Midterm | [space + justice]

For this past Friday’s mid-term review I focused on developing the plans and focusing on the functions of each space. This was a progression from my many earlier conceptual models and diagrams, and it was crucial at this stage to intimately understand the program and to advance the parti.

Simultaneously, I needed to examine the exterior form of the building, investigating how the interior can be read. A 1/32″ = 1′-0″ scale model began to explore concepts of solid/void, light/dark, as well as relation to the landscape and materiality. These last areas, through helpful critique, have become my springboard towards the next phase, namely integration into the site and material investigation.

October 30, 2012

Everlasting Midterms

by caroothers

For the midterm review, I was able to lay out the full floor plan in order to fully understand the spaces that are created. The 8th scale model helped to understand the courtroom spaces that are created by the lines, intimately looking at the clerestory windows that provide light to the interior space. This model was better able to display the open spaces around the courtyards as public space. The floor plans and diagrams helped me to begin to understand the rules of this building and the spaces created within these lines.

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The next steps in the process are digesting the exterior ground condition of these lines. I will be working on figuring out how these folded lines interact with the ground to create the interior spaces. The following studies will also explore the condition of the slope within the building site. The site plan will be able to be more developed through a series of design charettes exploring the building interaction with the site.

October 29, 2012

Midlife Crisis

by cchlebda

Two days before midreview, my project underwent a midlife crisis.

After I finished my model Wednesday night, I reevaluated my design and realized that my courthouse, while highly functional, was incredibly boring. It had no “soul”–nothing that made it unique. It could have been any courthouse, anywhere. So, I went back to some of the original concepts I had at the beginning of the semester and thought about how these could make their way back into the project (“intertwining public and private spaces” and the idea of pulling the park over or through the building). I started sketching ideas that kept the existing functionality of the latest design iteration, while making the building much more interesting.

I realized that in my past few iterations, the lobby was like a completely separate building from the courtrooms, and I even had a thickened “wall” of circulation separating the two. When I modeled it, the lobby also seemed out of scale with the rest of the building. Moving forward, I want to bring the lobby/vertical circulation into the courtroom part of the building, giving the user more of a “choice” than just walking down a really long corridor to his final destination. I also want to experiment with different, crisscrossing paths within a central atrium, which will literally “intertwine public and private spaces” in an interesting way, similar to the public bridges that I was already starting to experiment with in the previous design’s atrium.