Daffodil blooming

Daffodil dying

Bean stalk growing

Section, Plan and Diagrammatic drawings of Utopia stairs showing overall scale in relationship to our hotel pods and social space as well as the circulation between spaces and the movement of each individual cog like stair.

Perspective, plan and section view of archicad cnc modelling for utopia stairs

This is the current section of our two hotels. Utopua on the left, dystopia on the right. The next step will be to create a terrain and add in their relationship to the ground.

Archicad work for Utopia site device between two floors. Concept from turning cogs where people walk onto one circular slab that rotates and then they step onto the next, Each person can navigate their way round by figuring out which slab to step on to get to their destination.

Joyee, cup and jandal excercise - Archicad

Team Y.E.S has shown interesting developments on their design work for the semester. This week we were evaluating their work on the project ‘Between two floors’. The stairs designed were seen as
a way of transporting from one floor to another.

 For the dystopia site they had a city setting where it was quite chaotic and dilapidated. Their city was depicted as quite wasteful on resources such as energy and also space i.e interior living. They designed trampoline stairs that matched their nest on top. To summarize their idea in one sentence ‘tucked away in your private nest you can escape the wreckage of the lower city. Each exhilarating bounce will lead you scrambling up higher than ever expected’.  The user will need to do a lot of work to get up there, but once you get up there you get a peaceful scene of the city – a lot of hard work for a good reward. This correlates to their overall idea of having to do a lot of work for the hotel. The experience can be said to be quite exciting and frightening. The movement of the stairs is extended from the hotel. Y.E.S wanted to use curving moments to give an aesthetically pleasing and more flowing movement over hard edges. The curves also relate back to the buoyancy of a trampoline.  There is this overall feeling that the nest’s façade is entwined with the stair.

For the utopic side of the project, their hotel idea was for it to be self sufficient, where the hotel would be working for you. Their overall experience statement was “Slip, worry free on this self-efficient wheel that will send you smoothing to the next level, no time or energy wasted”. The hotel façade is made up of big panels of solar bricks. Their staircase, resembling a ferris, wheel, is integrated in the building faced.  The wheel is ran on sunlight. Geometric shapes occurring in the hotel façade complement the shapes of the carriages of the staircase. They then produced part of the stairs on the CNC.

Overall, the idea of their project seems very interesting where its dealing with ideas of sustainability and the balance between conserving and wasting resources. Our group did find it hard to distinguish the two hotels apart without the aid of the background. We hope to see them make more developments in the area of distinguishing their two hotels.

                               

We are going to use these two modules for our dystopian hotel. We wanted to create a mesh that was quite simple but dynamic. It isn't as open as our utopia mesh because we wanted to restrict the air flow from inside to outside and vice versa -thus settling for little holes that puncture through the double facade system.

This collage is made up of a number of photos taken during departure and arrival from both the city and island, as well as the journey between.

Various photos of stairs observed during my waiheke trip experience: stairs from the ferry, beach, walk up to the site, and the stairs my group made on the                                                              beach!