My Design Process

After completing all of the coursework and readings for this class, I identify my design process with the Arts and Crafts Movement. Like John Ruskin, I prefer to use a traditional craftsman tool such as a pencil, pen, and trace paper, to formulate my design and ideas. I understand my designs better when I hand draw everything down to wall sections. Plugging in design ideas into an electronic device, takes away from my understanding of how things should work, stand, or connect to other design elements, since the majority of systems and design components are given in programs like Revit, AutoCAD, or Rhino.

Even though my preference of designing deals with standard artist tools, my design process also falls in the category of Ville le Duc’s teachings of design, which uses technology to innovate designs. Once I have worked my ideas and designs on paper, I do plug them into an architectural computer program, Rhino, in order to better preserve these ideas and make it easier to fix edit them in the future. I also enjoy rendering my perspectives and sections in 3ds and editing the product renderings in Adobe Photoshop, by adding people, changing scenery, or adjusting the brightness of the perspective.

               

As far as organizing my spaces and developing a structural system and building envelope, I take the functional, social, and movement approach seen in many of Eero Saarinen’s and Rem Koolhaas’ work. I think about how a person could move about a space and what activities may take place within the site. My Professors Dan Woodfin and Olon Dotson instruct their students to approach design in this method, and with their design projects I found myself more successful in the outcome than on projects structure and system based. Dan Woodfin exhibited the functional approach through his beach house project, where I was instructed to develop a pedestrian pathway that led to the beach front but also branched off into a separate more private path leading to the living quarters, which hovered over the path and private from the public spaces. Olon Dotson addressed the functional approach through a project which required me to design an urban farm located in the inner city. His program for this project was very open, and I had to come up with activities and functions for this project which would bring the residents and other visitors into the space, requiring a lot of cultural and social research about this area.   I was extremely fascinated with these projects and their design strategies. As a result, most of the projects I have done lately center around social aspects, circulation, and activities, and their building forms and structure imitate these notions. 

Beach House (Dan Woodfin's Studio)

Agriculture in the Hood (Olon Dotson's Studio)

Open Floor Plan System

Le Corbusier

During the early 1900s, Architects started experimenting with plans, structure, tectonics, and materiality of residential housing. Among this experimentation, a new form of architecture came on the horizon known as the open floor plan system. Le Corbusier fathered this new system, which is also known as the Dom-ino frame, in efforts to celebrate industrialization and technology in architectural building process. This system consisted of an assembling process “in which the columns and the floor plates constituted a prefabricated system independent of walls and partitions (Colquhoun, 2002, pg. 143).” Its construction freed up more space, allowing the users more flexibility to design their own space, whether it is decorated with color, wall partitions, or furniture, without having to undergo the hassle of reformulating a structural system in order to fit these things in a space. Le Corbusier himself even decorated some of his buildings with colored plaster, transforming his design into an “abstract prism” (Colquhoun, 2002, pg. 144). As the years went on other, Architects such as Mies van der Rohe and the last great architect of the modern era, Louis Khan, began to pick up on this new style of architecture and manipulated its concepts to fit their own.

Le Corbusier's Dom-ino frame (open floor plan)

Mies van der Rohe

In his designs of a residential open plan, Mies van der Rohe introduces a game of juxtaposition between the functions of a column and a wall. Mies was more interested in creating architecture for residential housing, which hold necessity and genuine meaning and purpose. He was a part of the avant-garde movement of architecture, which sought to depreciate existing values of architecture in order to make room for a more critical understanding of art and society (Hartoonian, Winter, 1989, pg. 43). Mies took from Alberti’s ideas about the column being the “principal ornament in all architecture.” However, in his most famous homes, Barcelona Pavilion and the Tugendhat House, he reverses Alberti’s syntax of column and wall. In these homes, the columns read as load bearing elements while the wall displays its freedom from which the column and wall are identical in nature and purpose (Hartoonian, Winter, 1989, pg 45).

Barcelona Pavilion

Barcelona Pavilion floor plan on the right compare to a line and plane painting on the left

Tugendhat House

Tugendhat House Floor Plan

Tugendhat House Interior view of the dinning area locate on the bottom center of the floor plan above

Louis Khan

Louis Khan used views and the illumination of natural light in a space to define his open plan. He believed that “sense of light is the giver of all precedence, light belongs to that particular space.” Khan exercised this theory in many of his works such as the Art Museum at Yale University, Jonas Salk Institute, Kimbell Art Museum, and Exeter Library. In the Jonas Salk Institute, the layout of the concrete buildings open up to the courtyard/plaza and Pacific Ocean sky as a façade, experiencing its different hue of blues. When designing the Kimbell Art Museum, he plays with natural light in open warehouse spaces, giving the museum a homier, intimate appearance than just another commercial building. Each of the rooms are 100 ft long consisting of a series of halls with high and low spaces. Slits and beams placed on the ceiling in some rooms brought in natural light, and by using curved vaults the light spread more beautifully along the ceiling and wall.

Jonas Salk Institute (showing the view in the morning from the plaza)

Jonas Salk Institute (showing the view during the day from the plaza)

Kimbell Art Museum

Kimbell Art Museum interior view

It is truly magnificent to see how one’s intentions of an open plan system to celebrate technology and encourage individualism progressed and ends with an intent as a play of lights and views. In no way, shape, or form are any of these methods or others not mentioned wrong. Like many other designs, style, and theories of architecture, one architect will develop a concept or design and other architects of his time and in later periods will try to replicate this concept and design or desecrate it and come up with their own modified version. These three men, Le Corbusier, Mies, and Khan definitely used this open floor plan to their own advantage and executed their refined ideas well in their designs; therefore making them some of the greatest architects of their time and for generations to come. I am definitely sure that architects after their era tried to modify their theories of the open plan system, but they will always be known as the men who paved the way for these refinements of the open plan.

Citations:

Colquhoun, A. (2002). Modern Architecture. New York: Oxford University Press.

http://www.google.com/images

Hartoonian, G. (Winter, 1989). Mies van der Rohe: The Genealogy of Column and Wall. Journal of Architectural Education, 42(2), 43-50.