#finalreviews

Overview: Designs created for the construction of a new art museum located off Jackson Avenue.

This first design was my favorite both because this student did the best job of conveying his design in its entirety, and seemed to have the most creative, open space. He said he wanted the space to be interactive and have flexibility in the types of events that it could hold. The first floor was designed to be completely open to allow for more freedom in the use of the space. The second floor was designed to be smaller and more enclosed and be used more for displaying art rather than holding an event. And, the third floor was designed to be sort of an “L” shape. This was particularly interesting to me because it seems most people would choose to have one rectangular floor on top of the other without giving much thought to it but having the size and shapes of each floor so different helps to differentiate each of the spaces and give them their own feel. The student also designed the space with a glass roof fractured into organic triangles rather than having just a dome shape, which I think makes the space much more aesthetically appealing and intriguing, and less like being trapped in a bubble. I could not hear the reviewers very well, as they were facing away from me towards the student and his project, but one did say that he liked that the space had a conscious “idea of where you’re going and where you are,” and I think perhaps that has something to do with the student’s decision to give each of the three floors their own individual structure and feel rather than having the floors all the same. Overall, I liked this student’s project, and I think he did the best job of representing it visually, but I would have liked to hear more discussion from him about how and why he chose certain aspects of the design.

This second project was much more straight forward. The general idea seemed to be two buildings connected by a plane that I am not sure if it could or was meant to serve as a walkway. The student said that for her design she was focusing on the idea of regulating lines and cubism. Whereas the other student designs had vastly a-typically shaped buildings, this one seemed to me a bit simplistic. The only reviewer I could hear also voiced concerns about the simplicity of the design and stated that in some of the models, it was difficult to differentiate between what was supposed to be space versus object (part of the building). While I agree with this reviewer on the simplicity aspect, the vagueness of the models would not have occurred to me. While this student did have many different models, some of which I did not know how to interpret, I do see now after listening to the reviewer where some of the models, especially the drawn ones were ambiguous in their design. Though this was the third of four reviews I observed and the only one which I did not particularly care for, I thought it important to write about one that I did not like in comparison to one that I did. I think as any other building, perhaps a downtown office, this design may have functioned just fine, but as a theoretical art museum, in which the student has freedom to create virtually anything, and which should, by nature, be designed as a more creative space, it seems to me that this student did not allow herself to be as creative as she should have. I don’t think it’s that the design itself is bad, only that it is inadequate for the context for which it was designed.