Final Panels And Poster

Modelling the building.....

Further Modelling

Early Massing Ideas

I decided that it was time to start massing some ideas I had been having about this assignment. I started by making the basic shapes my building was going to encompass.

From here I started to add some structure, such as a truss system and a curtain wall. I had abandoned the idea of the folded skin as it was starting to obstruct the way I wanted the building to work. I had come up with the idea of having the building light up at night to allow the interiors to be shown and the folded skin was detrimental to this concept.

This is an interior shot of how the main space would look. The spaces would need to be placed higher or off to the sides in order to keep the perspective of the camera barrel.

Change of Site

After playing around with my buildings form, it became apparent that it was becoming hard to find a optimal balance between distance above the heritage building and underneath the bridge. One was constantly overpowering the other and I wasn't too happy about having the building in the same location as I was before.

I have therefore decided to return to the original location I had with the folie, and punch my building through the arches of the bridge. This will allow me to align my building with the bridge, and as the structures are so similar, have each one mirror each other.

The bridge is also useful in providing shade for the building, which is a necessity for photography as you want to limit harsh amounts of light in your photos. Not only this, but the arches of the bridge provide a natural frame for the building.

I am starting to wonder why I didn't just do this from the start as it is starting to make a lot more sense to me now as a building then it was just floating above the wharf buildings.

The only limitation this site contains is the narrowness of the arches, which will force my building to also be narrow as I want to have a continuous volume and not a narrow space at the end.

This building I found in an old student architecture book. It has clear links to the sort of building I want to produce. However, my building would need to be a scaled down version.

It can be seen to be a pure rectilinear structure with certain aspects which help to create a more trendy and exciting building.

Looking At Exemplars

This week I went back to look at some exemplars, but instead of looking at the typology of photography studios and galleries; I looked at the typology of cantilevered architecture .

From the exemplars it could be seen that the actual cantilevered section doesn't vary between projects but gains it character from its base constraints. This has shown me that the way in which the building is held up or attaches to the ground is very important and should not be overlooked for the purpose of the main building.

It could also be seen that quite a few of these exemplars wouldn't work on the site as they would block the main thoroughfare of Howard Smiths Wharves

This exercise has helped me to understand further how I want my building to change to a more defined building and the changes I need to make to make this happen.

While researching some buildings, I came across this building which has the same sorts of characteristics as my building. At least formally. This has a cantilevered section, however this building has two base supports instead of one, making it more structurally feasible. Also, the cantilever isn't as far as mine, making it easier to hold up.

This building is a proposed comic book museum in China, designed by MVRDV architects. While it differs to my building in many ways, I am mainly interested in the way in which their spaces all fit together. I particularly like the first image with the different levels which all flow into each other. They set up seperate spaces which are still connected to each other while the user has to pass through one to get to the other.