ARCH 101 Final Learning Portfolio
By: Kenneth Woodson Instructor: Jerry Lum
City College of San Francisco
Final Project Brief • • • •
Main Topic: “Rendering Nature: Making The Invisible Perceivable. A site specific project. Establishing the notions of place and journey. Support accidental encounters and human activities. Provoke others to appreciate everyday aspects of place that are typically ignored or taken for granted.
Team CKGW Chima, Giana, Will, and I are team CKGW. • Each of us has unique ideas. • We all work well with each other. • We plan out which days we are all going to meet together, so that everyone would not feel left out. • Everyone on the team is a hard worker and we try to communicate with one another.
Approaching the Topic question: Having the courtyard site, we wanted to render nature by taking the natural environment and placing it into the built environment because humans today are less aware of their surroundings and more on their own work. Creating this site specific area brings the feeling of nature into the built courtyard.
Site Analysis We chose 3 sites to work with: 1. The first site is located at the bottom of the stairway with the three tress. 2. The second site is located at the very top of the country side. 3. The third site is being the corner of the courtyard
Thinking about Rendering Nature • I’ve started my design Idea from how Bonsais are shaped by someone and it’s tapered trunk and movement/styling shows its sense of age.
Site 1 • This site was my first pick and it was very interesting because it was located on a sloped plane. • Environmental factors are changing in wind power and changes in the shade direction. • This site provides a view of the Excelsior district.
Model for Site 1 Experimenting with Folding: • 1. 2. 3. •
I wanted to create three spaces. The entrance Middle: seating/socializing area Folding structure/ view This will connect with the three trees and I wanted it to show structure and nature working together. This site was to help render • the shades movement during the different • time of the day.
Second model for Site 1 Experimenting with Tensioning: • I wanted to have these frames be made up some type of stretchable material so that from the tree to the platform, it’ll resemble certain parasite plants that latch onto their host for survival. • This also will frame the view of the excelsior district. • I wanted to focus on the view first before I went onto the 2 other nodes, but similar concept as the first with the sitting/socializing.
Site 2 • This site is a wide open space that is fully exposed to sunlight. • That plane is flatter than the site 1. • Is more visible since its away from the trees.
Site 3 • The courtyard is flat on concrete. • No wind strong strength. • This site contains a lot of left over wood that needs to be cleaned up and moved elsewhere. • Provides a larger area to work with.
Declared Site • Our team decided on this site because another team wanted site 2 and we didn’t want to compete or have a conflict with them. Wills design was buildable and its functions answer the question of rendering nature. • We would need to clean up the mess it gathered up in the corner • It was a site that was least picked, but we still see that it has much potential.
Spring Break Ideas During Spring break, I went on the Cal Poly SLO Design competition with the architecture club, ARCHS. Constructing our design gave me experience towards making out ARCH 101 project. This also gave me ideas towards designing a model for the courtyard. Having the chance to to Cal Poly SLO gave me experience in constructing a project and also got to see many other ideas people had from schools all over California.
Begin Construction
Creating The Panels Parts •
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We thought about ideas when it came to making panels and was trying to figure out how to have them stand up and not fall over. Since we cannot destroy the concrete ground to place panels in there, we came up with putting them in blocks of wood. One solution we found that seemed to work was, creating a slot in two pieces of 2x6 to put the panels in. Then length of the 2x6s vary between the height of the panels. We used 1x1.5 for the panels and varied them in height to match the curved concrete courtyard.
Process in making Slots and connecting the panels • We would first make two cuts that are about 1 inch apart and the use a chisel to chip away the piece. • To help connect the panels together, we bought some eye hooks that allowed us to get the right angle but it’s also still adjustable to a different format. • A problem we encountered was that the frames were tilted once we set them up. We fixed it by drilling another screw in the bottom to hold it up straight.
Creating The Tower •
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We wanted the tower to fill the empty space in the middle of our design, but also give the sense that it’s the mother tree of the forest. When constructing the tower, we needed a base that was strong enough to hold the weight of the tower. Having a triangular base sets the tower to have all evenly distributed weight. Designing the body to hold the arms was a problem we needed to solve. We created prototypes to test if the arms are stable or not and found that having three screws drilled in the triangular pattern will give it the most strength.
The Gazebo • The concept of the Gazebo was to create an area where the natural environment creates warm cozy shelters. • What inspired our design was the Starbucks Coffee at Dazaifutenmagu Omotesando by Kengo Kuma and Associates. • Its chaotic branches resembles the natures unpredictable form and it’s abstract structure. • We wanted to create excitement and build up when entering the Gazebo to provide a memory of the past that was exciting; such as, going into your first tree house or exploring an unknown place.
Constructing The Gazebo •
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When constructing the Gazebo, we’ve gotten advice from Fidel’s group, that using 16D nails with the 2x6x8 wood boards will be able to hold the structure together without cracking any of the wood. To get the branches to extrude out in an abstract way, we put two together in an “X” formation and drilled them all around the Gazebo Adding onto the abstract sense, we created different lengths of the panels and also different angels to give the sense that nature is not always symmetrical.
Applying Skin • When applying the skin to the “Forest Structure” we wanted to have transparency and blindness. • We bought two types of fabric, both are cotton but one is mixed with polyester to make it transparent. • We decided to have the inner frames to be transparent and have the outer frames to be solid. • With this effect, we created layers in our structure and trying to mimic the layers of a forest with many trees/leaves blocking some views and some are barely seen.
Creating Seating Areas • To help project the views we wanted we constructed two seating areas for people to relax and take a moment to themselves. • This provides that sense of the forest where you feel tired and want to take a break to enjoy your surroundings. • The benches were inspired from researching regular park benches and getting their structural form for that strong support.
Final Product
Presentation During our presentation, we learned a lot from the feedback we’ve gotten. The overall concept of bringing the nature into a build environment was shown. A problem that our team avoided was trying to embrace the corner part of our site. What we ended up demonstrating was that we substituted the corner with the Gazebo. In other words, we completely blocked out the meaning of that site and its corner, when we wanted to embrace it, we ended up ignoring it. Another error was intergrading all of our ideas together into one project. This ended up as being 3 sections of the site. What we thought of having 3 spaces became into 3 different projects connected to each other. Though we attempted to connect the ideas together with the fabric but to the judges, it still seemed separated.
Conclusion • What we learned from this project was that to embrace the corner, an idea that was brought up was turning the Gazebo the other direction so the opening would be facing the corner and that’ll direct the views attention to the corner. • When combining ideas together, its hard to shape them into one form so the sense or feel would be consistent. I think drawing them out and finding similarities of each idea and highlighting them into the project would make structure not to far apart. • We’ve learned a lot through the past weeks and sharing our ideas together really helped out the whole team. I think that communication is one of the biggest parts in teamwork. • Trying out different techniques when constructing this really helped out the final design. By building prototypes and putting them to the test gave us the idea of what can the environment do to it an also to see weather it will work since that we are working with real materials and not small models.
Final Thoughts This whole spring semester was a great learning experience for me. Since this was my first actually architecture class, I needed to do a lot of external research such as learning to use sketch up and improving my craftsmanship. ARCH 101 in both before and after midterms improved my ability to analyze deeply and always think outside of the box. The structural mindset I came into class has change during the second half of the semester because constructing and designing an actual installation changed my thinking process in solving problems where its not just a one step process but contains infinite steps. Though I don’t feel as passionate into architecture as I thought I would be I still learned a lot from this course and always going out to try new things is a great way to find your pathway. For me, I find architecture as a fun thing to do but not as a career, its not because of the course but my thoughts of it as a career and a practicing job. This project got me to know a lot of people in my class and that teamwork is the best option to be productive in a large project. Thank you for putting this whole project together and getting the experience of building an installation.