theCASTLE: Week 6

Week 6 Learning By Making class was highly anticipated because we had decided at the end of Week 5 that the time had come for us to explore actually making some models of what we thought the CASTLE should be. Ian suggested at the end of week 5 that we should all think about designs we would like to do and come ready to put together some 1:10 scale models of the spaces in week 6. Of course, dutifully I did spend some time pondering ideas over the week and came to week 6 where Ian decided that no pen and paper should be seen anywhere. It was confusing because Ian said the week before to come with a design, then I did and when we started today we were told we supposed to just be playing with cardboard and not thinking in plan so much as doing with our hands. On reflection, in our final lesson of the Castle where Andrew Maynard gave a wrap of his view on things, he suggested that a way of working was to allow people to go off and make their own explorations and musings on the topic and allow a free table for ideas to be placed back on for everyone to discuss, talk about and discard if necessary, I don’t think that this happened this semester because we always felt that we were in regimented exploration time, or being constantly asked to same questions about things we decided previously were later decisions to be made. For example, product choice, something we heard A LOT about constantly, we thought we had decided was a topic for a later group of the Castle to explore because we did the initial research and laid the foundations for those decisions.

Throughout the morning a number of cardboard iterations were done with Ian and Richard to explore the ideas that we had come up with at the start and researched through all our different topics. We found that, unintentionally (and probably due to our known design processes so far) we were doing a lot of our models with no roof and in plan, not really thinking about the complete implications of what we put forward. Bek and Gabby came up with a triangular walled structure that had pop up bits in it, trying to explore a form that didn’t start with a square based floor plan. The really exciting thing about their design (because we started thinking about services and living and eating and transporting all at the same time) was the idea of having your shower over the doorway, and then your entry door would always be clean! Dave made a model that had a series of slide out moveable parts, one was a slide out toilet cubicle that slid out to provide move living space and the other piece was a quadrant of a circle that pivoted on a point and instead of just sliding out it swung like a revolving door to allow a huge opening (or small opening depending on how much you open it out) and it provided that much extra floor space all over again. Dave also gave Ian and Richard palpitations when he turned the model on its side so it now had a roof that was the wall before, and now a solid wall was pivoted up into a big shading overhang over the box below. These were ideas that we were then to play with for the next weeks as well; we could all see the genius in them from early on!






Neph and I tried to model up the idea from the previous week that was the Weasel Pipe, a concept where instead of making a box and fitting things around the edges, you start with the services and the solid pieces in the centre of the design and it becomes more transparent with apertures and openings at the sides. This idea I think has influenced the end idea for the test rig and its use of portal box like frames, where the solid is contained within certain parameters and the area outside of that space is much more flexible and depends on the amount of space that one would wish to contain. Not that I want to claim the idea from the group as our own, but over the time that we spent doing the Castle iterations and identifying what we would want out of a structure, we followed certain trends of ideas and that stemmed from the ideas that: we don’t just want to make a caravan, so it has to use the space it contains and the materials it uses in a better way, an architectural way. We also knew that we had identified different ways of going about the space; whether to create a flat pack fold away thing that did amazing things from very little, or, we knew that we could make a shoebox that contained everything else inside it and had amazing use of space saving items that made the overall shoebox not very big. The initial cardboard iterations seemed to all be of the slide out variety, or all of the big box and cool things inside it variety, depending on how we had shared ideas between the group, and if someone had come up with a cracker explanation for one thing, but not another.

In the afternoon we did another lot of iterations and Kristy’s group designed a very Murcutt inspired long Castle, that reminded me very much on the horse drawn caravan that my family travelled in through part of Victoria. This reminisce came from the design having inclined sides for storage. They also modelled a kitchen bench cooking area that was on one side of the wall but could be pushed through on to the outside of the wall as well for outdoor living. We left the week 6 lesson with no idea of where the Castle was actually going, but with some exciting ideas.