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!

Textures

Here are the textures we ended up getting from around our site on tracing paper by doing rubbings with charcoal.

I really liked the geometric nature of these textures, found on the ground near a pedestrian crossing.

We ended up using this for our city site hotel. Our city site hotel was quite open and its walls have many lines going in different directions, so we thought that this texture would accompany the overall feel of our structure quite well.

This was the texture we decided to incorporate on the interior of our Island site hotel. The island site hotel is all about deception of sorts, with the inside being different than what would be expected from viewing the exterior. Since the interior is all about curves, we thought that this texture would be perfect, since it has a kind of dizzying, almost spiral aspect to it.

A brick texture

A tree bark texture

We've kept copies of all the other textures we didn't use, since not only do we like them, but they may come in handy in the future.

Plant room pieces

Just some photos of our plant rooms as we were constructing them.

Exoskeleton architecture

Since we were looking at the Pompidou centre for inspiration, I decided to have a closer look at exoskeleton architecture. Here are some images I found on the web of various buildings, I will look at the individual buildings in more detail later.

The COR building by Oppenheim Architecture and Design is interesting because it also relates to the Garden City in J.G. Ballard's Ultimate City.

Our first laser cut

After 3 days of working on the file (and figuring out how to use illustrator!) we finally collected the first laser cut pieces for our plant room. Our idea is that the plant room should look like a simple shape on the outside, but be more complex within, linking in with Manu's theme of deception and illusion. This is enhanced by the fact that each opposite wall has bars in the exact reverse to the other side, so that when you view the elevations straight on it appears to be a solid, as opposed to two walls, so the viewer's perception of distance is compromised by our illusion. The thin bars make it easier to look out then in, similar to the façade on Jean Nouvel's Institute du monde arabe in Paris. They would also create interesting shadows within the space, similar to those cast by Manu's needle model representing claustrophobia. Combined with the almost cage-like bars, give a dystopian, claustrophobic air to the space.

We also wanted a movable roof, with sliding rafters that can also act as shelves for plants to sit on. Having a roof that is able to move means that the lighting conditions of the space can be altered, which is important as plants will need lots of light. There are also spaces within the exterior walls where shelves can be slid into, with just their ends sticking out the sides, hinting at the interior.

We found it necessary to make a few models out of paper in order to test our finger joints to make sure that each piece would actually link with the others.