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.