uMkumbane Mixed Use

This is my latest design, which I presented last Friday.

The brief for this project called for a Mixed Use building (residential/commercial/offices) in uMkumbane, Cato Manor, which is quite a poor area in Durban. The building was meant to act as something of an acupuncture into the area, a catalyst for further development of a positive urban environment.

It was generally quite a theoretical project, which was super rad! Some theory reports here and here.

And now for some pretty pictures..

Model built with ArchiCAD, rendered with Artlantis Studio, and this time I tried touching the 35mm film rendered images up with Adobe Light Room. I'm very pleased with the result, as the plain renders always come out looking a little over exposed and low contrast, so LR made a big difference.

I've got a couple of little changes to make before portfolio at the end of the year, but otherwise at the moment I'm pretty happy with how it turned out. I'm also overwhelmingly happy that design is almost completely over for this year. So I can finally get some sleep!

197 Florida Road

Project 2 was an art gallery for Florida Road, a particularly trendy boulevard of clubs, restaurants and businesses in Durban. We were given a small, flat public park just opposite Spiga D'Oro restaurant as our site, and "femininity" as a general concept to elaborate on.

This project was a whole lot more fun than the last one. It was a lot shorter, and since I'd had design principles drilled into me pretty hard by the last one, I was a little more confident in my design this time around. I was also more competent with the software (ArchiCAD and Artlantis) this time around, so the drawings and renders came out much better.

I'm still a lot happier with this design than the previous one, but as always, I can't help looking back as I wrte this and thinking about all the things I would change. I wonder if Mies Van Der Rohe ever got this feeling..

Cluster Housing..

I thought I'd kick off the recycling process with my three design projects from this term. I've done renders of all of them with some pretty awesome software, so the posts are mostly just flashy pictures. Nothing too technical.

My first project was a pretty unrealistic brief for a cluster housing development on a site on campus. A massive valley that forms about the only green space in the whole university, as it is a protected reserve. The brief called for a club house, and twenty residential units, arranged to take full advantage of the transitional spaces (that which they were considering the almos vertical slopes)

It was a pretty annoying project,and seemed to draw on for ever and ever, but eventually this is what I produced.

Looking back I'm pretty disappointed really, but its all about developing as a designer I suppose.

These were also my first real attempts at using any computer based drawing techniques, so the CAD work is super mediocre, and the renders aren't great. At the time I was really excited though, and the software is really great. I used ArchiCAD for the buildings, and rendered them with Artlantis.