MID SEMESTER REVIEW THE WAKE UP CALL This week has provided time to step away from design studio: Air, to have a break and gather my thoughts. Time away is often a critical step when you hit a wall, when you cant seem to move forward a break can refresh you, resulting in a fresh mindset which paves the way for a new way forward. It can give new life to a project, instead of being obstinate about your concepts you can once again look on your own work with a critical eye inciting new and creative ideas. The response from the mid semester critique was underwhelming at best. Our design was criticized for lack of refinement; it apparently failed in the goals we had initially set out of structural stability and aesthetic appeal. The model was too small to adequately represent if the concept was structurally stable, was poorly made and didn’t exhibit a sound understanding of fabrication. Visually the pattern we had employed was too basic, and no real visual element was really introduced, such as a privilege point of view. The tutors were careful not to totally destroy our spirit, but were forceful enough in their words to suggest that our concept needed further refinement before our path forward was revealed. They said we were stuck in our approach, we had ideas and goals but had done little to develop it into a true concept, they seemed to realise we had really hit a wall. Initially, I was angry to hear this. We had put so much time into constructing it on the computer despite our lack of grasshopper skills, making it fabricateable, fighting through heartbreaking failures and unsuccessful attempts. I was also disappointed that our proposed concept wasn’t the culmination of our ideas. In the 50 developments we had many other concepts that we chose, attempted to develop, only to realise that it was either impossible to fabricate due to ‘meshing’, or in our minds, too much of a final product already to develop further into a better refined result. We kept being pushed back and back, until the design we chose was only a few steps in front of our recreated Voissoir Cloud. It was difficult to stand up in front of the class and present a concept that you know doesn’t represent the work you put into it, isn’t to your full potential. So when the critics said the words i knew i was going to hear, it was finally realising my failures without any justifiable excuse. It took me a week away from the subject to mull what the tutors had said over, and to admit to myself that they were exactly correct. I had initially been blinded by deadlines, stress and failures into believing that our design deserved praise. With a new refreshed outlook, i can now tackle the subject with a more level headed rational approach. Our troubles began in Week 6, when we were unable to successfully develop our recreation into our own idea, we had confined ourself by the Voissoir Cloud, and were unable to move away from it into something
new. I feel as though the course is partly to blame for this, making us choose particular computational themes and recreate a piece that represents this theme, it became hard to consider anything outside this confined box of the Voissoir Cloud. We had tried so hard to recreate it; it seems stupid to stray away from its ideas. This reluctance to step away from the Cloud, combined with a distinct lack of time, only two weeks, our lack of grasshopper skills and the ambiguity of the course expectations resulting in a less than desirable final product in the mid semester presentation. But the beauty is we still have 4 weeks, we still have goals and ideas that are relevant to the topic, and we have time to right the ship and correct the issues we have brought upon ourselves. We have had our wake up call, and its time to move forward. From here we must develop our own concept, one that isn’t constrained by the Voissoir Cloud, one that both represents structural and aesthetic themes and satisfies the constraints of the brief and the site, something we will look at in the coming weeks. Also rather than identifying our themes as ‘structural’ and ‘visual’, as we did in the crit, we need to streamline this into an actual idea. We need to develop these further so that these words can be replaced with ‘overlapping plates that distribute load’ and ‘privileged point of view’. Once we have these we will rid the design from its current ambiguity and we will have opened a new door, giving ourselves a path toward our final product. This is what we should have done in Week 6, but better late than never, we will have to do it now. I’m glad we had the mid semester crit, it has opened my eyes to our issues and failures. We have our path now, only time will tell if we will be successful in the development of our final design.