S21_ARCH306_ASSIGNMENT 3_FINISH
While our work as architects is never done, we need to train ourselves to complete our thoughts and finish our work in clear and compelling ways. This is a learned skill and a complicated task. Is your design fully resolved? Do you have all the answers to the question your building is asking you? The answer is likely no, but two weeks from today, you will need to present a clear proposal and lead a compelling conversation about your Architecture.
How do we do this? Do we put our heads down and work mindlessly towards the finish line? Or do we keep our heads up, take stock of where we are, and plot the most strategic course towards that ambition? The answer is the latter. Honestly, 90% of your work is done. Now you have to curate, strategize, and tighten up loose ends. Then you can put your heads down and get to work. For this task, you have two weeks.
Look back over the entire semester and use your design process as a guideline for your presentation. Architectural presentations almost always exhibit a similar set of artifacts, but your artifacts ARE your work. Drawings and models are what we DO as architects. The selection, curation, ordering and stitching of these artifacts will provide the fabric for a conversation about site strategies, city engagement, programmatic organization, material interventions that ARE your project, your Architecture.
As always, the specific instructions you receive in your own studios, and assessments of your own strategies for creating a narrative or analytical thread, take priority over this list. But, armed with this guidance, use the next two weeks to see beyond a list of deliverables; instead, deliver a presentation that exhibits understanding, meaning and depth using all means of technique and craft.
Site Understanding :
Any site analysis drawings or diagrams as well as site images that describe your relevant research and analysis of the site and context for your project.
Proposal (Criteria/Agenda/Objectives/Parti):
Diagrams, sketches, drawings and study models that explain your design intent, design process and design criteria. Clearly composed, carefully edited, and titled/annotated with concise verbiage defining and supporting the big idea, narrative or concept of your project.
Architectural Development (Plans/Site Plans/Sections):
Developed orthographic drawings that fully describe your proposal through its various architectural systems, regulating systems and design logic(s) at scale. Every project should have detailed orthographic drawings (plan, section, elevation) that describe the significant spaces, uses and experiences of your project using the detailed graphic conventions that we know and share. Think about your project in orthographic section as a means to dissect and expose the behavior of your building as an assembly and an actor. Think also about how the three, plan, section and elevation, bring together the actor (user) and the context (site).
Plans should make clear the character of structure, envelope, circulation, apertures, thresholds between interior and exterior, material shifts, scale, use, building’s relationship to site, etc. Sections should contain parallel information. BOTH MUST also explain connection to site and environmental context.
Tectonics / Assembly / Constructability
Larger scale assembly sections (sketch and/or hardline), axonometric drawings of material intersections, connections, relationships.
These drawings signify the material intent, the physical interaction and the legibility of the system to the user, as well as suggesting the sequence, material hierarchy and constructability of the intervention. Use these drawings to draw us into conversations about scale, texture, material and interface. In adaptive reuse, these are frequently weavings and layerings. Think of the relationships between pieces, thicknesses of materials, scales of representative systems.
Embodiment / Occupation / Experience (Inhabitant’s Eye):
Section perspectives, vignettes, sketches, animations, rendered model photographs, etc. The techniques for these can be hard-lined, computer generated views, loose but considered hand drawings, or an intelligent combination of media.
Use the experiential views to communicate the experience of ChiARTS within and in relation to its place. Consider this request carefully, and use it as a test and critique of your design. How does ChiARTS perform? How does it engage with the city surrounding it? With the agents within it? Build on the occupation and inhabitation you conveyed in the Embodiment model and the illuminated section axon to describe how architecture influences behavior.
Models:
Models can take many shapes and forms, and no design process can exist without them. Substantiate and clarify your proposal and process through the presentation of multiple models. Models can and should be from any media and any scale and from any developmental stage of the project, but models must be present in your review, and clearly presented as design tools – not only presentation tools.
Process artifacts:
Although most of your sketches, working diagrams, study models, etc should be woven into the proposal, its useful to display how you controlled a design process, directed research into solid criteria, established project controls (drawing systems, project geometries, modeling systems), generated iterations, evaluated them and made decisions. This information will substantiate your proposal and design effort. Do not overwhelm with the presentation of this information, or isolate this information outside of the context of the proposal, but use this material to illuminate your logic and allow reviewers to join your conversation; this means interweaving process and proposal, thought and execution.
Presentation:
Please consult with your individual professors for details regarding your specific presentation instructions. That said, your presentations should be well considered and well composed. Composition is an ethic that is paramount to our profession and craft. All drawings should be sequenced, not necessarily chronologically, but in an order most relevant to the appropriate reading of your proposal and with the intent of establishing the most legible and compelling presentation of your project. Your verbal presentation should be brief, but enthusiastic and compelling. Formulate your explanation by starting with your observations that establish values, then describe the critical ingredients or characters and finally the specifics of the assembly and its performance. Your words should be tied to artifacts (drawings, models) that guide the introduction and support the conversation. Use the presentation to bring the conversation in line with your agenda. The conversation is for you.
Our Final Review will be Wednesday, May 5th from 2:00pm-6:00pm.
Third Year Studio 