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.