Working on Weekends Again (ALL NIGHTER NUMBER 2, pt2)

Continuing with our saga then...

In making sure all the rooms were correct, besides general cleaning up of dirt that may have stuck to the very easily dirtied watercolour paper, i noticed i had been missing a ceiling above my main hall, having to correct that also.

Shown below are the vareous stages of assembly...

This is a shot of the rooms, partially assembled in halves of the house.

Test fitting of the rooms against the exterior walls

Sunrise on Barker St!

All of the interior attatched to the main walls.

After all the rooms were in, we attempted to cover the exposed face of the section with watercolour paper, which involved a lot of careful gluing and trimming.

In the late morning, Franchesca left for an important event. Fortunately by then, the house had been assembled in it's marvellous entirity. :) (...sigh. forgot to take photos of the terrace being built)

I stayed for a few more hours to assemble the exteriors which had thankfully been built already.

Leaving at about 2pm, i had my drive-thru KFC lunch with the relief that the model had finally been finished.

Again, didnt take photos at this stage, but it brings us to the completed model, which will be seen in the next post.

Working on Weekends Again (ALL NIGHTER NUMBER 2 pt 1)

For students, the notion of "rest" during the things they call "weekends" is in fact a myth. One designed for the upkeep of student morale, a cruel illusion, like an painting of water before a thirsty man.

It was Friday the 27th of March, and i had gone back to uni to spend another night on the model. This time Franchesca stayed as well, in hope we could finish it by morning.

We continued building the interior room by room, but unfortunately, one segment was missing a doorway and a small room (closet in the budoir if i remember correctly) so it was rebuilt, salvaging what parts we could from its predecessor.

As rooms needed to be complete prior to fitting and assembly, we had to finish them. Needless to say, (perhaps aided by late-night susceptibility to distraction,) we got carried off on the tangent of creating modelmaking masterpieces of detailing as shown below.

Trying to win the "Best Fireplace" award...

Cutting even curves suck. Layering sheets to achieve volumes sucks. Which is why i love building toilets and bathtubs at 1:100. (The toilet seat and my taps on the bath mean i also won the imaginary "Most Detailed Bathroom" award.)

And i think Franchesca easily deserved the "Greatest bookshelves and cupboards in the Budoir" award

Self-inflicted punishment for coming up with stupid awards in which we're the only entrants...

More actually happens after sunrise but i think that warrants a new post...

Mock-Up before Parti'ing

Here are the mock ups for my Parti diagrams. Very rough sketches to put down ideas for what to draw, what to emphasize, layout.. etc.

And i really liked the collage-like effect i got from throwing snippits of the same image together using different settings (colour, greyscale and b/w) on my scanner so i played around w/ that for your viewing pleasure. :)

If that interferes with the clarity, sorry about that, but they're not really meant to be be precise anyway. Mock-ups!

Enclosure

Geometry

Circulation

Here is another idea i had for circulation...
i figured it's way too inconsistant though

Structure

Program (it seemed appropriate i made it even more collage-y)

Working on Weekends (ALL NIGHTER NUMBER 1.pt 2)

So Nilo and i stayed for a night filled with 1980's hard rock/heavy metal and.... Kate Bush.

With the model, we wanted to emphasise the difference between the internal and external, and what better way than to simply pull off the skin. Removing one wall so people are able to see what is behind that wall. Literally.

And since we were unable to use any of the plans we had possession of, we had to study them and draw up one of the section we were in fact cutting so we knew what we had to build.

This is the Section drawn in my book,
the actual version we worked off is now long lost...

After that, we began the long process of building the rooms.

That's right, rooms.

As a jumble of rooms of different floor and ceiling heights, we were unable to simply make a floor, then put walls up on the level. We figured the most efficient way of doing this was by building the rooms more or less individually, and then assembling them.

I worked on the left half of the house...

Working with watercolour paper meant we had to layer a LOT.
For the garage seen above, some walls took up to SEVEN layers watercolour.

Garage with the start of the main hall stacked on top.
Again, 7 or 8 layers for the wall...

Whilst Nilo worked on the right.

I believe this is the anter room, closet and guest toilet

Nilo hard at work.
(note: This is him losing his Modelmaking Virginity!)

I was able to catch half an hour of sleep on a table at about 6:30 or 7 in the morning, but all in all, These rooms were a lot more time consuming than expected.

Working on Weekends (ALL NIGHTER NUMBER 1.pt 1)

We met again on Saturday the 22/03/09 to build.

Nilo and Franchesca

Upon realizing the idiocy of trying to make forms and then wrapping every one of them in paper was, we decided to stop being so cheap and invest in the proper materials. Thus throwing away everything we had done in the 6 hours on Thursday. woot.

Armed with a big sheet of whitecore card and a watercolour pad, we started from scratch again.

In order to illustrate the lack of transparency in the building, we decided would keep all external openings closed. And since we needed to layer sheets to achieve the correct thickness at 1:100, we were able to use the sheet of card undernieth it.

mmmm... layers... gotta love cutting the same thing more than once :)

"weighting" for glue to dry.
(lame i know... David dared me to write that!)

We first erected the external walls and the northern stair boundaries. Layering them in 2 to 3 pieces (note: this was no ordinary card, it was called 'mattboard' and we suspect it had some kind of plastic compound in the middle) the larger pieces needed more even pressure to prevent the corners raising up.

WIP of the front steps

4 walls, a roof and the walls of the back staircase completed during the daytime

With Franchesca having to leave in the evening for an interview, Nilo and I continued building well into the night....

To be continued....

Starting Model

So upon deciding that we would get working on the model as soon as possible, Franchesca, Nilo and I ventured to the Red Centre on our first available day-off, Thursday the 19th of March.

We decided that the exterior should be smooth and very clean, depicting the sterile and plain object that Loos wanted people to see, whilst the interior would be made from a coarser material, suggesting a more chaotic, organic 'feel' of all the unequal, intersecting spaces. Additionally, with the alien nature of the building to the exteriors, we thought it appropriate that the landscape be covered with an even coarser material...

On that, our idea was to even cover the exterior with a veneer of the whitest bond paper we could find.

So with that in mind, our heroes began building.

Using greycore card (since it was cheaper and readily available) we began constructing the external barriers of our site, the fence, the outside stairs etc. thinking we'd cover them later. as well as the four 4 external walls.

Oh, and i didn't take photos on that day...

Project 1 Start

Ahhh.. another semester, another studio.

For this project we've been assigned partners and a house, of which we need to draw Parti and Poche diagrams and a sectional model.

For partners, I've been teamed up with Franchesca and Nilo...

Group of three?!

That can only mean that we've been assigned the very simple (NOT) task of dissecting Adolf Loos's Villa Muller (viller mulla? mueller? :D ) as shown below.
Simple looking enough on the exterior yes? But looking at the sections and the models from last year's group? The interior is a complex conglomeration of cells, with varying ceiling and floor heights... should be fun to build.

Plan of action:

Build first, ask questions later...

..then draw the diagrams.