Model Photos

Just for you Sandra, you're favourite angle.


Highest room with low windows giving a floating feeling to the cube. Representing the painter as he has finally achieved his goals.

Middle room window on the side. Showing some successes but still not where he wants to be.

Lowest room with light coming from the skylight above. Representative of the struggling artist seeing success above but there is still a long way to go.

Stairs representing the journey of the painter, note how the receding pods cannot be seen while climbing the stairs.

Final Drawings

UnPoshe'd Drawings

These are my final drawings before I added light and shadow to them. Even though I drew the drawings first I didn't add shade them until I had my model completed so that I could use a light on my model to get an accurate understanding of where the light would fall.

Idea

By putting my narrative into an architectural form I created a multi tiered loft system with a prominent staircase.

The stairs represent the journey. They hanging spaces each have different positions of windows which create a different ambiance within each cube. While this is representative of stages in the artists life, it also more practically allows the artist to set different moods for his painting by utilizing the different lighting in each space.

The fact that the cubes are receding hints at both the painting and my narrative. While walking up the stairs the lofts cannot be seen up ahead, but one knows they are there. This is similar to the way in which the window is hinted at but not shown in Vermeer's painting. Also in the artist's journey he understood that success was just around the corner.

Early Sketchup model, a number of changes were made before the final building. eg. side walls removed, cube dimensions etc. Also at this stage the building had not been placed in its final environment.

Precedent studies

The Rucksack House designed by Stefan Eberstadt is an interesting peice of architecture as it can be added to any exsisting window to create a new space. This got me thinking about the idea of cubes penetrating into other forms.

Other pictures of simular ideas:

I had the thought of embedding the building into a hillside, I reasearched what other architects have done. This design idea is used very effectively by g ateliers architecture when they designed ‘finca el retorno’ in Columbia which fits into the environmental theme their clients wanted.

A simular idea was used in the Pepsico Headquarters.

Narrative

A series of uneven lofts represent a painter's journey.
From his humble beginnings as a struggling artist trying to make a name for himself, through his working life where renown was glimpsed at, hinted, but never achieved. Till in the end he finally reached his goal.

Painting

The painting I chose was a 17th Century dutch painting, "The Artist's Studio" by Johannes Vermeer. The ideas that I discerned from the painting, that I could use in my design were:
1) I found the play of light interesting especially as it appears from behind a curtain from a window that is not shown but is understood to be there.
2) The portrait painter with his back to the viewer is the central figure.
3) The configuration of the room in relation to the window so that the light falls on the model not the painting.