Bus|Shelter

Having concluded the latest charette in our bus|shelter and shelter|bus community design project. I present to you my bus shelter from start to finish. Given my site out side the weatherspoon art gallery I knew I immediately wanted it to relate and therefore I thought it should be sculptural, this led to a series of forms which I played around with.







I was inspired by the architect Tadao Ando who uses concrete and light to create interesting effects using a very minute amount of material, I came to the conclusion that I would use concrete while using light as a focal point of some kind. Taking inspiration from the Ectasy of St. Teresa by Bernini I found a phenomena of light called Zodical Light in which a wash of light goes up into the sky to a very fine point. I decided that this would be the effect that would recreate with my design.




With my concept and ideas I began to build my model






As you can see I took a very modern approach with a bit of minimalism as I wanted the form really to be what attracted the people. On the interior of the triangular wall are a series of glass prisms that will reflect the light and recreate the effect of the Zodiacal light.


These details illustrate a few of the minor details but are important none the less. One shows how the shelter is secured so it will not collapse or fall over the other shows how to keep the glass protected from the concretes expanding and contracting in tempreture changes.

Finally I prepared a contextual illustration of the bus shelter as it should appear in its site.

Prècis

Having finished our charettes for the shelter|bus and bus|shelter projects I give you my prècis of all the information. Use this in conjunction with other students work to give you an indication of what our studio is all about.

Advertising Charette

In our final charette we have the oportunity to come up with all sorts of guerilla advertisements to publicize our projects. My group seemingly made some rather silly ideas that actually might be really interesting.. One such idea was the idea of a protest in which the protesters are protesting against iArcs involvment in the community. As highlighted in the image below

Over at the blog of Lily Glover you will find another idea of a viral video

Also at Katie Reynolds blog you will find our idea of a series of seemingly random words strung togehter into an attention grabbing system on a bus.

Finally on Kurt Huizenga's blog you'll find a rather humorous example of our fake arrest idea.

Codes +

An ergonomical analysis of the Bed systems in the shelter bus
An Erognomic and Proxemic view of the bench in our bus stop
An ergonomic layout of the operating theatre on our medical bus
A layout of the drivers seat of the buses illustrating the various measurements that would be optimal for our design
Quick analysis to see if anything was really within good reach of the desk for doctors on the medical bus.

Following our experiments with codes, ergonomics and proxemics a few issues of our designs have been revealed but I believe we have also learned something new about the way people are thanks to the research we preformed. For example we discovered that people are generally comfortable having a space of about four feet between them and people they do not know which interestingly enough has effected our original estimates as to how many people could use the benches provided in our bus stop. Proxemics also helped us to realize that in a counseling situation the distance between where the doctor and patient would normally sit may in fact create a little tension between them due to the discomfort felt. In codes themselves we saw a number of handicap accessible features are not built to code to better allow the mobility of handicapped people.
I would recommend to designers that one should never be opposed to any sort of change. In fact I would go so far as to say designers should embrace it, it may ruin some sort of element you sought but it could also create the possibility of an even better element to your design. Codes may seem like a burden but they exist to help make sure that no one is left out and if you have a great design would you really want to leave some one out really? I believe we will all be effected by codes at some point or another, at some points we will mash our teeth and react bitterly over it and other times I think codes will help us form a better connection with the people we are actually designing for, everyone is different and your architecture needs to be able to react to that, other wise it will be a failure and it will lose its intent.