Studio I

I realize that while I've been showing a lot of what I've been a lot of my fun stuff and leisure activities, I've failed in representing the work I've been doing for ... you know ... school. I'm going to break this up over several posts, both to help you guys out there see the process of designing something, and to make it easier for me to have more content on here. So here we go:

This is our site: The ancient forum and Trajan' column (Note: Not my picture, my camera's battery was dead that day). You might notice that along the left-hand side of the photo there is a big wall. You also might notice it on the right-hand side as well. This is because that wall runs all the way around the site, and there's currently no way to get down among the ruins. The objective of this assignment is to make a way for people to get down into the forum, as well as to beautify the street edge for pedestrians (there's a major road running right past the ruins).

You can see here two different pages from my sketchbook showing some of my thoughts about how to handle this "urban edge". I really wanted to use stairs prominently, to lead people down onto various levels and eventually into the site. I also wanted to use that giant column at one end -- Trajan's Column -- as a focal point, and to direct people's attention to it in particular. Those walls are officially 7 meters high, so about 23 feet. This gives plenty of room for different levels on the way down, so I wanted to tier and step my way down to the ground.

Now, I didn't work on this alone, nor can I can take full credit for the ideas. I was in a team with 4 other people (2 from University of Arkansas, 1 from Auburn, and 1 from Philadelphia University), but for the most part I worked closely with this joker:That's John Mansour (like man-sewer, haha), the other Auburn student. And I can't take credit for that photo, that's his facebook profile picture. We're pretty good buddies, and we have a similar design style, so we work really well together, constantly bouncing ideas off each other and making our designs better.

We took some of my ideas and some of his, and brought them together into a strong graphic representation of our concept. In other words, we made a pretty picture:Yes, I know, it's incomprehensible. Pretty much all you need to know is that you're looking down on the forum ruins from above, the grey circle near the top with all the lines coming out of it is Trajan's column, the red area is the street level, and the squares running all the way around is the area that we had to work with. There, that wasn't so bad, was it? Ehhh, well at any rate it's a pretty picture...