The Perfect Bite

"What is required to foster learning and creativity within a space?"

This entire project began with the simple observation that a learning space is not definitive. Learning can happen at any place at anytime. Therefore the question is, how do you cultivate learning and creativity within a space? I began by diagramming the layout at High Tech High Chula Vista, by doing this I realized that it is a repetition of four kind of spaces which were side by side and in the middle there were the bathrooms. It was interesting to see how the overlapping of these spaces naturally funneled the users to the bathrooms which were arguably the “hotspot” of the school. After gathering this information, I took the programs and created venn diagrams to play with the overlapping of spaces and see how learning spaces could be more than one thing. After I created the diagram I was trying to explain my idea and ended up using a sandwich as a metaphor. When this actually helped people understand my idea better, I ran with it and thus the sandwich was born.

From here, I made a list of what makes a good education building. I used feedback from a questionnaire to build this list. I then listed what makes a good sandwich and connected the similarities. This allowed me to better understand what would be happening within the building and what I had to manipulate within the programs. I created a simple sandwich section and assigned the programs to each element. This helped me play with adjacencies and the stacking of the different programs, as well as the scale of the different spaces. The placement of the spaces and how you access them is very important since the”perfect bite” is achieved by getting a small amount of everything in order to create a succesful learning space.

 

Assembling the Sandwich

The general shape of the building is a tweaked sliced sandwich. In order to achieve “the perfect bite” I tried to use circulation (or the condiments) to cut through the programs. There is a large stairway leading into the building and an atrium space that has large spans of circulation within it. After mid-Review I attempted to further develop the larger space where the bulk of programs were. In the end, instead of completely rotating and messing the shape I settled on cutting away portions throughout and lifting the bottom to give more transparency to the programs in the building in order to see the “ingredients.”

Onwards

The “sandwich” is too constrained withing the form. Most of the feedback at my final review was to allow the building to get messier like a true sandwich. I feel like this is very important, and will even succeed more in the achievement of accessing and overlapping spaces. All the ingredients need to be more spread out and played with more. I want to explore these ideas further by messing with ingredients more and seeing how and where overlaps are and what happens within these moments. I definitely feel like I was overwhelmed this quarter and therefore I was very dissapointed that I did not go all in on this idea. It was a fun idea and that made designing the building fun and I’m excited to see how this sandwich stacks up in the end.

This post has 1 Comment

  1. cabrinharch on March 28, 2017 at 9:27 am Reply

    The idea of the sandwich is so delightful, playful, original – but also so relevant. Perhaps though the idea of the perfect bite is too ideological – eating sandwiches is messy business, especially when its a good one. Yes there are times when you get everything in one bite – a great bite – but there are bites or even other kinds of sandwiches that may only have a mixture of a couple ingredients. So to translate, the question is how much “bite” into different activities do you get in different areas of the project – both plan and section. I so very much encourage you to develop this playful attitude into your process testing out all kinds of ideas. At midterm, your simple triangular form was in fact very nice, but never tested out in program / scale. Your final model has so much potential, but again was not tested out to see if / how it really works, testing it with the concept of “bite”. This is the hard work of really getting into the project, and you certainly weren’t the only one reluctant to do it, nor the only one feeling overwhelmed. This is part of learning how to work with a large project – developing the story and demonstrating how this story is working through the project is the critical task, even if you cannot resolve the entire project. This really isn’t a question of form, but of testing out how the project works within the form, adjusting / modifying as necessary, and testing again. It takes going back and forth over and over again, which is why it is the hard work! I really look forward to spring, and really getting into the projects.

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