Independent Study for Week 10

• Using your 150 word descriptive ideas for your direction for your building as a basis, create an A3 expressive montage of your ideas. This should capture the feel and flavour of your thoughts. Post a high quality jpeg of your montage to your blog.
  
• Using the week 9 lecture as a guide, define a grid layout for your 3 x A1 posters, using grid lines and solid blocks. Think about page orientation, relationship between the three pages and grid sizes. Post images of your A1 grid to your blog.
• You can start playing with your base model to test ideas and possible re-envisioning of your planned building. Make sure to always save in separate version, so you always have the original base model to refer back to. Post any images of your progression, or influences to your blog.
  

Week 9 Studio Tasks

• Receive your grades and feedback from your tutors on your first assignment.
  
• In your groups of 3-4 and with your tutors feedback on your modeling efforts, refine your base model of the Vitra Design Museum, concentrating on accuracy and detailing, bringing your building to a high level of resolution, both for the interior and exterior of the building.
• Choose 2 images, an interior and an exterior of the Vitra Design Museum, and take either an quick rendering or an image capture from your model of the chosen images. The images should geometrically match up EXACTLY, and be recognisably the similar images. If they don't, then your model is not totally accurate. Members for the same group should each choose different images.
  
• Start thinking about how you would like to re-envision the Vitra Design Museum. Think about a new site context in which your building will exist, changes to the structure, scale materiality, and function.
• Write to your blog 150 words describing and expressing your ideas and intended direction for the re-inventing of this building.
• You can start collecting images and examples of the types of modifications that you intend to enact on the building, including site examples, architectural precedents, structural details, materials and functions.
  

Independent Study for Week 9

• In groups of 3-4 research the Assignment building and begin building a 3D basic outline model of the Vitra Design Museum.
• Post images of your group model to your blogs.
  
• Post your combined research to your blogs.
  
• Individually choose 1 building of Frank Gehry's (other than the Vitra Design Museum) as a case study. Go to libraries to find books about your chosen case study building, and begin preliminary research.
• Post images and 250 words of text on your case study.
  

Frank Gehry - Vitra Design Museum - 1990

Vitra Design Museum Commentary

"Using a palette of strongly architectonic forms, the formative ideas explored in his own house were further developed at a comprehensive urban scale in his design for the Loyola Law School....The result was large-scale disparate elements dexterously juxtaposed—thrust inward or conversely pushing outward—against buildings and urban sculptural elements that themselves were formally not reconciled in a traditional sense. It further evidenced Gehry's interest in the discreet interlock of disparate forms which, through collision and seeming disorder, somehow combine to create a presence in resolution—probably the basic reason why Cubism and Expressionism is so obviously his connection to Modernism.

"This is readily apparent in his Vitra Design Museum, a small, 8,000-square-foot building on two floors basically for the exhibit of chairs, design, and educational programs. The building is a continuous changing swirl of white forms on the exterior, each seemingly without apparent relationship to the other, with its interiors a dynamically powerful interplay, in turn directly expressive of the exterior convolutions. As a totality it resolves itself into an entwined coherent display in much the same way that Gehry's 1990 proposal for the American Center in Paris will likewise bring the disparate functional and spatial demands...into a more centralized though again a visually discordant, volumetric totality..."

— from Paul Heyer. American Architecture: Ideas and Ideologies in the Late Twentieth Century. p233-234.

Aerial View of Building

From: http://www.greatbuildings.com

Week 8 Studio Tasks

Must be Done today!!! Create an A3 interactive PDF. This task is aimed at getting you fluid with the technology, and producing a poster document quickly. Consider a basic layout to your poster.

• Do the interactive PDF tutorial, and read through the tips document.
• Find a well known building form one of the following architects:
• Louis Kahn
• Tadao Ando
• Toyo Ito
• Frank Gehry
• Zaha Hadid
• Carlo Scarpa
• Le Corbusier
• Frank Lloyd Wright
• Ludwig Mies van der Rohe
  
• Make sure that you can find a textured 3D model of your building on Google 3D Warehouse.
  
• From Sketchup export 2 images of your model (think about framing from a human perspective) a 10 second walkthrough animation using views, and export the model as *.obj file format. (these will be the main pieces of your A3 interactive PDF).
  
• Install Microstation v8i from the samples folder for this course. (ftp://emustore.fbe.unsw.edu.au/Resources/samples/Arch/ARCH1390%20Representation%20Studio%20-%20Harkins/Programs/)
• Open your *.obj file in Microstation, and export your model in *.u3d file format. (This is the file format that allows you to embed 3D models in PDF's).
• Make a PDF using a layout program, considering placement of elements on the page.
  
• Your A3 PDF should include Title and architect of your building, some text about your building, (include the reference of where you obtain your text from), 2 image captures, 1 x 10 second animation, 3D model with 3 named and saved views, your name.
• Upload your PDF to a file sharing site, and include an image of your poster and a link to your PDF on your blog.