End of term Review 1 Apr

1 April 2010: It was the last day of term, but also a review of the Tall Buildings unit. We were honoured to have Ken Shuttleworth (Make) and Dirk Krolikowski (Rogers Stirk Harbour) as our special guests for the day.
   Phil and Paul and DNc were amazed and delighted at the advancement since the week earlier. Every group had a new 1/500 model, and had managed to get printed posters with all buildings computer modelled, rendered and printed out. These all had to  be done earlier in the week for the MAD group, so there was time on Weds evening to assemble a video.
  The day's review started with the videos, which is a good way to get a quick glimpse of what each building is about, especially for the visitors who are unfamiliar with the site as well as the details of the brief, and the agendas of each group.
  We continued through the day at half hour intervals, with every group getting two crits. The guests enjoyed their day and gave plenty of helpful advice throughout the day, concluding with a group photograph and a talk back after Ken's taxi had gone to the station. Everybody was urged to have an enjoyable easter weekend (and relax!) and we look forward to a 5 week period before the next main meeting on May 6th. That will be a tutorial day with the next interim crit on the 13th May.

Tutorials 25 March 2010

The Tower designs have been advancing, but the master planning group are also keeping a close eye on progress of the overall plan, including the skybridge pattern.

The previous week (18 Mar) was a decisive moment, with an almost final skybridge arrangement being agreed on, and modelled live during the day, connecting the tower models with foamboard slabs.

The emphasis for 25th was to advance the tower designs, including Structure (we had Simon Palmer attending), Agenda (this is the time to decide finally), Organisation (planning, section, connection to ground and skybridges etc).... so that they would be ready to present as a design good enough to show Ken Shuttleworth, and to launch the students into the 5-week long Easter vacation.

So far, we have urged the unit to work mostly through Models and Hand drawn scale drawings. Now they are urged to go to computer for the next week.

Master Plans Crit 4th March

Here are some photos, details will be added:

Above: The entire unit ponder the various plans put forward and try to choose a winner - a combination of voting, negotiation, and pure logic.

Left, Group 2 foreground and Group 3 in the background explain their schemes. The final selection was a combination of these two.

Right, Minh and Sim yee explain their super skybridge design.

Urban Site Study presentations

18 Feb 2010: We had a whole day of the groups presenting their Site analysis, including an urban appraisal of the context of Leamouth - history, transport, facilities, population, employment etc. Each group also presented a special study that has learning content relevant to this scheme: (Canary Wharf and other out of centre tall clusters, Residential housing patterns, Civic Aspects of Tall Building design, and Regional Planning policies such as Thames Gateway). Two of the four groups attempted a visualisation of first ideas of how 8 towers could be on such a site.
The day started with an excellent lecture by David Leonard about master-planning in Stratford City and in Sharjah. Stratford is being constructed now, and it is just north of our site. The Sharjah story proved more useful as we saw how an idea grows from the genesis of nothing more than three elements: sea, some flat sand and a corniche - this idea became a kilometre of mixed use and mixed height planning, with a very three dimensional character, and entirely hand drawn at this stage.
On the Monday after this, Phil added a short lecture about ideas on master planning.
Photo above, is one of the groups, FutureScrape, who presented the first Urban Study.

Field Trip to London Part 3

4 Feb: We started the day at the office of Gensler Architects in Aldgate. Lukazs Platkowski gave his usual excellent lecture on Tall buildings, but as always using completely new case studies to illustrate his advice on TB design. Gensler have just won a competition in Riyadh with his design, and he showed the evolution of the design from a single tower to variations on twin tower or finally a split tower - one with a deep vertical slit between two cores to give good daylight and ventilation.

After the lecture we had a long walkabout, starting down Minories, to Tower of London (noting the Tower Hill office building by RSH), on to Tower Bridge, and into the GLA building - which we entered, as high as the public can go. We walked on past Hays Galleria and the Cotton Exchange to have a look at the building site of the London Bridge tower (the Shard). We took the Tube to Canary Wharf and had an hour's walkabout there. Caught the DLR to Canning Town station for a good look at our site. Then we returned to East India Dock station on the DLR and had a walk along the Thames (seeing this millennium beacon at E India Dock), and spend the rest of the time on the Trinity site - some people went for a walk on the small eco-park to the west of our site. The bus home picked us up from Orchard Place, for a safe ride home.

Field Trip to London Part 2

3 Feb: After Broadgate we walked on north westwards, to City Rd, and then to SOM's office in London. Timo Kujala entertained us with an introduction to the site, visions of the previous scheme for the site (now stopped), and reasons for changing to a new design (now going ahead). The new design will be more viable economically by doing without the expensive parking groundscraper; it was too high an upfront cost for a mainly residential scheme. The bridge to Canning Town station will also be cheaper.
After Timo's talk, we had to use the Tube to get to the other side of London, to Hammersmith, for a walk down through Fulham to the office of Rogers Stirk Harbour. Dirk Krolikowski has been working for RSH for 3 yrs on the Leadenhall St project, producing wonderful visionary 3D details of the construction - at all scale levels - from the megabraced frame, to the secondary frame, right down to how steel and glass of the facade will work and accommodate movement. He delivers a great lecture with plenty of good advice for young designers. He also allowed us to view the extensive model exhibition, mostly made by their in-house modelmaking team.

Field Trip to London Part 1.

Feb 2010: The whole unit took the bus to London on Feb 3rd for a 2-day field trip. We arrived at the Building Centre, which is a good start as it has the large London Model of present and proposed buildings, plus a lot of temporary and permanent exhibition material about London, and construction.

We took the Tube to Bank and had a long Square Mile walkabout from there, past Lloyds (always good to see), Willis (elegantly fitting), Leadenhall (site surrounded by hoardings), Swiss Re (Gherkin), Pinnacle (large hole in ground), and the Heron Tower. That is making good progress and appears to have topped out structurally, but has another year of cladding and fitting out to do.
    We walked on to Liverpool St station and through the Broadgate precinct (no time to go skating) and entered the plaza under the SOM building with the parabolic curve, that bridges across the railway lines. We walked on under the Broadgate Tower, now fully occupied (and not letting us in). The A-Frame supporting the entire east wall of the tower is impressively massive.

The visit to SOM and other parts of the field trip will be on another blog item.

The Final Crit for Term One

25 Jan: We had tutorials on 13th December just to help people finalise the design of their layout, and the Crit itself was on 20th Jan.
We had Lukazs Platkowski, Harjinder Singh, Sabina Fazlic, Simon Palmer as guests to help Davidnc and Phil, and Paul Jozsa helped out in the groups, including photography.

Most students managed to get their drawings up the night before, and Every student made it to the crit. It was a good exhibition, and every student and tutor taking part should be proud of the effort that has gone into the project. We try to achieve a good balance between research/innovation and reality/authenticity. Some of the presentation is extremely good, considering how much of it is dependent on underpowered laptops spending hours doing renderings. Well done everybody!

Below is the display from Rotterdam, the Water Tower group (David, Sam and Sadie).

High Rise Issues - celebrate

Friday 11th, we had the final HRI presentations of the case studies, and a party with beer from Phil and DNC and cakes from Mrs NC and Nu. So, Tall Buildings can be something to celebrate, too!
Photo by Paul Jozsa 

End of Term: all for a white Xmas?

Dec 11th: Well we have reached the end of term and had a crit on Weds December 9th with guest visits from Antony Wood (Chicago), Ivan Jovanovic (BDSP), Sabina Fazlic (Cardiff /B'ham) and Matthew Wells (Techniker). This was the last event before the vacation, and each group had 40 mins with the tutor group - thoroughly checking and discussing the designs and ideas. We had a number of tutorials on Thursday afterwards to clear up any remaining problems before the vacation. It has all been very encouraging, everybody has a scheme, and we are looking forward to seeing how they develop over the vacation.
All photos from David Nicholson-Cole's iPhone.

Ivan and Antony considering the mysteries of Mumbai

Matthew, Sabina and Phil studying Abu Dhabi

Antony and Ivan in Mumbai again...

Antony thinking about Chicago

Phil and Antony looking serious about Abu Dhabi...

Catching up on the Blog

We have fallen behind timewise with the blog, so I will post some articles to bring us up to date. We have had great progress with the main Tall Buildings design project, and also with High Rise Issues and with the Architectural Research Methods module.

Site Study and Agenda Presentations

Oct 29: Today saw all the groups present their initial site study research for their sites in Abu Dhabi, Chicago, Mumbai, Rotterdam and Singapore. Recognising that tall buildings have a physical relationship with places far and wide in a city, the research embraced both the local (e.g. the areas directly surrounding the sites), the intermediate, and the city as a whole. The research examined not only the climatic and contextual nature of the sites, but also the cultural aspects of place - what makes the city special? What are the opportunities in the city? What are the problems in the city? How do people live in the city? Etc...

In addition, students also presented an 'agenda' for their tall building design - an outline of it's responsibilities and how it will make a positive impact on the site and city. The agendas are directly influenced by the site studies and the unique nature of each city. With ideas ranging from solar desalination to farming and fitness, from religion and festival to prefabrication, the designs that evolve from these initial studies over the following weeks look set to both excite, and challenge the preconceptions of the tall building.

ARM in discussion about Major Threats

Mon 26 Oct and 2 Nov: The ARM group are looking at major threats facing the human race on this planet.... it's like excavating to the bottom-most layer of an archeology site... before you understand what's above. We will move on from there to look at density and densification studies for cities, and from there to discuss the type of tall or dense architecture required for 21st century living.

For the time being, the students have been looking at 4 major threats :

1. Peak Oil (the Olduvai theory) whereby the rapid energy descent that may occur after 2020 could mean more than not being able to drive to ASDA. It could bring about social disorder, major conflict, or wars, disastrous effects on employment and living patterns and force the need to densify cities more than any other.
2. Climate Change whereby we may see rising sea levels and extreme drought+floods, forcing some cities or even the population of entire countries having to reconsider their position. Climate change can no longer be met by old methods, such as turning up the aircon or mass migration.
   
3. Rising Population, and increasing imbalance in populations; in some cases too many elderly eg China, Japan, or too many young, eg developing countries, or too much migration in a one way direction, eg rural to urban, or from drought regions to temperate.
4. Water becoming increasingly difficult to conserve and manage and distribute, balancing between the needs of agriculture and industry, as against the needs of the population for well being and survival. Some needs can no longer be met in the old ways (dams or desalination) as these require collossal amounts of energy that we will no longer have.

Somehow, in their future careers, the students will have to lead the way to a better way of designing cities and buildings.
The Students presented their findings on Oil, climate and Water on 2 Nov and will present the Population threat on 9 Nov.
Picture above, the students consider Water resources, smiling for the camera, but worried about the future.

Tall Buildings against & for... and Master Planning

Fri Oct 23: was a very busy day. Phil gave a major lecture in the morning, going through the disadvantages and advantages of tall buildings, in comprehensive detail (the pdf is on the Web CT). This was attended by some of the ARM group too.

Later in the afternoon we had a visit from David Leonard, an architect-master-planner who has some wonderful work to show. Amazingly (for one so accomplished) David has his main residence in Nottingham, so is easy to get hold of. He had already been to London and back that same day! In the lecture, attended by about 60-70 students, he discussed the main criteria for effective master planning, and went on to show the major mixed use project in Stratford, London. It has many architects for the component buildings, and many official and community bodies who all have to interact in the process.

View Larger Map
The site shows blank on Googlemaps, but the project is on site, well progressed with construction, as part of the Olympic build up.
David showed a new project he is working on in Sharjah where an earlier over ambitious plan of towers has been shelved and he is restarting the project with more intelligent phasing, and economic flexibility. This was just the sort of thing our students needed to inspire them for the TBI project. He then spent the rest of the afternoon looking at the ideas of each of the five main groups, giving them feedback.
See the Convenor's Blog on the Web CT site for a more detailed feedback on the tutorials and David's comments.

Tutorials on 22nd Oct

Oct 22: We had a full day of tutorials, starting with a presentation from each of the main groups - they were not doing a full presentation, just telling us the progress in their research so far. Later, we had an hour with each group, discussing their sites in more detail, and what could be done with them. Phil did a quick presentation of examples of previous studies, in particular the idea of the buildings having an 'agenda' or 'big idea' that is additional to their brief. (apologies for not having a photograph).

ARM introduce their Cities!

Oct 19: We had an interesting morning in the ARM (Arch Research Method) module. The students were introducing their cities of origin, in terms of the criteria relevant to our debate - area, climate, population, zoning, relation to sea or river or mountains, typical housing forms in different locations, growth rings over the decades, etc. Very enjoyable.
We covered Shenzen, Hong Kong, London, Beijing, Dubai, Mumbai, New Delhi, Tehran, Hangzhou, Santiago, Warwickshire (rural), Pune, Isfahan and Calcutta. Apologies to Shanghai, Wuxi, Birmingham and Wolverhampton because we had to stay within 2 hours.

Structural Experimentation

We had a great morning seeing the work of the 3D structures week. We had models in straws and string, lolly sticks, ballpoint pens (with the ink tubes as joints), fishing line, copper wire, kebab sticks, playing cards, and more. We had one group using 'Bucky Balls' a kit of plastic rods and balls for exploring geodesic structures.
One tower was constructed upside down, Gaudi style, using metal armature and modroc to pad our the armature, with a movie to record the process. We also had a Tensegrity structure.

We were impressed with the work, the creativity, dedication to discovery, and the craftsmanship - and the humour in some of the choices of material. And it wasn't just about building for fun - there was some serious looking at precedents and principles, and lessons that could be learnt from the structures. The posters will be put up on webct soon.

The afternoon was spent with preliminary discussion of the sites in the 5 cities, and the tasks for the coming week, such as modelling.

Above,  model is in Modroc and wire, and was built upside down in true Gaudi tradition, by Pranali, David and Mat.

The one below includes the Bic pen and kebabstick models, with Minh, Laila, Lily, Mel, Arash, Arham and Ackshay. 
Below is the Lollystick model with Katy, Chris, Savita and Rain. Great work!

History as it is talled

Oct 11: Phil Oldfield delivered a lecture on the early history of Tall Buildings, from mid 19th century to the late 1980s.
This is useful because so many students doing dissertations on tall building topics have to do the same 'trawl' through the early history in their introductions. We felt that we should lay down some shared information, ideas and dates.
Phil followed it up a week later (Oct 18) with a highly informative lecture on Tall Building design thinking, particularly in planning, cores and elevators.
(illustration shows some of the entries for the Chicago Tribune competition)

ARM module under way!

12 Oct: We held the first Architectural Research Methods workshop meeting on Monday, in the Marmont. DNC presented a powerpoint on the prime topic, that of the future of urban settlements in 50 years time, the role of densification in our present settlements, and the validity of tall buildings (and many other factors) in determining our urban survival.
The workshop was organised into 4 groups, the CitiMix, Leaf group, High Risers and Blankety Blank. Each group has a balanced mixture of Indian, Chinese, and Brit students, with a few others mixed in.
For the first week and a bit, the groups will be doing studies of their own cities and regions, in the light of the criteria for our study: area, density, population, transport, climate, employment trends etc. They will also look for interesting overlaps and connections, eg if Beijing and Mumbai are discussed within the same group.
(The illustration is a reference to how people 50 yrs ago saw the present age of 2010. Our group are asked to look another fifty years in the other direction, to 2060, but in the light of climate change and the end of oil.)

Spaghetti, wire, dowels, string and what next?

Thurs 8th Oct: We held a briefing for the next stage which is to explore some real model making. This was first tried as a 2-day exercise in 2004 with Mario Cucinella, using spaghetti for the structures and tomatoes for the loads - very Italian!

This year, we are doing it over a week, and asking them not to be excessive in height but to excel in level of research, experiment and analysis - using a material of their choice - straws, garden wire, cocktail sticks, ballpoint pens, dowels, spaghetti, Bucky Balls, A4 paper. The object is to explore concepts of stiffness and flexibility, bracing, stability, efficiency. We also hope some will explore tensegrity, and suspended structures (such as Antoni Gaudi's chain structures).

Illustration from the 2004 exercise.