ARCH1101 Architecture Design Studio 1

SESSION ONE 2010

UNITS OF CREDIT, 6UOC

RESOURCES FOR STUDENTS

www.russelllowe.com/arch1101/index.htm
www.arch1101-2010.blogspot.com
www.groups.google.com.au/group/arch1101

ftp://emustore.fbe.unsw.edu.au and navigate to; Resources\samples\Arch\ARCH1101 - Lowe

the above is a link to the ARCH1101 resources folder (your user name is the letter 'u' followed by your student ID and your password is your normal fbe password. If you haven't set that go to the "current students" page on the fbe website and follow the "FBE password services" link).

info.library.unsw.edu.au/web/services/services.html
red centre guide

COURSE CONVENER

Russell Lowe russell.lowe@unsw.edu.au
Office Number 2020, Second Floor

STUDIO TUTORS

Ken Baird
Julian Cromarty
Matt Day
Fruzsi Korosy
Andrew Wallace
Brad Inwood
Vinh Nguyen
James Pedersen
Shaowen Wang
Maryam Gusheh
Katherine Burdett
Narelle Naumcevski

TIME

6 hours per week (2 hour lecture plus 4 hours studio).

Lecture: Wednesday 2:30 - 4:00PM, Mathews Lecture Theatre B Map reference D-23

Studio: Tuesday 9-1pm:
RedC 1004, RedC 1005, RedC 1006 First Floor Studios
RedC 5006, RedC 5007, RedC 5008 Fifth Floor Studios
RedC 6001, RedC 6002, RedC 6003, RedC 6004, RedC 6005 Sixth Floor Studios

In addition to the 6 hours spent in class students are expected to spend an additional 6 hours per week on self directed study for this course.

ARCH1101 is the first in the sequence of 6 Bachelor of Architectural Studies design studio courses. The design studio is an opportunity for students to integrate skills, knowledge and experience gathered in their Communications, History and Theory, Technology, Enabling Skills and Practice courses with an architectural design brief.

"Dada's devotion to the imaginative disruption of convention is an essential liberation force. I can't imagine how dada relates stylistically to my work, but in sprit it is fundamental." Gordon Matta Clark

In this course students will be introduced to a wide range of representational techniques and strategies. Students will be encouraged to take a critical and reflective attitude toward representation and develop opportunities for Architecture that grow out of Dada's "imaginative disruption of convention". In other words this Architectural Design Studio is about provoking and developing an imaginative disruption in the application of the conventional. Students will be introduced to collaborative research and will be expected to take advantage of contemporary ICT to build a body of knowledge and community of scholarship.

The three experiments prioritize investigation and experimentation. Students should record evidence of both over the course of the session.

The course is delivered via lectures and studio based tutorials. The lectures introduce students to the experiment briefs, to exciting and relevant examples of Architects, Artists and Designers work, to successful examples of student work, and to historical and theoretical concepts that can support design development. The studio sessions are where students engage with specific tasks, each one requiring the testing of a range of opportunities. The studio sessions are hands-on; using either sketches in small notebooks, personal electronic devices, or their laptop computers. While the work in studio isn't formally assessed each session it contributes to the overall assessment of each experiment; and can be seen in the section ASSESSABLE OUTPUTS below.

As noted above; in addition to the 6 hours spent in class students are expected to spend an additional 6 hours per week on self directed study for this course. The self directed study component of this course is a critical element in the overall ARCH1101 teaching strategy. Students will be required to develop significant levels of skills and knowledge without the direct input of the course coordinator or their tutor. This does not mean that they are alone however; with approximately 240 students operating public blogs contact with other students in the course can be extremely direct. Developing research strategies including both the course blogs, the course forum and the wider internet in general will provide a valuable resource in your academic and professional career.

At the end of this course students will have:

Developed skills in critical thinking and problem solving using freehand sketching. Students will engage with the conventions of the section, axonometric and perspective.
Developed skills in critical thinking and problem solving using digital representation. Students will engage with a range of important software, including SketchUp, Crysis Wars, Fraps and Blogger.
Developed techniques and strategies for overlapping manual and digital forms of architectural representation.
Developed research skills especially as they relate to formulating research questions.
Developed breathtaking and significant objects, spaces and environments.

Students should also review the graduate attributes for the Faculty of the Built Environment.

Included below are abstracts for the three Design Studio EXPERIMENTS. They are included here to give you an overall impression of the course and to bring your attention to the concepts, clients and software we will be working with. Each abstract will be expanded into a full brief at the introduction of each EXPERIMENT.

EXPERIMENT 1: THE DATUM

TIMETABLE: 4 Weeks, 25% of final grade.
ARCHITECTURAL ISSUE: Selling Creativity
ARCHITECTURAL CONVENTION: The Stair
ARCHITECTURAL CHALLENGE: Articulating below, on and above a ground plane. Studio workshops.
REFERENCE TEXTS: www.saatchi-gallery.co.uk and www.saatchi.com and www.sothebys.com
CLIENTS: Patricia Piccinini, Ricky Swallow, Richard Goodwin
SOFTWARE: Google Sketchup, Blogger
TECHNIQUES: The section, texturing and UV mapping, animation and blogging
ASSESSABLE OUTPUTS: 18 sketch sections, 36 custom textures, 2 draft sketchup models, 1 developed sketchup model, 3 animations on a Blogger weblog
PREMISE: We can understand Architecture as a series of relationships between surfaces, objects and spaces. The datum introduces an idea of measurement into these relationships so that we can begin to understand the balance or otherwise of a scheme

EXPERIMENT 2: THE SPACE BETWEEN

TIMETABLE: 3 Weeks. 30% of final grade
ARCHITECTURAL ISSUE: The Art of Experimentation
ARCHITECTURAL CONVENTION: The Ramp
ARCHITECTURAL CHALLENGE: Articulating figure and ground in 3 dimensions. Two laboratories.
REFERENCE TEXT: http://www.nature.com/nature/index.html
CLIENTS: Nicole Kuepper, Charles Darwin, Stephen Hawking
SOFTWARE: Crysis Wars, Playup for Google Sketchup, Fraps, Blogger
TECHNIQUES: The axonometric, Boolean operations, real time image capture, blogging
ASSESSABLE OUTPUTS: 18 sketch axonometric drawings, 36 custom textures, 1 Crysis Wars environment, 5 real time image captures on a Blogger weblog.
PREMISE: Architecture may be designed by the amalgamation of discrete forms. Such Boolean operations promote an abstract understanding of the relationships required to make whole systems.

EXPERIMENT 3: THE BRIDGE

TIMETABLE: 5 Weeks, 35% of final grade
ARCHITECTURAL ISSUE: The Architecture of Power
ARCHITECTURAL CONVENTION: The Elevator
ARCHITECTURAL CHALLENGE: Articulating shifting points of view. The World headquarters.
REFERENCE TEXT: http://www.volumeproject.org/
CLIENTS: Angela Merkel, Miranda Kerr, Helen Keller
SOFTWARE: SketchUp, Crysis Wars, Fraps, Blogger
TECHNIQUES: The perspective, Interactive elements
ASSESSABLE OUTPUTS: 1 MashUp of 3 news articles, 18 sketch perspective drawings, 36 custom textures, 1 SketchUp model that includes the two elevators and dining table, 1 Crysis Wars environment, 5 real time image captures on a Blogger weblog.
PREMISE: Environments change over time. Action and interaction within an environment provide a vehicle to synthesize information and make sense of continually shifting structures

SCHEDULE:

ASSESSMENT BREAKDOWN

Evidence of thought and rigor in concept development
Imagination and innovation in terms of the use of the representational instruments introduced in studio.
Precision and skill in each of the above areas of assessment

In addition to these criteria you will be assessed on the level and extent to which you engage with the learning outcomes for the course and the PREMISES listed in each EXPERIMENT abstract.

Students need to submit all three experiments to pass the course.

All of the student work is assessed via each students blog. Images and text are uploaded by the students directly. Video is uploaded to YouTube and a link provided from the students blog. Sketchup models are uploaded to Google 3dWarehouse and a link provided from the students blog. Crysis Wars real time environments are uploaded to drop.io or senduit.com and a link provided from the students blog.

LATE SUBMISSIONS

Late submissions will be penalized at a rate of 10% per day unless the student has made an arrangement with the course coordinator prior to the submission date.

Plagiarism is the presentation of the thoughts or work of another as one’s own.* Examples include:
• direct duplication of the thoughts or work of another, including by copying work, or knowingly permitting it to be copied. This includes copying material, ideas or concepts from a book, article, report or other written document (whether published or unpublished), composition, artwork, design, drawing, circuitry, computer program or software, web site, Internet, other electronic resource, or another person’s assignment without appropriate acknowledgement;
• paraphrasing another person’s work with very minor changes keeping the meaning, form and/or progression of ideas of the original;
• piecing together sections of the work of others into a new whole;
• presenting an assessment item as independent work when it has been produced in whole or part in collusion with other people, for example, another student or a tutor; and,
• claiming credit for a proportion a work contributed to a group assessment item that is greater than that actually contributed.†
Submitting an assessment item that has already been submitted for academic credit elsewhere may also be considered plagiarism.
The inclusion of the thoughts or work of another with attribution appropriate to the academic discipline does not amount to plagiarism.
Students are reminded of their Rights and Responsibilities in respect of plagiarism, as set out in the University Undergraduate and Postgraduate Handbooks, and are encouraged to seek advice from academic staff whenever necessary to ensure they avoid plagiarism in all its forms.
The Learning Centre website is the central University online resource for staff and student information on plagiarism and academic honesty. It can be located at:
www.lc.unsw.edu.au/plagiarism
The Learning Centre also provides substantial educational written materials, workshops, and tutorials to aid students, for example, in:
• correct referencing practices;
• paraphrasing, summarising, essay writing, and time management;
• appropriate use of, and attribution for, a range of materials including text, images, formulae and concepts.
Individual assistance is available on request from The Learning Centre.
Students are also reminded that careful time management is an important part of study and one of the identified causes of plagiarism is poor time management. Students should allow sufficient time for research, drafting, and the proper referencing of sources in preparing all assessment items.
* Based on that proposed to the University of Newcastle by the St James Ethics Centre. Used with kind permission from the University of Newcastle
† Adapted with kind permission from the University of Melbourne.

Students who have a disability that requires some adjustment in their learning and teaching environment are encouraged to discuss their study needs with me prior to, or at the commencement of the course, or with the Equity Officer (Disability) in the Equity and Diversity Unit (9385 4734). Information for students with disabilities is available at:
www.equity.unsw.edu.au/disabil.html

COURSE EVALUATION AND DEVELOPEMENT