WORKSHOP THREE: Experimental Model Making

the aim of this workshop was to both encourage extended and experimental thought as well as extended and experimental physical model making techniques. i learnt a few neat tricks along the way, like bending balsa and scoring boxboard. the first exercise was to visit sydney city and document a certain aspect of it (i chose stairs.) my poster points to the way stairs form not only an angular connection between the focal spaces of the city, but are not limited to 'coming' and 'going'. they can make the coming the going and the going the coming, dependant on the user and the context. the model that continues this theme uses string to descibe this intepretation of the stairs, and boxboard rectangular prisms to convey the genericism of most sydney city architecture. the interest of the city is after all in people and connections, not brick and mortar. the final week's presentation was a representation of my personal experience of the workshop, combined with a word (in my case "CONTROL"). i found that the workshop allowed a certain element of freedom, but this freedom was inhibited by the restrictions of time, medium, marking criteria. (this may seem like a depressing outlook on what was probably the free-est workshop this semester, but where's the fun in being optimistic all the time...) the poster represents this freedom encased in the restriction of medium (in this case the blank paper border enforces this cage). the model is an extrusion of this idea, with slivers of balsa being encased within a balsa cage; while outside this defined space of the sculpture, the outside world goes on, truly free.

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WORKSHOP TWO: Storyboarding Interior Spaces

the aim of this workshop was to visit a space and then document it through a series of 'vignettes', in much the same way filmmakers create preliminary plotlines for their films. i developed a fun pencil/pen drawing technique in this workshop. the first space i visited was the science theatre, and the final presentation was a fictional representation of the current design project (a bathhouse). as the science theatre is somewhat bland in terms of its planning (its basically just a corridor and a theatre with some toilets), i decided to script it as a person exploring the space and finally coming across his or her friends. with the bathhouse project i tried to convey a child (everything looks more impressive through the eyes of a child!) roaming through the different spaces, from hot bath to cold bath, experiencing the different patterns of filtered light, and finally coming to a bath with a panoramic view of a swiss alp vista (slightly diverging from the dark woolloomooloo site we were given in design...)

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WORKSHOP ONE: Storyboarding in 3D

the aim of this workshop was to visit a site (in this case Goldstein Hall, about halfway up campus) and then transcribe our experience (in pairs) into a tangible 3D "object". my partner and I noticed that the repetition of the columns in the space could be metaphorically interpreted as representing the memories and cumulative experiences of the students who pass through the space, so our final object was a sort of pop-up book (a playful representation of nostalgia and memory) that, when opened, presents just a vague drawing of the space; but then as you flip through the pages the columns pop up and build up a vivid image of the space; just as time spent at the space would help to give one a greater understanding of life itself (isn't this the purpose of university?)

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my preliminary drawing:

the final object: