Wednesday, January 23, 2008

Boston Critique Comments

The following are comments from the Saturday critique.

- How do you architecturally define the water?
- How do you put a building next to a very important water feature? The water seems to slice through the buildings.
- Where does the water start/stop. Maybe small features need to be added to water.
- In section, maybe the building could slip and slide similar to steps.
- Look at orienting the buildings in a different manner.
- What happens in the water?
- The water feature could inform the building.
- This scheme invites a person to interact with site. How can this inform details?
- Nice that the water isn't a standard fountain, but why is the building standard?
- Look at providing opportunities for watching and to be watched.
- Look at possibly bringing the water inside.
- What happens with the water during the winter?
- Do more diagrams that help define ideas to find locations for water. Possibly it creeps into other areas of the site.
- Look into various intersections with water.

After these comments, I'm going to look at the layout of my building and how the water element can inform the structure. I need to look at the size of my cafe. After looking at it and dwelling on it, I think it is too small. I also want to find a way that the main water feature will give the appearance of ice during the winter.

3 comments:

enno said...

You are all set. Go for it.
ef

Nick Graal said...

Frances,
Your boards are looking great. The idea to have your water feature(s) somehow active in both the winter and summer time will be a very strong selling point. You don't want to have a great water feature for only 7 months out of the year. Much like the large scale pond that was across from the hotel/the church of the scientist plaza (this is completely unused right now). There are some pretty interesting ways to use ice as a design feature. One that comes to mind is when metal chains are hung from the downspouts of a building. The ice forms and builds on the chains, producing a sculptural quality to it. I'll try to find an example.

kschommer said...

Frances & Nick,

I too have seen metal chains on down spouts and the great ice forms that they make. It would be a really neat feature to include in your project somehow. I think that your biggest challenge, and probably the funnest is going to be incorporating the water into the structure and look of your building. I think that it could be done in two totally different ways. One would be to attack it with a more modern form approach, kind of like Frank Gehry. And the other would be to use a more organic approach of maybe someone like Frank Lloyd Wright. Obviously there are many different ways you could go about it, but narrowing down how you want the character of the building to read will definitely be key.

Good Luck!