First Sketches

After a quick consultations with the participants of Shape My City, during an evening design session, we came up with some initial sketches for the design and modelled our ideas. After this, we went away and brought all these ideas together to make our preliminary sketches. 

Sketch showing how the structure would sit on the site

 

Close up birds eye of the structure, incorporating some the ideas from the session.

The design is a little more curvy now, this might complicate the construction process a little if the length of the perimeter of the structure given our limited time and resources. The little nudge in the design accommodates the harvest storage that was mentioned on the site visit, as well as providing the opening to provide access to the small slightly more wild section next to the site that had some bamboo growing, I thought this would also be a great place to try and get a small clamp to store some of the harvest, another thing we briefly discussed on the first site visit. Another reason for this nudge is so that if the "front" door is open, it would deflect the wind from the cooking area, keeping the area a little cleaner and easier to maintain, the wind should also be deflected towards the seating area, allowing for fresh air to reach the most private part of the structure. Although I can't prove that this would work, I'm not sure what the prevailing wind direction is on the site.  

Sketches of the sides of the structure showing how
it would sit in its surroundings

Another idea that came from the session on Thursday was to use glass bottles as windows in the structure, it didn't take a lot of research but here's almost exactly what I'm thinking of. This would allow quite a bit of natural light into the structure, but there's also a possibility of using different coloured bottles for windows in different parts of the structure to indicate certain times of the day. So in the top down sketch, the small grey boxes show where the windows would, ideally, be positioned. Which should roughly follow the direction of the sun over the site throughout the day. This should make the structure feel different throughout the day, whilst also maximising the amount of light let in. The biggest window would probably be just over the seating area, where the bottles will be built into the roof. 

The roof is inclined in the curve, so that its curve matches the curve of the structure as it turns around the corner of the site, which should reduce the push force exerted on the outer wall on the curve. But I think that a pillar might be needed to support the roof around the seating area because the walls slightly further apart at that point. The roof is actually inclined towards the "front" entrance too, creating a pinch point at the entrance giving the impression that the space is bigger as you walk through the structure, although I'm not sure if this is possible with the materials that we have available. The roof will overhang to protect the cob from the elements, though the extent of this overhang is yet to be determined, but a possibility might be to allow for a front porch-type overhang which protects the structure but also provides an outdoor space which could be utilised in warmer conditions, however rare they may be. 

After this first round of sketches, there are a few courses of action that we must take. The first of which is to get feedback on this first few ideas from the people directly involved in the project, as well as some experts. Some other items would be access to water, how is that already being supplied to the site, if it is at all, and how that would affect the cooking area's requirements. As well as some of the more practical elements of the build, such as planning a timeline, making materials lists and working on some construction sketches to help better visualise the build process. But for the time being, further research and exploration of ideas will be the best way forward.