Reflection on the Crux

The Crux of the project results in a feeling of achievement and a sense of satisfaction. Neither of these could be attained at such a scale from a finished set of drawings, they can only be found when your knee deep in mud, the rain is pouring in buckets, the daylight fading and with your hands and a hammer you raise from the mud an elegant mass of timber and wether you beat one nail or 100 on this project it is yours.

The overall result is beautiful, even with its imperfections because in the mistakes are the lessons.

I realised that setting out is a subtle art that all builders must master, that timbers bend & bow and how to use these distortions to work into the design. I learned more about timber in 5 minutes with a gardener than I had previously known.

'In cambridge University(i think its cambridge??) there's a Library which is spanned with huge lengths of oak beams which had become infested with beetles.

Ateam of structural engineers was contracted to replace the oak but they couldnt figure out where the would get timbers lone enough and straight enough. So eventually one of the cambridge groundstaff approached them and brought them to a grove of 7 or so oak trees that were completely straight and were about 100ft tall and he said that the duty of growing these straight tree's had been passed down amongst the groundskeepers for exactly this purpose'

Trevor, Dundee Uni. Groundsman '10

Shelter Build

Soooo Aoife's design got selected for the american gardens which im delighted with because its beautiful, I actually helped her out a bit with her design before the final review so i was pretty familiar with her project before it was picked.Myself, Jess and Klara are project managers, Basically we help out with everything but im over design, jess is over funds and events and klara is over materials and we all come together when it comes to the actual build and it is STRESSFUL to say the least, still enjoyable but tough.

The toughest thing is trying to make sure that everyone has a job and nobodys left out and then when everyone is working and the barrage of questions comes on a range of different subjects, thats head wrecking. But its great experience and our group is just tremendous. Everyone is working really hard which is great cos i think our project is quite challenging, the site for one is really tough as its incredibly sloped, the scale of the building too is quite large.

Im really pleased with the actual detailing, its really neat and is going to look great i think. We've managed to realise aoife's design, make it buildable and well detailed and as much as possible reduce the materials and therefore cost.

The cost was a huge issue from the off. We knew because of the amount of timber necessary that it was going to cost around £1000. It took a little while for the fundraisers and sponsorship group to get going which is understandable but its more or less all sorted now.

The materials team have worked tirelessly even with me barking at them for materials constantly. Klara and her team priced really good treated and plained timbers for the project at a great price and as i said have put up with me demanding materials immediately.

The construction team has also been great and really helpful to me. They were straight away in the workshop working out details at 1:1 scale. we worked really well as a team in working out little problems. They understand perfectly the time constraints and have been working really quickly and accurately in conjunction with lyle who is really helpful.

We are relatively on schedule and hopefully next week we'll be all done!

http://cruxatbotanics.blogspot.com/

This place is perfect!

Is it just me or is Holland the most perfectly laid out country ever. My very first impression was that it reminded me a little of le corbusier's plans for paris with beautifully straight avenues all over the place. To say i enjoyed holland would be an understatement. I could definitely spend my year out working and studying there.Lets start with the boat trip though..... I love the sea, I love the idea that i cant fathom the depth underneath me, its an intriguing un-certainty and welcome fear. I also love that show Deadliest Catch. I would seriously consider spending a full season or two on a fishing boat, imagine what kind of person that would make you if you survived that.

Holland was a contrast to the harsh, un-predictable sea. Not to say that it was predictable but it seemed so organised and arranged, and i guess it is arranged, what with the land reclamation its basically a blank canvas. Almere simply was a bl

ank canvas for OMA. I found almere incredibly sterile thoug

h, although i admired the idea and some of the buildings i couldn't warm to it. It was like the idea, the masterplan was there and yeh that was a great idea, an Architects dream really to design an entire city from scratch. however the execution wasn't as perfect. Some of the buildings i felt were cheaply and badly finished, very plastic. I thought if a school was landed in the middle of it with a tonne of kids to come out and impose a bit of attitude on the place as only kids could, that might grunge it up slightly, make it look lived in.

Utrecht as well was quite neat, but more fairy tale like and delicate. All i could think of the whole time i was there was In bruges. I really did like Utrecht, the canals were beautiful.

The newer parts of amsterdam also seemed all perfectly laid out. My absolute favourite place was the canal houses where each one was different. That was just such a pleasant space and despite the fact that each house was different that place was truly perfect in my mind

Shelter

Finished my shelter review yesterday after a marathon of work over the weekend. Reasonably happy with what i had pinned up. I never really expected it would be shortlisted to be actually built but I was happy enough with my review, it was a nice productive review which is always nice.
My concept was based on ying yang. My thought was that ying yang is a symbol for balance, and the balance in nature. The botanical gardens with its conservational role identifies that people are in charge of the balance and are the caretakers of the natural world.

I used this quite literally with the ying yang symbol as my basic plan and worked a form from that plan.

As you can see from the 3d's the horizontal element created by the windows is lost by the materiality. While making a 1:20 model for this i decided it would be easier to place the plywood sheets vertically. However if i was to make this building with proper materials to last for a lenghty period of time i would clad it with some vertical h/w timbers which could create the vertical opes. I also would extend the vertical timbers to elongate and dramatise the form.

I might make a new model this week based on stuff that came up in the review

Research Retreat Review

My review didnt really go too well, BUT i really really was unhappy with what i had so i was kinda hoping that my building would have strips torn off it by the tutors. They really didnt like it, except my own tutor did, well he liked my fundamental idea so i had something to go forward with. The main thing they said was i didnt interact with the landscape, i kinda agreed! i guess when i explained to them what i was trying to do they kinda rolled with it and gave a lotta constructive criticism. Back to the drawing board me thinks!

Hospitalfield Site Analysis

Im not gonna write about the things on the site, like views and crap, cos somebody else will, there are no views anyway, unless you like a big huge mc donalds sign in the middle of your seascape, i was intrigued as you may have guessed from my blog by rabbits, i really cant explain why, i just got hung up on it, anyway. I went out to arbroath twice and the second time, well it was a much nicer day firstly, and it was a bit springy, nice snowdrops dotted around the place, and loadsa rabbit holes.

So i thought, its a retreat, and what better retreat than a rabbit hole, they go there for protection, utter removal from the world, the mystery of whats going on down there, sort of an alice in wonderland idea!

So i decided that my building would be literally a retreat, literally removed from the world. I had the idea in my head of burying it, and i was looking at these kinda precedents.

The last precedent is skara brae ancient colony on the orkney isles, that got me thinking about the sense of community that i could create within "the burrow"

Tower Project

For our tower project we were inspired by organic forms, responding to tentsmuir forest we decided to base the form and structure on organic elements like plant stalks and shells. We decided on trees, we basically just started paper macheing a tree one day on the courtyard, the weather was very nice for it, bit nippy! We looked at a structure which emulated the rings of a tree and which the paper mache would act as a rainscreen and be hung off, eventually we just decided on a massive concrete structure with the mache acting as a rainscreen which would represent some sort of rusted steel facade. The form created from the tree mould would create intricate intresting spaces and viewpoints as you circulate up around the tower......Best to just look at it, the sketchup model probably shows best what we were tryin to do.

a lil comic which i wrote, inspired by hospitalfield and watchin too many tim burton movies

We walk around edinburgh sometimes.

I gotta talk about the parliment first, and forgive me if this becomes a rant but im trying to figure out why i dont like it and i think this is why: Firstly lets start by saying i suppose that it is impressive looking and it is really well finished BUT from an architectural technologist point of view i think that what happened with this building was that the architect came up with his design and progressed it fairly far along and then unfortunately he died. However then i think the reverance to the architect took over and practicality was left at the door. Like no technologist or contractor looked at things like the weird supposedly curtain shaped panels on the external walls and said "hold on sec, is this practical and if its not well does it at least have a specific aesthetic intent??" which i dont think it does.

for instance, and i laughed at this, the tour guide said that there were loads of symbols and features of the building which nobody could interpret that were a "mystery" and im just thinking that this is a parliment building that stands for a nation. It should be readable and symbolise that nation easily. I dont know, there were some things i liked, the landscape features around the entrance were attractive, the lobby with the up-turned boat ceiling was really nice, there were a couple of nice hallways. The debating chambers roof has the most un-readable structure i think, i couldnt understand that at all.

To end on a positve note, i love edinburgh, i love just wandering around it, reminds me a little bit of dublin at home, but more kind of medieval and fairytale like.

Mediator Project

I think the general feeling that people took back from hospitalfield was one of eerieness and death, especially after the story that mr payne told us of all the dead lepers they found under the topsoil....like two truck loads of corpses or something. I was intrugued by that, and the dead rabbits, that really caught my attention i dont know why.

Our tutor group fairly struggled over a creative leap in the beggining, i myself was in a mind blank, felt very un-inspired. Our initial thought (probably like everyone else's) was that of an experience which was uncomfortable and played a lot with light. The shadows from the trees particularly inspired our ideas towards using light. I was really unhappy with this idea...i think so were the whole group. Struggling for inspiration i started looking at tim burton material funny little melancholy stories that were just black and white. (type in vincent tim burton to you tube)

So as a group we decided to move away from our first idea and we looked at a few things and ended up at some shadow play, like a mobil. ot mobile, whatever! a childs thing!

Then finally from this we progressed to playing with ink, and dropping it on canvas. Basically our idea was to drop ink from a height onto a canvas with objects on the way down to disperse the ink. The basic concept is that of time and un-predictability, which is supposed to reflect upon the history of hospitalfield and the eclectic nature of the actual building and the uncertainty of its future. it worked fairly well on the day, not a complete success but it was grand, everyone got the idea, i think??

Hospitalfield site visit.

cold, tired, damp and foggy! that was my first impression of hospitalfield. I didn't really find it that inspiring at all to be honest. There were some small parts of it which i liked. The twilight effect sunlight on the morning we were there was quite nice, especially in the lawn area surrounded by trees. The shadows cast were interesting. There were also some nice textures and intricacies to the materials used in the building and out-houses and how moss and other plants had started to inhabit it.

The dead rabbits around the place were the most curious thing about hospitalfield.