Exp 3 stuff.

Hi all,

Some clarification and suggestions:

1) The T-s you have been drawing are an exercise in perspectives, penmanship, and visualising forms and voids in space. They don't need to be translated in any way into your bridge structure.

2) The mashups will ideally reinforce the ideas of power you are expressing in your bridge.

3) Consider the engineering of your bridge. Think about things like supports, balance, counterbalance, mass, etc. If you wish to disregard physical things like mass and gravity, have a good reason for it. Last week I saw many beginnings of bridges that were fairly straightforward slabs, placed across valleys like planks. In order to span a valley, real bridges have highly-engineered systems of suspension or support. Have a look at examples of long bridges and the different ways they are held in place.

4) Many of the abovementioned plank-across-valley bridges relied on a lot of added decoration to provide some distinctiveness. See if you can derive the distinctiveness at least partly from the structure of the bridge itself. Or the function: your bridge can connect more than two places, or it can be discontinuous, or it can curve back on itself. There are a lot of quirky things you can do.

5) DO NOT FORGET YOUR CLIENTS. You have been given a brief to design office spaces for two people. The office spaces need not be the same size and at opposite ends of the bridge. They can be over / under each other, in / on / under the bridge structure, and they can interfere with each other. But they are made for two specific people, so keep them in mind when you design. You wouldn't ignore your clients in your professional lives as architects, so don't do it now. I want reasons for your office designs: Experiment 2 was, on the whole, really lacking in explanation.

6) Don't leave your elevators and table until the last minute. They are important parts of your scheme. The elevators need not move straight up and down. They can form parts of the bridge depending on their position, or they can cause different elements of the bridge to react. Identify the design opportunities of each component of the exercise, and try to design them all in parallel.

Here is the brief:

Choose a specific business from two of the three clients and create an architecture consisting of three spaces. Two of the spaces should be located in a bridge that spans a valley. The valley should be inspired by a landscape from one of the clients country of origin (so while it is custom designed by each student the valley has a strong connection to a real place in the world). The spaces in the bridge are the clients offices (imagine they actually run their business' from there). The third space, on the valley floor, is a place for your clients to meet for a working lunch. Design two elevators to transport your clients to the meeting space and a table around which to meet that reinforces or challenges your particular understanding of "Power".