THE AWAKENING
- ESQUE
- Mar 17, 2019
- 3 min read
Updated: Mar 18, 2019
My final year of my diploma, last year, was an awakening for me. A slow opening of the eye after a slumber that had lasted forever, as if waking up from a coma. An amber glow of one piece of wood building up to an exhaling furnace ready to let out a roar from a beast healed from a mortal wound, ready to take its pound of flesh.
It took me many years to finally get a grasp on what design even is and I have my 3rd year lecturer to thank for that. Before this, design was just infinite whiteness spreading in all directions, with me in the center, like the hyperbolic time chamber in DragonballZ.
I took quickly to technical modules as I have a natural affinity to technical thinking, but design had - up until this point - been my Achilles Heel. Once I had a slight idea of how to design I invested all the time and energy I could muster into designing the project given to us.
The brief tasked us with choosing one of two sites in an Urban Residential setting where on the first site there was less space, a massive slope, and tall adjacent buildings; naturally presenting lighting problems. The second site was also on a sloping site but the actual site was flat and more spacious. This meant that it was not a matter of building in the vertical but articulating and integrating spaces in the horizontal plane. Both sites were corner sites.
The brief was to design an Artisanal Market, a Restaurant, and Apartments in the same precinct. So I set off with doing the site analysis and contextual analysis, precedent studies, and conceptual development. Each one being done over the course of a week. Our lecturer was basically teaching us how to sit, then how to crawl, stand up and then walk because we were clueless when it came to how to go about the design process. Our first and second lecturer is somewhat of a savant (you should watch him draw, his hand is and extension of his mind in the truest possible intended meaning of the phrase) and by extension we cannot understand his genius, He too finds it difficult, in my eyes at least, to impart the knowledge and skill he so effortlessly wields.
The market inherently craves a relationship with the street edge so it makes the most sense to place it along one or both of the street edges. That means it also gets to exploit the opportunity of the corner condition. The restaurant produces dirty air, needs a service alley, and all the while has an extroverted nature that needs to maintain a relationship with the market. But the apartments are an opposing force in the space because of the tenants' need for privacy and bipolar need for access to the very space they require access to.
Let me share with you some sheets from the product albeit is not the final product. Some parts of the presentation are not final and some are missing due to theft of my hard drive (an annoyance considering I had spent 6 straight weeks pulling all nighters every single day on this project). Last year I was developing my design conceptualization and I am happy with the progress I have made. This year I intend on working on post editing and presentation and I feel that will complete my design competence. Stay tuned for the rest of the post. I will post the second part as soon as I have access to the software necessary to get the images from:...
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