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.