//week thirteen

reflection...to sum up the semester, i believe it is important to be able to read a city in order to design for a city. For example in renaissance style planning the cities are symmetrically planned cities with perfect symmetrical geometry which makes it easy to design symmetrical architecture for as you can read the city through its form. Today we are trying to change the way we look at and others look at urban design. The ideal future city are those of eco cities which are sustainable and highly proficient in the use of resources. These are the cities which we are trying to ultimately achieve.

Below are some questions which were posed to us at the beginning of semester which i will answer now after finishing this unit:

what is architecture? architecture to me is sleepless nights, and more importantly the act of designing buildings which are site specific and connect with there surrounding context


what is good architecture? a good architect will design buildings which complement and connect with there surroundings


what is a city? although in past times geographically walls once determined a city, today a city tends to have no physical boundaries and is usually a large developed area of commercial, economical and residential merit.


what does it mean to be a good architect? it means being cleaver about design and architecture, understanding the context and site of the project and being respectful and compliant to already existing urban environment.

my comment on the images from first week, revisited....

image one:

building dominates context

image two:

blocks views to significant mountains

image three:

scale is out of proportion

I found it interesting to note how different my opinion and comments were on these images. I remember in week one when i first looked at these images and i struggled to find anything to say about them. Now when i look at them i see this huge building that takes over the whole landscape and dominates the context of the place. The buildings architectural form also differs from the rest of the surrounding buildings strengthening the fact that this building has little relationship with its context.   

//week twelve

LECTURE ON SUSTAINABILITY...



reflection... the lecture today was held by three guest speakers including; Elise Robertson, Magna Kowalk and Susan Loh, who all gave talks on their own perspectives and interests in eco cities.
The first speaker, Elise Robertson, spoke about three types of Eco-cities:
these included:  the garden city
                         historic green centres
                         and utopian green cities
//below is the model for Ebenezer Howard's Garden City for Tomorrow..

The Garden City that Howard Talks about refers to slumless smokeless cities. This idea about cities came about in the early 20th century and was very innovative for its time, it posed emphasis on creating planned cities that exhibited abundance of parks and gardens. I think that this type of utopian city be quite effective in terms of creating a beautiful sanctuary for people to live, although increasing large public areas within the city in abundance could possibly create the opposite to what is intended. It could create a dangerous city if these public spaces were not used appropriately. 

Overall i enjoyed listening to Elise's discusion and found it interesting to know that these kind of theories of utopian eco cities are not recent thoughts and ideas and infact are original theories of famous 20th century architects and urban planners. 

Magna Kowalk the next speaker stated: "All we can have are responses not solutions"

This statement got me thinking about my future profession in architecture and how it is important to think holistically about sustainability and the outcomes of certain designs. I think it is also important to note that we are commencing a change in the urban environment where we have to change the way we and others look at design. 

Susan Loh talked about eco cities through the perspective of other well known founders and urban planners. For example; Ebenezer Howard - the garden city, Frank Lloyd Wright - the living city, and William Mcdonough - Hannover Principle. Mcdonough's theory explains how humanity and nature need to co-exit in order to achieve utopia. 

Before this lecture i initially thought that the notion of eco cities was a relatively new idea, that has come about in response to the diminishing resources around the world. That is why i was surprised to find out that some of our early 20th century urban planners where already thinking about sustainable design and quality living standards. 

//week eleven

reflection....when analysing architecture within its context one can be and should be quite critical of how well it is suited to its environment and surrounding urbanism. It is one thing for an architect to focus on the design of the building, but without having any focus on the surrounding urban landscape the architecture can only function on its own rather than being part of urbanity. Today in the lecture Peter Richards brought up the issue of architecture + architecture does not always = urbanism, this is due to the reasons mentioned above about how architecture needs to consider the surroundings for it to function within an urban context. I think that the Villa Savouy is a perfect example of designing without taking into consideration the context of which it is designed in and the client it was designed for.

Form follows function? or does function follow form??
Peter posed the above questions to us today in the lecture in terms of how the exterior of the building functions within its surroundings. He elaborated on the notion of form follows function and made us think more broadly interms of the urban environment and how the architecture functions within its context. He talked a lot about access points of buildings and how they relate to adjacent buildings and town services. In particular we saw examples of cities that lacked in efficient urban design, where parts of the community  backed onto public facilities and shops although they were completely blocked off from these necessities, as access points to these parts had been completely disregarded. I think that this kind of lack of consideration to the function of these large impacting shopping centres and the surrounding mobility of the city creates chaos and demotes urbanity. All the aspect that help create an urban environment such as; walkability, diversity, proximity, connectivity, accessibility and legibility all contribute to creating a functional community.

When planning has not been considered and architecture is just randomly placed within a site this kind of approach function follows form approach. In this approach the functional aspects such as mobility and street scape of a city seem to get lost and rarely work coherently. Although, one can argue the pro's and con's of planned form follows function cities, for example they can create abundance of open space where possible danger of buildings being placed anywhere without consideration of its surrounding context can occur. Although these highly planned cities, on the oposite spectrum, can also be high evolved and have thoroughly considered the mobility and the accessibility of its architecture and urban form.

//week ten

Reflection… today in the tutorial we received feedback for our final boards from project two that we submitted in week nine. We also talked about what architectural element from our city from project two that we would like to analyse for project three.  I have chosen to analyse the Bundner Kunstmuseum in the center of Chur.  The fine arts museum was built in 1874 and was intended to be a private residences, it wasn’t until 1919 when it began being accessed by the public.  The building, today, has an extension on the back of it; this space is used as part of the exhibition space.

In the lecture Mirko talked about the importance of heritage with in a city and how it is an important aspect in order to understand the city. This made me think about the city Dubai which is a very newly developed city with little heritage to help visitors and residents identify themselves with in the city. It is a city which exhibits a total disregard to human scale. When heritage buildings are demolished and cities are rejuvenated this lack of identity can occur even if it had once presented a close interaction between the people and the architecture. Today i learnt that it is important to have a combination of old and new which compliment each other in order to achieve a presence of connection to the city.

//final submitted board

final board

...above is the result of our board after the exhibition and feedback we received from the tutors and Mirko. aspects that we changed:

- enlarged the scale of the nolie map to 1:2000 and added floor plans of important building

- included a few sketches of important aspects of the city

- enlarge the mobility map