Progress

I feel I have made some progress today and am not nearly as grumpy and fustrated as i was yesterday. Which can only be a good thing. I am still thinking out the design with no mental or physical picture of what I want the whole to look like.

The area I made today is the area i intend to be used as "the office" part of the office. By that I mean the working area. I haven't quite figured out how I'm going to link that area with some kind of viewing area for information about my journals. Also I do intend to get rid of the standard wood finish but there is not much point doing that until I've finalised thing.

Some pictures of what i believe to be progress:



This is my first attempt? Maybe arrangement is a better term. I had some further ideas for this but we are limited to 100 prims (primatives) and so i decided to try and find a more effecient way to build something very similar. (on saying this i think i just realised one way 1 can make another part of what I made today contain less prims. -.-)
The thing with this design is that I was intending to have this "cave" (the contorted/twisted box thing) in the centre rear of a larger space with the journals area at the front. This would have created a private office of sorta within a larger public space but it ended up seeming a little too closed off with not enough integration between spaces.
I'm writing this a couple of hours on and i can't remember quite why i didn't stick to some elements of that idea and am now considering returning to it.
Note that the "cave" was initially going to be more of a cylinder like that in my last entry but it didn't contort (the seeming obsession with contorsion does have something to do with one of my journals its not just my own little thing - think Frank Ghery and possibly Zaha Hadid) well and provide the physical space i was after.
Anyway one of my reasons for progressing the ideas was the previously stated over use of prims and a realisation that you can only really cut a prim in one place.



I want to show you the twisting from a distance. To me it creates something of an illusion of movement.



So the issues with the floor extended beyond the amount of prims to just not really working, due to the fact it seems impossible to crop prims effectively and the fact the ground isn't flat.


So this led to:



So the major changes here were: the rotation of the "cave" so it is more of a tranisitionable space that has more flow, the floor becoming all one level which seems a more effecient use of prims too me and a more practical use of floor space. Also i added 3 glass exterior walls and a glass ceiling/roof. It's basically made a contourted cube shaped tube inside a normal cube - I was hoping to create some juxtaposition between formal, grounded cube and a cube that has been distorted and had its relationship with the ground altered. Hopefully this is also working some way to incorporating two conflicting elements of my journals - the emphasis on geometry in Majalah Arkitek (Architecture Malayasia - although literal translation of Majalah Arkitek is Magazine Architecture)and the 90's-present reaction against pure geometric and traditional architecture by modern architects in Design studies. However I feel this has definately channelled Design studies more than Majalah Arkitek. Hopefully I'll be able to balance things out more.
And what about the third journal, AA Files - well that is where the idea of a cave has come from and it is also what is dictating my design as a ground-based horizontal design rather than a vertical building. So it hasn't been forgotten.

So more pictures for this design from different angles e.t.c.



Looking through the "cave" work zone. Hopefully the glass will look more like glass at some point because at the moment from the inside you can't really tell its glass - actually it may as well not even be there its so hard to see.



Looking out from the "cave" the area immediately infront of the cave is where I intend to create the "jorunal" area. In this picture i really like the twisitng interior on the left hand side. It kind of reminds me of folding or some form of accordian.



Looking from the righthand side of the "cave"



A view from the outside of the building. Note the curved semi-dome like contours of the cave roof. This was something of a happy accident which references the iconic domes prominent in islamic architecture (e.g. mosques).Islamic architecture is one of the things that was present in Majalah Arkitek - although Christian architecture of churches was too so maybe I should encorporate that. (however they were modern churches so maybe the seeming modernity of the building thus far is reference enough.)

Overall I'm finding that i'm learning to think in secondlife (although I do always have to have a pencil and sketch book next to me).There is one thing I am slightly annoyed about - that is that I get my best ideas when I'm dozing off and am also completely unproductive in the afternoons. Mornings should last forever.

Pen, Paper, Toilet?

Oh my gosh two posts in one day. I must be going great.

On the contray I'm not. I started with some sketching on a sheet of paper - yea so old fashioned but I cant think in secondlife and it takes too long to do things. So yea put some ideas, text and image on this page:



Then I decided I needed to stop procrastinating and actually work in secondlife. Thats where things go wrong. Part of my design ended up looking like a public toilet (this is the only bit i actually worked on too. Plus I'm considering whether my design will spatially work and have some architectural merit. Furthermore I have no concrete idea of what I want only partials that don't seem to be working out too well.

So the glorified toilet:

So there has been an obvious long period of absence from my blog (and also secondlife) with final crit for Design, an essay due for European Studies and studying for Architectural Technology this projet somewhat stupidly got put on the back burner. Apologies to the two people I know check this in hopes of some form of an update. Though honestly I think the main person I've let down is myself :(.

On the plus side I have researched and gone through my journals. They seem in many respects worlds apart and I'm stuggling to know where to even start designing. Contridictions between the texts are rife so its partially a case of what to include and what to ignore. Furthermore two of my journals are very academic and almost inaccessible to a fresher architecture student. They aren't particularly inspiring either as there is a lot of text and little of anything else. I'll be creating a seperate post for each of the journals which I will hopefully linked to or displayed within Secondlife. At the moment really i just need to figure out what to do. I'm even considering starting with a pen and paper even though the emphasis of this project is what you can achieve on the computer.

Over and out

Starting to Build

So I've started building on Secondlife.

I've got to say that while it might not be the most difficult thing in the world it is fairly challenging (for me at least). Its also really time consuming and I've come to the conclusion that you can easily spend a lot of time messing with small and insignificant things.

As well as starting building I've taken some photo graphs (snapshots) of what I've been building. It's not too flash and I've since realized that there are better ways to do things. There are definitely things I'm going to be changing. Furthermore I think I need to have a better grasp of my journals so that what I'm designing is more informed by the journals.

So the photos:



My first prim! Complete with the standard plywood finish - lovely!! I was actually quite interested in looking at cantilevering systems. (A symptom of my last project [based on Icarus and Daedalus] I think)



Starting to build and combine prims



Basically how far I got working on this particular design



Attempting to show scale



So what's with this last one?? Looks a bit different and is really glowy. Was this intentional? No. Why has this occurred? Well I'm not entirely sure I thought that maybe it occurred due to a difference in the version of SecondLife i was running but after talking to one of the Tutors/CAS guys we came to the conclusion it was more likely a product of different operating system speeds - with home being REALLY slow and uni being significantly faster.

This image here definitely makes me want to start over with things more in relation to my actual journals.

Also I might post some other photos I took - very similar ones admittedly that I have crudely (with Microsoft paint) drawn on to illustrate what I was trying to do. Alternatively I may not as, as I have said, may be starting over.

The Beginning

This is my first post on my new blog. Yay.

It's also my first compulsory blog.

Compulsory? - Yes it is complusory.

See I'm a first year architecture Student at the University of Auckland (yay for being a fresher). Part of one of our paper's require's us to create a blog to document what we do in both that class and other classes as well. (it can also play host to things that interest us.)

In saying this is a complusory blog hopefully it will eventually become something I enjoy doing and updating rather than a chore. Either that or this becomes a habit would be good.

So far in architecture I've done a couple of projects for all 3 of my architecture papers (I also have one general education paper this semester) - photographs of which might appear on here sometime later.

The main use of this blog will be to document the creation of an office space in Secondlife. I'm definately a newbie at secondlife and have to admit I find the whole thing somewhat daunting but I'm going to try my best to get it to work. That said if anyone has any advice about building in secondlife or architecture in general dont hesitate to contact me - I need as much help as I can get in this.

For now I don't really have much to upload - this is it really.

Tegan