Rich Brilliant willing.

One of the best resources of the art school has to be the magazine section in the library, but recently the selection has taken a huge turn for the worst. Most of the art and design magazines have been replaced with journals, which i enjoy too but not so much for research, or craft magazines which i unfortunately don't feed much into my research as the magazines i read more frequently. There is something about seeing a designer in a magazine that i had known about months before it published...i guess its comforting in a way to know that somehow i do manage to absorb information.

Rich Brilliant willing is one such design troupe. They have worked with urban outfitters as well as more smaller companies and themselves to deliver unique, individual and often quite playful outcomes. There approach to design really inspires me to take a light hearted and simplistic approach to my spaces, and should hopefully feed through to the next project i have, which should be a wig shop.

3 star Urban - Hotel design

The first design project of the year has started and its a doozy, i have to design the entire interior of a hotel in a site (either urban or rural) chosen by the tutors along with the star rating specifications (either three or five star), it goes without saying that I'm looking forward to getting stuck in.

The class will be working with the Scottish tourist board with the view to create a "hotel expressing a fresh and innovative take on the diversity of Scottish culture and heritage". We have only been given a skeleton brief so far so i can't really tell the extent of what we expected to design but i am guessing that it will be something like: Entrance, Hallways, 2 standard rooms, Restaurant, Cafe/bar as well as branding and other elements.

I have to admit that to begin with i wanted to design a five star, in terms of materials you can be a little bit more frivolous and then also include pieces of furniture by designers instead of more economical options. But now the challenge of sourcing materials (which incidentally is my weakest point), thinking about sustainability and the life time of my design is turning me round to the idea of working within the constraints of a 3 star urban space.

When visiting the site we were brought into this huge room that was apparently used as a ballroom before they had to close it because of health and safety issues which i think i would like to use as inspiration for my project. Abandonment, Simplicity, Entombment and ethereal.

Diagrams

[Provisional]

The process.

The good interior.

Should strive to provide a place to inspire individuals, making use of all the relevent/applicable/responsible elements at the disposal of the designer to create something that can enhance the space and maximise its potential.

Projects end

Its more than halfway through the project and i am still struggling with the idea of it. How can you represent your feelings in a way that can be put down onto paper in such a regiment and structured way? Leona (The dyslexia student liaison at the GSA) helped me realise that this task would be difficult to me because of the way that my brain works, the way i learn/communicate is much more visual than factual....this doesn't mean that i want to create some pretencions graphic system to communicate my ideas, i just want it too be simple. After the iterim crit drew suggested that the graph could be a sentence summarising what we think makes a good interior and about the processes. Maybe an Acronym?

IBOTP - IM BORED OF THIS PROJECT.

I got the last film from Berlin developed today. Its just as bad as the others but it does have lots of pictures of Daniel Libeskinds Jewish museum. Mmmmmm Deconstructivism.

A Chinese exhibit

China is the theme of my next project. We have been asked to design an exhibition space within princes square to showcase some elements of Chinese design/history and promote Chinese tourism. When i first got this brief i didn't really understand the reasoning behind having this project and saw it as more of an experiment on my tutors behalf because of some similarities in how the students from china design. For the first project most of the Chinese students included some kind of Fish tank and or used bamboo as a material in there design. I think that my tutor kind of sees this as a test to see if we can (attempt to!) embrace a completely different culture, take into consideration its customs and create something that will speak of china's past whilst expressing its present.

As soon as i began research for this project i was careful to not to let things that i would not really be able to get a good understanding of in the time we have been given before the first crit. This was also a good way to help me avoid creating a pastiche of the china style and help me to try and understand at least part of the culture respectively without doing it in a condescending or patronising way.

At the moment a big chunk of my research has been around that of the concentrated nature of China's city's, i really like the way (Aesthetically) the buildings come together creating patterns of repetition and interesting collisions. I like the idea of trying to represent ALL periods of China's history unlike the Beijing opening ceremony that just focused on the wonder of the ancient and completely left out the Rule of Chairman Mao. I think i can do this by combining materials and by thinking about ways that there could be two structures intertwined with each other.

The image above is a good example of the kind of 'communist' style building that i could use to get inspiration for my exhibition display. There is quite alot of building works like this one but i liked the recesses in particular picture, somehow i could integrate the stands into a wall so that it would be able to be seen from both sides...likes a two way fireplace. Im not sure where this project will be going but, today i will be playing around with the floorplan a little so i can see how too fit my display cases etc into the space.

Office Project Conclusion

My office project is officially finished today. Although im kind of glad this is over i just started to get into it towards the last few hours...im not really sure how or why this happened but i guess i will just have to live with it for now. This time we presented the project on a projection screen in our studio that is normally used when we want to explore our designs through the use of 3d projection technology (cue the oos and ahhs).

As with every presentation i wrote a few notes beforehand to help me through the talking and so that i didn't forget any points that were essential to the delivery of my design idea. For me, through research and thinking about office design in general, my main goal in this project was to fit between two different types of spaces. One being a stark boring work orientated place and the other being a completely over the top 'play scheme' esque environment. I felt that there was a need to address this paradox and try to resolve it!

So as you walk into the space you are welcomed with calm disguised lighting and natural raw materials that really set the mood of this office. The desk itself wraps around to include a bunch for seating and the wall dividing the kitchen from the entrance space. It took ages to put the recessed lighting into the bottom of the wooden structure but it looks pretty successful, im pretty happy with how it turned out.

This leads you into the hallway which is angled slightly so that your perspective of the space is warped making it seem longer than it actually is. This thoroughfare helps to divide up the space in to two different sections, Lu pening in my class had a similar idea where the space was divided up into 'work' and 'living' areas.

The kitchen speaks for itself, simple with room enough for the bin so that everything is tidied away, i really like the shadow the scoop light above is causing.

The meeting room has enough space for four people to sit around comfortably and has a tv on the back wall which you can't see in this rendering. I thought alot about the dividing wall between the bosses office and the meeting room and came to the conclusion that it would be a good idea to echo the industrial feeling and also thinking construction wise, i wanted to accentuate the joins instead of hiding them. Thus resulting in a kind of greenhouse like design. The doors in the middle can be slid open to open up the space if it needs to be and it has one other feature.

Finally the bosses room, Completely with a terribly rendered Mac computer. The final feature of the dividing wall is also shown here. I was looking at dividing screens and suddenly thought to myself that it would be more interesting to include a device that would provide visual privacy for the boss or the people in the meeting room and that i should make a feature of it. I think my tutor thought it was a bit of a weird idea but in my opinion it is applicable to the style of this office and a great talking point. I talked a little bit more about how there would be natural light in every space (even the bathroom) and how too me this was very important in an working environment.

An Office Dilemma

My crit for the shop project went well, although my final presentation was in my opinion a little bit too rushed and nonchalant but as it was the final crit and we had a crit one week before that so i didn't really have anything new to say apart from here are my final pictures.

As soon as the crit had finished we were given our next project which was to design the interior of an office space, which if i am honest didn't inspire me in the slightest when i first heard it...but now i am nearing the end of the project I'm quietly confident about my design. When researching about office spaces i found that most of the things that i came across where either stuffy and boring or on the complete other end of the spectrum. So i found myself trying to create a design that fitted in between each of these. Something that provided a calm working environment but made the best use of wall height, angles and room proportions to excite and add interest.

This is the floorplan of the office that i have come up with, one of the parts of this design is the corridor which was initially inspired by an image i came across whilst doing research. The image was of a temporary office designed by B-architects for The Brussels Bourse Theatre (BSB). I loved its use of materials but most of all it was the dynamic of the corridor slicing through the middle of the space that attracted me to it.

In the plan thought, the hallway is skewed a little bit. I decided to do this when with a discussion with a tutor he bought up the fact that the space might not be big enough to achieve the same effect and to trick anyone in the space to think it was longer than it actually was. I will be doing some visualisations soon to show you finishes and some lighting ideas that i have.

Project Project Project death

Tommorow is the last crit of our first project this term 'Specialist shop'. Its a four week long project where we have to focus on being accurate about materials, finishes and the general look/feel of the store. I was given Bookshops which, according to my tutor, is the most boring and predictable shop to have been given. Go figure.

I started the project by researching Books in a very literal sense. What are they made of? How are they made? when were they first invented. I really wanted to get a sense of the thing that the shop was selling and in the process i came across the recipe (or at least the ingredients) of ink.

"The ink used widely to print books is made from the soot of burnt wood. It contains various pigments and dyes, made from metals seeds and chemicals."

For the shelves i wanted to keep with the idea of processes and so i liked the look of archive shelving and the cyan colour. But when i put it into vector works it made the already clunky shelves look even more out of place, so, as suggested by one of my tutors, i should keep the shelves fairly neutral and introduce colour into the store by putting colour behind the selves. Therefor bringing colour into the space but subtly.

The 'mystery' of the book shop/book production process was the hinge pin to the whole design. This idea is most obvious in the back section of the shop where all the fiction books are supposed to be. I wanted to make the customer have a feeling of being totally enclosed within books, and i had an idea of putting a mirror on the ceiling to create a double height affect. Drew contested me and suggested that it might be a better idea to put a strip around the ceiling to create the same affect, but still leave space for the lighting.

Amata said something that i think sums up my shop 'It has so many little interesting points' although this was something the tutor told us to stay away from...i think it works well in a book shop because, they are all about exploring and finding things that excite you (just books hopefully).

I had a few ideas for the store frontage, i loved the style of 'low key' pornography shops that have a kind of two way mirrored finish. So that passers by wouldn't be able to see into the store but patrons would be able to see out onto the street, creating this kind of voyeuristic people watching element. But that bought into the question, how customers would know it was books. I decided to instead play on the shelving element and show the pages of the books stacked on the shelves, relating to the products kept inside.

I kind of wish i had more time to play around with the renders but....such is life!

CLOSED

The final crit for the cube house was a very informal, so how did you get here too this point sort of thing. Which too be honest was a big relief because i was dreading getting my stitches taken out. As well as this we were given another brief another puzzle type project.

Breaking it down very literally i have to fit a stair and a ramp into a 20x20m space. The space isn't big enough to fit a ramp in because of the radiant ratio so, you have to be inventive on how both pieces fit into the space individually and on there own. There are some other rules, the stair and the ramp must cross at least once so someone using the ramp could decide to use the stairs or visa versa.

My first few ideas were all very boring and predictable and because this was a 2 week project i didn't want to get stuck in a rut generating ideas even though its pretty fun. My favourite idea was one with stairs similar to the acropolis or the pyramids but i just couldn't figure out how to fit the stair and the ramp together or how they would cross over. As well as this i thought about ideas of playing around with illusions of perspective, creating a tapered corridor to make it appear twice its length therefore making an already huge space seem even larger in size. Unfortunately the space wasn't big enough to do that so i went back to the acropolis idea.

In the mid project crit Drew pointed out that the ramp seemed too separate from the stairs and kind of peripheral too the whole design. He wanted me too improve my layout and combine the stair and the ramp more, i thought the easiest way to do this would be to combine the stair and ramp completely (just like the acropolis). As well as this think about the layout of the stairs is it possible to put more than one landing into the flight?

Ive just noticed that i have to make the top two stairs a little wider on the left side so that it lines up with all of the other stairs (and it might make the way the ramp collides with that level a little more tidy. But in all im pretty happy with the design. I like the brutal geometry of it all...its as if an ancient monument has crashed into the space and then was even further desecrated by the snaking ramp. Materials wise its obvious to me that too make a definition between the stair and the ramp might be the best idea, i don't think we have to think about materials too much. just give a hint as too which materials we were considering.

Cutting it fine

Its that time of year again where deadlines are creeping towards me, new projects are being sprung apon all of us at the last moment and well...lets just say i have quite a bit of work to do and not much time to do it. As well as this i had an accident involving a scalpol just before the deadline of my Cube house to project, i won't explain what happened because i have done so too many times now too different people. Needless to say it was a character building experience that i wont forget and using a scalpol will never be the same.

Day 3

One thing it did make me remember is my fascination with biology, probably going back to my high school days. Watching a wound heal is so interesting, the different stages it goes through. New skin, old skin. I only wish that i wasn't so squimish and organs/muscles didnt make me feel so dizzy. My hand modeling dreams are ruined! haha

Day 11

November chill

Its update time folks

Since the last post a whole bunch of things have happened (as usual).
One of the most interesting developments would have to be the developments within the magazine that me and my flat mates have been putting together.


The idea of Mammogram was to create a platform for discussion within the art school for students,staff and anyone with any relation too the art school to voice there opinions on anything (within reason). We also wanted the magazine to enhance the feeling of community within the art school that is unique and, i think anyway, worth preserving. So all content is submitted by students of the art school

Here Is the first exhibition review i wrote with Zephyr:

" Haptic: Design exhibition review (Twinkle splashy wow)

Within every issue of Mammogram this section will cover current design exhibitions in and around Glasgow, bringing you the latest from the world of design. This month we visited the lighthouse for ‘Haptic: Awakening the senses’ an exhibition focusing on the sense of touch and its impact on design.

The space plays host too work Commissioned by Kenya Hara, the chief executive of Muji and the Nippon design centre, Shigeru Ban, Panasonic, Shunji Yamanka and other international Designers. As you walk through this pleasing collection of interesting objects your sense of touch is liberated. From Remote controls fashioned from silicon too traditional Japanese shoes lined with organic materials’ each designer attempts to capture the meaning of haptic. Along with this every piece has a sample for you to touch giving you a small sense of what the work feels like. And although the samples were small and rather worn the idea you were allowed to be hands on with at least part of the design was very pleasing.

The highlight of the show is Kenya Hara’s ‘Shishi Odoshi’. Water fills a glass receptacle and then with a chime it runs down a white board to then be dispersed by small nodules making the water appear to roll instead of flow, as if you could touch it. Another fantastic work was that of Naoto Fukasawa who has made drinks cartons out of replica fruit skin that suggest the contents. The original is copied so closely that the designer went so far as to create tiny replica seeds for the skin of the strawberry carton.

Throughout the whole exhibition its only downside was its sparsely placed lighting that distracted from the work itself, which should of commanded the space instead of sinking into the background. Although this is just one small fault greatly overshadowed by the quality of work displayed. If you are looking for inspiration we recommend this exhibition for any student of any year of the art school.

The exhibition is open till the 29^th of September and costs £1.50 for students during the week but is free on Saturdays"

The second design exhibition review along with the rest of the issue can be found by following this link:

MAMMOGRAM
Design study wise i have been given a project where i had to design the interior for a cube house within a set of strict rules (which i later found out weren't so strict) and have been getting tutelage on the CAD programme will be using for the next 3 years of my life called Vectorworks. Im getting to grips with it pretty easy, probably because of my previous experience with CAD software...although i have such a long way to go to get to the level of work that i want to be producing.

Anyway, this is quite a long project so we had a couple of crits in the first few weeks too make sure that we were on the right track only...for my last crit it didn't exactly go as i wanted it. But i suppose i should take it as a learning curve and work harder to produce work that is more 'polished' and works...practically as well as aesthetically. I wanted to create an interior that could express the potential for sculptural and inspirational arrangement of space within such a rigid structure although it seems that that is not what this project is about. As a result i have to rejig my floor plan and lose a little of that dynamism....i feel a little relation to Le corbusiers tyrannical aesthetic obsession

Images cont.

Yesterday i spoke to our CAD tutor Digger and he threw the images that i had chosen the day before into question. A couple of the images that i had chosen were ones that i had been hanging onto for over 2 years or so and when i told him this he said to me

"Does this mean that your design style/taste hasn't changed over the last 2 years?"

I don't know if he meant to make me think harder about my choices or weather he just wanted a set of brand new images too capture my most recent inspirational sources but whatever he wanted he did cause me too worry a little about hanging onto old inspirational material. Is it a bad thing to hang onto images that inspired me 2 years ago? To be honest i think the main reason is that those pictures appeared in a magazine and at the moment all of my inspiration is through either books or the Internet as i can't afford too buy magazines (no matter how much i want to be able too). And so today i have spent some time in the studio going through some names that i had collected in the back of my moleskin in an attempt to find new interiors that inspire me.

I came across this interior by topotek 1, I love its playfulness and its interactiveness.


Isay weinfeld designed this amazing book shop in Sao Paolo, Brazil. It surely must contain over 3000 books crammed into every available space...but my main attraction to this particular building was the entrance where she made use of bookcases and implemented as innovative doors.


The third interior is an exhibition design by Herman Verkerk, the Arnhem mode fashion biennial in ... This show is arranged every two years specifically for showing state of the art fashion on an international scale whilst highlight socio-cultural aspects.


Nendo Design made this interesting exhibition piece in 2007 showing some of their works in an unusual way. They wanted to challenge the viewers sense of perspective and how you would normally consider objects.


Miffy is the star of the last image that i found, this flagship store (the first dedicated Miffy store in the world) was designed by UXUS design...i love how the designer captured the brand of the product perfectly but then i found out they also designed packaging for Macy D's and i was reminded of a conversation me and my friends had recently.

Selling out is very much part of being an artist or a designer and creative people have always struggled with the idea and notion of selling out too 'the man' but the odds are you will have to at one point in your career even if its just to get one more rung up on the ladder. So we came to a conclusion, our time at art school is probably the best time for us to create our ideas without the huge worry of money or the burden of responsibility so this time has to be used to realise our personal goals (as many as possible) before we sell out. and the world ends.

July and im home for some time

Well first year has been over now for 1 month or so and between moving all of my possessions into storage (which in itself was a huge investment of time, money and energy) and then returning home to find that there was no Internet in the house and no hope of it till the end of June ive had no time to post. That's my excuse and im sticking too it.

Being back home for an extended amount of time is a really strange and to be honest un-comfortable experience, I had my freedom and here it is severely compromised. I feel constantly under my parents feet and the only thing i can do to try not to annoy them is to keep out of their way and confine myself to my room. One great thing to come out of no Internet is that i have been forced to read/draw/paint to pass the time and have been getting into a book called 'The architecture of happiness - the secret art of furnishing your life' by Alain de Botton. Its quite a tough read but very interesting none the less, it talks allot about the psychology of design which has always interested me and how we can create buildings in different ways which can affect us subconsciously. Its changed my view on the practice of architecture and my role within it and at the same time deepened my dislike for certain factions of modernism (i.e. Le Corbusier).

Apart from that book ive been reading some on Impressionism and realism in the 20th century and decided to buy another book by one of my favourite authors Haruki Murakami its called 'The wild sheep chase' ive only read the first few pages but im hooked all ready such is the power of Murakami. Im sure i will have finished reading it by next week depending on how i spread my time about. The great thing about having free time and no particular thing to do is ideas seem to flood to me...i have 3 ideas for installation pieces, 3 photography projects, 2 art pieces, various clothes and pieces of furniture. I HAVE TO DO THEM. Someone please force me to make something this summer otherwise i will be really depressed at having wasted so much valuable time.

China looks like it will have to wait till next year now because of money issues and i missed the deadline for application, but instead my parents suggested a trip to Canada to visit my relatives, and i jumped at the opportunity. Apart from not seeing my Canadian family for over 6 years i have really missed the place too, the fresh air and beautiful scenery is inspiring to say the least so im pretty pumped about the trip i even get to meet my cousins wife/husband/child (i have more than one cousin out there just to clear that up.

When i wasn't reading i was sorting out things in the loft into boxes of 'leave' and 'take to Glasgow' and i came across this old passport photograph of me (top) i think its 4 years old and well...its quite clear that i have changed quite a bit...even if the hair is a drastic instant change, by the by the other photo is probably the most recent one of me. It got me thinking about change and how much of it i have been through in the past 4 years....GCSES, AS level, Btec and the first year of my degree, what a whirlwind to say the least. This time last year i was so excited to go to Glasgow whilst at the same time working full time for Habitat MK who incidentally have refused to re-employ me on the grounds of company restructuring which sounds like a lie to me.

New blogs

Ive spent the morning looking at other peoples blogs and have discovered a few that i will definatly be adding to my site list for you to look at. One one particular blog, Design for mankind, i found 2 more blogs that i really like the look of and one particular blogger even had an issue of frankie in her post (which was a daily for Design for mankind). I don't want to steal content from someones blog so i will just say that there is some interesting content on Design for mankind and i think you should check it out (in particular the what the world eats photo essay). In reflection on other peoples blogs i noticed how little of my own designs/ideas i have been posting so to remedy this i will show you a couple of things from the 'This & That' project i just completed.


This image is a representation of the office that i had designed in its final position. I thought for a long time about where to put my office...at first i thought somewhere like The botanic gardens or Kelvingrove Park but decided that they were too obvious. Being obvious is one of the things that i really tried to avoid whilst thinking up concepts for this design but in the presentation to Drew and Patrick i felt like i was being criticised for being to vaugue. In particular the cut away sections in the office cell and the bathroom, drew likened it to pee stained walls...oh dear.

In the end i decided that the best place to put the Office was on a disused plot of land just behind a recycling plant. I suggested that the plot could be planted with flowers that bees are attracted too that way both areas of the design will have been covered.

Work is finish

Phew, well i have now officially finished all work in relation to my first year at the GSA. Its a funny feeling a mixture of relief and apprehension in regards to what grades i will get for this term in H&C and in Design.

The meeting that i was talking about in my last post went ok although i can't help feeling like the tutor brushed me off a little bit as i was the last person to present my work one tutor condensed the evaluation of my work down into one word 'Hexagon'. Personally i thought that the mid term review was very un-helpful but maybe i just didn't understand what she was trying to get at, also the fact that the Interiors tutor wasn't even in our review kind of annoyed me. Just recently i had my final review with the head of interior design, i don't think that went very well either.

I don't know what it is but every time i have a review i lose my vocabulary and i can't describe very well why i did certain things in my design. This didn't help very much when i tried to defend why i decided to put vertical recycled plastic board cladding on the majority of the walls inside my portable office. I put my defenses up and suggested that 'it was essential to the design concept and that it was inspired by the construction of a beehive' but after i knew i could of worded it better adding something like 'i didn't want the inside to be a complete carbon copy of the outside, there needed to be some kind of change in finish to communicate the change of atmosphere. Submergence in a recycled material with an emphasis on height and 'natural' materials'. If only i could say those things on the spot...

Anyway, today with the handing in of my design concept sketchbook, i have no more work to do and only feedback sessions to attend so technically i have 4 months of free time to do what i like with me moving back to Glasgow from Milton Keynes Mid-late August. I really wanted to get a picture of my work on the wall for the future (and for this blog) but i wasn't allowed into the studio because of the assessments so i (and you) will have to wait until next week when i get my grade.

Birthday treats

Today is my birthday!
Although im not sure how to feel about it because i am turning 20 and exiting my teenage years, im not sure because i don't really regret getting older just the fact that im getting closer and closer to 'Real life' which seems a little scary. As well as it being my birthday its also an important day in regards to university as i have an important presentation today for H&C.

H&C is the contextual part of my studies at university and is mostly about the history of art and design and how it effects us still to this day. For the presentation everyone was given an artist or designer and asked to put together a 5 minuite talk on a piece of text and two images that were provided for us. For my talk i was given the textiles designer Bernat Klein who i actually didn't know anything about before hand..and to be honest i hadn't even heard his name before im not sure if i have researched enough for my presentation but its to late now.

Sorry for such a short post but i have to go now to do the presentation!

Working like a coal miner

Last year on the run up to the end of my studies the work load seemed to creep up on me and jump out from a dark corner striking fear into my heart...and this year i have a feeling that its going to be pretty much the same sort of scenario. Although this time its entirely self inflicted because i have so many ideas for projects that i want to start that my main university project (this & that) is beginning to get put on the back burner. As a result im not sure how loyal i will be to updating this blog, one thing is for sure i think the posts with have to be a little bit more brief as each post can take up to 2 hours of my time if i am being particular about layouts and uploading photographs from the terrible halls Internet. I hope i am forgiven for this!

One of the hardest parts of the course at the moment is getting hold of the course tutor to ask him his opinion on what i am doing in this project, so even though the other tutors will help us, i could be veering dangerously off point. Is this a part of university that i havn't taken in? In regards to 'Self study' that is?


My research sketchbook is starting to take shape, at the moment im looking at various architecture and interiors to get some inspiration. Mount Fuji Architects created an interesting house exterior with the use of a punched stainless steel cover, i think this kind of 'punched' material could be used in my design, either through window covers or maybe room dividers. Anyway what you see above is an excerpt from that sketchbook, the drawing was just a little idea about the exterior of the box...although as i have already said im not sure if we are allowed to change the shape of the container that much. Id love to find a way to create an interesting shape whilst allowing more light into the container itself...and im sure i will come to a good conclusion after some more sketch booking.

Next week i am hoping to have both model making and Vectorworks tutorials but again the tutor hasn't been in for me to check.

A new flat

I have some very exciting news, I now have a flat for next year! The first down payment has been put through and i will have to finish of some paperwork and sign some forms and its ours, i really can't believe that its happening. The flat itself is so beautiful with 3 double bedrooms (not the largest that i have seen but big enough to be comfortable and snug) A large kitchen/diner with a kitchen nook and a dryer that is on a pulley. As well as this there is a Living room with bay windows and a huge storage cupboard all for £300 a month its such a good deal especially for the location too. I did take any pictures which i really regret now because i think that its going to seem like such a long time until august even though its only about 3 months away in reality.


I thought it would be interesting to upload the second part of the brief (also useful for me if i forget to bring my brief into the studio) as you can see its very specific and i will look forward to the workshops in Vectorworks and the model making tutor also. Especially since i found out that we won't be working with foam board!

Here is a copy of the floor plan that i have to work with, so far im just thinking about space and how it can be adapted to allow 2 people to work alongside each other with the minimum amount of conflict. How can i communicate harmony in difference?

Crit etc

I had a review today of the nine photographs that i had selected for the first part of the breif, and surprisingly it went really well (i say surprisingly because i felt very unprepaired). I spent quite a large amount of time thinking about how i should display it and what photographs i would choose to show and finally as i said in my last post i started on the book. I started by seperating the book up into 9 sections and then masking taped the edges so that it made a thick barrier between each photograph. Im really happy with the final product, and so was the tutor i think i will be making a second version of this book with the 9 selected images that i have edited on photoshop.



As you can see in that picture my Holga Photos have come through so here are a couple that i found interesting. Tommorow i will post you my new brief and some priliminary ideas.

Happy Days

The weather the last few days has been absolutely beautiful and it stays light till around 9pm now so there is more time to do things...although it still doesn't seem like there is enough time in a day to do everything that i want too. Yesterday i slept in till 12, tidied my room a little and then decided to go to Morrison's with my flat mate to stock up on food for visiting friends and the like and whilst picking my purchases i found a pack of 6 crumpets for 9p, so we decided to have a crumpet feast on returning to the flat.


I took a slightly M&S food picture to remember the delicious occasion and Kirsty kindly invited me to a Barbecue for dinner, we sat outside in the courtyard by the hosts house and ate a ton of food followed by mini muffins, mini flapjack and an episode of Planet Earth. That night though i didn't sleep very well at all and ended up browsing various blogs till the early hours of this morning and finally getting to sleep around 5am...i really thought i wasn't going to last through today without sleeping but i have, must be my reserve energy.

I got to the studio around half nine and chose my favourite images, with the help of Amata then put them up on a wall next to where i was sat so that i could consider them easier and have desk space free to write down ideas/sketch and the rest. Sorry for the bad picture i only had my camera phone today, i also found a picture of the Jim Lambie exhibition that i forgot i had taken.



I don't know if you can see very well in that photograph of the exhibition but all of that dark sand on the floor was just loose glitter and it went everywhere, i woke up the next morning with glitter in my hair and all over my face, im still finding bits now.

Later on this morning we got given the first part of the second part of the brief (how confusing!) which consisted of being given the 'two distinct business activities' that the first brief we were given talked about. I had my fingers crossed for an interesting combination and i think i was lucky in what i was given in the end. Anyway i have to design a space around:

Recycled Plastic Boards and Locally Produced Honey

This week is all about research into these particular fields so ive got three books on materials for construction/interior decoration and have found out where i can get information, possibly pictures, of bees and honey production!