Casting the Honeycomb Stairs

Although we handed in our CNC files over a week early, they did not get cut. Therefore, we had to hand make a mould. This involved Andy meticulously hand cutting out 180 tiny hexagons, something which required a lot of effort and concentration.

While Andy cut up the hexagons, I put together the actual mould as well as worked on other models. This mould required a lot of pins so was a bit dangerous!

I used the remainder of my masking tape in order to make sure that there were no gaps, as I did not want the plaster to leak, and since this mould was supposed to be CNC cut it was quite difficult to construct by hand. Unfortunately the mould did leak a bit, but I managed to control it. 

I'd like to thank Michael McCabe from Mnument (http://mnument.tumblr.com) for letting us use his plaster. 

The Creation of the Cable Car Pod

I made the cable car pod by stitching together wire mesh then covering this with rice paper. We liked the idea of using rice paper over our pod because it would have different levels of opacity, depending on how much rice paper was covering a particular part. This would create different lighting effects and different levels of visibility within the pod, making it a very interesting internally focussed space.

Crit Notes

Concept behind the project

·      The story behind the architecture

·      Dystopian realities, utopian hotels

·      Escape

·      Program: the City hotel is an exaggerated version of the good points of the city, and the Waiheke hotel is an exaggerated version of the good points of the island life

·      Some elements however make you question whether it is all utopian however, or if your day to day life was so dystopian, e.g. the chaotic rush hour stairs and the fact that you experience everything during the journey, which is quite beautiful.

Inspiration (precedent) for the project

Tjabiao Noumea cultural centre

Jean Nouvel’s Institute Arabe

Metabolism

Beijing Bird’s nest

Form and Spatial qualities of the project

Atmospheres

How the kinematic elements (e.g. times square screens) affect the space

Light and shadow

The relationship between indoors and outdoors

·      The Waiheke hotel is mostly open, apart from the rooms and the plant room, which acts as a reception and the bridge between the two halves of the hotel

·      The gaps in between the ‘towers’ of the city hotel

Material qualities

Architectonics

How the separate elements of the project come together

·      How the pieces from the 4 workshops interrelate

·      Connection methods: e.g. on the plant rooms. How this influence the architecture

Shortcomings of the project

·      Quality of some of the models: CNC ghosts and time issues

·      Stairs: too conventional, and don’t really fit with the rest of our design. Had to design new stairs anyway for the Waiheke hotel.

Order of discussion

The concept and site

The city hotel

The Waiheke hotel

The workshop pieces, and how they fit together

3D printing

Here is our first 3D printed component, the single pulley of our cable car mechanism. Manu mage the nice wooden parts of the pulley in the workshop- everything is coming together very well! 

The size of the 3D printed object is quite large, and the finish is quite rough. Therefore we are considering making our cable car pod small in comparison, so it is the mechanism that is the main part of our design, similar to how in some forms of architecture, e.g. brutalism, it is the structure that is mostly expressed.

Here's our second 3D cut piece, a double pulley. 

Unfortunately, our final 3D cut piece, a hook, did not work. It was too small, and hence very delicate so it broke shortly after being printed. We were informed by Franca that this piece was really too small. We have learnt for next time!

Lantern modification 2

We decided to try modifying our lantern by cutting holes in them and filling them with a lighter, clearer material. This would create windows in our lantern that would then create an experience for the travellers.

3D Printing

Here are photos of the 3D printing that we have done so far. We have one more piece that is still being printed, it will be ready by tomorrow.

The single pulley printed perfectly. The sizes are exactly as we wanted and the file came out just like the 3DS Max 3D model.

Unfortunately, there was an issue with the double pulley. Due to the fact that objects on 3DS Max do not snap (or if they do, we are unaware of this!) and that we working at such a small scale, we did not notice that their must have been a tiny gap between our pieces. Anyway, the consequence of this is that we ended up with 3 separate rings as opposed to a nice double pulley! We now need to consider what we are going to do; whether we can think of a way to join these pieces without using glue (which is forbidden for this design project) or if we just need to fix the file and get this reprinted. Obviously we will have to spend extra for this and 3D printing can be quite pricey... lesson learnt, double, triple, and quadruple check your files!!!

 Here are our three rings all separate!

This is essentially what the pulley would have looked like, if we hadn't had the error with our files!

Hopefully our third piece, which was given to be printed at the same time as these pieces but that is taking a bit longer to print, will be fine!

Waiheke inspired hotel-roof and textures

Here is the finished Waiheke inspired hotel. The roof mimics the design of the plant room roof, and the textures, most of which are edited from photographs of real materials, are mostly organic, for example there are various types of wood used.

I still need to figure out how to make the sides of the plant room, but it is quite late (2am) and I need to be in studio early tomorrow morning so I think it's about time I tried to get some sleep. 

A world within a world- this hotel appears open, and yet it is confined. This is once more playing with the communal living vs. isolation dichotomy.

The texture on the elevator also resembles the texture on the floor of the plant room.

Laundry areas

There are three laundry areas, hidden away between elevators yet still open to the rest of the hotel and easily accessible.

Kitchen and Dining

I have added a kitchen and dining area in our Waiheke inspired, city site hotel. Since the island has a much more relaxed atmosphere, I thought it made more sense if guests were able to cook for themselves, rather than having the constructed experience of being served. Since we also want to keep things very open I simply placed kitchen and dining areas in the middle of the hotel, so that it is easily accessible at all times, but it also has plenty of space to manoeuvre around. The fact that there are 6 chairs around each table and that each room only has capacity for 2 means that guests will get to know each other throughout the dining experience. This plays into the whole communal living vs. isolation dichotomy that we are so interested in exploring in regards to hotels.

Safety railings

I have added railings to all the room levels for our Waiheke inspired, city site hotel.

Waiheke inspired hotel reception

I've made a reception area at the front of the hotel. Since we want this hotel to have a very open feel to it, I think it's best that the reception is not closed away in a room of its own. I chose a jagged looking desk with lots of corners as this complemented the honeycomb columns. I also imported the Honeycomb stairs to our hotel file. Next we need to consider where we want any other sorts of rooms or areas, and how we want them placed. We also need to start working on our own textures.

Waiheke inspired hotel

We have combined Andy's exterior and my interior to create our overall hotel design. I also elevated everything and added a base. We still need to finish the plant room, add our Honeycomb stairs and a roof, and consider whether we want any other forms of rooms.

I am feeling so much more confident with ArchiCAD now, though!

3DS Max hook

The first on the 3 objects we wish to have 3D printed: a double hook which will clip onto one of our pulleys and also the top string for support.
This looks simple, but I had never modelled on 3DS Max before so it took a bit of figuring out! It's quite fun once you get the hang of it though.
We're hoping to hand this file into the digital fabrication workshop tomorrow, hopefully everything will be OK!

Cable cars

For our second vehicle, we are looking at creating some sort of manually operated cable car spanning between our city site and Waiheke island. Since escape is such a fundamental concept for our hotel designs, we came up with the thought 'how far are you willing to go to escape?' If the site is viewed as dystopian, then the traveller has to exert effort to reach the utopia. Therefore we want our cable car like vehicle to be manually operated, perhaps with a pulley system of some sort.

Transmaterial- SRW Weave

We decided to try weaving together seaweed and rice paper in order to make them slightly stronger than they were on their own. This was a rather time consuming (as we had to be careful not to break the pieces as we were weaving them) yet rewarding experience. However, once we completed the weave we found that although this was stronger than the pieces had been individually, it was still quite brittle and there was nothing to hold the weave in place. Therefore we decided to create a binding backing for it with glue.
Since this is a very lightweight material we feel that it gives us many opportunities to incorporate into one or both of our vehicles.