{RE}thinking the Doll House

"The vast majority of factors which influence decisions regarding architectural form are made for an architect by the surrounding environment. We are generally able to respond professionally to physical factors such as
topography, weather, and availability of materials or construction skills. Admirable design is often the careful and creative resolution of a site’s peculiarities. Many a potentially valuable architectural opportunity has however been horribly undermined by the problematic stylistic aspirations of a client. This is rarely a challenge which can be overcome by a single architect confronted by committed clients armed with a library of coffee table books and home magazines. The root of the problem is far deeper and sugar‐coated than one expects. Today’s clients are saturated from birth with imagery, much of it clichéd sentimentality, of hobbit homes and noddy houses. Fairy tales and
historical constructs presented to us from childhood establish a limited range of familiar forms, which we tend to accept as convention before we are able to critically assess their relevance to our environment or the modern world.
In this assignment students will be asked to engage with popular architectural iconography by designing and building a full sized doll house."


So... That was the brief that we were given... I challenged the brief... for 2 reasons... 


The first is that any building that I make to 'educate' a child about good architecture may be good today and disturbingly inappropriate tomorrow, essentially propetuating the issue. I feel that things like void, mass, light, shade, volume and scale are far more appropriate when educating someone in architecture. This allows architecture to be contextual and responsable, not in style and trendy...


The second is that I wanted to explore the programs more than simply making a cutting pattern of something that I could do by hand... I wanted to used the computer to generate a pattern that I put together... Success or not... Well, I learnt... which is as far as I'm concerned the key.. so Yes.. :)

Tell me what you think...

Thesis Title Page... Take 1

The Blurb says:

"Wineries have become glorified factories that indulge the tourist in manipulated grandeur, culture, tradition and sophistication, and in doing so, have successfully blurred the line between industrial factory and sculpture architecture." 

GOLDRING on bloginterview.com

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Bruce Cantrell

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Matrix City 2

Here is the Final hand in for the Future City Project. The text is quite small on the image, so here is the blurb:

'The tourist gaze' is a fabricated view of the city. This view is a compilation of nostalgia, day dreaming, media manipulation and naivety. "For the twentieth-century tourist, the world has become one large department store of countryside and cities" (Schivelbusch, 1986:197). The city becomes a scripted event that caters for the tourist. In a sense, by the tourist being in the city, the city that the tourist came to gaze upon no longer exists. The 'post-tourist' realises that the entire presentation of the city is pastiche and accepts that it is all a game that s/he is part of. Interpretation of the city now is comprised of a physical manipulated reality, biased and distorted baggage, and the fabricated tourist driven script. Essentially, the city only exists as a physical stage for the tourist's "right to disregard native concerns and feelings, [and] the right to spin their own web of meaning" (Bauman, 1993:241) to make the Matrix City.

The Matrix City is booleaned by a contour that runs through the landscape representing that the tourist gaze is contextual. It is then twisted as a distortion of the fabrication created by the tourist. The city begins to melt into the alleged fabrication to become a new city _ The Matrix City.

Bauman, Z. (1993) Postmodern Ethics. London : Routledge

Schivelbusch, W. (1986)The Railway Journey. Trains and Travel in the Nineteenth Century. Oxford: Blackwell

Urry, J. (2002) The Tourist Gaze. London: Sage