What I define Threshold as.

For this project, we are to design a threshold between the Architecture studio and the Courtyard.
For me, the struggle to think like a real architect is the threshold that a lot of the students in first year architecture have to overcome. We first year students come from the 'normal world' of thought, and we are forced to make a transition from that world into the new (to first years) 'architect world' of thought.
Studio helps us to develop our ideas and designs. It is the birthplace of our careers as architects and designers. I see the studio as the place where we can interact with architect minds (our lecturers and tutors)
The courtyard is the linkage between studio and the outside world. We're in this place between the architect world and the outside world. So i want to put my threshold in the courtyard because i think the courtyard represents the place that we are mentally at. Stuck between 2 worlds.

Development

I started to develop my design more. I wanted to replace the L shaped surfaces with these hollow hemispheres. i think these hollow hemishperes will emphasize the expanding and shrinking movement of my design more. I'm using a reflexive script that allows my structure to change size when my avatar moves near it. i wanted my hemispheres to expand and shrink when my avatar reaches it, because i want this sense of breathing in my design. Architecture building is the birthplace of our careers as archtects and designers, so i want to celebrate this through this movement of breathing that represents life.
Through the images above, you can see the development i went through to construct my dome shape. This last image is when i am scripting my hemispheres with the reflextive size script.

Developing my design.

The framing of our main entrance doors in the architecture building are coloured red. The doors of the architecture building can be seen as obstacles and linkages between 2 spaces. For my threshold i wanted to construct a more complicated and harder obstacle, so i used red poles to frame the obstacle, which relates back to the orginal red framing of the doors.

started building my threshold on the site

I have developed my design from the first experimental design i had before we constructed the architecture building.
I placed my threshold in the courtyard.
I have changed my many rectangular surfaces into many L shaped flat surfaces. In my design I am interested in making a surface through many objects. because most objects such as tables, have many surfaces that make the object, but i want to play with the idea of having many objects create a surface.

Beginning to construct the architecture building.

Before we started our threshold designs, we needed to start constructing the architecture building so that we had a model of our setting. the construction of the architecture building took about two days, and all of group 1 contributed to this project. Each of us contributed a part for the building.



For my part of the architecture building, i decided to collaborate with melody, we mapped the light that came through the windows of the student center. we recorded the length that the light through the window stretched as time went pass, we made 3 recordings of this (11am, 1pm, 3pm). We thought that mapping the area would be a more interesting way to represent the space rather than realistically constructing it. Our end result can be seen in the 3 images above, the light is represented by 3d layers of rectangles. I wanted to layer the light intensity of the room. So the higher the section, the more exposed it was to light throughout the day.

Experimenting

From last semester, during the virtual media tutorials when we were making our offices, i found that there was a problem with my office when i used alpha channels or when i made my textures transparent. the layers would overlap and change the order of layers while i rotated my view of my office. This accident and malfunction of the digital was quite interesting, as the space and depth of the structure would change. It was an illusion that contradicted our understanding of logical spaces.
So for my threshold design, i wanted to continue to experiment with this character of second life. I started with a horizontal surface, then moved it into a vertical surface to experiment with the effective-ness of the overlapping. While i was walking my avatar along the vertical wall, i realised that the overlapping of surfaces only worked when i rotated my avatar's view, so then i aimed to created a dome with many rectangular surfaces, because a dome shape worked best, because it allowed the avatar to rotate its view to experience the alpha channel overlapping surface malfunction.

This is my first experiment, i think i will change the shape of the rectangle into something else.

Experimenting with form on 3dsMax

When we first started this project, we had to familiarise ourselves with 3dsMax, because in our project we had to make a sculptie that was a part of our design.

These images above are snapshots of my experimenting with 3dsMax. I started to form a sharp surface that look like facets if u view it from a 2d like view. I was playing on the ideas of using facets from my first project. From my result, i will conclude that i quite like how surfaces overlap, which triggered me to remember