Please do not attempt to deal with these issues separately.  Furthermore, after the design is ‘complete’, there will be time for you to explore the intricacies of your detailing.  This process will likely impact on the macro design, and you must demonstrate a willingness to constantly re-work and re-design.  This is a process to be embraced rather than resisted.

For this project, the focus of analysis will shift from ground and sky to corners and openings.   Ground and sky had a strong relationship to ‘topography/typology’, and similarly, corners and openings have a strong relationship to ‘urban semiotics’.  Openings deal with issues of permeability and inclusion / exclusion.  What is the relationship between inside and outside?  Who is granted access and how is that access controlled?  What else moves through openings (other than people)?  What are the poetic and technical issues that need to be resolved with regards to openings and the movement of elements through it.  Likewise, corners have a strong relationship to the urban fabric.  The city of Johannesburg was designed with small street blocks in order to maximize the number of street corners and therefore viable retail outlets.  As such, street corners are places of gathering, intersection and changes of direction.  How does the corner of a building relate to an urban corner?  What are the poetic and practical issues that need to be addressed and resolved at the corner of a building?  Note that a corner does not necessarily mean the corner of a wall, but can be defined as any junction involving a change of direction.  Likewise, an opening is not necessarily a window or door, but any puncture through a building envelope.

PRAGMATICS

This project continues your ‘module journal series’. You are required to maintain a weekly journal for each described course module, collected in the programme streams as follows:
Design and Theory = ATD, ATS, ALS,
Representation and Realisation = ATC, ATS, ACD
Pragmatics = ATG, ATO, ACD
Each programme stream lecturer will be adding further instruction towards journal for each week of the project.

The consistent development of journal content will allow the following considerations to emerge within your final project pin-up:

- Investigate the social-political history and meaning of the site through intensive, visually driven architecturally focused
  mapping. A focus on DRAWING as a thinking tool for exploration and representation.
- Document observations and distill data into visual communication of findings.

- Translate observations into workable concepts and tools for design.

- Develop a consistent visual language (brand/identity) through experimentation with drawing, montage, collage,
  photography, film et.al.
- Design a building – an expression of history, meaning and comment.
  A conversation with context, community and user – cultural, infrastructural, social, public and personal.

- Synthesise concepts dealing with the ‘signifier’ and ‘signified’.

DESIGN TOOLKIT

Your design toolkit will emerge through the development of drawing outputs as processes of analysis, discovery and experimentation as outlined in task 1 above.    
                                                                                                                             

SITES

RECOMMENDED READING
http://www.domusweb.it/en/architecture/2012/03/12/from-line-to-hyperreality.html
http://archinect.com/news/article/54767042/drawing-architecture-conversation-with-perry-kulper

Lynch K. The Image of the City. Harvard-MIT. 1960
Bacon E. Design of Cities. Penguin. 1976
Jacobs J. The Death and Life of Great American Cities. New York: Random House. 1993 [1961]
Allen E, Iano J. The Architect’s Studio Companion. John Wiley & Sons, Inc., New York. 2002
Bremner. Writing the City into Being: Essays on Johannesburg 1998-2008

Martin J. Murray, City of Extremes: The Spatial Politics of Johannesburg. Durham: Duke University Press, 2010. Juhani Pallassmaa. Eyes of the skin: Architecture and the Senses. 2005

Jimenez Lai. Citizens of No Place: An Architectural Graphic Novel. 2012

STUDENT WORK:

documentation of students work in progress....