Nick Brennan ARCH1201 2009: Project 2

My Painting: Johannes Vermeer's, The Geographer

Narrative:

An entrenched bunker for a hermit with a predisposition for geography and geology.

My original concept for the design was a cube shape buried in the side of the mountain to form a bunker. The main openings were the single slit on the lower floor and a large panorama opening running around most of the top floor. I had a light shaft running through the centre of the design and considered a light shaft at the back of the top floor.

My further development of the original concept focused on making it blend in with the chosen site of a mountain. I did this by slipping the top floor backwards into the mountain and by integrating the building into the surrounding terrain more. I also removed the idea of a stream running over the roof of the design. I also narrowed the slit openings after looking at how narrow Tadao Ando's were in his Church of the Light. If they were to let light in only and not views the lower floor slits needed to be narrower.

I decided that the buildings internals also needed to feel as if they were part of the mountain so I stepped the floors to make it feel more like a natural cave. The openings are the entrances to the lower and upper caves and the cave gets bigger as it goes into the mountain. Here a series of thin openings lit by light shafts act like natural fissures.

The main upper cave opening is to act as the entrance into the cave/bunker, just as my geographer/geologist would crawl into a narrow cave to explore.

This was a rough working model I made with some scraps found in one of the studio bins. It is crude and only roughly to scale but helped me in seeing how the shadows fell and also how the terrain would have to be made for the building to fit in with it.

I then went on to develop the design with further drawings and also computer models and renderings to let me see how the light would truly fall on chosen materials.