Botanical garden canopy in Columbia. The idea behind this design was to resemble the extension an growing of trees, with the modular hexagonal ceiling representing trees. With the structure only acting as a canopy, the space
created within is open to the elements that surround it, with the high
ceiling giving a sense of grandeur.The garden can be used as a function space as well as a butterfly reserve - being conscious of the ecology of the area. Visually, we extracted the elegant twisting motion of the scattered columns into our design, as well as the hexagonal modular system.
This project was proposed as a botanical garden for Moscow. The exuberant colours and organic, non-geometrical forms break away from the traditional. It shows how an interior and exterior can be created with hardly any resemblance to what we find familiar.
Firstly, we focused on the sounds that would be associated with the atmosphere of our stairs.
The dystopian stairs were mechanical and made of cogs rotating on a chain, and so the sound of machinery and construction was what we would imagine when walking up these stairs.
In contrast, we imagined the utopian stairs bringing a sense of calm and serenity, therefore we chose the sound of a waterfall.
The videos themselves are not linked with our stairs.
This image used the repetition of another image - a building on the city site with the reflection of the apartment complex opposite. We mirrored, scaled and fragmented this image to create the same kind of feeling in 'The Ultimate City', when Halloway sees his own reflection in a highrise and thinks it is someone following him. We wanted to create the atmosphere of confusion and a little bit of movement with the blurred edges.
The second image was from the construction site under the building. These colours reminded us of the bright neon lights we would imagine filled Halloway's city, and also to the Pixel room in our second life hotel facade.
The last image was also from the construction site, and was manipulated to look like the space lead to darkness and was never ending.
[Text: The external façade of a building is very telling. For a
hotel, the impression a guest or customer forms of it is from its exterior. The
outside provides a way-finding for them, and encapsulates their experience in
the hotel by being the first and last thing they see.
For our Utopian Garden City hotel, we wanted to form a
shared space where people are directed through the building by how the spaces
are planned. The hotel begins in the inside space of the teleport room, and
from there the circular walkways direct you around the open rooms in the centre
of the structure. This would encourage interaction with the other visitors in
the hotel, instead of the usual closeted use of hotel rooms which guests would
only use to sleep in.
We also wanted to create an entrancing visual experience.
The curved structure combined with the movement of the water texture creates a
subtle optical illusion – the façade is fixed yet it feels fluid. It interacts
with the edge of the water it sits on. As you walk through the spaces, the
boundaries of inside space and outside space are merged.]
[Text: For the façade of our second hotel, in Halloway’s ruined
city, we wanted to make something that would sit high on top of the
skyscrapers. This was inspired by a moment in ‘The Ultimate City’, when
Halloway first flew in to the abandoned city and was faced with these giant
office buildings emerging from nowhere. In the same way, we wanted out hotel to
have a big visual impact.
Another significant moment in the short story was when Halloway
began to bring his city to life:
“A Gasoline-driven
generator in the entrance hall was soon pounding way, its power supply plugged
into the mains. …Television sets came on, radios emitted a ghostly tonelessness
interrupted every now and then by static from the remote-controlled switching
units of the tidal pumps twenty miles away along the Sound.”
With this idea, we screened the side of our façade with
static TV screens, using rotating textures of pixelated static and alpha
channels to give a realistic effect. The rooms that hang from the ceiling
illustrate “the city being itself.” “It was only now,” JG Ballard writes, “in
this raucous light and noise … only in this flood of cheap neon that it was
really alive.” The panels that change colour frantically and imitate the pixels
of a TV. The interior is also dimly lit with yellow light to resemble the feel
of city street lamps.
The ‘wings’ of the structure subtly respond to the movement
of the avatar, moving slowly up and down.
All together, we wanted to the guests to feel the assurance
of the city’s visual noise that most people take comfort in.]
In our documentation of the utopia we have purposely made the content of poor quality, this is not due to the fact that we were not literate enough to use the recording software, but for personal reason ... ahem ... This documentation revolves around the aspect of a revealing distopia through the revelation of pixels. BLURRED PIXELS lol!
Working on Second Life has proved to be harder than expected. As with the ArchiCAD files in the previous workshop, Second Life has its own restrictions and limitations to adhere to. However, with this also comes the ability to show kinematic movement within our hotels - something we would not have been able to do in ArchiCAD.
Each mesh is very large in terms of prim size - they have a lot of triangles and vertices. The simplest thing to do to reduce the amount of prim in an imported mesh is to choose the least amount of polygons possible when exporting from Rhino.
We were very excited to get both our meshes to work on in Second Life!
For the kinematic movement of our first hotel facade, we used a moving texture. This was applied to only one direction of the weave, because with both directions it looked confusing and busy. We slowed down the movement, and to the eye it looked as if the whole facade was moving.
'Foundation' lines on Rhino that will be put into grasshopper to create our basic shape
Mesh on Grasshopper before it's baked
Exported into 3D Max
Instead of assembling it all on Second Life, where joining point to point is not always accurate, we decided to upload a part of the mesh that we had already repeated on Rhino
