Design is the most important and most difficult part of being an architect. Design is essentially the response to an integrity inherited from a given idea (brief) and/or concept (function) and/or location (site).
Our brief:
IN PLACE Semester one’s brief asked students to consider the concrete characteristics of buildings location; it asked students to make designs that responded to measured surveys of a site, and the things and people it accommodated.
ANY PLACE will ask students to consider a broader sense of context, considering urban and cultural conditions that extend beyond the local. It will ask students to take a measure of, and make designs that respond to, the human condition and urbanity.
Urban Any city is a complex set of relationships, including – for example – networks of human circulation and movement that connect its many sites. We can understand characteristics of any particular site by thinking how it is cut across by or dislocated from the formal infrastructure of transport – tram lines, car-parks, pedestrian routes – and informal patterns of movement and occupation – from shopping habits to street life – that make up the city. Every new building responds to the established patterns of movement that define it, but also intervenes in those patterns, interrupting them and establishing new connections and dislocations.
Cultural The creation of buildings or cities reflects the contemporary period as it is. Designing a building or creating a space directly demonstrates new values, our ways of living or thinking.
Within the guidelines of this brief I should wish to incorporate the following:
First I would like to continue the concept of ying and yang in regards to the library. The library should accommodate this in the plan or section as the two merge together in symmetry. Signifying their bond and emphasising their natural unity.
Subsequently the fundamental picturesque landscape of Rome and the natural beauty of the city, including the river, should be incorporated as such.
The history of Rome should be enjoyable through the program of my building whether in the concept of glazing, and creating a link with the surroundings through views out, or opening up qualities of the city for the users of the building to enjoy. The layers of history should be exemplified and incorporated, either subconsciously or not, in the concept of design.