Review 1 - The Crash of The Hindenburg...

Hi Sam,

You're right I am gutted with how badly I presented my work yesterday, I'll be honest I think the work its self deserved higher than a D but my presentation was absolutely horrific, I knew it and it was written over everyone's face who was watching me. But I can't change that now, I will however ask if we can have the option of using the screen in future? I know I didn't use it to its fully potential, I knew that going into my presentation having watched James' before mine, maybe if I had utilised it better I would have felt more comfortable...

I have no idea why I couldn't articulate what my brief was yesterday... I just crumbled... your e-mail laid it out so clearly, I don't know why I couldn't of just said that yesterday...

"- A small transport and maintenance terminal. This is relatively straightforward in 'brief'; but has scope for being very beautiful / extraordinary / delightful / practical.. etc.

- An adaptation of existing buildings to becoming docking stations
- And perhaps an airship itself. This part is optional, as is the 'docking station' adaptations, to a degree." 



With that a side I would like to just go through the feasibility that I have done for the small airship terminal and maintenance hangar, as I probably should have done yesterday. It essentially gives my reasoning for how I have broken down the site.

With the programme of a transport terminal interchange this would no doubt create a large amount of load on the local infrastructure. This is addressed in my town plan which highlights the wealth of existing transport infrastructure for what is essentially a medium sized town. Farnborough has two junctions onto the M3 both equidistant from the site, as well as four train stations (Farnborough Main, Farnbrough North, Frimley & Aldershot) within ten minutes drive of the site; each station serving a different train line. This combined with the area around my site where the road infrastructure has been put in place prior to the business park being completed, again placing the site is in a good position again to deal with additional traffic loads generated by the proposal. Based upon this I think it would be fair to suggest that the local infrastructure would be able to cope with an additional small transport terminal, although there would need to be minimal investment, shuttle buses etc.

Town Plan, showing Farnborough's existing transport infrastructure.

For the site itself I began with the blank site and my first consideration was where the airships would be arriving and leaving from. The main runway for the airport is located directly to the south of the site meaning airships will need to approach the terminal from the North of the site.

An assumed no fly zone during the operational hours of the airfield means that Airship will have to approach and depart the north side of the site.

Next I looked at how the public would access the site. due tot he large element of the hanger this needs to not break up the site

Aware of the fact that the largest part of this program is the maintenance hangar which when taking into consideration the need for an airship to land next to it and be towed in so this was placed on the site next. To begin with I just placed it on the site to get an idea of it's ground coverage and how it could relate to the terminal element.

The hangar element placed centrally on the site showing the additional space required to land and tow an airship into the hangar.

Tom seemed to dismiss the hangar as a token part of the project in the review, he said that I would "design it in a day" and that would be it kind of thing that was there. I don't agree with this I think that although the hangar is a large expansive space its relationship with the terminal building has the potential to really take this project to the next level. To give this the most opportunity at this stage of the project, I pushed the hanger towards the north of the site and wrapped the terminal element around the south and eastern side of the hangar. The eastern side was chosen so that commuters/ business travelers would disembark straight into the heart of Farnborough business park and immediately be struck by the old Grade II listed hangar, this also provides the preferred route for other travellers to take advantage of the existing infrastructure shown on the city plan.

Final image showing the placement of the hangar and terminal in relationship to the airship circulation and public access. 

Using this layout I began to look at how arrivals and departures would be separated in section, the site and access routes lend the building to have a quite linear process starting with outgoing passengers on the western edge, which are the processed as you go through the site with and although this image is quite crude and doesn't include all the smaller more detailed elements it sums up well what my intentions are for my first proposal.

Sectional exploration of the separation of departures and arrivals.

Finally, despite what happened yesterday I am still very happy with my project and the direction it is heading. I have a clear vision of how each element of the project could be. For next week I think the most important part is to really begin nailing down the brief, I'll produce an initial proposal, largely based upon the way I have broken down the site above, through which we can look at any spaces which are largely redundant and any additional spaces needed in order to make the programme work.

Thanks,
Andrew

Drawing Asthetics

Hi Sam,

I want to draw my plans in the style of the attached drawings which are aeronautical diagrams of aircraft. I think this style could work across all drawings whether plan, elevation, section or three dimensional.

In plan i would label all the components of the city every building, tree species, flight paths etc. What do you think? anything to add?

Thanks,
Andrew

EDIT: First stab at the plan is below, it is finished enough for now (resolution had to be lowered for the blog)

And some of you (Katy!) will be very excited to read this article in this week's AJ...

Some of you ask to see examples of what a report may look like. I came across this in BDonline - it's a page taken from a planning report submitted by Ellis Miller for a scheme which has just been granted next door to our studio in Dalston. It contains most of what Review 2 asks of you, and looks pretty good! Don't judge the content (building) too much, just look at the way in which it is presented. Some of you tend to allow the graphic design of the pages overtake a clarity of communication of the actual content.  I've put the full PDF in the Dropbox folder in a section called 'All'.

Some notes on grammar, in preparation for Review 1

Some useful notes on grammar for Reviews, writing and life in general

I / ME / MYSELF

Taken From Paul Brian's website (https://public.wsu.edu/~brians/errors/errors.html#errors)

In the old days when people studied traditional grammar, we could simply say, “The first person singular pronoun is ‘I’ when it’s a subject and ‘me’ when it’s an object,” but now few people know what that means. Let’s see if we can apply some common sense here. The misuse of “I” and “myself” for “me” is caused by nervousness about “me.” Educated people know that “Jim and me are goin’ down to slop the hogs,” is not elegant speech, not “correct.” It should be “Jim and I” because if I were slopping the hogs alone I would never say “Me is going. . . .” If you refer to yourself first, the same rule applies: It’s not “Me and Jim are going” but “I and Jim are going.”

So far so good. But the notion that there is something wrong with “me” leads people to overcorrect and avoid it where it is perfectly appropriate. People will say “The document had to be signed by both Susan and I” when the correct statement would be, “The document had to be signed by both Susan and me.”

All this confusion can easily be avoided if you just remove the second party from the sentences where you feel tempted to use “myself” as an object or feel nervous about “me.” You wouldn’t say, “The IRS sent the refund check to I,” so you shouldn’t say “The IRS sent the refund check to my wife and I” either.

Trying even harder to avoid the lowly “me,” many people will substitute “myself,” as in “the suspect uttered epithets at Officer O’Leary and myself.” Conservatives often object to this sort of use of “myself” when “me” or “I” would do. It’s usually appropriate to use “myself” when you have used “I” earlier in the same sentence: “I am not particularly fond of goat cheese myself.” “I kept half the loot for myself.” “Myself” is also fine in expressions like “young people like myself” or “a picture of my boyfriend and myself.” In informal English, beginning a sentence with “myself” to express an opinion is widely accepted: “Myself, I can’t stand dried parmesan cheese.” In all of these instances you are emphasizing your own role in the sentence, and “myself” helps do that.

On a related point, those who continue to announce “It is I” have traditional grammatical correctness on their side, but they are vastly outnumbered by those who proudly boast “it’s me!” There’s not much that can be done about this now. Similarly, if a caller asks for Susan and Susan answers “This is she,” her somewhat antiquated correctness may startle the questioner into confusion.

YOUR / YOU'RE

'You're' is an abbreviated form of 'You are'.  Example: You're going to remember this / You are going to remember this. 

'Your' is quite different. Example: Your grammar will improve. 

ERM / LIKE

'Like', used in place of 'erm' is not acceptable. 'Erm' isn't great either

Bad example: 'It's like big and made of like steel'. You would sound like a complete idiot. 

Reasonable example: It's erm big and made of erm steel. You would sound unprepared and lacking confidence.

Best example: It's big and made of steel. Now you have command of your expressions and the attention of your audience. 

STIRLING PRIZE

CLICK ON THIS BELOW AND READ:

Link to article in Guardian

UNDERSTAND WHAT YOU ARE DEALING WITH

You probably recognise this, but if you stumbled across it in a field in the 1950s, you may not have. You may have thought: 'Bit of a ruin, load of old blockwork and render, let's demolish, use as hardcore and build a nice new building here'.  More careful cultural and historic assessment would have uncovered its pivotol role in European and global Modernism, and with careful re-positioning in the marketplace, realise the now limitless economic value of this building. I am not suggesting that you will all have an un-loved Corb on your site, but this image does illustrate that our first impressions, and the value the world places on buildings needs very careful assessment before getting the bulldozers in.  This week, we did a quick cost check on some of the buildings you were proposing to demolish and uncovered all sorts of cultural and other values embodied in the bricks and mortar. We also found those bricks and mortar could be worth (in one case) £1,800,000 at today's labour rates. Draw What you've got in lots of detail. Analyse it using the following factors (and perhaps others): 1) Material Value can you use the materials on site? (Have a read of Oliver Wainwright's piece on the Stirling Prize winning Everyman Theatre in the Guardain for more on this); 2) Cultural Value; 3) Historic Value; 4) Scope for Change (what's needed to bring it to use, what's going on around it); 5) What could that use be? 

ANDREW

Lovely drawings Andrew, and nice, clear research, conclusions and conjecture. Keep on with this.  I might add Edinburgh, Belfast, etc etc and Scandinavia too, non? Or do airships only go down?  :-)

Airship Programme

Hi Sam,

Just a quick post about brief. We spoke last week about the potential for an airship terminal which would allow for activity at Farnborough Aerodrome outside of current restrictions, with an additional idea that it would provide essentially a sleeper service. I have been looking at the speed of airships, and although here is an airship which travels at 300kmh it achieves this at high altitudes and would be unsuitable for my purposes. From looking at various airships it seems that 80mph would be a conservative/realistic estimate.

I have also managed to rip some CAD drawings of the Hindenburg from a PDF, and with a bit of work they have turned out pretty good. The accommodation is all contained within the rigid structure of the airship along with crew's quarters etc. The gondola suspended underneath is purely for the pilot navigating the airship.

So with this information I think the program works best for destinations between 8 and 14 hours away, and would be seen as a more luxury way to travel. You could be provided with a bedroom making the experience much more like a cruise than current airline travel. Potentially a reaction to the fact that flying is seen as more of chore now compared to previously when it was more of a novelty? With the sleeper airship programme the flight itself becomes less of an event with the focus being on arriving refreshed as if you haven't just made a long journey.

EDIT: here is a quick image with 3 airships based upon the hindenburg imposed over a potential site. 

A warning about 'Highlinification' of cities, which perhaps have a serious job to do.  In this week's AJ Magazine, I'm sure you've all seen already. It's interesting to see how artists (Grayson Perry) and Architectural Journalists (Rory Olcayto) seem to have a similar message but use very diferent media to communicate it. What is your message, and how do you communicate it?  There is a thesis in this.

A story of regeneration, by artist Grayson Perry... It's all too true, unfortunately. The question is, what can architects do about it?

Sid's Research

A wonderful bit of site research Sid has come across. See the full PDF in his dropbox folder, under the date 141006

I like the graphics so much!

Marble as you've not seen it before

WATCH IT HERE

CJ LIM LECTURE TOMORROW!

Tutorials for 09.10.2014

Morning Sam...

What is the plan for tutorials this week? Do we have allocated times? Also are we going in groups of 2 or just one-on-one tutorials?

I saw that we have a technical lecture before from 9-10 am on blackboard- but haven't heard anything else about this. Do you know if this is happening every week?

Thanks,
Lucy