Hi, I'm Conrad Guo

I am from Bury, Manchester, and I am currently a BA1 Architecture student at MSA. For my personal interests, I enjoy modelmaking, building LEGO, and cooking.

As part of this project, I’d like to experience designing a space with parameters and constraints to understand challenges when designing and creating solutions to overcome problems that will occur during the design process.

Today, we went to B15 workshop to start making our scratch model for our engagement activity:
We first used the existing plans that we got from our collaborator and cut out the floor plan onto cardboard, which allowed us to have an easier time when modelling the walls. Next we focused on making the exterior walls of the basement level, where creating windows was the main challenge for us We wanted to maintain some level of accuracy whilst also being time efficient, so we decided to cut shallow slits for the windows rather than making them to resemble Victoria Hall perfectly. We finished with making the interior walls of the basement, which went without issue due to the strong foundation walls we had set in place prior. We finished the day with an accurate looking basement level, and intend to work on the ground floor in the following days.

For today, we finished off the ground floor level of our cardboard model:
We traced the floor plan again, but this time adding extra thickness on the exterior so that there is a distinct separation between the two floors. After creating the exterior walls, we came across a problem with the wall where the slits we made to bend the cardboard were too prominent so we first experimented with different styles to cover the gap and choose one that suited the design.
In our next group meeting, we will discuss how our model will be used in the engagement activities.

After we discussed our next steps with the group, we went to the maker space in MTC during the afternoon to update the model and focusing on the interior partitions.
We made some structural changes with the additional walls for the storage unit as well as an extra door in the mid section of the building to create a fire safety corridor.
Tomorrow we plan to finish creating the different partitions then bring the model to discuss the placement with the rest of the group as well as take perspective photos inside the model.

After we finished adjusting the model to our proposal, we brought the model to our group to discuss our next steps.
We then made some final adjustments to the model with the suggestion from our group so before taking some final pictures of both a floor plan view as well as some perspective views of the model.