Original Sections

Floor Plan 1:200

Above is the Floor Plan with corresponding section lines to indicate the cut plane for my two sections which are below:

I have decided to hand draw all of these images onto brown textured paper to portray my design as an earthy and more natural concept as I felt it suited the site and ethos of Woodfordia. However, this did cause some trouble when it came to scanning as apparently the paper was too thick for all of the scanning shops I went to, therefore all of these images are quality photographs of drawings to scale.

I found my research to be very helpful in shaping and guiding my own style of drawing for this assessment. I took good aspects from all of the drawing and attempted to blend them all plus my own style to create the best sections I could. I was inspired by the way Renzo Piano and Norman Foster were able to depict the intended activities within each space and also their ability to convey details without overpowering to composition of the whole drawing. My use of colour and tones to convey light conditions and materials was inspired by Morphosis, Steven Holl and Jean Nouvel. One of my main goals was to create an image with depth and texture, because I noticed this to be a key component to a successful section through my research. I used a mixture of techniques including pencil shading, water colors and pen work with different line wights to achieve this.

As can be seen in my sections I have shown a lot of site context as this was a major element in my design process as the topography of the land shaped my building (as can be seen in the model photos below). The building sits in a place called the grand canyon in Woodfordia and this is like its name suggest a bit of a canyon. The building sits in a valley surrounded on all sides my bushy hills, my building serves as an escape from city and is a place to return to nature. This is why my building is very open to the elements, it also influenced the choice of materials including rammed earth and lots of raw un-milled timber. I attempted to portray these materials and light conditions with colors and tones using many earthy colors and light texturing.

Details of the building may be hard to see as the drawings are both done at 1:100 but I included as much detail as I could manage with my finest 0.1mm pen. This can be seen in the floor detailing and also in the footings and roof construction .

The most important element of course was the portrayal of the intended activities. As my building aims to function as a retreat or a sanctuary I did not want to fill the scenes with crowds of people (like Norman Foster) as this is not how it would operate, however I did try to display as many possible scenarios as possible without over doing it. I feel I have done my vision justice in this extra assessment as for my final presentation I ran out of time and was quite disappointing with how i portrayed my design because I knew in my mind it was so much better.