Thursday Crit- Second Life

Malia West

http://taniawest.wordpress.com/

This weeks brief was about 'sustenance' and Tania back back to her Samoan roots, as this is a big part of her identity. Her design concept took inspiration from traditional samoan housing plans, thus the design of her building is open plan and decided to make the columns and beams visible. I particularly liked the how she blended "tradtional and contemporary". It was interesting to see weaving detailing beside very contemporary features, inspired by Daniel Libeskind's Jewish Museum in Berlin (her matrix building). Tania explained how to get into the Jewish Museum, you have to go through another building, and she played with this idea, and disected her building through her neighbours. I thought this was an innovative idea, and this made me think about ways I could incorporate neighbouring architecture with my own, for my next project in SecondLife. 

Designing her own alpha channels and uploading it onto SecondLife was good to see, rather than the boring default ones. The plan of the building is not symmetrical at all, emphasied by the placement of the openings and thresholds. This helped make the architecture feel 'organic' and inviting- which is what I think of when I conjure up images of tradtional pacific housing. Overall I think Tania's design is a successful one.

Ziyi Liu (Bill) http://walkingsuperman.blogspot.com/ Bill grouped the members of his architectural firm, so a designer is paired with an architect.   Each pair gets one side of the building with a glass wall seperating the two areas. He stated he choose glass as the material, as he wanted the members of his firm to discuss ideas from across the room. I wonder if there needs to be a glass wall at all. What if all 4 members were placed in an open plan setting, so they could bounce design ideas off each other togethor? Bill had some fun scripts (however they did not work, which may have been because the computer was lagging?), and it would have been better if the round rib structure at the top was made with his own textures. His building looks well made, with a clean palette of 2 materials- concrete and glass. Maybe introducing a third material could have livened up the architecture? <><><> Yi Heng He (Damien) http://dhdesign2.tumblr.com/

Damien designed a building where when given commands, the walls expand out. He explained the purpose of this so during the daytime the building can effectively use the space, and at night for security reasons it becomes compact. He sited his building opposite the Les Mils gym a very busy area. Therefore he found a place of second life with existing structures on either side and wedged his building in between. The function of his building is for news broadcasting, and the central threshold acts as a place where information can travel through. It seems his building is mimicing the transitonal space of the new Ernst and Young building in Auckland city which the building his architecture is sited.



The rectilinear nature of the building, and the cubes that contract in and out, is reminicent of Zaha Hadid's Contemporary Arts Centre in Cincinnati. Similarly both buildings are compact and solid. Damien's tip was to find scripts on 3greeneggs, fortunately I found this site last semester for Media 1 and was a great help. I could see Damien thought hard about the site and also how it could influence his design.