Domus Domus Domus Domus Domus

Wow, after weeks of hard work, domus has ended. ha terminado. it was a big challenge to try and bring together everyones ideas, especially with a larger group, but we soldiered through and produced a project which someone in the barn mistook for a 4th years! yesss! the critiquers had a few issues but overall labelled it a 'strong project', so well done to all of sangath 7! luke, top work on the posters and all the 3d modelling along the way; leigh, the site model got lots of praise from fellow students and looks pretty cool in the images below; ilce, all the hours patiently trying to glue the rib to the base paid off, coz the critiquers loved our model.

I've included some images of the model below. enjoy. adios.
Sophie

more developmental work for domus.................

project three: DOMUS

What can i say about the final project for archi 2a, apart from awesome. Richard kept the best til last. Being a group assignment i initially thought it would be challenging, especially because im so stubborn and very opinionated. But i was proven wrong, beacuse the group i was part of (sangath 7) worked remarkably well together. We managed to utilise everyone's strenghts and understood everyone's weaknesses. In our group's case, someones strenght was anothers weakness and vise evrsa, which meant that we formed a unified and strong group. Even though we all had different distinct styles, we managed to create a house that had great concept, a great plan, and excelltn presentation. By far, DOMUS was the best project of the semester.

Good job Sangath 7. WELL DONE

These are some my developmental drawings for Domus.

Final Presentation for project two: minimal

project two: minimal

PROJECT TWO: MINIMAL



some developmental work for project two.

second poster for project 1: Minima

Finally, ive come around to posting some of my work on our blog. Its taken me this long to work out to use this blogging business. So, yeh, below you will see all of my final presentations, and some of my develpomental work, the succesful and the complete and utter failures.

Man, project one, what a challenge, pressure gallore. One sleepless night, turned into a sleepless week, and i think the fact that we had to produce a project that required so much in such a short of time was the main reason aas towards why i felt the pressure. I feel like i produced a good result overall, but i could have done better.

These are the posters for Project 1: MINIMA

DOMUS Final Submission

Hey ppl !

Below you will find our groups final submission for DOMUS. Poster 1 - elevations , Poster 2 - site plan,floor/roof plan, Poster 3-section & 1 pt persepective with photo montage & further 1:50 physical model. Enjoy!

Cheers,

Nat

P.S. Thanks Mitch & Luc 4 all your hard efforts n sticking to our groups 'laws'.

here are our posters for Domus, good work team! ...Sangath 7

Domus design development

Well, our design is pretty much finalised, so i will post some of my sketches of our design development:

This idea is a design inspired by Denton Corker Marshall's house at Cape Schank. I thought that having a deep 'box' around the windows would be a solution for the need for eaves.



This idea involves separating the different areas of the house (refuge, prospect, and studio) into three different levels. We have kept the form relatively simple, and have included horizontal slats across the windows to act as a screen from the sun.



Developing this idea...elevations



Next, we came up with the idea of a more organic shape. As we wanted to base the idea on aboriginal x-ray art, this idea is supposed to represent the shape of a rib.



This page has two ideas on it: up the top, we explored the idea of putting pods in the curved shape we had came up with. Down the bottom of the page, the initial concept of the utility spine running through the building. The spine houses all the services: bathroom, toilet, laundry, BIR's, storage, part of the kitchen and stairs. The open areas off the spine are the 'served' areas.




This plan neatened up the 'spine' idea, organising the various areas more efficiently. This has became our final plan. The spine not only houses the services but also acts to divide the areas between prospect and refuge, public and private.At this point, we considered simplifying the shape, making it into a simple rectangle. however when we pinned up our curved plan in the tute, our collegues seemed to really respond to the curve, so we went back to that idea.
The Spine in 3d


A 3d sketch of the idea, with the spine running through the middle, and the ribs around it.

After coming together in the group and esatblishing a rough floor plan, we worked separately to develop the house and produce different approaches.

Here is the development I did. I experimented with the roof form, looking at desert creatures for inspiration. I wanted the roof to act as a shell which protects the inner space from the harsh surrounds.

I also created some quick models to try and develop the roof form.

Domus development- Mitch

Here is my first development work for Domus, which I worked on before we combined ideas in a group. I started fairly conceptually looking at the creatures that inhabit the desert and how they manage to survive in such a harsh environment as well as how the environment itslef operates, and used these ideas for inspiration. The most noteable ideas I came up with were a scorpion armour inspired structure, which has an outer armour shell to protect the inner space. A tangling steel structure warpping around each other like a tree root with gaps in the material acting as windows. And finally a snake inspired floor plan concept which has rooms curving around an inner courtyard in a natrual and organic way that I though suited the desert environment. The texture of snake skin also interested me as a texture that could be employed for the house.

Inspiration...

As our site for Domus is in Kakadu, we have taken for our inspiration for this project Aboriginal rock art, which appears all over Kakadu. This rock art is often called 'x-ray art', as the images show the skeleton and organs inside the animals and people pictured. The idea was to come up with a design for a house which appears 'x-rayed'.



We came up with a concept in which the structure of the house was like a skeleton, with repetitive 'ribs' holding up the house, and wrapping around it. Our tutor andrew suggested we look at Santiago Calatrava's work. We looked up Calatrava's Milwaukee Art Museum (first image below) and found that his interior design really related to what we were thinking of...


these other images, from calatrava's science centre in valencia, spain, also portray the idea of the building's skeleton.


In order to make the 'skeleton' clear and dramatic, we are thinking of making the walls glass. Mies's Farnsworth house provided inspiration when it came to creating a plan for a house which was enclosed in glass, inparticular the way he articulated the utility block.

Week Two - Domus - Luc, Nat, Mitch

After we discussed our initial deas about how the house should respond to the site each member of the group worked separately throughout the week to generate a range of concepts. We shared our individual ideas and considered a few concepts to develop before deciding on a design that we all felt best suited the project. The concept we decided on is an insect/scorpion amour inspired design. The space is to be covered by a large roof which continues to the ground, acting as a protective shell from the harsh environmentis. It would be separated into thin strips of metal and placed at different levels to allow small amounts of light in. We discussed that the house could be lowered underground to provide natural insulation, deciding that we would work individually over the weekend, developing the intial concpet and meet on Monday night to compare ideas and further develop the concept. On Monday night we shared the new ideas and alterations to the original concept we had worked on over the weekend. We all liked the development of the floor plan done by Luciano with all the rooms centering around an internal courtyard, and te roof separated into four sections sloping at different angles. This development also defined the inetrnal space as being separate from the the roof. The group again considered whether the design should be dropped, but did not reach a desicion, and decided to individually develop the concpet throughout the week, before meeting on Friday.

DOMUS - minutes (wk 1)

As a group we selected the hot-dry climate zone (desert).This was a hot zone that experienced warm winters (arid).The site can be found 200km south of the Fitzroy Crossing in WA,located in the Great Sandy Desert.

We decided that the live-work envelope should cater for only 3 people such that we could make it relative to ourselves as a group.

In our first group session we essentially explored the relationships between buildings and their environment in terms of climate,landscape & culture.The central issue we would have to overcome in relation to our climate zone was diurnal flux (day/night temps 0-50 degrees Celsius) ,to ensure that our design was in fact 'comfortable' and hence liveable .In particular we looked at desert vegetation,Islamic and African architecture,right down to the clothing worn by denizens of arid climates, to give some initial context to the site.We then tried to adapt these back to the Australian context we were working with.

The major stress of our climate was the summer daytime heat.Thus in order to escape from the hot summer days our dwelling should try to exclude this hot outdoor daytime environment altogether by

-being a low,squat dwelling to the ground (insulation)

-having heat collector/barrier or thermal chimney (hot air rises)

-having a central axis courtyard living

-windscoope & water feature (evaporative cooling)

-going underground

-roofs encounter great solar gains from the sun directly overhead ,thus must be well insulated

-small windows

-any external wall to be made of thick,heavy materials as light weight materials cannot store a sufficient quality of cool from the previous night to be significant and thick to ensure that any cool pulse be delayed to arrive indoors during the hottest part of the afternoon.