P3 - Final Model and Images.

Here is y final design for Project 3.

I designed the Wing at the SW of the site, which is a cafe/library/auditorium for the school, with gallery space along a central hall.

Model

View from the North across the main entrance.

From inside the hallway

Another inside the hall way, looking out from the level 1platform.

View of the auditorium

Drawings

Ground Floor Plan

1st FLoor Plan

Sub Ground level plan (auditorium)

Elevations.

Top - East Elevation

Bottom - North Elelvation

Section

A detail of the arch framing, and the connection to the roof of the Media room.

P2 - Refinement of the Master Plan

As mentioned in the previous post, we needed to change a few things on the master plan. So here's the new scheme. (Again, we started with markers and refined it into a CAD drawing)

To deal with the problems with the master plan, the arts wing/library at the SW of the site was rotated slightly, and the area to the East of that was enclosed, creating an entrance at the SE corner where we intend students to enter the school.

P2 - Final Master Plan

Here are our final posters for the Master Plan. We have a few things to re-consider after our review. The main issue was how the site dealt with the wind, almost funnelling the Southerly wind into the site in the Winter, so we need to change it all a bit to respond to that. Anyway, here they are...
(the quality may not be very good, I had to reduce the quality heaps to get it to go on the blog)

P2 - Developmental Drawings

We spent a night down at Jacinta's awesome holiday house in Torquay to work on it. First of all we began talking about our schools, and what we like/disliked about them, and what worked/didn't work. We then laid out our scaled print of the site and spent a night drawing and re-drawing on trace paper, over previous sketches, until we were happy with the design. Most of them were pretty messy as we just had markers and drew anything that came to mind. This is the outcome:

P2 - Senior School Master Plan

Today we visited the Torquay school to do some research on our next assignment, a Master Plan for a new Senior School wing (Years 10-12) there. My group member Jacinta will put up photos from our site visit on her blog:

http://srd364jrsome.blogspot.com/search?updated-max=2008-10-23T22%3A23%3A00-07%3A00&max-results=7

We're looking forward to getting underway with the design for the master plan, posts will be up soon showing our development...

P1 - Final design.

We were quite happy with our final design for RARE. Unfortunately our submitted video did not work completely. The animations just came out blank. We have re-made the video in windows we seems to have worked but it has not yet been posted on You Tube to view. Here's the first version which explains it to the most part.
http://au.youtube.com/watch?v=GcQRfB4OPDQ

We managed to incorporate most of the ideas we had earlier on. Those Being stack cooling, evaporative cooling and cross ventilation that could easily be controlled. It's a small classroom but that's what we were after, only made out of 1 shipping container, and it includes and shaded outdoor learning spaces with a blackboard up one end.
The roof is made of curved steel frames which fit inside the container, and they are covered by the sprung roofing, which is also to be stored in the container for delivery. The roofing members are curved to allow for stack cooling, with the idea that the hot air will rise and escape through the louvres below them. A gradient to the back of the building allows collection in the water tank there.

P1 - Schooling for an Indigenous community?

Today we decided to focus our classroom on an aboriginal community. There are a few reasons for this, one following up from my previous post where I finished by saying it would be pretty cool to be able to design for a remote community where materials and labour aren't as easy to come by. We feel RARE is a great solution to providing cheap and ready made schooling/classrooms to local communities.
We hear so much in the media about problems in the indigenous community, and many experts say schooling is they key to aboriginal welfare.

Here's a quote on education from an article I read on the need for better schooling for indigenous communities.
"Higher levels of education are associated with lower rates of incarceration and increased engagement in civic life. In short, education is the key to better life opportunities and choices."

This angle also gives us an opportunity to design for a hot arid climate. Some Environmental things we have decided will be needed for such a climate are natural cooling; operable louvred windows for natural lighting and cross flow, with big eaves over. Solar energy and water collection and storage to cater for the classroom. If possibly, we would like to provide evaporative cooling in collaboration with the cross flow ventilation system. Another idea is to try to use stack cooling to further cool the classroom.
For our brief for the classroom itself we have decided to focus on only the 1 classroom in belief that if we can design on classroom for one class, more could and would be used throughout a school depending on the size of it. We feel it is important to provide plenty of shaded outdoor space for the students, with the belief that this may help keep kids enthusiastic about learning, and not keeping them within 4 walls all the time that they're learning.

We have come a long way today with design and hope to meet up tomorrow to finalise it. I will hopefully post some early sketches of the final design tomorrow night before we start final drawings and renders etc.