Disneyland Development

The Disneyland charrette is coming along pretty well, we have some really exciting forms and ideas that came together in a pretty harmonious way. Ill tell you this much: two paths lead to a central explosion of activity, one dedicated to music...one to light.

Now here's some renderings for your enjoyment!

Disneyland "The Hook"

Recently we were notified our design needs to consider a "hook" for the disneyland redevelopment project, basically its a point of focus or "money shot" that sells the whole project, basically the element that, if void, would rid the project of its soul. The backbone, the barrell that the entire thing revolves around. Ok you get it. So basically our concept idea is a collage or mosaic of cultural experiences, not like epcot center or small world where there are isolated moments of dedicated experience, rather a blending of the elements from various cultures morphed chopped up and reasembled to the point that they are boiled down to thier essence. The way these cultural experiences unfold are through the way various cultures deal with and contribute to light and music. We found common themes that crossed various cultures, like colored glass, patterned screens walls and fabric planes of enclosures for shading. So basically one entrance form deals with light and kinetics while the opposing side deals with music and at the center plaze they combine in a creschendo or light, music and water with a polar grid of water jets that provide a wat finding focus and hopefully a "hook".

here's what i made so far for our rendition of the "hook"

Disneyland Charrette

So as if i didnt get enough school as it is, i signed up for an application based spring break studio charrette run by Disneyland's Imagineers!

So basically there were 8 design majors chosen from each of the four design majors on campus to make 4 8-person teams made up of architects, urban planners, landscape architects and graphic designers.

The design problem we're facing is the transitional circulation space in between the two parks located in anaheim: Disneyland and Disney's California Adventure (DCA). Nothing brings the entire area together, no vision, no holistic goal or theme that serves the extremely unique actions and uses that occur. A simple example was watching people in the main plaza (jokingly reffered to as red square, but acutally called the "esplanade") sit on the floor in the dead of the heat since theres absolutly no seating anywhere.

Our group has some ideas concerning the design and ill try to scan and upload our concept phase soon. The final review is next thursday so this is a really crazy fast charrette thats gonna require some heavy all nighters. Stay tuned but i dont think ill find much time to upload simultaneously. One of the professors involed is Ray Kampf and he suggested us to look into Designing Disney for inspiration, it was an interesting starting point looking into how Disney design's spaces.

101 Things I learned

I stumbled upon a very interesting book couple weeks ago online and had one of those "oh my god i have to have that book just so i can look inside and see what it says" moments. I just got it a week ago and i feel it was a good buy. Its called 101 things i learned in architecture school and it basically provides little tidbits of information on the kinds of things architects learn about and do in architecture school. Being in my fourth year, a majority of the information is repetitive and barely fun to look at, but i realize for an individual JUST entering a program of architecture or someone that has no idea how and what architects learn, it would most likely be an amazingly interesting simple read. There are moments in the book for any student, for example i enjoyed the bit about how to present your project at a final review (paraphrased):

1. state the design problem
2. discuss the values, attitudes and approach
3. describe your design process and the major discoveries you encountered
4. state and explain the parti, point to your overall diagram
5. present drawings and model
6. perform a modest critique of your own shortcomings or what you would have done differently

Ive never approached a review that way, especially number 6, which i feel is very important in our field. One of my design professors once told me that no matter how long you work on a project, design never ends, therefore your project will never be perfect so there's no point defending its honor like your own mother's. Parts of it are strong, others not so much. Defining its weaknesses helps you avoid them in the future and learn about the process of designing.

All in all the book is charming, witty, and the little mini cartoons are fun to explore. I think every architecture student should invest in a copy, preferably earlier in their academic endeavors.

Keystone Chair

Something really exciting happened while we were all busy doing our buildings last week (that's the actual terminology we use) two grads (elaine and jen) came up to me and Owen and asked us if we want to participate in this cardboard chair competition called chair affair.

We got together, charreted the idea for one day and came up with a chair all of us are really proud of.

Most of the designs from the past use layers and layers of cardboard stacked in an integral fashion to create a form that can support human loads. when we all got together we felt we should push a sustainable agenda and limited ourselves to one sheet that can fold into a compact stool for a studio environment.

The project was very weak during the first several trials and the vertical walls would buckle under the weight of anyone's full force but with the introduction of a secondary structural piece (Cut from the same one sheet) the whole project solidified and the design came to life.

We started with small origami-like mock ups and played around with different systems of folding, cutting and scoring until we came up with an idea we felt would be plausible.

Three or four tries later with actual cardboard sheets we came up with a design that was pretty streamlined and sexy. Here's the final presentation board we submitted.

I think we have a good chance at getting something.

Done!

I'm finally done with the space elevator base studio! The review went super duper well only we were a little rushed since the chair of the department wanted to set up for her review and since her class is so much more important than ours they needed a whole hour to set up their fruit and chips, so yeah, my ten weeks of work i'snt really all that important after all, but it went GREAT!

There were some pretty crazy cool people there reviewing our stuff from Boeing and NASA who were familiar with the space elevator base concept, name drop time!


Edward D. Mc Cullough was there from Boeing, read his bio its crazy. He suggested our work should definitely get published since a lot of other minds should be involved in this development and give feedback towards the progression of this idea.

All in all it went really well and our board came out really nice, heres a link to the full res layout.

Hopefully something bigger and better can come of this studio, it was very exciting seeing all the work in one large display of effort.

cool!

Tower Shading Motion

Presentation Board:

http://www.box.net/shared/34t1lfy21u

Here's the motion!



Here's more!



Look at this!

http://www.box.net/shared/bg1vtj8837

Updated Detail Rendering

Since Daisy's crit we updated our detail rendering and brought in the floor treatment that reflects the hexagonal grid of the entire structure.

Here it is:



We have also figured out our program diagrammatically and we are waiting to divide the space further with interior walls.

The next step after this diagram other than the interior divisions is when and how to cut the horizontal planes to create programmatic connections vertically.