WEEK 8

Site map presenting topography and outlines of building footprint that we are looking to engage with.

The red lines indicates the movements through site. The design proposal looks to engage with the four directions that users can intersect through our site. One from the underpass, one from the barrack wall, one from the old government house, and the last from the biology building. The red box outlines is the rough bubble diagram of where the design can occupy.

Note: This is our second proposal of the digital library after the first, planar design. This approach looks to solidify our ideas that we gathered from reading city of bits. The idea to isolate to create a realisation for the need for reconnection.

As our ideas for creating the flexible, free flowing planar library came to a halt. The readings of city of bits provided my group members new insights for creating a new digital library. For Noah, in our discussions, he was particularly interested in the idea of bringing people together, through the act of story telling and overall bridging people together. For Daniel, his interest leaned towards creating functional isolated zones that people could use. For that, I argued that in terms of inventiveness, it would seem like we had traveled back in time, where things used to begin in one space. I.e During prehistoric times or in old villages, people would have a storeroom which was isolated from the other buildings. But as time went on, we started to place things under a single roof for convenience. With that kind of trend, the contemporary spaces now are looking to blur boundaries and create flexible spaces. I thought the proposal could've been more interesting. Ethan had the idea of combining both elements in a sense, having an individual experience true isolation to realise the need for reconnection. Hence, moving forward, we combined both Daniel's and Noah's ideas under the function of Ethan's.

From there on out, the design was simple. A study chamber/pod, nine metres squared, and a park space above. Before we came to the design that we had now, the group proposed working with a large 4 storey terraformed library space. To me, the gesture of the terraform was unnecessary, it wasn't an aesthetical decision nor quite a functional one. The whole idea of submerging and isolating users and allowing them to gather in the immediate overground wouldn't work in that scenario. Since the building was 4 storey, logically it just wouldn't work out. I think they then proposed to have a crater and people would walk to the ampitheatre style crater to gather for story telling. After spending a long time explaining why it wasn't a strong idea and the potential flaws of that idea might have moving forward. We looped back to the original idea of submerging and surfacing users in a one storey underground space.

Snippets of iterative sketches that the group did on a long 5m+ roll (total)

Sketches show working through stages of generating an idea for the isolation -> divide scheme.

After deciding on the submerged single storey study pod library space, I started to look at how to organise them.

Through using a 3x3 cube as a single study pod, I looked at how to organise them around a courtyard. The intention of the courtyard was the open space that people could surface onto the ground level as well as providing light to the underground space.

I worked through 3 levels of courtyard organisations, a 4x4 (of 3x3 cubicals), a 3x3 and a 1x1 spacing.

The conclusion I received was that the courtyard spacing between 3-4 was a good number, anything below that would be too dense, unless we are trying to achieve that extremity. I found that having smaller courtyard means that we could fit more pods, i.e 3x3 courtyard could fit around 180 pods compared to 4x4's 128 pods.

Note: each organisation scheme was fitted into the previous bubble site outline diagram.

The not to scale plan shows the excavated region of our proposed intervention. The interest to engage with the underpass region.

After discussing the progress with my group members, Ethan noted that his intention of the study pods wasn't as large of a scale as I had explored. Instead he was looking at figures around 60-80 pods whilst Daniel was more interested in doing roughly 100. So, we compromised at 80.

The next exploration looked at spacing the pods in a fibonacci sequence. The idea of the fibonacci sequence spaces the pods furthest away from each from the courtyard and gradually gets denser towards the edges. This was done to emit light to the study pods at the edges. I played around with organising different levels of spacing from each other and creating offsets to balance the emission of light.

After figuring out the spacing sequence, I fitted the organisation back into the outlined footprint and started to generate the plan from there. However, while working through this plan, I found that the design was definitely lacking. It was too basic and extreme, thus lacked any design elements or aesthetical features. That's when I started playing around with the roof plan of the building, creating moments of porosity on the roofscape as a mode to let light into the underground space as well as creating a more interesting plan to look at. At this point, I felt that the plan was still too machinic and I started to cluster the pods to create a more "humanly environment" (its not), but it started to make the plan look more interesting?

It was definitely at this point that we figured, this extremity of the concept doesn't work either. We went from complete openness to an utter isolation, both tried to work on the extremes and both failed on the extremes. We ended up merging both ideas moving forward to the third scheme, learning to balance both extremities and basically going full circle.

We started to look at the older explorations of the planar schemes and took out the elements/components that worked to insert it into the new scheme. I was quite fond of the spinning door and the potential of the spinning doors.

The elevation drawing on the image below shows different thickness of the spinning planar doors and its conditions. With a door that's roughly 500mm thick, it would require two people in order to move it, 500mm and at 2300 height, it would require minimum of three people to move it. So, it was an interesting play of creating walls that only allowed a certain amount of people into a space.

With the third proposed scheme, we looked at RCR's Bell-lloc winery as a precedent, keeping the idea of sinking the library underground from the second proposed scheme.

Bell-loc Winery RCR

Bell-lloc Winery RCR

We were in a rush to produce drawingts of this third proposed scheme by tuesday, and it was 4 a.m tuesday when i was working on this drawing. I had started to fill the rooms with furnitures and populated the plan, but decided to remove it because it wasn't properly designed and chose to do a bubble diagram instead.

The plan shows our third proposed scheme that's significantly reduced in size. The realisation stemmed from working with very large proposals up to this point, I guess we asked ourselves why did we need such a large space in the first place. The readings of city of bits gives a good reasoning for shrinking the digital library due to the de-spatialisation from working with computers. The plan has four ramps arranged on two dominant street axis. The bottom ramp looks to engage through its diagonal gesture, with the underground passage and barrack walls. The roofscape of the digital library will be in line with the existing landscape, so a person would walk seamlessly from the existing footpaths onto a new greenspace that is met with our folly idea.

Section of the digital library done by Ethan C.

This project is still undergoing changes, but this is what we managed to achieve before our cross-crit.