Sunday, December 15, 2013

Thursday, December 12, 2013

Pre-Review III: The Firebird Suite

The week before Review II was productive, but rushed. We were able to rehearse our presentation, and spent more time gaining full understanding of our team's concepts. Some team members were absent from some VCs, we had some scrambling for decisions before the presentation, and were not able to get synthesis of all of the team's ideas into the document. 

Sunday 

We met to digest our coaches' and peers' comments and discuss how to move forward. We had a good VC in which we discussed the core spaces of our program: the spaces for researchers and the spaces for visitors, and the spaces where everyone merges. We discussed the layout of the research space, and asked questions like: "Will they rent the offices?" and "Could it be like a membership?".  The greatest product of this meeting was the necessity of a wishlist, where we could all communicate our thoughts on the program. Heinrich directed us all to submit our ideas to the Dropbox, and he would compile them into an Excel file. Rodrigo aided us by reminding us to remember to concern ourselves with spaces that are of the greatest benefit to our stakeholders.

Tuesday

Our goal for Tuesday's VC was to make fundamental decisions about the placement and orientation of our buildings. We had chosen this diffusion of smaller building volumes for a few reasons: a) seismic safety b) diffusion and porosity and c) integration of the built environment with the natural landscape.

Technical difficulties prevented us from having a productive meeting. For the first 30-45 minutes, a team member's connection was choppy and he was on and off the VC, able to hear us, but unable to be heard. Therefore, we could not gain an understanding of his model for the site.  One of our coaches, Andy, was present and helped to moderate the meeting. The meeting became less of a discussion and more of an argument, and emotions were running high. The team member left the Hangout, and Andy directed us to try and come up with a visual representation of our journey so far.

The team agreed that we couldn't make any decisions that day. We had two diverging concepts for the site and needed to hear everyone's thoughts before we could move on. We concluded that we would reconvene the next day to hear all of the architects' concepts, and discuss what ideas we liked the most.

How we felt after the VC...


Wednesday

We reconvened Wednesday night. This meeting was able to bring us to a better place for a few reasons: 1) Gretchen was able to talk to her local coach, John, and he was able to attend part of the meeting, 2) Rodrigo was able to attend and offer advice as well, and 3) we had less technical issues. By the end of the meeting, both Joris and Morgane were able to present their ideas, explain them, have a q&a session, and receive feedback from the coaches. We were even able to make a few decisions!

After the arguments of Tuesday, Joris listened to Andy's advice and drew a storyboard of our journey as a team over the past weeks. It was a peace offering, and the team felt unified after discussing it.  See Joris' story: here.

Joris, Morgane, and Tibo's work is presented below:

Joris' concept for the transit center
Joris' plan for the site
Plan view of building area


Morgane's explanation + references for her concept: here

Morgane's plan for the site

Tibo's diagrams and explanation of the linear park: here



John and Rodrigo offered their insights, asking us to consider this wishlist heavily, thinking about how we want our linear park to relate to the volumes of the research park, how people will travel across this space, and how we want to connect these differently functioning spaces.

Before we ended the meeting, we voted on the placement of the bus terminal (aboveground) and whether we wanted a diffuse or dense campus of buildings (a combination of both).


Thursday

Today's agenda was also optimistic, but the product of this meeting was very valuable nonetheless. Salvador presented more detailed sustainable design strategies, and Joris elaborated on his plan for the transit center.

Salvador's sustainability presentation: here

Salvador's concept for the building/bridge crossings
Joris' vision for the transit center
Section views of the transit center
We discussed the topography of the site, using these slopes/benches/volumes as both building and bridge and as a way to integrate the linear park with the research park campus. The discussion became stagnant as we realized that we had not completed Heinrich's wishlist, so we could not decide what spaces needed to be placed, and where. 

Some Bedouin Thoughts:

"We found peace with our metaphor (symbiotic succession), and we are finding good ways to connect to it with our concept. We have found a productive way to make decisions, and we survived another forest fire. We were able to get some coach feedback, came to an innovative concept (interactive museum), and were able to use the landscape to interact with the architecture to realize our concept of symbiotic succession." - Carina

"I think we have achieved great symbiotic succession after all these fires! I feel that, in a way, we were about to lose the interdisciplinary essence with so many individual proposals, but now that we talked about integrating them, and everyone is participating, I think we're back on track!" - Salvador

"I think we hit another rough patch, but our desire to keep our team unified helped us circle back into another iteration of the design process and come to a better understanding of each other's visions. I think our next proposal will be very powerful and have a much deeper connection to our metaphor and better reflect our team process." - Gretchen

Tomorrow...


So, Gretchen converted Heinrich's Excel wishlist sheets to a Google spreadsheet, and the team has been tasked with voting on their desired spaces/functions, and Heinrich will compile and analyze our concepts.

As a team, we feel much better because we are moving forward by both making our opinions heard and making decisions. 



Review of the Review :)





Thursday, December 5, 2013

Tic tac Tic tac

Hi everybody!

I am happy to write a few lines about mixed thoughts I had after the review, that i shared for some of them already with Key and Tringa.


In Alice in Wonderland, there is a famous discussion between Alice and the queen. Alice doesn't understand why she stays at the same place while she's running.
The queen answer: "Now, here, you see, it takes all the running you can do, to keep in the same place. If you want to get somewhere else, you must run at least twice as fast as that!"


John Tenniel, Alice in Wonderland illustration

Maybe it looks like that in actual society as Bauman explain it in "Liquid life". Maybe so fast that it becomes almost impossible to construct something or to have principles that are sure to stay right during the times (trends appear, disappear, ways of being change all the time, Are conventional way of construct not adapted anymore, to make creativity appearing?). We talked about waggle dance, events, sometimes about ephemeral architectures. Andy told us about anabolism, catabolism. I think there is a common point to all those ideas. Maybe the most adapted answer to the 21st Research Park can't be formulated for the future, but only for meanwhile because everything is changing too fast. More than that, the question of the intensity of our proposition will affect research, creativity, and life improvement and experiences in this site.

What about a new kind of proposition, something unconventional, at the interface of ephemeral architecture and virtual or event. Like a festival (we spoke about Burning man festival with Key, but mediterranean climate is actually too regularized by cycles of construction and destruction (fire) and rebirth and death, intensity and dilatation). We could transform this Research Park Program into an ephemeral and intense event that could appears regularly as chaos or rebirth: indeed the intensity will be at its paroxysm for all the stakeholders and their different kind of activities. We could propose a highlight for enhancement in general (culture (arts, music, theater, ...), research and sciences, sports, ...) that will gather much more people from much farer and improve a bigger intellectual and social effervescence.

As Cubists already did, we should improve fourth dimension (4D) in our project. Time should be in the center of this project, because of its evolutive character. At the same time it will have instantaneous (son of its age) and multifaceted character (son of its surrounding - multiculturality) that permit much more: each year we could improve so much, construct the site, learn, share, and then destroy again and next year everything is gonna be possible again, and adapted to its age (ephemeral and unplanned in advance).


Marcel Duchamp, Nu descendant un escalier

Now, why not searching for structure that could enhance unstructured apparitions, the playground of the game: so it could be research as a game of improvement, and our site as a playground for this game.

Finally this idea is a search for a base, on which could appears ephemeral temple of enhancement (research, culture, ...) - give the impulse to make autonomy appears -> THE HIVE.

Now what about searching for this structure, and moreover imagining first impulse, the 21st Research Festival of Stanford/Palo Alto 2014?? :-)

These are just ideas, brainstorming, impressions, it should make comments and discussions appearing! I am waiting on them! One love.

J