I've decided I should post the real scruffy end of my design process - my sketch books. Or at least, I'll post extracts from them. Most of it would be pretty boring, or make no sense, but I'll put up a few pages from throughout the design process so far. The drawing hardly marks me out as the next Picasso, or even the next Rolf Harris, but it's about visualising a thought process, not making beautiful pictures. That's my excuse anyway.
The images above are from pretty early in the design process, which you can tell from the fact that none of the images looks remotely similar. I really didn't have much of an idea what I wanted the building to look like at this stage, but it helps to work through a few ideas on paper.
What the images hopefully illustrate is that I switch between drawing little sections, plans, elevations, details... pretty much anything. Each idea is best expressed in a different way, so you draw the most appropriate representation for exploring and developing each thought. There were quite a few pages of my sketchbook with images that look a complete mess because I've drawn revision and revision one on top of another as I work through the idea.
Here are some images of early Sketch-Up models, also exploring the general site strategy. I was pretty confident at this stage that I wanted to pursue a linear arrangement inline with the island. That's not to say there weren't niggling doubts though, I'm as indecisive as it's possible to be. I wasn't actually proposing that the building would be black and pink by the way, it's just contrasting colours that help differentiate voids, shapes etc. And Carmody Groake used pink in their model (see below) and I really am that shallow sometimes.
I'm going to be posting a few images of architects or schemes that have inspired me throughout this project, as I'm a bit of a geek for trawling through endless journals and architects websites for precedents. The batch above are from Carmody Groarke, whose models I love. Thes rest of their architecture is equally wonderful.
Here's a few photos of early design work. At this stage is was still wondering how to translate the traditional courtyard/cloister configuration onto a narrow site. In the bottom image you can see that the courtyard is simply overlaid onto the island, ignoring the boundaries between land and river. This isn't a case of simply ignoring the specifics of the site; the whole building will have to be raised above ground level to avoid flooding, and with that constraint in place you can deliberately ignore or blur the perceived site boundary.
