Wednesday, April 6, 2011

Project 2: Contextual and Spatial Parameters: Folies to Buildings

Understanding Thresholds - Contextual and Spatial Parameters

Now that you have developed your concept, narrative and formalised them into a folie, you should have a good starting point to begin the next phase of this project. Revisit contextual, geographical and social issues you investigated in Project 1 again, identify key issues relevant to your theme and investigate further. The folie itself may cease to exist in your main project but the concept needs to be utilised.

During this stage, you are expected to gain a very good understanding of your group theme, site, users, relationships to surrounding areas and Brisbane as a whole as a subtropical city. This project will serve as a research and initial design proposal phase of your project. Please note, from now on, that your theme leader will provide specific requirements.

The aim of this stage is for you to define contextual parameters you will use to evaluate the conceptual relevance of your investigations. Parameters provide a means to identify your core interests and help you to focus your attention to specific issues you are to investigate. For example, your parameter can be set to work with shadows. Specific parameters relevant to shadows can be intensity, darkness, tone, temperature, etc. Or, it can be something more abstract such as connectivity. Parameters for this would be public transportation access level, wireless connectivity level, walk-abileity and cycle-ability level, etc. By identifying several good parameters with specific interests, you can begin to identify a clear goal of your project. In other words, they are something you will identify to limit the scope of what you are going to deal with for the rest of this semester. "Limit" in a sense that it will allow you to stop dealing with too many issues and get on with your own very specific interest. This has to be executed with rigour or it will simply limit your possibilities and outcome.

Please also remember that this phase is not for you to produce a set of generic site analysis - we know you can produce a standard set of site analysis and we do not need to see them. You are expected instead to engage with your own unique research method to identify issues beyond what everyone can see as obvious facts. For example, we do not want to see any sun-path diagram unless it is related to and presented as your specific interest directly relevant to your project, an arrow diagram to vaguely describe traffic directions which are very obvious and does not identify any interesting issue to deal with, endless pictures of exemplar projects without any clear description of why you are referring to them, etc. In other words, we want you to investigate with the method you invent and want to see your own unique outcomes, which eventually become the core inspiration and concept for your building project for the rest of this semester.

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