Some of the site analysis work we have done today in order to get a better understanding of the area and the site. The work was produced by MArch and BA students. This gave the chance to BA students to apply what they have learnt in yesterday's Photoshop and Indesign workshops.
This morning we did some research on designing successful playscapes, cognitive tasks, health & safety standards, regulations etc. to get us ready for designing our pods!
Everyone took a section to research and then shared the knowledge with the group so we were able to learn from one another and discuss how this would impact our project.
The team found it really interesting and useful in creating some constraints for our designs moving forward. It’s really important that we are designing fun, playful learning environments for the children that are also safe and reduce the risk of anyone getting hurt whilst using the pods.
Following our research we will be applying the knowledge we’ve learnt into our developing designs… watch this space!
Model making was the second most challenging task, as everyone needed to find any relevant materials around their house within a 5 minute timespan. The materials could be anything, even recycled materials! Everyone had to use imagination and adapt their ideas in order to successfully transform the materials from items inside their house!
The first ice breaker exercise for the week involved creating a collaborative drawing of Beech Road Park using Zoom as a platform.
This exercise was inspired by Niall Mclaughlin Architects who organised a collective drawing workshop, which allowed people to draw parties all along their streets when lockdown ended via zoom. Around 300 people were collectively involved and it created a wonderful colourful and detailed drawing.
We are thrilled with how this simple half an hour exercise has a created a really exciting image and allowed some initial ideas to be discussed!
Great day today with really amazing sketches produced in Jason Boyle's workshop!
This workshop was an amazing opportunity for students to become fully emersed in their sketches and then reflect on the journey or their drawing by documenting it with photos and videos.
As a group, we then discussed the sketches and reflected on the constraints and opportunities presented with the 1-hour time frame.
Creating progress videos allowed us to see the unique process and journey of everyone's sketching styles.
Big thank you to Jason Boyle for his amazing workshop! Looking forward to our next workshop with Ewen Miller!
Today we had Sarah Christie, the youth work manager from The Proud Trust come to speak to the team. Her talk focused on giving an insight into the workings and groups within the centre. Helping us gain a better understanding in the reach and how important the centre is to those who use it. As some of the team will be attending youth group sessions, but also just as important in every day life, Sarah spoke to us about the importance of language choice and use of pro-nouns.
For most, their singular and visible gender identity is a privilege. Not everybody has this privilege; those that are referred to with the wrong pronoun can feel disrespected, invalidated, and alienated. You can't always tell what someone's gender pronouns are by looking at them. Knowing and using someone's gender pronouns is a positive way to support the people you interact with.
We hope that this project partly brings awareness to this, and those that are reading this post, we ask that you strive to help make this become normal practice.
We continued our event on the fourth day with series of discussions and sharing sessions showing the progress on the group work they have done so far. This Informal workshare was to encourage teamwork and communication between groups and to keep track of the progress. Great effort from all the groups today! We are very impressed!
After the speedy drawing workshop, Jason selected a student to win three mentoring sessions with him! So a big congratulations to Jessica who won! This gave students a first taste of entering an architecture competition.
To aid the design development of our proposal, the MArch students presented professional guidance and standards to the BA students. At this stage in their educational career, most of the BA1 and BA2 students are not familiar with Approved Documents, the RIBA Plan of Work or HSE guidance on the provision of welfare facilities. This project has offered an excellent opportunity to introduce these standards and allow the undergraduate students to become familiar with real-world design regulations, providing them with practical industry knowledge for their graduate Part 1 roles in the years to come.
Today we covered both at home modelmaking, and as requested by our undergraduates, Rhino 3D. This will help further expand our team's skill sets. The at home modelmaking was focused on being creative with a limited palette of materials, and saving money by using waste as a recycled resource. It concluded with a short video created by the RIBA that covers tips and tricks for paper modelling (pictured above).
The Rhino 3D workshop was a concise talk that covered all the basics and logic behind a somewhat complex system. Unlike AutoCAD or Sketchup, Rhino 3D allows for the easier design of curves and organic forms.
A great talk, and a really interesting Q&A from our guests Sara & Jeremy this afternoon.
They gave a great insight into Passivhaus Design, through their years of experience and the live projects they are currently working on. Hopefully, this is valuable knowledge for the students to consider when designing future studio projects!
10.00 a.m.: Morning catch up and briefing
10.15 a.m.: Colouring booklet development
1.00 p.m.: Lunch break
2.00 p.m.: Colouring booklet development
4.00 p.m.: Informal work share on Miro Board
4.30 p.m.: Review of #DAY4
4.45 p.m.: Run-through #DAY5 schedule
1.00 p.m: End of #DAY4
We are really excited and looking forward to the sessions!
We have a few top tips sessions scheduled to share knowledge on the tips and tricks of different architectural mediums. Today was the first of three sessions where we discussed how to integrate different sketching styles into architectural drawing and the importance of iterative sketches.
Joy gave the group a talk on Mary Mitchell, a landscape architect she has been researching for her PHD. Mary Mitchell is one of the case studies group 3 are working on, she graduated from the MSA in 1953 with a Landscape Architecture Degree. We discovered a lot about Mary's career, she has been extremely influential and successful in the landscape profession and accomplished a lot in her lifetime. We discussed legacy for women, why her projects are less known or no longer exist in the built environment and the need to protect those projects that still exist. It was interesting to see that many of her projects were recognised, but we didn't know her name.
Our students are making excellent progress developing their concepts which have been backed up by precedents and research. The students are becoming familiar with the RIBA Plan of Work as they progress their designs through the stages, developing their Stage 2 Concept Design into workable plans using the Spatial Coordination of Stage 3.
The Q & A with our collaborator Rob provided parameters for the students to consider in their design development. This is useful experience as the students are learning to design to a client's brief and considering the cost implications of material use and temporary site accommodation. We have discussed how the use of certain materials may impact how users feel within the space and are constantly questioning whether our designs could improve the well-being of site workers; an important consideration for our social value impact.
Developing dual-purpose spaces with temporary furniture creates usable space with the aiming of reducing the number of units needed, therefore improving the costs for the client.
Today we had a guest speaker, Joy Burgess. Joy is currently carrying out her PhD at the MSA in collaboration with Historic England. She is researching the work of female landscape architects in post-war Britain and looking to make a contribution towards a feminist history of landscape architecture.
Through the previous precedent analysis, each member of the structure group was tasked to produce a collage/image which explores how the user may interact with the proposed Blue Line. We have decided to incorporate the use of textiles as a response to Manchester's industrial past, from art installations with hanging elements promoting user interaction, hammocks made out of fabrics which encourages playful environments, to enclosed walkways with opaque fabrics ranging in different colours and saturation that provides a multi-sensory experience.
We are pleased to announce that Sam Turner, founder of Resilient Works, and Simeon Shtebunaev will be joining us for a live discussion/Q&A at 9:30am on the 11th May.
Sam, an architect, founded Resilient Works in the chaos of 2020 as a response to the need to drastically change the way we build, with the intention of bringing together his professional experience and an activist’s spirit. He also founded the Carbon Literacy working group in the Architects Climate Action Network.
Simeon is a researcher and senior lecturer in Urban Planning at Birmingham City University. He is also an architectural designer and planning consultant at Beatfreeks and is currently researching how young people engage in the planning of future 'smart' cities.
Over the past few days, the students have been working in smaller sub-groups, researching innovative methods that might benefit Little Rissington. We all came back together this morning to relay what each group had found.
The Miro session was great! It allowed all the students to interact and comment on each other's findings. It also allowed us to see any overlaps in the sub-groups. The students will finalise the research tomorrow, in preparation to start creating visual content for Ecospheric next week.
We are so excited that Jason Boyle, an architect, mentor and member of the Manchester Society of Architects was able to join us for a live presentation and speedy drawing workshop. Jason has more than 20 years of experience as an architect and has spent the last 11 years of his career in the Nuclear Industry.
After the presentation students are given an hour to sketch a building taking photos/ videos of their progress. These will then be turned into a short progress video of each individual drawing! This is a great way to see the journey and story being told through sketching.
As well as wanting to encourage everyone to use existing skills we also thought it would be a good idea to do a photoshop workshop for students to learn something new. In the workshop we taught skills which could be relevant in the next task; the Abstract Movements Workshop. Specifically relevant were the motion blur tool which gives a sense of movement and the use of the graffiti brush to further this and also add texture and depth to an image.
Check out the schedule for Day 2!
9.00 - Group Catch Up
9:30 - Guest Talk with Sam Turner
10:15 - Guest Talk with Simeon Shtebunaev
11:15 - Miro Brainstorm
14:00 - Group Discussion
15:15 - Initial Research
16:00 - Exchange and Digest
16:30 - Debrief
A few slides from the opening presentation to carbon literacy and some interesting discussions on what a 'workshop' can be. How can we engage as many people as possible?
The landscaping group have explored four aspects in designing the landscape and furniture along River Irwell: the use of different surface materials for different purposes, threshold treatments for adjacent functions, arrangement of varying pedestrian levels and the incorporation of urban furniture. The consideration of these key design aspects has allowed us to refine our landscaping strategy for the project which will be developed and formalized during the remainder of the week.
Working from home, we've had to find interesting solutions to get clean audio for the voice over of our videos. Here is one of the MArch members of our team recording the voice over for the photography workshop video.
Inspiration From Our Guest Speaker: Jee Liu and Jamie Wallace (Wallace Liu)
Wallace Liu has introduced their adaptive reuse project in Chongqing, China, a building that has been created amongst the remaining structures of a former steel factory. We are inspired by them and found some of the ideas and concepts that are relevant or can be applied to our scheme!
Question 01: “Such an exhibition, how do you create a movement order for the users to prevent visitors from getting lost in such big space but at the same they don’t feel restricted in your exhibition space?
Question 02: In this project, did you do anything to strengthen the existing columns to support the new steel structure as the columns seem to be deteriorating and in worst condition?
Question 03: Is there any particular reason for using perforated metal panel for the facade? Why not other material like polycarbonate? Is the facade for ventilation, solar shading or simply aesthetic reason?
Question 04: Our project is at the Tetley in Leeds, a former brewery factory, any suggestion on how to deal with the historical background when you reuse it?
Question 05: There are some industrial and architectural heritage conservation projects that are not successful in China, a country that is heavily influenced by commercialisation, but your design has greatly integrated between two, how do you conserve the historical and cultural values of a building with the prevalent trend of commercialisation?
Day 4,
Framework development, understanding how materials can be "RE-USED" from the MTH site. An initial exploration of moulding available from historic casting methods. The moulds could potentially be repurposed in various ways explored by a framework algorithm/ visualisation.
Material consumption alone in architecture accounts for appoximately 55% of total produced emissions in the UK, and contributes to 50% of the total C02 emissions globally.
Our built environment is demandind more of our planet. We are using materials at an accelerating rate, however, it is still often cheaper to scrap the old and buy in the new. where would we put all of our waste if this were to continue?
On day three the Blue Line team began to develop a conceptual response to the brief within our smaller groups, focusing on landscaping, structure and signage which will contribute to a final masterplan by the end of the week. Taking into account precedent studies, we have created a series of images which consider how elements of the precedents can be incorporated within the varying conditions of the River Irwell.
Within the signage group we have begun to consider the significant surrounding node points in relation to the river and how we can make connections between these and the Blue Line. By identifying these points at an early stage it allows us to strategically place a series of entry/exit points which correspond with the river's surroundings. These points will provide a basis for where signage will need to be placed.
We are currently exploring the concept of signage acting as a beacon and providing a safety element to the river as this is an issue we aim to address through design. The signage allows pedestrians to be aware of their surroundings when walking below street level and also provides sufficient lighting at night time.
Alina is a first year Architecture student at MSA. She wants to learn more about how different materials and lighting can change the atmosphere of a place, as well as how people have changed their ideas on what these concepts mean. She is interested in how multiple social, political, environmental and cultural beliefs influenced the build environment.
We concluded the research tasks yesterday by mapping out the ethnic diversity of different boroughs in London - looking specifically at the amount of Black, Asian and Minority Ethnic workers in the construction industry who lived in London.
After the Adobe Photoshop tutorial we began making collages based on each type of pod. Photographs from precedents that we all previously looked at were utilised to produce the finish images.
Here are three examples of the collages produced!
Stay tuned to see how we turn our fun and creative collages into a final design.
The next step was to develop the concept ideas further. We have split into 5 smaller groups, established based on the movements people were initially interested in. Each group was given videos to watch where they could study one performance each each and one workshop act, this is to highlight that circus acts can be accessible to everyone. By watching videos we started to see the transitions between movements that were not apparent from pictures alone. This will help to understand the spaces needed for the acts and workshops to take place, which was something we discussed with our collaborator.
Within group 1's cultural pavilion, led by Adam & Hayden, they sought to represent the percentage of Gypsy culture that makes up Bradford and aim to educate the public and prevent racist issues they encounter. By creating a tower with the design based off of gypsy culture and their 'travelling wagons', they could set a landmark for the train station, supplying views from the sky for visitors to Bradford before experiencing the ground level. Here they have shown initial sketched conceptual designs for this cultural tower.
A very creative first day with our Parktopia team!
We explored how nature is portrayed through music and had each of our team members pick a song, that reminds them of nature, and attempt to visualise it abstractly through any medium. Here are just a few examples!
"I generally associate nature with walking, with it serving as a backdrop for reflection or introspection" - Eva
"Being in nature can be a relaxing experience, but also makes me think of the sublime and grandness of the natural world, a reminder of our scale in the world" - Joel
"A lively atmosphere which makes peaceful sounds. It belongs to everyone and no one" - Namon
We began Day 1 with a group meet and greet followed by a guest talk with Scott McAulay to introduce AAS, and his work, to set the tone for the project. The MArch, accompanied by a presentation, introduced the scope of the project and the outputs for the 2-week program.
This was followed by a 'what's your carbon footprint?' task to get to know everyone a little bit better.
Welcome to our fourth day of MSA Live!
We kicked off the day with a final 15 minutes of 'Complete the Sketch'. This creative exercise consists in giving everyone a page with only a few lines, leaving it up to them to complete the composition with their own drawings!
Todays prompt was more challenging than yesterday as there were fewer lines which encouraged a more creative approach. This was a great way to warm up in the morning before our speed sketching workshop with Jason Boyle. Stay tuned!
Day 3 Task: Concept Spatial Design for Tetley
The students designed a more suitable space for the elder people to stay, relax and communicate, while also making the spatial accessibility within the Tetley more comfortable for the elderly. Here are the sketches and renderings that the students designed.
The MArch introduced to the BA the concept of 'cradle to cradle' and the RIBA 'retro-fit for the future' schemes. Both of these ideas intend to provoke the questions of material waste and ultimate long terms sustainability of our built environment.
'Cradle to Cradle' the primary source for the BA seeks to illustrate the full life cycle of materials and products. It questions, how can items be disassemble, and how easily can they be re used. The concept introduces the sentiment that for all of the objects that we use, their materials should be seen as 'borrowed' rather than use. If you cannot return the materials back to the earth, is it really susstainable?
Within group 1's cultural pavilion, led by Adam & Hayden, they sought to represent the percentage of Gypsy culture that makes up Bradford and aim to educate the public and prevent racist issues they encounter. By creating a tower with the design based off of gypsy culture and their 'travelling wagons', they could set a landmark for the train station, supplying views from the sky for visitors to Bradford before experiencing the ground level. Here they have shown initial sketched conceptual designs for this cultural tower.
The position of the structures allows for people to have direct view and access, with circulation from all routes North and South of the Church. People visiting Rochdale will be able to see the installation when arriving via the metro, bringing attention and direction towards activities happening underneath the sheltering structures and around the Church.
Day three involved lots and lots of illustrator! The M.Arch students ran a workshop to get to grips with illustrator. We worked through diagram examples together that were created for the previous research case studies. We then used Miro to decide on a 'house style' and create mood boards for the exhibition boards together.
We were joined by our second guest speaker today, Richard Denneny.
A stonemason working on the Manchester Town Hall refurbishment, Richard’s talk opened the student’s eyes to the realities of stonemasonry work on restoration projects like this as well as highlighting the specific spatial and programmatic requirements for a stonemason’s workshop.
This image is a capture of the BA student's discussion today.
From now on, we have been divided into two groups responsible for model production and rule book production. We will complete and improve our respective work content in the next few days. Y5 students will help on the job every day.
‘Post-Ideation Sketch’ is the significant design process where designers generate a large quantity of ideas through sketching and brainstorming. This activity aims to help students in BA Year 1 and Year 2 facilitate thinking and order their thoughts after guest lectures. There are no restrictions about painting tools and layout. Each drawing was under 25 minutes limit. The above collage shows the learning results of each student from Day 1 to Day 3. The process will direct them to uncover innovations in the following MSA LIVE days.
We were really pleased with the strategies and mapping that came out from yesterdays session, today we will wrap up any loose ends on the diagramming exercise to make sure you have all completed them.
We will also introduce Storyboarding as a method to capture your ideas in still frames. You may want to show how your strategy changes by day and night or the different elements. We will also be working on some thin line drawings to capture your ideas further.
We look forward to seeing you all at 10 AM – have fun!
We were delighted to conclude day 3 with a recorded Q&A with our wonderful guest speaker Tara Gbolade! The discussion covered the Paradigm Network and the importance of networks that promote diversity and the challenges faced by ethnic minorities. We spoke on architecture education and what can be done by design bodies and practices to promote diversity.
We introduced the outputs after forming concept ideas of the movements and how they can be represented, so that they don’t seem quite so daunting.
The outputs are:
One ‘Acrobanner’ consisting of 10 images of 10 circus movements to celebrate 10 years of The Circus House. These will look good in their own right and as a banner which can be hung at The Circus Festival.
One Ergonomic Booklet with detailed studies of movements and health benefits of 5 circus acts. These can be used as a guide for planning social distancing into workshops during the festival.
Time for the fun stuff! A quick icebreaker! Using the images from this morning’s presentation, everyone picked the circus act which inspired them the most and chose a medium to represent it. It was great to see the range of media used; pens, pencils, paint and digital drawing. By coming together at the end of the session and sharing our work, we learned how the same act could be interpreted in a variety of ways. This really helped us to understand each movement in more detail and gave us a platform from which we can develop and progress.
Please welcome our BA students to the team! The first meeting at Cirque du Arc was an exciting one! As community is a large part of our ethos and design focus, we spent the morning getting to know each other and introducing our partner, The Circus House. We did this through sharing some interesting facts and learning about all the great skills each person can bring to the table and develop over the next two weeks. Whilst getting to know the partner we learnt about ten different circus acts, particularly focusing on the movements involved with each.
DESIGN TEAM : IN-DEPTH SITE STUDY
The session today started with the full-blown analysis and site conditions to be taken into consideration while the initial stage of design. The Albert square is spatially interesting and the enclosing architecture is varied. We as a team believe that the scope of implementation is quite high. Studying the social and historic significance of the sculptures and the Albert memorial gave us a clearer vision to our project aims. Looking forward to developing some concrete design elements in the session tomorrow.
Group 3 - Home screen and Building Elevation group
The Building elevation group continued on designing more elevations from Day 2 as well as refining and detailing the initial elevations. Then they began to construct pieces of elevations representing different buildings into one. This exercise allowed for the students to come up with varied and interesting elevation designs.
The clothing sets made by the avatar and clothing group were made to be a symbol of the course in which are unlocked in. So for example, the mailman clothing sets represent the course that teaches how to send an email, and the doctor's clothing represent the course that teaches how book a doctor's appointment online. Each clothing set will correspond to the course that it is unlocked in by finishing it.
Group 2 had a very productive day today. The Avatar and clothing group focused today on using the compiled precedents and inspirational ideas for avatar and clothing from yesterday to come up with a unified style for the avatar design. Then they have began designing clothing sets for the avatars to give it a sense of variety and individuality.
Group 1 - Achievement icons and Learning platform group
For day 3, the achievements icon group has focused more on refining the designs that were produced yesterday and started moving into designing the other course aspects of the learning platform as well as the general learning framework of the app.
On the third day, we arranged a tutorial about Illustrator. Our MA member, Yifan, demonstrated how to use some basic skills of Illustrator to clearly express strategies and ideas in maps by showing his previous work and using an example of a 3D view mapping of Rochdale that he had already drawn. By the end of the tutorial, the BA students will have used Illustrator to draw mapping that expresses their ideas and hopefully this tutorial will be of great help to future students when they complete their own work.
Day 3 started off with a tutorial on building a basic website on Wix, following which the first and second years were split into three teams to create a separate website. All the teams came up with fantastic layouts using the WOAH colour scheme, developing the ideas from Day 2. The day ended with a group discussion and reflection on the designs created so far.
The church's visibility in Rochdale will be reflected through the mosaic as a key element. By creating a colourful mosaic walkway to lead people from the train station to the church and adding mini dome installations along the way for people to enter and experience.
It was great to visit Cornerstone Day Centre. Our team received Patrick's talk about the detail information of existing building. Patrick has explained how the day centre operates everyday and the potential opportunities for reusing some spaces.
After the morning presentation with Liam, we started to identify loose and fixed materials within the Manchester Town Hall. After specific materials were hinted and selected the BA and MArch spent time researching around them in regards to possible ways we can re-use, re-purpose, and re-cycle them.
This researching around the materials pointed at important questions for us all to attribute to the development of the framework, creating a standardised way of sorting the quality of sustainability the materials within the Town Hall have.
Day 2
Research on the Background of Homelessness in Manchester
Our team has split into two groups and investigated four different topics regarding background of homelessness in Manchester. The topics are "Reasons for Homelessness", "Types of Homelessness", "Demographics & Policies" and "Support Networks". Each group has justified their findings and discussed the distribution and needs of homeless people in Manchester generally. We also explored how existing initiatives and regulations to see how the society tackles homelessness issues. The research will be taken into account in our design intervention.
Today we did some quick diagrams to see the ideas of the 'House of Negotiation'. Based on yesterday's site analysis, the works are established from different angles and all of them are impressive!
Filming has started!
Filming the preparations to make model, one of the steps is shown above. Set up a phone holder, get the materials and tools ready, and get creative! Looking forward to the final work!
Our number one consideration for our collaboration with Manchester City Council is affordability, keeping costs low by utilising modular construction. Secondly we want to highlight sustainable materials with an aim to reducing the carbon footprint of the design. Lastly adaptability of spaces and modules will ensure the longevity of the project!
Tomorrow we are going to be putting on a Model Making Workshop using everyday materials found around the house. These will be quick fire sketch models to create forms from our initial ideas that we have been working on.
Derek Horton joined the Smart Community team today to provide us with a professional perspective on the art galleries in Leeds.
First, Derek told us about his experience of running the &Model art gallery housed in the reused three-storey 19th-century building in the center of the city. He shared a presentation that introduced the building and its potential as a small art gallery space. Second, Derek talked about the past of the Tetley, the progress made over the years, and suggested opportunities for improvements.
Then, he highlighted the importance of the flexibility and scale of gallery spaces, the type and amount of light, the dialog with the context of the building, the inviting entrance zone, the consideration for the building's heritage, and accessibility. All those aspects contribute to space as a successful gallery.
Finally, the discussion started within the group on the various aspects of the project, its constraints and opportunities, and the reflection on concepts developed so far.
The meeting with Derek was very informative, and our group is grateful for his time and knowledge he shared with us.
Day 3
Liam Bentley, the assistant design manager from the Manchester Town Hall project explained the process of how they are documenting the assets of the building. These includes from bricks to cast iron radiators. After the documentation they are also responsible for storing, restoring, and taking a decision on how to reuse the assets or if they can’t reuse, what to do with the assets.