aae2016 Research Based Education - Volume Two
323
Figure 3 Exercise 3
Exercise 3: Memory Scale Collage
This is a way of abstracting the design task as one of scale and grain. Part 1: list relevant reference spaces or objects you know. Paste the plans over your site. Part 2: from the reference objects determine the grain(s) or scale(s) relevant to your brief. Abstract them as a grid that is spaced apart by the relevant distance(s). Draw in response to the emerging grain: things existing (kept) and proposed (new). Also look at what follows the grain, what transgresses (is larger or differently proportioned), what sits well below (more compact spaces, points or nodes). Theses scale exceptions can now be seen and manipulated in the foreground in contrast to what is typical or normal. Rem Koolhaas and Elia Zenghelis (OMA) working on the competition for the Parc de la Villette, Paris in 1982 decided they needed to discover the scale of the park. Initially they pasted buildings and then squares over the park. Then, realising that a park is not a building and a square is more readily defined by its edge conditions, they decided to find a relevant social dimension. They decided that you could walk past a friend having a picnic without greeting them if you were 25 metres away and used this social scale to cut the park into 44 strips. Now they knew how big the park was.
Exercise 4: Wallpaper Map
Choose a range of ready-made patterns or wallpapers that you judge can relate to your concept. Sketch or list different ways of interpreting a chosen few of these patterns. For example: as solids and voids, as contours, as areas of different activity, as private or public space etc. Phoebe Braidwood used this exercise (figure 4) to begin her design for a Cider Park on Weston Island, Bath in 2006, mapping and then modelling different strategies from found patterns.
Exercise 5: Name
Whatever idea or aspect of your project you want to explore: give it a name. Then diagram that name in as many ways as come to mind immediately. Once you have diagrammed all the possibilities that come easily to mind, choose another name and draw the diagram(s) for this new name.
Exercise 6: Muff on a Huff Puff
A game which is a sort of architectural version of ‘picture consequences’ which one Danish family I know calls ‘Muff on a Huff Puff’. It exploits the hive-mind to develop ideas. A list of players is drawn up with the accumulated creation going off on a journey round a circle of people. An alternate version has the pieces returning to you at each stage, so it is more like a dialogue without words.