Workshop 02

1 WORKSHOP-2. INSIDE / OUTSIDE and OUTSIDE / INSIDE

For this exercise, you are required to produce a minimum of 2 views of your project; a view from inside your proposal looking-out, together with a view from outside your proposal looking-in.

This exercise is intended to promote spatial thought and decision making, to connect your design to the physical context of the site and for you to consider scale (whether that is human-scale or machine-scale). Remember that you are designing a piece of architecture and not an object or a piece of sculpture. Remember that your design is mutable and unsettled at this time.

The format is limited to A3 (or A3+ …..letterbox…..like wide-screen cinema) so that you can work quickly and intuitively. You can work in any medium that you choose; SketchUP, CAD model, photoshop, relief model, cut-outs, hand drawing, but these views, or ‘snapshots’, should be specific to the place and not generic. They should not be from magazine-world or TV-land.

Inside looking-out. Think of how you will design apertures in your projects façade and how they will frame particular views of the site and frame particular views of the city beyond that. Indicate scale within the foreground and a suggestion of how the space is occupied. It may be helpful to conceive of this ‘snapshot’ as composed of a series of 4 layers ‘foreground – aperture – site – city’. Layers that can be shifted and manipulated relative to each other.

Outside looking-in. Think of how a particular ‘landscape’ feature (whether the existing DLR footbridge or ‘landscape’ proposed as part of your project) will frame the view of the building. Indicate a glimpse of the façade, its colour & texture. Is it porous, reflective, hermetic and sealed, rough and shaggy? Indicate scale within the project and show how it is inhabited. It may be helpful to conceive of this ‘snapshot’ as composed of a series of 4 layers ‘city-landscape – project-landscape (site) – façade – inhabitation’. Layers that can be shifted and manipulated relative to each other.

You will produce say 6, 8, or more, views over term-2. Get into the habit of testing an idea, or if you prefer, asking a question, with each view that you make. Do different apertures within the project respond to different areas of the city? How does light effect the envelope, filtered or in direct shafts of sunlight? Do different facades of the building respond to different areas of the site? Each successive inside/outside snapshot should ask a different question of you, the designer. Refer back to your earlier projects. Are there ideas within them that can be revisited and tested within the inside/outside snapshots?

2 REFERENCES

2.1 photographs – not credited

2.2 Le Corbusier. Interior from “Towards a New Architecture”.

2.3 Le Corbusier. Exterior, Villa Savoye, 1929-1931.