The Interim Submissions from the Four Schools

The Interim Submissions from the Four Schools

The critique on Tuesday was an honest and useful exercise. All four schools now have tested their first resolved solutions against the interpretations and assessments of their peers.

I note that it is difficult to thoroughly and accurately critique ideas that are not firmly pinned down by their creators, or if resolved, that have not been represented or easily communicated. Words are messy and flexible, and as they were the primary communication medium that augmented most of what was shown by the schools on Tuesday, what I write below is based on my interpretation of the drawings that were pinned-up and upon the minutes of the presentations that I scribed.

The School of Fashion has communicated well its design intent of small and intimate spaces that are woven into a tight site with existing buildings. This communication could be better made with some diagrams of how the people will actually move through the space (as this is the central motivation for the tricky streets). At the moment the site plan more than slightly resembles a labyrinth used to test the sedated wits of laboratory mice. The one contrast between this beautifully colored plan on butter-paper and the laboratory is that the laboratory, in its labyrinth, presents the mice with one true path.

Perhaps the suggestions, offered in the critique, of a hierarchy of spaces and lifting up some key buildings to do this, will sympathize with the users of these streets and will offer them some relief and some guidance, while at the same time present them with the opportunity to make a conscious choice of whether to get lost or found.

Our School of Multi-Media spent significant efforts to represent its ideas and design intent in its drawings. I believe that this was accomplished because of all of the intelligent and pointed criticism that the school’s scheme received. This criticism has been very helpful. It highlighted the areas in which we ourselves were uncertain. However this uncertainty did not stop us from designing solutions – not all of which were successful. Now we have a very stable place from which to design. We have our peer reviewed first solutions which have been tested.

Our core design problems revolve around two aspects of our scheme. With the school of Multi-Media buildings these involve top-lighting and a readjustment of floor plans to better utilize natural light. Also the relationship between the two buildings of the school, though ameliorated already through the creation of Alfred’s Avenue, it can be further enhanced and intensified. The Health and Well-being buildings on the waterfront must address their relationship to the public thorough-fair along the Waterfront. And both, the School’s buildings and those of the Health and Well-being Center must work together in urban design and architecture to better cross the bender over Western Beach Road.

The Bleeding Spaces group plays a very important role in this project, weaving together the main public spaces. They have communicated to our School of Multi-Media that they are very close to a solution for the Cunningham Street Bender that will mediate between street level and Bender level. They have given us confidence and have increased our resolve in our group’s original design intent of creating a ‘platform’ of designed and important public space that would link and unify all four schools of the DDI.

Their library was an interesting proposition: Four sides, four levels, four schools. Perhaps this could be taken further, like four different facades or street fronts for the building (or like the Mecanoo building shown in Richard’s lecture where the four different lecture theatres each, through material, represented one of the four schools that were in the one faculty and one building).

The School of Industrial Design and the School of Architecture needs to make more of their site and the opportunities it presents them. It is known that the School is aware of the ‘problems’ of the site’s levels because these were articulated by them in their critiques of The Bender that were recorded in their comments directed at the School of Multi-Media. These concerns about The Bender, rather than constraining, offer-up a chance to better design the two schools of Industrial Design and Architecture into the site.

It became apparent that a key aspect that had hardly been resolved at all was the vertical aspect of their scheme (this being most obvious in the absence of stairs of any depiction or description). In now focusing on the physical and visual ups and downs of their plans and sections it is very possible that all of their hard work, in planning each of the levels, will click together these levels and integrate them both with the street and to The Bender.