Project Statement -Drafting

Canberra - The Place to Be? Or Not?

We have identified a lack of international presence for our countries capital and a lack of national and international interest.

When looking at the parliamentary functions we defined some key issues of education and lack of public involvement. --> Public Involvement

Architectural Solution space/spaces for public consultation and observation of decisions.

The Question was posed that if legislation is for the people then why aren't the people of Austalia and their views properly represented in federal parliament?

Our solution is to create a public presence within the federal parliament by an architectural inssertion.

This 'architectural entity' is not only going to be a base for public forum but will boost the international presence of Australian federal parliament and Canberra as a whole.

Project Drafting

Capital Strategy

• Your chosen strategy (flexible, mobile, distributed or virtual) was well investigated.
• Your idea creatively identified problems and issues associated with ways capital city / parliament worked today in Australia and a speculation was made to suggest your idea could lead to an innovative solution.
• You summarised your investigation well and communicated all necessary information clearly and creatively with images and diagrams in your panel.
• Your blog communicated your idea development well.

Our chosen strategy is Flexibility and throught the past few weeks we have investigated many different ways in which a structure can be flexible and the different catagories that flexibility fall under such as adaptation(see previous blog for more catagoiries also a select few are on the presentation panels)

We identified a problem within the stucture of parliament that we can address through our chosen strategy. This problem is public presence. We suggest that a type of publi forum/Q&A can be used to combat this problem and a flexible space would be the ideal way to provide an architectural solution

This diagram shows where the problem lies (the arrows) and where our solution is based (the question mark)









Capital Infastructure and Presence

• Your investigation to identify how your strategy could make use of the existing and/or new infrastructural support was good, unique and innovative.
• You made a good effort to identify how your chosen strategy could have its own unique presence and identity for people to identify that it constituted Australian Capital.
• You summarised your investigation well and communicated all necessary Information clearly and creatively with images and diagrams in your panel.
• Your blog communicated your idea development well.

As we are dealing with parliament and not Canberra as a whole we chose to focus on the infastructure and presence issues that are directly related to parliament house.
We have previously identified that the building will be our main focus and we looked at the current layout and design. We also believe that because we are introducing a more public focus on parliament accessability to and around parliament is a key infastructural issue. Canberra is a realtively small city and the first fully designed garden city in Australia(the newer outer suburbs are creating a problem) and most people are happy to drive are ride around. Comparing the current population to the anticipated population for the cities design Canberra is exceeding it's capacity. Griffin (Canberra's designer) proposed that new linked garden cities should be added when this happened however this is not happening and the city is just sprawling into it's surrounds.
The presence of Canberra a parliament house is a big issue globally as not many iternational people can identify Canberra as Australias capital. 

This diagram shows the simple combination of history and culture with a cities structure that create a disiarable place (which canberra is currently not)
Another study on our panels shows how many cityies can be identified by just their skylines.

This diagram shows the cultural presnece within parliament which we believe is lacking on a national and more importantly international scale.

The flagpole atop of Parliament house is the being of what could be great capital presence. National we can identify with it however the international presence is lacking





Architectural Types and Purposes

This diagram shows the gaps that we have identified in the parliamentry structure and where we propose our architectural entity will be most effective.

We would like our Architectrural solution to bring Australian parliament into the 21st Century by both its form and function inside and outside of the parliamentry system.


 
 
Architectural Presence and Identity

I believe that presence is a key issue in improving the public presnece in Canberra and the national interest in parliaments activities.







A very intersting study I looked at relating to Architectural identity was the design for the Burj Al Arab(know world wide for it's unique design). http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Wra7o6gb6Wc#t=04m27s

The section I was very interested in was where the Architect shows how many of the worlds most famous buildings can be drawn very simply but still be recognised. I believe that something like this could dramatically enhance Canberras presence in the world.

Week Six - Refinement

This week I have been looking into how members of parliament would view our proposition.

I started by finding a general definintion of what members of parliament do in Australia-

As the elected representatives of the people, parliamentarians need to be aware of the needs of their constituents, and will be expected to respond to those needs. Engaging the citizens in decisions that affect their lives is therefore essential to good governance, and a cornerstone of parliamentary procedure. Parliamentarians are also an important link between the electorate and the executive government, and play a key role in voicing the concerns of the people they represent and in advocating for changes that will improve their lives.

I then found an article from the queenland governement looking at our exact issue of promoting public presence in parliament. It identified two key issue which we will have to deal with as well-

It seems, that two major obstacles stand in the way of attracting greater community participation in committees. The first is that the existence of parliamentary committee inquiries are not, as a matter of course, publicised beyond major metropolitan newspapers. Efforts are made by committee secretariats to reach relevant individuals and groups but, largely due to time constraints, these efforts are focused on the most 'obvious' potential witnesses.

The second obstacle is to break down public perceptions of the irrelevance of parliamentary activities to their lives. Clearly this cannot be done only through the work of committees. At the same time, however, given that one function of the committee system is to 'take parliament to the people', a strong case exists to use innovative and experimental methods in order to fully carry out this role.

I then looked overseas for more on our topic of public presence and found these statments which reflect our thoughts from Barack Obamar-

Government should be transparent.  Transparency promotes accountability and provides information for citizens about what their Government is doing.  Information maintained by the Federal Government is a national asset. My Administration will take appropriate action, consistent with law and policy, to disclose information rapidly in forms that the public can readily find and use. Executive departments and agencies should harness new technologies to put information about their operations and decisions online and readily available to the public. Executive departments and agencies should also solicit public feedback to identify information of greatest use to the public.

Government should be participatory. Public engagement enhances the Government's effectiveness and improves the quality of its decisions. Knowledge is widely dispersed in society, and public officials benefit from having access to that dispersed knowledge. Executive departments and agencies should offer Americans increased opportunities to participate in policymaking and to provide their Government with the benefits of their collective expertise and information. Executive departments and agencies should also solicit public input on how we can increase and improve opportunities for public participation in Government.

Government should be collaborative.  Collaboration actively engages Americans in the work of their Government. Executive departments and agencies should use innovative tools, methods, and systems to cooperateamong themselves, across all levels of Government, and with nonprofit organizations, businesses, and individuals in the private sector.  Executive departments and agencies should solicit public feedback to assess and improve their level of collaboration and to identify new opportunities for cooperation.

I also looked into the parliamentry stucutre in Austalia to understand it more

Week Five - Project Development

From our identifide issues with Australian Federal Parliament we meet up to talk about how this could create a design brief and how it related to the elements we need to present.

We first started looking at the broader scale of Canberra as a city

-Transport is lacking

-Gas, electricity and water are easily available

-Interenet is widely available with good coverage

After talking with our tutor we decided we were still being to broad as most of these elements weren't directly impacting our design. We continued to discuss each panel for the upcoming presentation and defined what would be on each.

Vision for Australian Capital - Capital Strategy
- public presence our key issue
- public presence and interaction with parliament (how this may happen possibly a forum/Q&A)
- a need for better connection between the federal government and the public (interested public?)
- how this will manifest into a form/function

Vision for Australian Capital - Capital Infrastructure & Presence
- looking at building infrastructure and immediate surroundings
- how this structure can be used in opening up parliament
- how using flexiblity will influence the capital presense
- modifying elements to create connectivity
- altering the function of the forum

Architectural Investigation – Architectural Types & Purposes
- presence is the people what we are proposeing is to bring parliament to the people and make a louder public presence 
- How will we be forming our public forum
- What spaces may/will be needed to facilitate our ideas

Architectural Investigation – Architectural Presence & Identity
- how our new insertion will create publicity
- our design should be sympathetic to the original symbology of capital hill
- BUT this will also allow for the push into the 21st century
- Building fabric: adding to it – layers of time 

The 'Beehive' New Zealand Parliament House

After our tutorial I looked at some examples simillar to what we are propsing. Bowen house in New Zealand was the temporary home for their parliament, to be able to function as a parliament house it went through some refurbishments includeing;

-two large select committee rooms that can be joined to create a single large space by withdrawing the wall between them 

-glassed-in viewing galleries where the public can watch and listen to select committees at work in the select committee rooms 

-function areas for both formal and informal gatherings 

-conference and meeting rooms 

-large waiting areas and new restrooms.

The original plan for the Beehive by Sir Basil Spence

The top floor is occupied by the Cabinet room, with the Prime Minister's offices on the ninth floor (and part of the eighth). Other floors contain the offices of cabinet ministers.

Other facilities within the building include function rooms and a banqueting hall on the first floor of the Beehive, which is the largest function room in the parliamentary complex. 

Other facilities include a theatrette and a swimming pool. restaurants. The building also houses, in its basement, the country’s
The parliament building is used by MPs who hold meetings or are discussing bills or new laws.

Week Four - Theme Group Flexible

The Jelly-Mould Studio

Shearing Layers of Design- this is a very important concept in flexible design which looks at the different elements within a buildings design, how fthey relate to each other and how flexible they are. The different layers are sight, structure, skin, services, space plan and stuff.

Cheryl (one of my team members) found a tv series inspired by the book (How Building Learn by Stewart Brand):  http://kottke.org/08/08/how-buildings-learn-tv-series .

I thought it was very interesting and could be related well to our design and our set tasks for this week. The show looked at low cost flexible buildings can be very important in regards to economic growth.

There are many differnt ways to think about (and create) flexibility in architechture some of the different catagories they can be split up into are:

adaptable.  adaptable structures features repositionable partitions or are changeable per user/occupant (case studies: rietveld schroeder house, japanese housing).

universal.  what typifies a universally flexible building is its ease of adaptation per use.  these buildings are often characterized by open floor plans and typology free design (case studies: s.r. crown hall, eames house).

movable.  movable flexible buildings consist of relocatable or repositionable structures or buildings capable of being torn down and reassembled in another location (case studies: nomadic tents, airstream trailers).

transformable.  characterized by modular design (capable of adding or removing units or components) transformable structures can also open and close, change form, or change color (case studies: plug-in city, university of phoenix stadium)

responsive.  responsive buildings can respond to a number of external stimuli, including, but not limited to, energy/environment, interaction, usage, or occupation (case studies: allianz arena, institut du monde arab).

Focusing more on our design assignment and the issues raised by Yasu my key thoughts and ideas were;

Canberra the place to be? not....BUT Could be the place to be!

I believe that canberra has a very real lack og global presence which the copetition is adressing. On a national scale we can all recognise and relate to Canberra however it is still very low on our list of cities to visit.

Parliament, what is it? Why do we need it? How does it work? What could be better?

In our team we identified a lack of education and knowledge about parliament in the general public. Many people don't know the differences between local state and federal government. However in aying this many people don't really care and think that when it comes down to it most of the decissions made in Canberra won't affect them. From this we came up with two key issues that we would like to tackle in our design project- a lack of knowledge in the running of parliament and a lack of public involvment in federal descisions.  

One of the design projects that I was very interested in that I believe relates very directly to flexibility is the Digital Water Pavilion.

Imagine a building made of water. It features liquid curtains for walls - curtains that not only can be programmed to display images or messages but can also sense an approaching object and automatically part to let it through.
MIT architects and engineers have designed such a building, and it will be unveiled at next year's international exhibition in Spain. The "digital water pavilion" - an interactive structure made of digitally controlled water curtains - will be located at the entrance to Expo Zaragoza 2008, in front of a new bridge designed by Zaha Hadid. The structure will contain an exhibition area, a cafe and various public spaces.

Week Three - Infrastructure, Strategy and Presence

This week we were looking again at our theme groups this time through the lenses of infrastructure, strategy and presence

Infastructure

Presence

Strategy

  

Through the topics of mobile and distributed we looked at transport through and via space, sea, road, rail, air and land and the different modes of transport that would be used in each of these.

We believe that mobile and distribute (as well as virtual and even flexible) can be related very well to community and providing a link between the public and the functions of parliament.

We again struggled slightly with virtual but an example of what we discussed was how the internet can be used to bring large groups of people together for a specific cause. One major issue we had was how do you make a virtual presence?

Flexible Discussion

Virtual Discussion

Mobile and Distributed Discussion

Week Two - Flexible, Mobile, Distributed and Virtual

This week we looked at what each of our themes might mean.

We started in our tutorials looking at mobile

to define mobile there was both the form and the function, a mobile form is something hanging usually rotating and the function is something that moves around usually making stops at defined points.

We got slight stuck thinking about how we could relate this theme to parliament and what parts of parliament are or could be mobile such as local state and federal.

Moving on to distributed

definitions were; divided into distinct phases, share or deal out, to deliver

again we got slightly stuck focusing on parliament rather than just distributed but still came up with some interesting ideas of a national "web" where Canberra is currently the center and the state capitals the outer points.

Our third topic was Virtual

imagined, opposed to reality, simulated, responsive, power force, sensory

we defined virtual with a ven-diagram with virtual being the space which combines reality and non reality

Virtual throws up a lot of options for parliament however we found it hard to tie it down to a physical connection.

Finally, for this week, we discussed Flexible 

adaptation, modification, growing, developing, user defined were all linked to the idea of flexible

we kept coming back to the definition that flexible is something that can be used in different ways.

Week One - Unit Introduction

Today/this week we were introduced to our exciting assignment relating to the CAPIThetical Competition. Luckily I have just been in Canberra and talking to my sisters friends (my sister lives in Canberra) they all thought it was a very interesting idea to redesign Canberra and even a good topic for a university design subject! Although not directly connected to parliament, my sister works for a government division and has many views on what could be improved upon.

In our lecture we looked at the strategies of design (not solely a building but built form) relating to our four major themes of Flexible, Mobile, Distributed and Virtual.

What first came to mind when looking back on the lecture for this week was how old the parliamentary system is in Australia. Although Australia is not an old country we have taken elements from other countries to create our own parliament, part of our brief is to update our area of parliament to be relevant in the 21stC. Looking at this through our themes there are many very interesting and developing technologies that can be integrated into our  system to bring it up to speed (date).

Presence and Identity was another theme that remained in my mind after the lecture. When thinking of other countries such as France and England for example if visiting these countries the first cities we think of are Paris and London which are these countries capitals, they are exciting and famous and the heart of each however when thinking of visiting Australia I doubt that people first think to visit Canberra. So why is it that people don't want to visit Canberra? Is it just a place for grade 6 classes to visit and study for school? Is it just a city for the government to function from? Can it be made to be desirable?

When thinking about iconic symbolism and identity I realised how well I knew what our parliament building looked like. A simple google image search can show how identifiable the structure is, but is this just because I see it on the news or would people from other countries be able to identify our parliament like we can with many others?

    

 A quick video showing the inside of parliament house (accessable by the public)