Monday, March 26, 2012

Initial Design Development

Once we got into our group and began discussing potential ideas for our folie design, we found it was quite difficult to get a strong concept going. We began by focusing on the "learning" part of the project. We found ourselves considering if we should focus on direct or passive learning, the one potentially being to boring of a way to consider the project and the other could have ended up not teaching the occupant anything if we lost focus during the design phase. After a while we decided it would be a better idea to decide what we wanted people to learn about before we considered the mode of delivery.

We thought about how during our walks around the city it just seemed like such a hectic place and that perhaps people needed to "learn to relax". This lead us to considering a how people could relax and how we could provide this space in the site given to us. Although, after consulting with one of the tutors we began to see this as a bit of a weak concept and began to explore different directions.

Eventually, after considering several options, we decided to focus on learning through the senses. After all, the site is full of potential for this kind of learning:
  • Sight: It over looks a large stretch of land and river (especially if you built out of the cliff or from the bridge).
  • Sound: You can hear the background noise of the CBD as well as the rumble of traffic from the bridge above.
  • Touch: There is alot of interesting textures around the site, from the steel of the Story Bridge, to the concrete walkways near the site and the old buildings within the site.
  • Taste/Smell: The city pretty much smells like the city, so we weren't going to focus on this sense to much, although its worth noting there was more of an earthy smell around the site (probably from the river and vegetation).
  • A sense of history: Although this doesn't really fall under this category the same way as the conventional senses do, we thought it was worth considering the kind of historic feeling you get from being near the site and being able to see the old bunker/buildings. As this is an older part of Brisbane we thought it would be well worth considering some aspect of it for our design.
Now that we had the basis for our design, we decided to gather examples of other sensory structures and do a bit of research as well as some rough sketches for our next meeting.

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