Final Work

My design takes the curious traveller on a Journey and process from Buying their ticket, to waiting for the ferry, to exiting the waiting room and boarding on their boat. It explores the nature of a traveller or tourist who has relative levels of interest in either what is around them and what there is to discover, or is more interested in watching the humans around them.

The first room is where the passenger buys their ticket. Like the windows in the dutch paintings, the ones in this room are above eye level, and only serve to allow controlled light into the room. Once the passenger has bought their ticket they descend a few stairs into the lowered waiting room. These stairs are framed by glass, allowing the passenger a momentary glimpse of the outside. From the bottom step, the passenger has a visual connection with the outside world,
The waiting room has fenestration set above eye level on all the walls except for the one facing the water. This gives the room a strong sense of containment and directs the focus to the one wall, which has been articulated by angled slit shaped windows (inspiration taken from those in the photo below) which allow glimpses of the outside world.

Inbuilt masonry seating has been set up against the walls on either side of the room, meaning that passengers can either sit facing the framed views or are forced to turn away from them. This is related to my analysis of the 'traveller' who is either very interested and curious of their surroundings or less interested in their surroundings and more intrigued by watching the other humans around them.

The ferry is accessed via an outer waiting area which can only be accessed on the boats approach. A large set of automated roller doors open upon the boats arrival, only allowing passengers to leave their contained world at the final moment. There is a textural change, as the floor of the outside area is covered in gravel. The traveller has little visual access into the building from which they have come due to the nature of the windows and is therefore forced to look ahead to the expansive water in front of them and the boat. Thus the curious traveller is finally able to escape from their contained world and into the expansive beyond.

Initial Ideas/ drafts

Elements that I want to include in my design look at adressing qualities within the dutch painting and trying to apply them so that they inform the way my building is used.

these include:-
control and restriction of light
Influencing movement and behaviour within the building.
a strong sense of containment
a strong sense of materiality

I decided to keep the building on a relatively small scale, to convey a sense of intimacy evident in the dutch paintings. I also think that a small scale is relevant to this type of building.

I found this photo inspirational. It shows a fortress/castle style window in which you are able to see a small framed view of the outside from inside, but from the outside it is very difficult to see inside. I wanted to use this idea for my trement of windows to control the views of my travellers and to deny them visual access into the building from the final outside waiting area.

Project 2 Painting Analysis and artist analysis

The Painting

For my design I have decided to focus on this painting called "Woman lacing her bodice beside a cradle " (1661-63) by Pieter de Hooch. I love a few things about this painting. Firstly the potential narrative of the scene is very ambiguous. A mother Tends to her baby in the foreground while lacing her Bodice, beside a partially concealed bed. A dog, on its way to the next room turns for a moment to face the woman.

Through the doorway into the next room, a small child hesitantly yet curiously looks out the open door, one of the few sources letting light into the room. Her back foot is raised, she looks almost ready to go outside, yet somehow mysteriously bound to her mother and the indoors. The focus of the painting moves from the various figures in the foreground to this curious little girl, who to me is the major focus and mystery of the work. There is a certain curiosity about what lies beyond these rooms and outside, and a beauty in the way that the doors interconnect with each other, providing slices or glimpses of the volume and nature of the spaces we cannot fully see.

The rooms appear to have quite high ceilings, and curiously paintings are hung very high up on the walls almost out of eyesight of the inhabitants. The high small windows cast dramatic but controlled light on the scenes. The colours of the walls and furnishings are dark and warm, dramatized by this certain play of light.

My narrative

From this painting I have decided to focus on the possible character of the little girl, and her social interaction with the other figures in the painting, as well as her reaction to her interior space and that which is beyond. I have decided to make her a traveller or tourist, who is embarking on a journey somewhere for the first time, because of her curiosity of what lies beyond the contained interior scene, yet her slight hesitancy to move beyond that world. My sentence is

A waiting Room for a curious first time traveller ready to board their boat

Pieter de Hooch - Some interesting comments

"De Hooch's paintings have complex structures, which create the illusion of real perspective. Rectangular architectural frames and Blocks give the impression of distance, and lead the viewers eye to the main focus of the painting... receding floor tiles also help create this impression of persective" ( "Essential history of Art" Kirsten Bradbury - www.artchive.com/artchive/D/de_hooch.html)

" As well as his mastery of perspective, De Hooch was skilled in the portrayal of natural light falling on a scene. His light is warm- more intense than vermeers and his colour range is richer, with fewer cool tones" ( www.rijkmueseum.nl/aria/aria_artists/ 00017097?lang=en)

"De Hooch sometimes gave his interiors hidden messages" ( www.essentialvermeer.com/...)

"A wonderful device of his was the open door or window that reveals a deep space beyond. De Hooch loves to take the eye down corridors and through doors, often proceeding outdoors, perhaps across a canal to another building with even more windows. Proust in Swanns way refers to the device as a metaphor for emotional journeys "as in these interiors by Pieter de Hooch which are deepened by the narrow frame of a half opened door, in the far distance, of a different colour, velvety with the radiance of some intervening light." (reference needed)

Villa Muller The Model

Our sectional model of Villa Muller was constructed from Balsa wood at a scale of 1:100. The sectional cut is in the most suitable position as it articulates how the building is used, and circulated around, by both the patrons and the house staff. It shows the the central service staircase as well as other staircases and level changes and how they connect to one another.

Final Submission

In my parti diagrams I have attempted to represent the two distinct systems of organisation in Villa Muller. Much of the house is organised around a corridor system in which rooms lead off or terminate from a corridor. All the service areas use the corridor system. Rooms either lead off the core service staircase, offering an easy and discreet way for cleaning and maintenance to be carried out, or lead off other distinct corridors and terminate, giving these rooms a sense of being privately tucked away from the more public areas of the house. The corridor organisation is represented in light blue.

The more public domain within the house uses a combination of corridor and interconnected organisation to join spaces. This is important in Loos organisation of the house based on the theory of 'raumplan' in which storeys and spaces relate and interconnect according to their functional and symbolic importance. This organisation allows the viewer to have a visual connection with their movements,as cut away walls allow them to see into several rooms of the house from one spot. Interconnected organisation is represented in yellow.










My poche renderings attempt to show both the penetration of light in Villa Muller as well as the depth and level of the various spaces. I created these renderings by tracing the sections and plans onto clear trace paper, using different grades of pencil to emphasise the cut layers. I then used several different shades of grey copic marker and pencil to render the interior spaces. I decided to use tones of warm grey for the areas used by guests and patrons, and tones of cool grey for the service areas. The difference in the tones emphasises and separates the two uses of the building and emphasises how the distribution of windows and light creates a visual separation between these two sections.

The fact that the outer shell is white is very appropriate to the building which has an austere, plain, modernist exterior, giving emphasis to the warm and comfortably decorated interior.

Draft Parti and Poche

Parti






In my first Parti attempts I tried to look at the Plans of Villa Muller and analyse how the rooms in each level connect to each other, and what this said about the way they are used, and the social hierarchy evident in the building. The services areas and rooms tended to be accessed off corridors and a core stairwell running through the one end of the building. These rooms are private and tend to 'terminate'. The more public areas used by patrons and guests are more interconnected and flow easily onto one another.


Poche






In my first Poche attempts, I looked at the two different ways of representing poche drawings. In one section I made the outer skin of the building dark, and the inner spaces lighter, while still including some details like furniture to give a sense of scale. In the other style of poche rendering, the outer shell of the building is left white, and the inner spaces are rendered according to how the light is distributed within them.

Images of the Villa











The Boudoir



The great hall