Site Selection and Pedestrian Movement

So this is something that I decided upon and documented a few weeks ago but I never got around to posting it. The site that I selected is the empty lot between the Myer centre and Irish Murphy's Pub. 

This was chosen for a variety of reasons, including;

• Location near major pedestrian routes within Brisbane. People walk down George Street and then through the Myer Centre to get to many of the bus stops that are currently in the Brisbane CBD. 
• The Location of the site is also right on the threshold between commercial and residential space that we identified in the first assignment. This is something that I want this building to incorporate. I want the building to begin to define this region of the new Brisbane as being a retail and commercial zone.
• The Maglev route that we designed in the first project also passed roughly through this area of the city. As George Street was always a street that we felt needed to be kept as a vehicle accessable street, I feel that it would be good for the Maglev tracks to run over this street. 
• The Space has no building on it, so building at this location would have a minimal effect on the current fabric of Brisbane. I do not want to be knocking down buildings in the project to make room for new architecture when this could be avoided with just a little more thought and effort on my part. That said I do not think that I will be able to keep everything that is already there. Minimising the damage is important. 

The majority of the space will sit within the empty lot that is already of the space. I want the Maglev station to sit over the existing buildings that lay between the site and George Street. Vertical public space will serve to connect the Maglev station to the spaces that sit in the empty lot. In this project I want to explore how this idea of vertical public space could work, without the need for lifts or other technologies that isolate certain areas of the space. 

Pedestrian circulation became very important to my ideas on this project the more that I looked into the idea of vertical public space. In an attempt to make the vertical space vibrant I thought of taking the peak hour traffic that goes around the space and taking them into the space, up and over the Myer centre in way that reduced their times. This would mean that the space would become a transitional space, and would have a constant stream of people flowing through it, peaking in the morning and afternoon. Because of this I began to map how people would use the space. This can be seen below. 

The way that people move through the space began to from the conceptual plans of my design. This 2D mapping however did not help to determine how people would rise vertically over the Myer centre. What it did do was solidify what areas of the site the public space I was designing would occupy, and where it would change the built form around it. This was most  clear in the addition of a walkway from the site through to queen street. This is something that I now feel is an important part of my design, as it helps to connect the Queen street and Elizabeth street, noth of which have important roles to play in the future of Brisbane. Queen street as a pedestrian mall and Elizabeth Street as a public garden space. 

Nanotechnology in Architecture

So while search through hundreds of pages about reponsive architecture, turing down the vast majority of them due to a lack of connection to the user, I found something that could be exactly what I am looking for in this project. That is:
                            Nanotechnology
Sensing architecture summed up the implications this filed could have on architecture in 2 separate posts about the subject (links can be found at the bottom of this post), in which Maria Lorena Lehman identified Nanotechnology as having the potential to greatly impact architecture as we know it, through the development of new building materials, such as Graphene and Carbon Nanotubes. These materials would replace traditional building materials such as steel, and have the potential to create buildings that are extremely efficient and possibly do not require structure in the way modern buildings do. All of this can be found in the Sensing Architecture articles. 

The properties of nanotechnology that interested me most were the strength and adaptability it could potentially produce. Carbon nanotubes are 100 times stronger then steel, and even have the potential to change the state of matter to alter the building. The potential effects of nanotechnology can be seen in Year 2050: Cities in the age of Nanotechnology by Peter Yeadon, and include things such as water purification and molecular self assembly. It is at this point, when looking into the future at what nanotechnology could possibly provide, that it becomes hard to distinguish the line between architectural fiction and science-fiction. 

So from here I need to talk to Davor, to find some direction with this project and to determine how far into nanotechnology and the potential it has I should go. With many of the benefits of this technology years away, and the future scenario set in the year 2032 (thinking about going back to 2035, but we will see), I am unsure of just how much I should envision for the future.

What I am leaning towards doing at this point, is making the function of upper portion of my building (a skyscraper) a Nanotechnology Research and Development Centre, with the focus on the lower parts of the buidling remaining a Maglev Station, Public Space and retail areas. This would be a viable function for a building in the future, as nanotechnology has the potential to effect several sectors of the economy, creating new products, new jobs and new industries" (Yeadon), which means placement in a prime location in one of the nations fastest growing cities would be a good idea. It also means, as the building would be a marketing tool of sorts, the technologies and building techniques used in the building would be of the highest possible standard, far ahead of the general practice at the time. This means that I can potentially justify the use of technologies that are vastly different to those of today, to create something that is innovative and imaginative. 

One thing that I am focused on is looking at people in the future and the way that they go about their lives, both around and within the architecture. This is something that I do not expect to change dramatically, even with drastically different technologies. If you look 30 years into the past, people were not behaving all that differently, they just had different things. Newspapers have been replaced with smartphones, boardgames with video games  etc. The building that I am creating will take that into account, and accommodate and improve on the way people live today, not attempt to change the way people live. 

Sensing Architecture Nanotechnology Articles:

http://sensingarchitecture.com/6779/uses-of-nanotechnology-for-architectural-design-the-graphene-skin/

http://sensingarchitecture.com/523/nanotechnology-and-new-materials-for-architecture/

Year 2050: Cities in the age of Nanotechnology

http://worldarchitecture.org/uia2005/hng/year-2050.html

Other articles relating to Nanotechnology.

http://greendimensions.wikidot.com/nanotechnology-in-architecture
bucky balls http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Buckminsterfullerene
fullerenes http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fullerene

Development Week 9

Looking into exemplars for this project I Research into smart/responsive environments in the world of architecture. This is the direction that i want to go with this project. Their project 'Hi drone" is an example that i have been looking at. The way that they re-organize the space is so simple yet it works so effectively, creating the opportunity for thousands of possible combinations. Looking at this project has given me a few ideas, especially about how to tansform a space between peak hour and non-peak hour.

The first idea that I had relates to linear space, and how to open and close this space when the flow of pedestrian traffic requires it. Basically what I was looking at was creating a floor grid that can be raised and lowered, so that during peal time it could all be lowered, creating a flat, empty space, however during off peak times, sections of the grid could be raised, creating seating and chairs, as well as other spaces for people to use. This can be seen in the diagram below.

I was also looking at the idea of using a system similar to this to help raise people from ground level to higher points in the ‘vertical public space’ that I am trying to create. It would work like and a amalgamation between a lift and an escalator (see image below). The floor grid would move up and down in a way that the user does not feel as if they are walking up stairs, simply walking up a ramp. However there are a lot of problems with this idea, chiefly that it could only support 1 person using it at any time, making the design useless in peak hour. I am beginning to think that to get around this I am going to need a network of escalators; however I will continue to look of alternatives to this.

The full article can be found here http://www.archdaily.com/15014/ad-futures-4-sparc/