PMB Campus Law Building

On Thursday I went with my class to Pietermaritzburg for the day and, believe it or not, there is actually a fair amount of interesting things to see in Maritzburg.

The reason we were there was to check out the site for our new design project, a fine arts school on the PMB, UKZN campus. Its a really interesting project and I'm pretty excited despite the daunting task of designing an entire faculty building.

I took a whole lot of photos while I was there, so I have a few things to share, but today's post is dedicated to the Campus's Law faculty building.

Wow.

The campus is basically split down the centre by Golf Road, dividing it into the more traditional, main campus of mostly brick constructed buildings and the Golf Road campus comprising an assortment of incredibly sexy, brutalist concrete buildings of which the law building stuck out as my favourite.


I love the streaky old concrete and huge windows of the South-facing library and the brick infill panels and the planting around it and the stairwells and the symmetry and... Sho. Great stuff.

Hope you're having a great long weekend!

On a side note, I'm absolutely loving David Crowder at the moment. Certainly not your average worship band. So kiff.

Ixopo

The last two or three weeks have been a blur. This year is turning out to be even more demanding than the last and without God's unexplainable peace, which has been incredible, I'd be a total wreck. Thursday was my first hand in for the semester, and Friday followed with a pretty dismal set of results, but I look forward to a chance to right myself again next quarter.

Submission was completely hand draw, so I have no pictures to post of the project, although I'm not sure that I would either way, since the end results were rather disappointing..

Looking back on the project though, I must say I quite enjoyed it. I've learned a fair deal about how I respond to pressure (not very well) and been directed to do some pretty interesting research work.

The project was a Buddhist retreat for Port St. Johns, a small sea side town on the Wild Coast in the Eastern Cape. My main precedent study was of a retreat in Ixopo, an hour or so's drive from Durban. It's a really beautiful place that perfectly embodies the opening paragraph of Alan Paton's Cry the Beloved Country:

There is a lovely road that runs from Ixopo into the hills. These hills are grass covered and beyond any singing of it.

I took a few photos when we visited it about a month ago. There's certainly nothing architecturally outstanding about the place, but it has some serious vibe, and I found it an incredible example of just how strong a sense spirit or identity a certain place can have.

Sugarcane Fires

Its nine o'clock on a thursday morning, and I find myself in the lan at varsity desprerately trying to amuse myself. I wouldn't be here at all if it weren't for an irritating little issue with our exam on Monday that I need to try and sort out. Total waste of time.

So, as usual, I turn to my greatest procrastination tool: blogging.

I thought I'd share my second recording from last week with you. Like THIS one, I used the webcam mic instead of my proper microphone, and did some extra, Justin Vernon inspired, layering of guitars and vocals, with some piano and other stuff thrown in.


(Click HERE if the player isn't showing)

Its one of the most spiritually themed songs I've written in a while, but is mostly about the sugarcane fields that used to grow all over the hills around where I live, that have subsequently been replaced with residential development. Whenever the cane was harvested, they would burn away all the extra chaff to expose only the sugary stems, which would cover all the houses near by in a thin layer of ash a lot like burn newspaper. Its about laying off whats not important, and getting to the sweet stuff in the middle.

Let me know what you think..

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.