Studio Excerise 4: Week 7

Part 1

Do some research on your selected architect / artist / designer to determine what they might look for in the design of a home for themselves. Can you find any information on family? What about their cultural roots? What can you say about their design style? Think through these and other questions and write up a section on your blog that defines how this person would define their needs and desires in a home.

Santiago Calatrava?

Background information and notes

• Architect, artist, and engineer
• Born on July 28, 1951, in the town of Benimamet, near Valencia, Spain. 
• Calatrava is an aristocratic name, passed down from a medieval order of knights
• Lived in a populated by Jewish converts to Catholicism. 
• The family on both sides was engaged in the agricultural export business, which gave them an international outlook that was rare during the Franco dictatorship.
• 1975-1979. It was during this period that he met and married his wife, who was a law student in Zurich.
• an assistant at the ETH and began to accept small engineering commissions
• Entered into competitions, believing this was his most likely way to secure commissions. His first winning competition proposal, in 1983, was for the design and construction of Stadelhofen Railway Station in Zurich, the city in which he established his office.

 

Studies

• Age of eight, he attended the Arts and Crafts School  
• Age thirteen, his family took advantage of the recent opening of the borders and sent him to Paris as an exchange student. He later traveled and studied in Switzerland as well
• 1968 returned to Valencia and enrolled in the Escuela Tecnica Superior de Arquitectura, a relatively new institution, where he earned a degree in architecture and took a post-graduate course in urbanism. 
• Undertook independent projects with a group of fellow students, bringing out two books on the vernacular architecture of Valencia and Ibiza. 
• 1975 at the ETH (Federal Institute of Technology) in Zurich, received his Ph.D. there in 1979. It was during this period that he met and married his wife, who was a law student in Zurich.

Design Style Influences

• At a very early age developed a love for drawing. In Valencia, Spain, where he grew up, the harsh Mediterranean sunlight would place in sharp relief the things he liked to draw- rocks, trees, buildings, people. Their outlines would slowly soften as the day progressed.
• Nothing he drew was ever really static; everything is in a state of change and motion
• He took classes and learned techniques for creating the various illusions of something caught in the moment of movement, but it was never quite enough. As part of this impossible quest he taught himself aspects of mathematics, such as descriptive geometry, that could help him understand how to represent his objects in two dimensions.
• Attracted by the mathematical rigor of certain great works of historic architecture, and feeling that his training in Valencia had given him no clear direction.
• architect Le Corbusier. Somehow this architect had managed to create completely distinctive shapes. He turned even something as simple as a stairway into a dynamic piece of sculpture. The buildings he designed seemed to defy gravity, creating a feeling of movement in their still forms. Studying this booklet, Calatrava now developed a new obsession- to learn the secret of how such buildings came about. As soon as he could, he transferred to the one architecture school in Valencia.

Part 2:

Put together a brief. Remember that in this document you must define not only what you want (as the client, but why) In this circumstance your brief must be capable of being understood by your architect without you there to explain it, son includes lts of explanations about room sizes, how they will be used, how your family interacts in the home, how you entertain, how you like to work in the kitchen and other general living spaces, etc. A document of this nature will run to at least 4 pages of material combining the lists of spaces and the explanation of those spaces. Also be sure that you explain the architectural style that you want for your home, and include images that help to explain what you are after.

Design Consideration

1.Natural lighting  
2.Engineering facade to reflect calatrava's mathematics logic .
3.An aristocratic design for family background - Mediterranean
4.SOHO which includes studio place & library
5.Purity - the colour white will be used for the scheme
6.Movement circulation around the house will be smooth transition


Room List

• Lounge room
• Family room
• Kitchen
• Master bedroom + 3 Bedrooms
• Study/ studio
• Gallery