No. 10 Final presentations of the Musuem

Tuesday is the famous day dedicated to presentations and today we were also asked to present our final proposal for the layout of the Museum of Archeology in Valletta.

I believe that my group worked hard, starting from simple sketches and continuing on to develop something that is different. For the benefit of having lecturers that never saw our project I believe we have presented our project quite well, starting from the very beginning till, what has been developed so far.

But I believe that so far was not good enough at this stage. Although when we discussed the layout we took into consideration all the rooms we did not show this in the presentation, because we focused mainly on the first 2 rooms when doing small models and renderings. I think that we have spent a lot of time, trying to produce something with 3d programs, when we could have easily done it in a physical model, for the sake of this presentation and to explain more our proposal.

I believe that our next step, is to solve this and work hard so that next week we can finally present our work for the last time, in a complete way.

Picture to visualize what we had in mind.

Our experimentation with 3D studio Max.

Small Model.

No. 9 The Design Generation of the National Museum of Archeology

One discussion leads to another, one argument leads to another, one hour leads to another, till its 14:30 and we were asked to leave the studio.


But we now have conclusions, about some parts of the design. This physical model helped us a lot in terms of scale, to see if the elements are in proportion to each other and changes in layout so that it would be better. It was much faster for us to take decisions and change plans with this model, instead of when things were only drawn on paper.


Sorry for the poor quality of the photos!!

View of the layout, although it was an early stage and many changes were done later on.

Discussing possible changes for one the rooms.

Some changes to one of the rooms.

No. 8 FOLDING - Design Generation

Folding is a design process; design methodology using physical modeling. The creation of a relationship between material and structure, which produces from. This process started around the mid 20th century, and some important people who forms part of this section in design are: G. Deleuze; G.Lynn; Guattari; Claude parent.

Folding – design generator has 4 transitions:

Matter and Function: Matter the paper have one constraint, the continuity of the surface, but a series of transformations could be applied to it. Fold; press; crease; pleat; cut; twist; wrap; hinge; weave; compress and unfold.

 Algorithms: Are recipes, step by step instruction of how to solve a problem.

‘When folding a piece of paper the series of transformations resulting into the paper fold artifact, is a genetic algorithm form’

Spatial organizational and structural: creating a structure with space and volume, whilst introducing topology and tessellations.

3D Prototype: The end product is a structure resulting from the whole process.

An interesting article regarding folding is found in the magazine AD 1993 "The fold: Leibniz and the Baroque: The pleats of matter."

    

These designs were not done by myself :) but shown during last Monday's lecture. I hope I will be uploading some of my experiments later on.

No. 7 Neri OXMAN

Neri Oxman completed med school at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem and later on ventured to London to get a degree from the Architectural Association School of Architecture. She isn’t so much on architecture and design, she states that their revolution lies on the surface.

‘Forget about the way it looks, think about how it behaves’

Neri Oxman herself.

Holding her fabrication of skin-like membrane, done with a 3d printer

Her work is more on material ecology, and studies how the material reacts, in a way to suite the need of people. To produce a different kind of design is to start thinking and looking also at material in a different way.

http://vimeo.com/7806194

This video shows Oxman speaking about designing form. At some point she states 'What does a material want to be?' The only reason that a chair is of a certain design is because we have decided it should be this way, but what if we look at what the material can do and give us, what if we take it to its limits?

No. 6 Sketches of FRANK GEHRY

This is going to be the next movie / documentary that we should be watching.. I haven’t seen it myself, but taking a look at the trailer should give us a hint of how this architect’s mind work.

‘That is so stupid looking its great’ he said in the trailer.. Maybe we should start thinking this way.. Not to be practical, but there should be no limits to our design.

His architecture is a breath of fresh air, a new way to look at architecture. We need a breath of fresh air at that old museum :) 

http://www.sonyclassics.com/sketchesoffrankgehry/main.html

No. 5 To Think outside the Box.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=HPQN0qrQ0AI

This video has nothing special, but the last part, made me feel that if I think beyond, I can create anything I want, with any material...

We need to think outside the Box a lot!!

No. 4 New Approach

Being in the digital era we are now encouraged to develop more computer programs, rather than sketching the traditional way. I was actually researching some information about the new times in design and came across this article, which in some ways and after reading it made quite sense to me.

I believe that we are living in new times and we have to start changing our ways of doing things, this one is about design.

http://www.designophy.com/article/design-article-1000000106-forget-brainstorming.htm