theCASTLE: Week 5

Week 5:

Week 5 was our presentations for The Castle and also the Self-Fab group. The Self-Fab group went first with their power points describing the competition brief that they were trying to meet. The competition was to choose your own site and problem to deal with, but to also use digital technology to inform your design. The group decided to choose Johannesburg, South Africa and the influx of people visiting the city for the 2010 world cup. The Group decided to design some small self-fabricatable houses for the tourists that come and stay in the city for the duration of the World cup, utilising the building skills of the people in townships and settlements to generate employment through making them. The houses built can then be given back to the community after the world cup has finished to those that worked on the building project.

The ideas behind the project brief are very admirable and I tried, with some images from my trip to Joburg, to show the need for exactly that idea of housing, or creative and flexible ideas along that line. The biggest problems in South Africa are the housing shortage and the governments lack of care about the dire situation for millions of residents (South African or not). The Self-Fab group is endeavouring to create very efficient computer modelled structures that take into account the skills and opportunity level apparent in South African townships at present.

The Self-Fab group’s work so far was very thorough and well presented, considering the overall frustration level things that they were trying to achieve in a big group. Everyone appreciated the brief a lot more through discussion, which was good.

After the Self-Fab group, the Habitation group were to go next. The group dynamics had been such that Neph and I had been left at the eleventh hour to put together our presentation, and we didn’t really think much of it before we started, but as we talked our own ideas did start to grow on us. The fundamental image that represented all our ideas on the topic so far was encapsulated in the picture of a weasel on our first slide. We did explain this enigma later, but I think that it gave everyone a good indication of the calibre and research that we conducted.

We started off our presentation with the ideas we had been throwing around for a while, but that we had just put into a mind map form. The mind map was run along the lines of lots of different TIMES. These TIMES could be the different times of the day, the different time in your active community life, the different times of your psychological state and budget and financial times. The actual TIME that it took to do the mind map in Vector Works (of all programs we could have chosen) meant that it had a strangely illogical but intuitive feel to it. Everyone seemed to understand anyway. After our Marvellous mind map we went onto describe two different philosophical camps in which you could design the CASTLE: the shoebox or the origami box. The shoebox we felt was a container that you would live within, and everything would be solid and just rattle around inside the box. The Origami box would be a structure that started small and could be unfolded or unpacked to become the bigger structure that you would live within. We pointed our this would be a big question down the line somewhere when we are deciding what kind of Castle to create.

We finished off our exemplary discussion with the proposal of the Weasel Pipe. The Weasel Pipe is an idea representative of us saying, “make sure we always think outside the box”. It was an idea where the CASTLE was actually a very tall and thin tube, which you slid down various chutes inside to get to various functions. Obviously one of our less realistic ideas.








The next group to go was the Buildability group of Bek, Sam, Gabby, Hannah and Kristy. These guys put together a really comprehensive power point presentation about shapes, forms, materials, ESD’s, embodied energy, new technologies and methods of construction all cross referenced through a matrix where each form of shape or construction method was rated against several criteria in order to test what would be the most appropriate to use. In the end of the presentation we were told that shapes like the tear-drop and cube would perform the best structurally, with forms like the triangle and tear-drop having annoying unusable spaces, but being quite strong. The cube is a really good shape for storage and using all the areas, as is any rectilinear design. The best construction methods would be timber framing or sandwich panels that are strong, light and very easy to insulate.

The third and last group to present were the Services group who talked about the kitchen and bathroom fittings, designs and new technologies that will be applicable to this project at some point. Also power generation, there was a really wonderful example of informal power generation from a Tokyo rooftop where lots of little plastic cogs hung together and all spun around to create electricity.

After a break we came back after all the presentations and talked about where we would like to go now, which was a question we were often asked, but felt a bit blunt in staying we want to stop stuffing around and start building something, but we did that this time, and from there it was decided that next week we would start making cardboard models of CASTLE designs. Yay! I think that everyone was really pleased at the point we had got to and the information gathered so far, putting all the theoretical ideas into practise would be quite difficult.