Rebuilding the city - Design E03

By focusing an analysis on one special aspect of zurich, we should rebuild the city for the better.

The analysis proved the places by the mouth of the lake into the Limmat to be horribly disconnected from the lake by an immense amount of traffic.

Places and adjacent buildings

Trafficroutes

A Room - Pouring - Construction E04/05

The mid-semester exercise in construction, concluding the sequence from the hat over its plan to the room. The task was to chose between one of three major construction methods (pouring, framework construction and layering) and to transform the model of the last exercise into a new one regarding the limitations and qualities of the chosen method and solving the method-related problems (the connection between single bars in framework, the openings and edges in layering and the construction and de-construction of the mould in pouring). Every method also got some limitations, being the restricted length of the bars, the requirement of only using same-shaped building blocks and to be able to de-construct the mould withouth destroying it and without moving your model. My method of choice was pouring as I never did it befor and it sounded really intersting, because you are quite unlimited in terms of form and dimension of your model.

Membrane Structures - Strucutral Design E02

As our lecturer won't stop praising so called sexy structures I decided to not go after sheer functionality (as the first project in Structural Design did), but to exaggerate and to push the limitations of our tasks to design some really sexy structures. In case of this exercise we should create a membrane structure to span the park of the campus. We had the same wooden board from the last exercise and the demand to cover 20m² to 35m² (in scale 1:50). The membranes were replaced by nylonstockings.

Room Sequence - Design E02

This post will get quite heavy, as this Exercise was the first great and seriously criticized and went over the course of three weeks. It was worked in teams of two. We recieved three main tasks, divided into a submission on that day and a submission over the week. Each task was concluded by a criticue to review our thoughts, concepts and ideas.
The final submission should be a room sequence with special attention on the lighting, the number and dimension and the connection of the rooms. The first subtask was to wirte down a first coneptional idea, to scrible some sqetches and to manufacture one or more processmodells. Second task was to build a first greater and high quality modell and to documantate each room by taking a picture of. In the week to final submission we should refine or possibly rebuild the modell get better pictures and place them on a A0 layout for presentation as well as rewrite our conceptional text.
I will split my post into three main sections outlining the respective parts of this Exercise.

A Room - Construction E03

Following the construction manual of the hat in this exercise we could chose one of about 100 hats that were created and to transform that hat into a so called one-room ("Einraum"). The challange was to extract the constructional concept out of the chosen hat, chose a better suiting material (as the material of the hat was randomed) and build a room that gets its ports, windows and its generall form just from the one chosen concept. It is quite problematic to just stick to one idea and try to get every possible solution for the tasks. It seems so easy to just throw out an idea to solve the different problems on how to create a door, a window, walls and a roof. The real challange is to solve each and every problem out of your concept of construction.

A Hat - Construction Manual - Construction E02

Just a short post about the second Exercise in Construction. The task was to draw a construction manual on how to braid the hat. It proved to be terribly difficult to just imagine how to braid three strings of two rattanthreads in 2D and even more difficult to draw that out. The resulting manual in A1-format looks quite poor and I am not very satisfied (so was our assistant...) but I did not have enough time and energy to fully think and draw out every thread so I just drew them as lines (cheap, I know). Also for the untrained drawer it seems to be quite challanging to sqetch the hat as a whole.

Perhaps on a side note some words on the name of the hat. In lecture we heard about the similarities of hats and houses providing a protective covering from above (most houses do that from sides as well, though). And looking at our finished hat we had associations like airy, light, white, sky, and so on. So after throwing around random thing that came to our minds we finally chose Casa Blanca to be the name, for obvious reasons.

The Möbius strip - Art E01

In my opinion the most awesome and funny exercise I recieved so far was in art. We listened a short lecture about the Möbius strip (a thingy which has no distinction between  upside and downside face and only one edge but forming a ringlike object will transform your brain into some similar structure if you really try to understand it). The task was to take the Möbius strip and to think it one step farther and get some not yet known use, object or generel piece of art.

The Möbius strip beeing a two dimensional object that can only excist in three dimension as it twist in a way that is impossible in only two dimensions has a three dimensional counterpart the Klein bottle, which is basically a volume that is twisted in the fourth dimension to recieve an object that has no distinguishable in- or outside. To be able to understand that horrible wiggly thing you need to project it into three dimensional space where it can only be displayed with a selfintersection (in the fourth dimension it won't intersect).

Me and a fellow student did a quick brainstorm (I will write something about that subject soon as it is a very productive method of gathering and improving ideas) and produced a whole lot of ideas ranging from Möbius texts that end where they start, but twisted over Möbius videos wher the camera follows a Möbius strip to a Möbius projection of a closed ring-street section. We decided to go for a fourth option and went to lunch.