Name: Rowdah Charbak

Atelier: &architecture

Undergraduate: Manchester School of Architecture

Arch Skills: AutoCAD, Sketchup, InDesign, Illustrator, Photoshop

MSA Live Role: Guiding SWOT analysis, Urban acupuncture & Diagramming workshop

Hobbies: Theatre, Set design, Baking, Painting, Ice skating

Fun Fact: I've never tried coffee but I'm a green tea addict!

Name: Frederick Ng

Atelier: SKN

Undergraduate: Taylor's University Malaysia

Arch Skills: Sketchup, Lumion, Photoshop, Revit, AutoCAD

MSA Live Role: Guiding and teaching of 3D visualisation in Lumion

Hobbies: Badminton, Playing Piano & Saxophone

Fun Fact: I struggle reading musical notes even though I play music!

Name: Phoebe Tang

Atelier: FLUX

Undergraduate: The University of Hong Kong

Arch Skills: Rhino, Enscape, Photoshop, Illustrator, InDesign

MSA Live Role: Presentation of benefits of nature to wellbeing & community

Hobbies: Cooking, Drawing, Singing

Fun Fact: I used to be an athlete!

Name: Qing

Atelier: MAKING

Undergraduate: Queen's University Belfast

Arch Skills: AutoCAD, Sketchup, Photoshop, InDesign, Illustrator

MSA Live Role: Providing a Sketchup & 3D modelling workshop

Hobbies: Travelling

Fun Fact: I was in 5 different schools throughout my primary education!

Name: Shanice Langford

Atelier: PRAXXIS

Undergraduate: Birmingham School of Architecture

Arch Skills: Rhino, Sketchup, Vectorworks, Photoshop, Illustrator, InDesign

MSA Live Role: Providing a illustrator and collage workshop

Hobbies: Film Photography, Horse Riding, Drawing

Fun Fact: I have a pet cat:)

Name: Evelyna Hadass

Atelier: SKN

Undergraduate: University of Nottingham

Arch Skills: Revit, Sketchup, InDesign, Illustrator, Photoshop

MSA Live Role: Providing an InDesign skills workshop

Hobbies: Reading, Photography, Cycling

Fun Fact: I am fluent in Russian!

Who is our project's community?

Burnside Centre is based in Langley, Middleton (M24). It has served its community for over 53 years, and they work with a range of people to provide crisis support, preventative support, progressive support, and early years child-care.

Their mission is to alleviate poverty and increase the quality of life for the local community. This means they work with people from all backgrounds such as young parents, those long term unemployed, facing mental and physical health barriers and a range of vulnerabilities. They are a team of caring and supportive staff who will work alongside our community to make meaningful change.

Today marks the start of our project. We will be visiting the site and doing an urban acupuncture workshop focusing on really understanding the site and its needs!

Watch this space for more updates...

A great start for our first meeting. We all got to introduce ourselves and share some fun facts!

This morning we met our collaborator! It was really insightful to discuss the brief further and start to think of design ideas...looking forward to catching up again with them Friday...

After speaking to the client we got the opportunity to explore the site and take lots of pictures.

We measured the site, analysed the entrances and explored the surrounding area.

Today we undertook an urban acupuncture workshop to gain a more thorough understanding of the site at different scales. Urban acupuncture is a design tactic used to examine the strengths, weaknesses opportunities and constraints of the site to help support our design decisions.

The group really took the task in their stride with a hands on and proactive approach!

Through the analysis of mapped census data, in combination with observations from the mornings site visit, the team were able to identify potential design opportunities based off the constraints of the site.
Overall a very productive afternoon which will help support our design choices.

Today we will be exploring the many ways to create good architecture diagrams and how diagraming techniques can be an effective way of visually presenting a clear overview of the site findings.

The day began with an Illustrator tips and tricks workshop followed by exploring how we can use Illustrator to create clear and concise program diagrams. The aim was to apply our understanding of the site and begin to think about the communities wants and needs.

We split into groups focusing on the client brief, analysing precedents and exploring what we think the community may need. Using the provided sections and elevations each group was able to apply these ideas.

Given the challenging narrow site the team was able to visually present how their proposed spaces may interact with each other. Each group creatively managed to express their ideas clearly!

Over the past 2 day the team have produced some cool sketches.
Check out this one..

This drawing was done by Zhuoran Lu our MLA student. She was exploring how to integrate different hard and soft landscaping to create an inclusive space that could host a number of community activities.

As a team we have really enjoyed seeing different concept designs emerge and discussing some of these creative ideas!

AND there's lots more to come...

Today we will be pushing our ideas further looking at how to use collage to integrate our ideas and experiment with different materials, textures and forms.

This morning we worked on developing design exploration techniques through collaging. We started by examining the pros and cons of using collaged techniques and the proceeded to use precedents we had found for biodiverse designs to create collage proposals for our site design.

We broke off to allow each individual to explore their own collage style! Here are some of the exciting ideas the group started to create…

The Big Draw! We came together as a group to combine our individual ideas onto the site plans and elevations to explore all the different precedents and approaches we had found…

Here are some of our outputs from our Big Draw Design exploration workshop!

Check out our favourite collage from the students..!

Here we have a collage from Nour Elzawi, BA2, who used mixed media to create this atmospheric spatial design!

A day full of ideas! Day 4 focused on truly understanding what the Burnside community want to see in their community nook…

This afternoon, we presented to the Burnside Community Wellbeing group. Our presentation was about how biodiverse architecture can be used to support community wellbeing!

Following on from our presentation, we held a design workshop with the Burnside community! We asked questions like: ‘What would you ideal space be? What would you personally want to change about the site?’ To help inform our design decisions next week! We also brought precedent examples and asked them to collage what they liked onto the site elevations to work as a catalyst for our design ideas…

Some of the ideas from our community design workshop!

Check out the next post to see what Burnside had to say about the design!

Here are some of the collages produced by the Burnside community! Some really exciting ideas here that we can’t wait to incorporate in the design…

Day 5! The day of the design… We are consolidating all our ideas from last weeks development and beginning to formulate our physical proposal!

The sketchup workshop covered a range of topics including creating basic 3D shapes, creating sections and using different tools to modify and edit models. This session was beneficial as it directly contribute to the development of our design proposal.

We also had a Biodiversity talk that provided an insights into the importance of biodiversity conservation, and how it can be achieved through sustainable practices and the implementation of environmental-friendly design for our proposed ideas.

Today marks the start of our design resolution stage! We have been bringing together all the ideas we discussed last week and are beginning to form a site proposal.

We split off into 2 teams to create individual proposals based off the ideas from last week, and then presented this to the group for feedback.

The team have come together to combine the 2 ideas to make a final design proposal!

Today we are focusing on our drawing outputs. It’s key to think about how we are going to communicate our proposal to our collaborator!…

Working on our CAD skills to act as a foundation for our GA drawings which we are making today!

We are finalising the key details of the design to ensure there is consistency across all our drawings!

We are continuing our progression in the drawings to present our scheme to the collaborator on Friday!!

To form the basis of our visuals we have organised a Lumion workshop to teach the students about the basics of digital rendering.

We resolved our sketch ideas for our final proposal into accurate dimensions to form the basis of our general arrangement drawings.

Check out the next post to see our digital proposal model...

Here are snapshots of our proposal modelled in sketchup!

A key day for resolution of design communication and ideas!

After drawing in AutoCAD we have been post producing our drawings in photoshop...

Check out of GA drawings...

Here are our proposed plan, section and elevations, created by our amazing BA1 students, Andrea, Joey & Hamza, using AutoCAD and Photoshop!

THE RENDER OF OUR PROPOSAL!

The side space, although minimal space, will be filled with pollinating plants as well as bird feeders to encourage biodiversity and animal activity!

Our proposal is full of planters to allow the community to grow their own produce!

We wanted to create a space for the community to gather that could be used after hours...

We developed a series of infographics to display information across the site in a colourful and vibrant way!

To support Burnside in creating the modular units we created detailed specifications in the form of a specs booklet.

The final day of MSA LIVE!

Today we presented our proposal to Burnside, who loved our project. This has been such an enjoyable process with a creatively free brief!