Music Building Interface

Based on our previous music project we were asked to design an environmental interface between the music building on the UNCG campus and West Market Street. The interface was to engage passing motorists, pedestrians, and students. Our design was also architectonic and part of an imagined amphitheater.

Based on Adagio for Strings and our group design, I designed an architectonic form that considered acoustics inside the space and aesthetics outside of the space. I intended the exterior of the form to be an ionic water feature.

Iteration 2: For my second iteration I expanded the wall into three different pieces that extended the width of the grassy area next to the music building. I added stainless structures to the tops of two of the walls that were intended to be water features.

Iteration 3: For this model I removed the stainless structures on top of the end walls. I also skewed the walls so they made interesting architectonic spaces on both sides of the wall. My concern with this design is that it looked too much like a gate.

Final iteration: For my final design, I combined the three individual walls and made one long wall. The undulating pattern that is skewed makes architectonic spaces on either side of the structure. The final design becomes a part of the topography and has planting that marry the designed landscaping to the natural vegetation.

This is my presentation board. There is a plan of the space, north and west sections, north and east elevations, and hand-rendered perspectives of the interface in place.

Adagio for Strings

The second half of the semester we worked on a multi stepped project that began with a group project and ended with an individual project.

My group consisted of myself, Natalie Johnson, Emily Febrizio, and Annelise Tennakken. We were assigned Adagio for Strings by Samuel Barber to listen to a design a form that represented the music and our individual ideas. This is the form we made.

This piece of music is very quiet, and gradually builds, although it is somewhat anticlimactic. Our form represents the gradual building of volume, instruments, and layers in the piece. The black plane in our design represents disonance in the music, and the drop off represents the anticlimactic nature of the music. The very small waves at the end of our design represent the very quiet small parts of sound at the end of the music. Our project was made out of Bristol board and bamboo skewers.





Light Box: IAR 102 and 112

For this project we had to make a light box from white board 6x6x18. Before we made the box we had to do a light study; look at different light situations. The lighting situation I chose was sunlight reflecting off of a highly reflective/prismatic surface and on to the wall.

This is my picture of the reflective light.

This is the inside of the first light box. The interior and exterior of the box are entirely white. On this box I drilled holes in two of the sides, the light streamed in through those holes.

This is the light box from the exterior. The hole in the center seam serves as the view finder.

As part of our color week, we remade the light box using the color scheme from our 18 color study.

When we remade our light box the new dimensions were 4x4x12. On the inside of my light box I put stripes of color on the two sides of the box that did not have the holes. The colors were symmetrically laid out with the second darkest pink-red in the middle and the colors becoming more blue until they were the darkest cyan of the bottom triangle. I then adhered very highly reflective silver paper to the inside of either end of the box, this gave the illusion that the colors continue indefinitely.

This is the center of the colored light box. You can see the color gradient if you look carefully. I think this is successful because you can see the color gradient in the reflected light more than in the paper, itself.

Here is a picture down one side of the box. The gradients of cyan are very clear but all of the gradients beyond the darkest cyan are a reflection. Again, the reflected light reveals the actual paper color.

Assignment 1 Continued : Dining Tables.....and more

The first project in IAR 102 Studio was a project about dining tables. I chose to pick a dining table design from 1 designer on 5 different continents (see the first post under IAR 102). From there, we were asked to choose one of the five tables from our board and pick design elements and properties that we felt that it had. Once we did that, we had to make a sketch model (in about 10 minutes) from whatever we could find around the studio.



Karim Rashid's Flap Table:

Here's my sketch model of Karim Rashid's Flap Table:

We then had to make the same table in scale, using a 1":1' scale:

Then we remade the table to work out any kinks in craft, etc:

For this version I made my base a little shorter, stopped inverting the colors, and put an edge around the table so the board under it did not show.

Then we chose a plan from four dining spaces provided and came up with a parti of our concept for the design:

Concept parti~Juxtaposition of circles and straight lines, color, contemporary, space-saving

Because my dining table is so small and none of the dining spaces seemed entirely appropriate for it, I decided to convert my space into part of a studio apartment. This is my working floorplan with all of my notes along the way.

We were also tasked with designing and making a model of a "sideboard," however, we were encouraged to think of a sideboard in a non-traditional sense. My first idea for a sideboard was to take the lines of a mid-century modern cabinet and put a contemporary twist on it by use of color and materials. I intended for the sides and top to be a very slick white surface with sliding doors and the back in orange. Here is my sketch model for that sideboard design.

I needed to challenge myself to design a "sideboard" that pushed some boundaries. The next piece I designed was a short shelving unit. Each course of shelves are a different color, in keeping with the contemporary design of the space, and are movable. I then considered stacking it on top of the unit above, but it was still too traditional. I scrapped the idea of using the cabinet as a base and decided, instead, to make the shelving unit taller.

Here you can see the colors of the shelves.

This is a top view with the shelves adjusted in a non-linear orientation

And finally, this view of the shelf indicates the size compared to the scale figure.

After making the table and sideboard and designing the space in plan, we made sketch models of the space. I chose to make mine out of whiteboard and to scale (1":1'). After making the sketch model of my space, I was challenged to consider the windows and ceiling. Originally, my windows were 8' and the mullions were on a grid and  predictable. I changed the mullions to echo the circular shapes and forms found throughout my space and further emphasize the concept of circle vs. straight lines. I also put a grid of beams on the ceiling with sound dampening fabric woven through. The beams in the grid pattern did not work with the rest of the design the way I had hoped, so I changed the ceiling to a series of sound-dampening circles of varying sizes; some were lighted to add light to important parts of the room (art, sideboard, and seating area). For this project we also had to incorporate a piece of artwork from the Weatherspoon Art Gallery on the UNCG campus. I chose a kind of creepy looking Claes Oldenburg and a large, colorful painting by George McNeil.

 Claes Oldenburg: Symbolic Self-Portrait with Equals

                         George McNeil: Bedlam Place

 

These are perspective drawings of the space. Notice that they still indicate the shorter shelves on the original sideboard as a base and the beams on the ceiling.

The chairs that I chose for my table (Karim Rashid' Flap Table) are by Calligaris in orange. I also chose a colorfully patterned chair by Starck as side chairs in the seating area.

Calligaris Ice Chairs in Orange

Mademoiselle by Phillipe Starck

The final model of my (dining) space came together using the original concepts from my parti. 

Ceiling detail

This was a great project for me. It challenged me to push my design threshold and to continue to think more creatively.

Assignment 5 : Color Week (IAR 102 and 112)

Color Week:


Color week is full of fun mini projects. We started finding middle ranges between two colors, then three colors, we chose four colors and a middle color and choose mid-ranges for all, and finally we made an eighteen color diamond shaped chart finding mid-range colors between combinations of two and three colors. The final part of this project ties to the Light Box project from IAR 102. We had to remake our light box and add color from the color scheme of our 18-color color chart.

Mid-range between yellow-green and cyan

           

          Mid-range between light yellow-green and medium violet

This is a group of four color and a center color with mid-ranges in the center corners of each large square. Doesn't it appear that you can see through the orange paper to the other four colors?

       Visual mid-range between three colors

This is my 18-color color diamond with mid-ranges and 3 way mid-ranges.

Project One Dining Tables



IAR 102 - Project One

Dining Tables