04 April, 2008

River of program space

On Wednesday, our group might have had a break through and with the number of times we seem to have started our master plan over from scratch...its about time. We reworked the whole plan a few days before and showed it to Professor Hecker who responded with a few positives, many negatives and some really interesting ideas. We were struggling with how to plan out major program spaces without just designing a footprint for a building here, a building there etc because that didnt work with our overall 24 site idea at all. What Hecker suggested was that if we wanted to have circulation throughout the site be a focus, why not make the buildings part of the circulation and have so called "rivers" of program space where you can access the same program space from many spots on the site. This has been done in different fashions before and it seemed to fit with exactly what we were looking for - broader strokes of programming so that it fit more with our overall idea. We went back and I started sketching with different colors representing different types of programs. It was all just broad sweeping strokes connecting and morphing into one another creating moments where sometimes 3 or 4 program spaces are all connected. The result was interesting and we have begun to see where its taking us, especially in terms of creating specific spaces designed for 24 hour usage. We had to go back to seeing the site as an extension of the city as a whole, and not try to create a mini-city. I think the progress we made this week will be the direction we continue to go in and hopefully we wont be starting from zero anymore, which is good because the end is in sight and there's still a ton of work left to do. At least having an overall idea thats starting to work is good right?...3 months in...oh well, maybe thats how things work in Spain

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