Domus brief

2009 SRD 264 A+B: Deakin University School of Architecture and Building

Architecture 2B SRD 264

Project 2: Domus (40%)

The second major 2B project is an exercise in collaborative architectural design and requires team-work and representation at the level of orthographic architectural projection and model making. In this project, student teams apply the knowledge and learning of Minima to enhance design synthesis in Domus.

Domus: Design teams of three students (there will also be one team of four in each tutorial group) are asked to demonstrate a new concept for a sustainable live-work environment in one of the major climate zones of Australia. The three major climate zones are hot-humid (tropical, Northern Australia), hot-dry (desert, Central Australia) and temperate (Southern Australia). In Domus, students extend their Minima project to design a shared live-work environment that can accommodate the three to four people of their design team, plus one guest, in one of the three climate zones. Each house must be fully autonomous – i.e. it cannot rely on power or water from the national grid, for it may be that for lengthy periods there is no grid power or water. The project should be approached through an understanding of the relationships between individual (private) and collective (shared) spaces within a living environment. This understanding is arrived at through the exploration of: the relationships between buildings and their environment (landscape, climate and culture); the impact of energy (passive), materiality and external site constraints (shadow, breeze, topography) from the environment on making architectural space; and how notions of ordering, organisational principles, repetition and composition shape architectural form making.

Task Domus: Extend your minima project to design an autonomous and environmentally sustainable shared live-work environment that can accommodate three to five people in a specific climate zone.

Objectives Understand the relationships between individual (private) and collective (shared)

spaces within a living environment;

Explore the relationships between buildings and their environment (landscape, climate and culture);

Explore the impact of energy use (using passive systems), materiality and external site constraints (shadow, breeze, topography) from the environment on making architectural space;

Introduce the notions of ordering, organisational principles, repetition and composition in architectural form making;

Requirements Your client wishes to demonstrate a new concept for an autonomous environmentally sustainable live-work environment in a major climate zone of Australia. Domus requires that you respond to the climate zone assigned to your group.

Site Allocation

During Minima reviews, a sign-up sheet will be pinned up to allocate climate zones to student teams.

Your project must address the local climate with an emphasis on environmental sustainability and passive low-energy architecture. You are required to develop a prototype for your climate zone. Specifically, your prototype must show how the external physical environment (temperature, humidity, breeze, heating, cooling, light and precipitation) can be addressed through architecture.

The live-work envelope must cater for two types of spaces, individual private spaces, and shared collective spaces. Within these, you can define how a sleeping space, study or work space, a living and dining space, and services (wet areas, food preparation, storage) are allocated.

Process Lectures each week will touch upon and/or clarify the objectives outlined above. Articulate your concept of Domus following the weekly tutorial guidelines. Each week, design teams must present thumbnails representing every weekly stage of their design. The tutorial guidelines are as follows.

Week 5, Analysis of Climate and Site design

You will not be involved in tutorials this week because of teamwork workshops. But outside of these workshops you should achieve the following prior to Week 8 tutorials.

Analyse your climate zone. What are the major environmental factors (sun, wind, light, heating, cooling, materials, vegetation, precipitation, humidity)? How can you respond to the challenges, constraints and opportunities presented by these parameters? How can you expand your concept for one person to include five people as well as the possibility of sharing functional spaces?

The site is a real one. It is located in a natural setting within the climate zone allocated to your group. There are two constraints: First, the site is a rectangle, 12 metres wide x 36 meters long. Second, the long section of the site (36 metres) faces North. Create a measured drawing (hard-line) of the site at 1:50 (plan and 2 sections) for your climate zone. Make copies of the site drawings and distribute to all team members.

Week 6, Concept development: The building envelope as a bio-climatic skin

Each team member must develop the abstraction, idea or concept of their minima into a concept for a Domus plan & building envelope. The building envelope (floor, walls, and roof) must respond to the specific climatic requirements of the site (designed above). Explore your building envelope concept through sketches, drawings and discussions with your tutorial groups and in consultation with your tutors. At the end of this week, the team must be able to articulate their concepts for Domus as a plan and bio-climatic skin.

Investigate dissection or sectioning as a tool for representing architectural ideas. Cutting and slicing through space allows you to see "inside" and "in-between" objects. Explore your concept of the Domus by creating massing models, dissections of the model and drawings that reveal the spatial qualities of your concept in horizontal

section (plan) and vertical sections. By the Friday pin-up the team must be able to visually present their 3 individual concepts using horizontal and vertical dissections.

Week 7, Concept development

The team should use their three design ideas to generate a set of design principles that will inform one design. To do this, the team should record the design principles revealed in each team member’s design idea as thumbnails and phrases. Record the principles that are common to all your designs and alongside these record other principles that all team members agree should inform your team-design. From these defining team design principles each team member should propose a new team design. At the beginning of your tutorial pin-up these three alternative team designs.

Week 8, Detailed design and Representation of Domus

Repeat the idea selection exercise of week 7 to arrive at a new set of design principles. Use these principles to generate one team design. Present this as a sketch/thumbnail in your tutorial. This design idea will be further developed in the remaining two weeks of the project. The major component of this phase is the development of a wall-section through Domus. The wall section is a section that runs from the ground up, through your building envelope showing how your internal environment is related to the external environment.

Week 9, Presentation

The representation of your team design for Domus must comprise orthographic projections of your scheme in 6 A2 (594mm x 420mm) sheets in portrait format and a physical model of Domus and its site at 1:50. A well-presented and thoughtfully composed presentation is required, addressing the following:

Site plan @ 1:50 showing major features (landscape, vegetation, contours) and the scheme (floor plan, openings, level changes etc.)

The site being 12 x 36 meters, 2 A2 sheets in portrait format can clearly express this requirement @ 1:50 scale (bottom half of sheets). North orientation must be shown facing vertically up the sheet. Circulation, ordering principles and spatial organization must be clear from reading the plan. Text is to be used sparingly. Colour is recommended. Digital prints, in colour may be made in the Resource Centre (contact Marj Timberlake, for details : [email protected], ph.: 52278338).

Long Section @ 1:50, Short section and/or Elevations

In the top half of the two sheets described above, draw a detailed long section through the site. Clearly show the distinction between ground and your scheme. Pay particular attention to the details that are necessary to bring out your section. Use photomontage and other techniques, to develop the section. All drawings must have elements of the site present.

Wall Section @ 1:20

Incorporate a 1:20 Wall Section through the external envelope of your Domus, indicating the scale, size and composition of material usage, openings, connections. The wall section need not indicate how your Domus will be constructed, so construction details are not necessary.

Physical Model @ 1:50

Card and balsawood are examples of materials you may wish to use. The model must clearly show the site as well as your scheme. You may use the sectional model technique or any other means of model presentation. The only requirement for the model is that it be made of to a high quality. Des Walters is the Technical Officer in charge of the model workshop. ([email protected]). He will be available as a resource for SRD263 for help with model-making queries and advise during workshop hours.

Design Process

mailto:[email protected]






On 1 A2 sheet present your thumbnails from every week. There should be 3 from Week 7, 3 from Week 1, and 1 from each of the remaining Weeks 9, 10 and 11. So you should present 9 thumb-nails in total. These thumbnails will provide a ‘storey-board’ of the team’s design process. This may not be a linear storey-board for it may have dead-ends and about-turns. Do not merely mount old thumbnails if they are not now of a quality appropriate for presentation - in which case they may need redrawing.

Submission process

On the morning of the Week 9 studio, submit your work between 10:00 and 10:45 am in studio where either Marj Timberlake or a Studio tutor will note that you have completed your project, and add a submission stamp on the back of each of your A2 sheets. You must have pinned up your submission in Studio by 11:30 am. If your work is not stamped on time, pinned up by 11:30 or you are late for your review you will be penalised for late submission. Any student who does not present for review will be penalised 30% of the project marks.

Review Programme

Details of review programme will be posted on DSO. The broad outline of Review is as follows on the next page:

Time Location: A+B Studio Location A+B Studio Location: A+B Studio Location A+B Studio Location A+B Studio

Tute Group 1 Taliesen

Matt Baird

Tute Group 2 Copacabana

Lana van Galen

Tute Group 3 Sangath

Ron Golany

Tute Group 4 Battersea

Guenter Lehmann

Tute Group 5 Mosman

Richard Tucker

1100--1155 Teams T1 & T8 Teams C1 & C8 Teams S1 & S8 Teams S1 & S8 Teams M1 & M8




Contact Richard Tucker via the DSO Domus discussion thread if you need further clarifications.

Fair Assessment of Team-members Contribution Team/Individual assessment - In order to make sure that each individual within a team receives a grade that reflects their contribution to the project we will be using an on-line self-and-peer-assessment (SAPA) tool that has been developed over the course of the last three years. Every week, each team-member must log in to the SAPA to rate the contribution of themselves and their teammates. This register uses two quantitative measures and one qualitative measure. The first measure asks you to award yourself and your peers a percentage of a team grade. This first measure is backed up by a second that asks you to rate one another on a five-point multiple-response Likert scale. Self-assessment in this process has been shown to encourage learners to take responsibility for their own learning through the making of reflective judgments. The further purpose of the third qualitative measure, which asks you to comment on your own performance and that of your peers, is to elucidate anomalies or unexpected final evaluations. At the end of the project, an assessment matrix will be generated that awards each team member a multiplier of a final team grade that had been assessed by the unit coordinator, tutors and moderators. As the SAPA is an integral part of team-working process, for each week that you log in to the register and satisfactorily fill in each of the three measures (the process takes only about 5-10 minutes), 2 marks (2%) will be added to your individualised project grade. When you fail to complete the register, it defaults to award everyone in the team an equal share of the marks. The register will

be open each week from Thursday morning to midnight on Monday. Eighty-five percent of students in 2006 were awarded multipliers within the range of 0.85 – 1.15, for the only students heavily penalised were those who were consistently rated by all their team-mates as under-performing. The assessment register will be demonstrated in the lecture introducing the Into Energy Efficient Design project. Full instructions for its use can be found on the SRD264 contents page of DSO.

Domus brief

Technology

Transcript of Domus brief