[6] Tom Kundig: Prototypes and Moveable Parts

In generating conceptual ideas for the mobile architecture for both progression of the group work idea and individual work, I have looked to an exemplar that I am quite familiar with and have used as a precedent before. The ideas expressed in this video create the starting point for investigating how the mobile architecture might respond to different contexts, transport modes and types of inhabitation. 

[6] Exemplar text

I borrowed XS Extreme: Big Ideas, Small Buildings from the library and came across one particular project which although is only very generally and rarely mobile, it poses possible responses to creating a mobile architecture for parliament/canberra.

[6] Presentation Progression

The boards for the interim presentation were developed quite substantially today after we had completed various tasks individually and as a collaborative group in a design meeting. We finalised our vision and strategy panel, while refining and almost completing the infrastructure panel. All that remains is to translate these findings into a conceptual architectural response for the final board.

[images coming soon]

[6] Week 6 Reflection

We have finally started to make solid progress on the core concept of the mobile architecture, developing the strategy, infrastructure, purpose and presence of this transient architecture has been challenging. However this lack of structured idea development and standard brief has allowed a stronger and more resolved overarching concept to emerge which is founded in research and investigations. If we can continue to develop the group strategy, the individual assignment will become much easier and responsive to the various issues or opportunities within our group brief.

[5] Mobile Architecture

The video below shows a design for a compact and adaptable architecture which can respond to how people might wish to inhabit the space, the climate, privacy and other similar issues. These ideas can be employed in generating a mobile architecture for a transient contextual location. 

[5] Capital, infrastructure and presence.

The base layer for panel 2 is presented below.
Mitchell Young generated this image.

[5] Vision Strategy and Statement

Below is the panel progression I have completed so far in developing the first panel and overall strategy.
This is an exploration of the issues and problems with Canberra currently and forms the base layout for panel one; layered over and around this will then be the exploration of mobile architecture, parliament and the strategy statement.

 Initial presentation of issues

 Transferred into a digital medium 

Final base layout for panel 1

[5] Individual conceptualisation

I spent some time brainstorming general ideas for a mobile architecture and diagrammatically exploring how it may function/move/perform/transport/be inhabited. 

[5] Week 5 pre-tutorial discussions

Prior to the week 5 tutorial a group meeting was held to further out concepts and develop a refined strategy for a 'mobile' architectural response. Here is a general outline of our group strategy and identification of how to approach both assignment 1 and thereafter assignment 2.

[5] Week 5 Conceptualisation

[5] Architecture's Youthful Revolution

"Not so long ago the typical professional path of a graduate meant working long hardcore hours under the wing of a bigger company and patiently layering brick over brick of professional experience, until a chance of a break comes somewhere in the late 40s. It necessarily included the slow and logical gradation from pavilions, beach houses and private homes to perhaps a small public facility and if lucky enough, a major commission. But all those preconceptions were shattered when in 2001 the 26-year olds Bjarke Ingels and Julied De Smedt left Rem Koolhaas' OMA to found their own, hugely successful PLOT, which only 5 years later peacefully split in the two just as successful practices BIG and JDS. OMA though was long before known as future-star incubator - just check this cute infographic. Or if you're a bit more shameless, go for this one, all from the resourceful and witty "Notes on becoming a famous architect" blog.

Most commonly the cut-off age limit for joining the "young architects" graph is assumed to be 40. But as practices are nowadays often founded and led by professionals in their early 30s or even younger, most of them are far from BIG's joyous success and would argue that actually producing buildings is what makes an architect. And while professionals and critics share the rising concern that ongoing recession and scarcity of jobs might chase young practitioners out of the field a considerable part of the latter are actually redefining the profession. Can you imagine starchitect gurus converting a former gas station into a temporary community cinema or gathering a dream team of colleagues to help the underprivileged world?

There is surely an agenda or rather, multiple agendas that arise as the discipline becomes even more densely involved with issues of economy, globalization, ecology and social processes. A lot of youngsters return to the hands-on craftsmen approach to skip the contractor and constructor steps through inventing and building their own briefs, mostly as light, temporary structures to pass the according laws. And this approach has produced some of the most original and provocative urban interventions recently going as far as Michael Rakowitz' ParaSITE project. An experiment running for over 10 years now his custom-made inflatable "bubble tents" for homeless people literally parasitizing on private homes have triggered an intensive social and political debate. Another decade-old, major initiative is Cameron Sinclair and Kate Stoth's Architecture for Humanity: a non-profit network of over 50 000 professionals providing design, construction and development services to communities in need.

Today's selection celebrates the diversity of the emerging faces: from the "radical pleasing agenda" of comic-loving BIG through the digital blobby optimism ofEMERGENT to the caravan architects of Fantastic Norway, travelling around the country to offer architectural services to different communities. There are, of course, numerous cultural and economic implications to this and perhaps rightfully Guardian's Rowan Moore warns us that

architecture like this could become a delightful, middle class game."

http://www.huffingtonpost.com/tom-mallory/young-architecture_b_931097.html#s334377&title=Fantastic_Norway_House (accessed August 25, 2011)

[5] Week 5 reflection

Collaborative discussion:

We met as a group at QUT yesterday to discuss and develop ideas for the group component of developing a mobile architecture. Going through the brief and through discussing possible approaches to creating a presentation of our strategy and architectural intent we all became familiar with how broad the possible responses could be. We used this to our advantage as much as possible in further exploring possible responses to an architecture servicing parliament or canberra and generated further parameters and ideas to which we can respond in developing an architecture.

I gained quite a lot from this meeting and solidified many ideas which I had vaguely considered - I now have a much stronger position on what is needed for canberra/parliament, and how a mobile architecture can best support this. The next phase of the process is developing refined ideas and parameters for the presentation coming up and use these to develop a set of boards exemplifying our conceptual response and the direction we intend to proceed in.

Artefacts produced within these discussions will be uploaded shortly.

[4] Interactive Transportable Architecture: Text

Link. (Accessed August 21, 2011)

[4] Mobile Diagramming

Diagramming possible arrangements, manoeuvres and 'actions' of a mobile architecture.

-Distribution
-Segregation
-Diversification
-Combination

[4] Move

youtube
vimeo

[4] Week 4 Reflection

After individually generating some ideas based on an architecture which can move, relocated and shift positions I have created a strong basis for further development of this concept and future generation of an architectural response. The group work has further solidified some of these ideas and helped me to formulate additional and deeper ideas about what a mobile architecture is. Perhaps more importantly, an idea was generated in terms of how this architecture might function and what its basic purpose is in terms of a parliamentary role. We have proposed an architecture which can service members of society which are dislocated from major bodies of people and often do not get their voices and opinions heard. We propose an architecture for the minority, which can act as an agent of parliament for the forgotten people.

I have began to conceptualise further functions this architecture might have in terms of my individual response, and am looking forward to implementing these and creating a project which enhances existing parliamentary services which creatively seeking to reinvent the initiation of political discussions.

[4] Week 4 progress

Within the week four lecture and tutorial, the following developments were made:

[4] Kinetic Architecture

Within the theme of mobile architecture, I conducted some further individual development and research into the key ideas of an architecture which can change it's location. I am starting to formulate a set of rules and strategies of which to respond to in terms of eventually formulating an architectural response. The next stage is to generate a function for the mobile architecture to produce and a way it can service parliament or enhance existing services.

[4] 'Move' p174

Within a book I own - Flexible: Architecture That Responds to Change (Robert kronenburg), is a chapter on mobile architecture. I have taken notes and generated ideas from this section of the text and are as follows:

[3]Mobile Architecture

I began to generate some conceptual ideas about what an architecture agent of parliament could perform in terms of servicing society while being mobile. The ideas were very basic and diagrams kept simplistic to ensure that an idea did not become locked in. This exercise was essentially an individual exploration of what mobile architecture is, or could be.

[3] Week 3 Progress

The week 3 lecture and tutorial helped to generate further ideas and concepts as to what each strategy could entail in terms of an agent of parliament. Simple diagrams began to be drawn showing the early sign of an architectural response, however the ideas are still extremely simple, this will remain this way to ensure an architectural design is not reached prematurely and all areas of ideation are explored first.

[3] General mobile exemplars

All images obtained from google. (accessed August 18, 2011)

[3] Mobile Exemplar 02

La Petitite Maison Du Weekend - Patkau Architects

"La Petite Maison du Weekend is a prototype self-sufficient minimal dwelling. It can be relocated to virtually any outdoor site, where it will provide the basics for everyday life: sleeping for two, kitchen, shower, and composting toilet. Made of a variety of materials and premanufactured components, it generates its own electricity, collects and distributes rainwater, and composts human waste using only the natural dynamics of the site."

[3] Mobile Exemplar

Tom Kundig: Rolling Huts

"Responding to the owner’s need for space to house visiting friends and family, the Rolling Huts are several steps above camping, while remaining low-tech and low-impact in their design. The huts sit lightly on the site, a flood plain meadow in an alpine river valley. The owner purchased the site, formerly a RV campground, with the aim of allowing the landscape return to its natural state. The wheels lift the structures above the meadow, providing an unobstructed view into nature and the prospect of the surrounding mountains.

The huts are grouped as a herd: while each is sited towards a view of the mountains (and away from the other structures), their proximity unites them. They evoke Thoreau’s simple cabin in the woods; the structures take second place to nature." 

[3] Architecture is a Device

I took notes while reading 'Architecture is a Device'. This text held some interesting ideas and has helped me to generate a position and strategy for approaching this assignment.

[3] Massive Change

"Design has emerged as one of the world’s most powerful forces. It has placed us at the beginning of a new, unprecedented period of human possibility, where all economies and ecologies are becoming global, relational, and interconnected.

In order to understand and harness these emerging forces, there is an urgent need to articulate precisely what we are doing to ourselves and to our world. This is the ambition of Massive Change.

Massive Change is a celebration of our global capacities but also a cautious look at our limitations. It encompasses the utopian and dystopian possibilities of this emerging world, in which even nature is no longer outside the reach of our manipulation.

For many of us, design is invisible. We live in a world that is so thoroughly configured by human effort that design has become second nature, ever-present, inevitable, taken for granted.

And yet, the power of design to transform and affect every aspect of daily life is gaining widespread public awareness.

No longer associated simply with objects and appearances, design is increasingly understood in a much wider sense as the human capacity to plan and produce desired outcomes. Engineered as an international discursive project, Massive Change: The Future of Global Design, will map the new capacity, power and promise of design.

Massive Change explores paradigm-shifting events, ideas, and people, investigating the capacities and ethical dilemmas of design in manufacturing, transportation, urbanism, warfare, health, living, energy, markets, materials, the image and information. We need to evolve a global society that has the capacity to direct and control the emerging forces in order to achieve the most positive outcome. We must ask ourselves: Now that we can do anything what will we do?

The best way to express the capacities of our modern world is through its fullest range of media. To date, Massive Change has taken on the form of a traveling exhibition, a book, a series of formal and informal public events, a radio program, an online forum, and this blog. Since the exhibition’s opening in October 2004, several school boards have expressed interest in incorporating the project’s ideas into educational curriculums."

source - Buce Mau

[3] The Political Circus or the Parliamentary Road Show.

This is the theme group which will be followed for the rest of the semester under the strategy of Mobile Architecture. The general brief for this theme group project is as follows: 


Jennifer Siegel states in her lecture Mobile Design- the Death of Distance (2009) "in an increasingly changing social and environmental climate of today we are no longer believing in the monumentality of buildings."

She sees "as the future of buildings become more portable and adaptable they become more useful. Before long we will shed the bulk of excess of static environments... With the recognition of mobility of demographics and information there is an increasing capacity of architecture to respond to fluidity"

In Australia we are seeing increasingly growing social and environmental shifts. The nomadic worker (whether at home, in an office, on a train or plane) and the nomadic politician?

The travelling Circus requires a place to perform. Is this in a structure that has to be erected (and then how does this travel easily?) or is an existing environment modified temporarily to suit their needs?  

[2] Conceptual Diagramming

Basic diagramming of the function/purpose/possibilities of a flexible/distributed/mobile/virtual architecture.

[2] W2 Reflection

Reflecting upon the past 2 and a half weeks, it is clear that no single idea has solidified in my head about what is possible for this project, and even what is expected. However I think this is predominantly a good thing as the ideas and concepts springing forward are dynamic, unique and responding to all areas of flexible, distributed, mobile and virtual.

[2] W2 STUDIO WORKSHOP - Infrastructure, Strategy & Presence

Pages from other group members notes on these discussions:

[2] William McDonough: Cradle to cradle design

William McDonough: Cradle to cradle design

[1] Norman Foster: Green Agenda.

Norman Foster: Green Agenda

[1] W1 STUDIO WORKSHOP - Four Strategies