Spring Term 2010, Week 5

This week my personal life has been an emotional roller coaster, so architecture has taken as much of a back seat as it can without me getting behind. I have, however, finished working on programming and general massing, and am now working on tweaking my floor plans until they make perfect sense. "Programming" is the phase of design during which the designer essentially makes a list of the different spaces required for the finished building. This can also include a variety of brainstorms used to determine how these spaces should relate to each other. For example, you don't want your bathroom in your kitchen, or your rec room right between two bedrooms. This is the gray area between programming and massing, which is usually done with drawings and/or models rather than written lists and brainstorms. Massing is a visual representation of the sizes of spaces and how they relate to each other. Instead of making a model of a finished house, at this phase the designer could, for example, make boxes roughly the size of each space and put them together to get a visual idea of how they interact and of how they affect the overall form of the building. Some designers choose to color-code these boxes to make it more obvious which spaces are where.

I've finished my general massing, and am moving on to architectural vocabulary and, as I said, am tweaking my floor plans to get them to make more sense. The things I'm looking at right now for plan sprucing are sustainability issues (getting direct daylight into rooms, etc.) and circulation. "Circulation" in architecture means "pedestrian traffic," or, "how people move and flow through a building." For example, minimizing hallways while still getting people to every room in a way that makes sense means that the client is paying for square footage that's actually being used, instead of paying for people to walk around the building. At the beginning of this rambling paragraph I mentioned "architectural vocabulary." What I mean is that I have to decide what I want the building to look like. What types of window shapes do I want to use? Will the structural beams and columns be visible? What method will I use to prevent large, blank, boring walls from dominating my design? When a designer chooses architectural vocabulary for a project, it is usually simply the making of a list of design elements that match each other to choose from as the design progresses. It's sort of like filling your closet with clothes that all mix and match. You can pick almost anything out and you'll still look great.

Spring Term 2010, Week 4 (3rd Year Curriculum)

This week we finally got our site. For those of you who aren't in architecture school, this is essentially like giving a painter a canvas and enough information to develop a painting. Usually this is done sometime during the first two weeks of the term because it is the basis for the term project. Without a site (physical location) to work with, it is impossible to design a building that works well with reality. Knowing what my site is allows me to work with the topography, yearly temperatures, winds, precipitation, local natural disasters, all applicable laws, and a variety of other factors which have a large impact on building design. Needless to say, I am rather frustrated that I only just now got all of this information. I spent about an hour today making a digital model of the existing topography of my site. I am now ready to begin the design process for my term project. On Week Four. Of a ten-week term.

This term I am taking it easy. I completed my architecture engineering sequence last term, and transfered with all of my GE and professional electives complete, so I am able to take only 12-13 units per quarter from now until I graduate, unlike my peers, who usually take 17-20 units. I have studio, the 5-unit core of the architecture program; architectural practice, the 4-unit co-requisite involving a lecture and a lab; and architectural history, the 4-unit bane of an architecture major's existence. The fact that I am only taking 13 units, combined with my incredibly lax studio teacher, has given me way too much free time. I'm going to fill some of it with this blog, which I will continue to use during my summer studying architecture in Switzerland as a way to keep family and friends updated.