House Typologies

Commentary for assignment 1 design process

I looked at various themes covered in my initial blog introducing the client.

These are: dust, sleep, rotting, seclusion, death, clear skies, hidden passages, still spaces.

I chose precedent pictures of buildings that had interesting towers for my inspiration.

I considered what towers are used for and how they could stand up.

They could be used as a lookout, watching people, living in seclusion, watching the stars, organization of space on available site, form a presence within the surrounding urban setting by being visible.

Towers have better vertical stability if there is a core that goes into the ground. They can support other structures or be supported by them. The clients requirement for a tunnel can be accommodated within a core.

Still life painters usually paint things like plants and rocks so I explored an aesthetic for some of my buildings that evoked that style.

If the tunnels were like roots, it would be an ideal way of stabilizing a structure and providing an excellent way to exit the building for my client.

The clients ‘works in progress room’ is to be located away from the bedroom.

There is to be a gallery space and also a drying/storage space for paintings.

Certain rooms need to be able to accumulate the client’s need for more dust than usual, so dark interiors are one option in achieving this. Another way is to position objects such as columns close together as to catch passing dust. This will also give the impression of the dust covered bars pictured in the first blog.

Unit 7 is a secluded area because the client requires still controlled environments to cope with his impediment in experiencing moving objects properly.

I started drawing my designs by hand after considering some of the key requirements of the client.

I chose some of these images and began modelling how they might look in 3d with Google SketchUp 6.

I chose four designs that I liked and thought had some potential to be developed.

I determined which two of these would be modelled in card and continued to refine some of the details in the SketchUp models.

I worked out roughly which elements would house which units so that I could decide what to do with all the remaining space considering the scale is not limited and there are other requirements of the client.

My first house typology is a tower within a tower. There are multiple floors to lookout from and they share a common column that they are either supported or cantilevered off. I left panels off the model design as to show the various layers it is made up of.

Unit 7 is in the top compartment of the tower.
Units 5,6 and 8 are housed on the floor midway up the building.
Units 1-4 are on the ground floor on the main plate.
Units 9-12 are on the same level as 5,6 and 8 but in the central tower section.
This house is an imposing structure that is self contained but allows good views. In the SketchUp version there was a tunnel system below the building.

*******************************************************************************

House 2 explores the use of objects as props to support other elements, even though the physics are impossible to calculate at this stage. The tower is stabilised vertically by root-like structures that double as tunnels and horizontally braced by surrounding structures and wedged rock formations.

Unit 7 is an area on top of the rock formation propped up by the tower and the structure on the right. (pic 1)
Units 5 and 6 are at the top of the tower.
Units 1-4 are in the rock-like structure wedged between the tower and another formation on the left. (pic 1)
The body of the tower contains units 9-12

Unit 8 is in the left structure. (pic 1)

*******************************************************************************

The third house typology is a fortress with two suspended towers. In the original sketch up design, there are lift shafts that run from the bottom of the towers to the underground tunnels required by the client. The bars that are running down the side of one of the walls holding the larger tower up are a response to the picture in the previous blog.

Unit 7 is in the open area outside of the towers but within the surrounding walls.
The larger of the two towers contains dwelling quarters for Sklyksk
Unit 5, to 12 excluding unit 7 are housed here also.
The smaller tower contains dining/cooking areas that include units 1 to 4.

*******************************************************************************

House 4 looks a bit like a cake but is actually responding to the rusty/dusty bars pic and also the one of the man sleeping because not only will the columns collect dust but they create interesting effects when lights passes through them.

Unit 7 is a courtyard that lies at the bottom of the area within the crescent circle tower.
Units 1-6,8 are internally placed in the circular substructure surrounding the tower.

Units 9 to 12 are located within the secondary tower structures running along the same perimeter surface as the columns adorning the front/open side of the crescent tower.

Welcome!

Meet Sven Sklyksk from Steglitz in Berlin.
He is the still life painter from Hejduk’s ‘Berlin night’.
This is an exclusive look into the painters world.. or frame.

First, as people may or may not know, he is very particular in getting his still life composition just right. He has a photographic memory but he must arrange things in advance of his mental camera shutter firing or he wont be able to correct it when he paints. He is obsessed with the surface detail of the world, which no one sees save for a second look. Ever since he was a boy, he would pick out the details that everybody else was too oblivious to see. People did not even like watching movies with him anymore because he would point out all of the dimwit extras that were still wearing their digital watches on the set of some medieval movie. One day it got too much for him and he decided that the only way he could use his talent for spotting the subtleties of the world was to paint.

Several years after he decided to become a painter, he noticed his sight was starting to go, but only with moving objects. As long as an object was still it was clear to him. He was lucky to be able to focus on one moving object as long as there was nothing else moving in his peripheral. Ever since, he has not been able to cope very well with the world outside his home. If ever he leaves the main house, it is via underground corridors or at night when he doesn’t feel so complexed by the crazy pace of the day. Even home can get too much for him if there is too much going on. In his spare time he watches movies on pause as a form of relaxation.

One way he has gotten around his impediment for experiencing motion is to photograph the action in a few frames and then create a storyboard of the events. Some of his first paintings were derived from the idea of glorifying the stillness of life. There are offcourse the famous statue paintings which Sklyksk has made look even more real than some people. Being a statue it is an ideal model because it will hold its pose forever. Another subject he loves to paint is a clear sky because there is no apparent movement.

Following the steps of many other still life painters, he chose fruit and vegetables as yet another area of interest. He would offer to pick up the rotting fruit at the gardeners house at night so he could collect it and let it go mouldy. This was apparently not groundbreaking enough for the art community of Berlin so he began exploring a niche nobody else had the guts to test the panel of exhibition judges with.

It began one night when he was walking back from the gardener’s house. He was walking past the Innsbruckerplatz and onto Hauptstasse when he heard a loud noise. It was a gunshot. Moments later he heard sirens. He saw police cars pull over to the side of a road where he could just make out the shape of a body, another car had gone ahead to catch someone on the run. The police had already established who the suspect was so Sklyksk decided he had the right to be a little nosy.

He initiated a conversation with the officers at the scene. Eventually he told them that he was a still life painter. One of the officers joked and told him he should paint that still life (referring to the body), not knowing that he had just given Sklyksk the idea that would leave him destined to land himself a special job painting corpses when cameras were not available. The only reason he was ever able to use these paintings outside of the coroners domain, was that he painted them in an impressionistic way as to conceal the identities of the victims.

He didn’t want to paint corpses forever so he decided to take a job at the local hospital painting portraits of comatose patients for charity to help fund research into reversing their vegetative states. Eventually the motion in the hospital was unbearable for him so he stopped going. Soon however, he met someone that would change things for him.

Her name was Erica. She was from the surface world. A ghost that had the ability to travel anywhere because she was everywhere. She was like a book of holiday destinations. She was like the Internet because she only had to imagine a location to be there. But the catch was not many people ever saw her. She mostly watched the world around her because she was not an active participant. There were occasions where she made eye contact with people doing inconspicuous things that are in harmony with the surface world because nobody notices them, but they were usually too embarrassed to acknowledge the contact, because commonly they were in the middle of picking their noses!

Sven Sklyksk was the first person in over a hundred years to communicate with Erica. It happened one time when he had set up his composition ready to take a mental photo. Atypical for his typical style he decided to try using the sky as a backdrop for his subject matter. As he took the photo in his mind a shooting star crossed his peripheral and what he painted he could not believe. Somehow he had saved the detail of the shooting star in his memory. It was Erica, he painted what he remembered and was amazed. Erica has not existed in the physical realm for a long time. As he painted her she felt like someone was calling her, an invitation if you may. It was this captured moment in time that had linked them, and for as long as the painting exists the connection will remain open. Long story short they found a way to be together. When Sven wants to see Erica, he sets up a mannequin and invites her to fill it up with her aura. He can see her as if she’s right there, but anyone else who has visited him lately only sees the mannequin.

Preserving the stillness of his quarters, Sven Sklyksk makes sure everything is left undisturbed. There are private areas in his domain that accumulate dust and it is this kind of environment that he feels most at one with. If it is a windy day, he prefers to travel underground in his secret corridors to various parts of the city.

Recently he has done a parody of his own work where he goes out at night and instead of painting corpses, he paints pictures of people that look like they’re dead but probably just passed out. Anything that stays still long enough for him to capture the essence of, he will work with it.

Martin Pixa

Hello!