Barcelona-Cross sections

The task that we had to complete was create 3 cross-sections along a stretch of Barcelona, a place of our choice, but the 3 diagram had to be at the same site, we chose to do our diagrams by the beach.

Barcelona

Just got back from Barcelona a few days ago, and i must say it was one of the most fascinating places i had been to in the sense of art and architectural design. I visited many sites in addition to those with the group, and feel i broadened my horizons, learning loads in the way of organic design and the integration of architecural design with landscape design. Places i visited include Casa Batllo, Sagrada Familia, Font Magica, Parc Guell, Camp Nou, the Barcelona Botanical Gardens and many more...

Barcelona pics

Focus week - Barcelona

Going to Barcelona, Spain next week, can't wait! Even though we are going for studying purposes, it should be an amazing place to visit with the amount of architecural and landscape sites to visit. Really excited to see the works of Gaudi in particular :)

Potters Field Park

I visited Potters Field Park as part of Parklife module just like my trip to Laban, however the object for this site visit was very different. I was to make a presentation and also a report on Potters field, happy days! When i 1st got to the park i wasnt too amazed, it looked pretty dead to be honest. There was a clear focal points and composition of the park was very good, but everything seemed a bit dull. I was pretty upset, i liked the site and i knew it had potential but the seasons were changing and the plants where dieing down for the winter. Everything about the park worked for me, id thought it would be more busy, but it was a secret haven for the few people that knew about it, the planting made for a calming environment and the large green areas helped to create a calming atmosphere. Things changed however, the closer you got to the river you got the busier it got and it was clear the designers had adapted the design to meet the demand of the thousands of people that pass through the space every day. The calming planting had been replaced by long rows of clever seating, well placed trees helped to keep the site from looking too plain and ordinary, whilst helping it through the transition. Something that i loved at the site was the skate stoppers, as the site has long rows of seating to meet the demand but this would definately attract the wrong people. Thankfully they did their job and the irritating sound of rattling wheels and scraping wood was nonexistant. All in all i think the design of the site is very successful and worth the recent development altough not all agree, you know who you are!

Potters Field Park

Laban

Laban is one of the finest institutions for the training of professional contemporary dance, and thats exactly not the reason why i dropped by! Outside the Ladan centre is a very fresh and interestin landscape. I visited the site as part of my parklife module, with the aim of studying the changing levels and to learn how to draw accurate drawings of difficult sites. The landscape was truly amazing in my honest, its not often you see such a usable contemporary grass land, finished with differeing gradients, sharp edges and breath taking composition. Although to some such a site wouldnt be very significant, to me who likes designing hard landscapes, this was such an interesting blend of natural resources but with strong man made shapes. It was so user friendly, it was clearly enjoyed by young children but many grown people in my class seemed to like it too! However i must say as much as i liked the site i hated the given task, the shapes and differing gradients made it very hard!

Royal Aademy of Arts Visited 2!

After i went to the Anish Kapoor exhibition i went to see the Paper City: Urban Utopias exhibition that was also running at the same time. Paper cities was mainly an architecural exhibition, there to show what designer and architect thought the future holds for the urban city. Although mainly architectural many of the images consist of interesting landscapes, something that can bring me inspiration in my work and good precedent. The exhibition itself was in the smalles part of the Academy occupying a tiny space on the side where not many people could see, however if down to me should have had a much bigger space, maybe the Anish Kapoor galleries if im not being too cheeky! The images on show were very strong and to top off the great experience you could make a scrap book of the images that were on show, there was great pads with each image which you were allowed to take free copies away. I made the most of this and took as many as i could get my hands on :) what a great idea, i wish there were more of these kinds of exhibitions. I scanned my images in and the scrapbook that i created can be seen below...

Paper Cities:Urban Utopias

Royal Academy of Arts Visited!

Ok so this morning i went to the Royal Academy of Arts to see those two exhibitions, mixed emotions to be honest, somethings were better than others.
Anish Kapoor was a bit of a disappoinment for me to be honest, after paying £8, a whole £8 more than the Tate i was expecting good things. To add to the misery i wasnt even allowed to take photos of the few things i liked. The sheer scale of some of his work amazed me, but i went there to be inspired by sculptures that explore space but i left more confused than anything. one piece named 'shooting into the corner' had an interesting concept, there was a cannon projecting 20pound pieces of red wax at 50mph through a doorway and into the corner of the following room. Although a good concept the clay was projectd with little force to make a dramatic live piece of art that the pubic could enjoy at 20minute intervals, instead many people would be cramped into a small space, built up with excitment as the artists helper preped the cannon only to be met wit a load bang and a second of undramatic flinging of red wax. Yes i did i liked the concept but i did dislike just as much! The live act doesnt rightly portray the reasoning behind the art, the Academy states "the drama of Shooting into the corner takes place in a space set apart, rather like a boxing ring, a ritual arena in which a symbolic act of violence is allowed to occur", yes it does portray this but for me its just not strong enough, but then again i wouldnt say my thinking patterns are the same as some of the wacky artists and art critics out there!

Anish Kapoor

Focus week: Royal Academy of Arts

So for focus week i had a look at some exhibitions that would interest me, while online i found two exhibitions at the Royal Academy of Arts in central London. 1 exhibition was for Anish Kapoor, and the other was named Paper City: Urban Utopias.
Anish Kapoor has become one of the most respected and influential artist of his generation, gaining international acclaim, for his works exploring form and space in the medium of contemporary sculpture. I thought it was time to see what the hype was all about!
Secondly was the Urban Utopias exhibition, after seeing some images online i was interested in some of the landscapes portrayed, i might as well go and see this while im there!

Helloooooo Yr 2!

Well after a long time away from studying im back for my second yr! was really happen that i didnt have any retakes during summer, but i have forgotten some of the skills that i learnt last year, looks like i got alot to do then! happy days :D

Tutorial with new design.

Basically i decided it was not time to muck about any more, so i went and done some serious thinking with respect to this project..I found something that would be ideal as a focal point in my proposal, the Castle like building! Then i decided to have a look in the library for some precedents, and got cracking with throwing some ideas onto paper. This is definitely the approach i should have taken last time..I had my tutorial and Ed&Bridget seem to love my proposal, Bridget in particular says its a million times better than my last one. I need to work at a closer scale now and get into some serious detail, and prepare myself for my second tutorial on Tuesday 5Th. Then i got to get myself ready for my presentation, getting worried now! But i think if i do my work all should be well...

Final presentation, or was it!

Ok so basically today we had our final presentation for this project and lets just say it did not go well at all. I felt that my idea was fairly good, but clearly that was not a feeling shared by my tutors! Im really upset over that but i do understand why they were so straight forward. I should have known better myself, but i was jus naive in the sense i thought i can get away with some standard work! I failed to do any useful research that would help me with my work and the whole project lacked direction. Shame really i thought it looked pretty cool!

Any way i now find out that they are not impressed at all and have given us an extention of a week. Not a joke though, they seem pretty clear with the fact they want us to work a lot harder. I definately aint going to waste this opportunity.

Sustainability Report finished!

Wow another late squeeze, i do not know whats wrong with me..I once again left this written work to the last minute! Not proud of myself at all..I need to take this alot more seriously next semester, and you want to know how i feel about this report? Words can not express how pointless i feel it was! Like it makes any improvement to any of my other works! I feel i should have still paid a bit more attention to the report i do not want this to be the downfall of my year...my report was well written but i do not know if it had enough context to get a good grade but im confident ill pass the module and it will definately be a lesson for next year!

Finally finished with History and Culture!!

Handed in my second H&C essay today, o what a happy day it was! i can not think of a worse subject than history! It is something that haunted me since high school! However i did not find it that bad at uni, guess it was down to the fact it was about something i find generally very interesting. I forgot to mention once again with my youthfulness n stupidity i left this essay to the final day as well! I feel that i done pretty well though, last time he said i did not read the text thoroughly enough and needed more quotes to back up my points, well this time i use 3x as many quotes and not jus rubbish random ones! i feel i have progressed well but were going to have to wait and see...

Practice profile...West8

This is my powerpoint for my practice profile. It may look a bit empty and lacklustre, and i do agree, however my powerpoint was not the most important part of my presentation..I felt that talking freely and having a longer q&a period would be better! However a lot of people before me talked about West8 already and i was left with little to talk about that had not been mentioned already..I think i learned that in these circumstances i should try and go 1st so i can talk about what i really want! lesson learnt i guess.

That damn PDP...

Just handed in my PDP, what a long procedure that piece of work was! I feel it was kind of relevant and useful, in the sense that it brings to your attention what you are good at and what you need to improve. However as a piece of work that needs to be submitted i feel we could have done something a lot more useful with the time! I'm just glad to have got that out of the way really...

Another presentation bites the dust!!

Yep another presentation! Sustainability this time. I am pretty sure this did not go well at all..our efforts for this presentation were lackluster! The contents of our presentation were good however we simply did not have enough of it! We also lacked a thorough understanding of what we were supposed to do resulting in us missing out on presenting some vital information we had in our slide show...we got to work harder next time team!

Liverpool, New Brighton

This is the starting point of my route to the site where this project is based. I chose to start the the towns train station!

I like photographs that are low down on the ground..This is at the top of the high street next to the train station. This area was not really anything interesting.

Waterloo road! This is the road that links the high street to my site for this project! I love old road signs like this, unfortunately there scattered around the side roads these days...

This is the Castle that sits opposite my site. Its a focal point in my design, a place that i feel can be very interesting. Incorporating this into my design will be my main focus, i think this can unlock the potential that this area really has!

Jaspal just looking across the water. I felt showing this picture can show how deprived and un important this area really is. You can see the outdated banisters, not only is the design rather depressing and boring but it clearly is not cared for, the paint has chipped all over the place and its as if nobody cares..to be brutally honest i can understand why, the area does not really have anything going for it.

Liverpool trip! Manchester...

This is a piece of art i think :confused: it was very interesting to see such a thing in the middle of a shopping area, it really proved that the whole had been renovated! It gave a nice separation to the hectic shopping area! It was kind of dangerous though! The individual things were not attached to the ground, they rocked when i tried walking across! Maybe i was not supposed to do that..

It looked amazing from every angle! I really liked this piece of functional artistic sculpture, to put this kind of thing in they landscaper design worked really effectively, I'm going to consider things like this in the future if i feel its appropriate.

This was another piece of clever Landscape design. It was a sort of extended bench right in the middle of a square..At first i thought it was so odd but it made sense, it was a clever use of the space as it allowed the people from the area to come and enjoy their breaks in a visually nice place. The seating feature itself was nicely designed as well it its raised and cut in areas, i liked this a lot!

Looks like Fahin is having fun on the bench, i felt it looked like a surf board so i asked him to jump up for a photo!i thought the design of the bench was interesting, i didn't see how it fitted in with the area however, but it was aesthetic.

This is a photo of me feeling sorry for my poor feet! i decided to buy shoes that were tight cause they did not have my size and then wear them on a long walk, how stupid of me!

Final brief!

I have been waiting for this day a long time now! Can't believe it is actually here now..so what is the final brief? We have to create some kind of public space or feature where our route from town meets our site. We can do what ever we wish within reason! This should be interesting for sure, i wonder what i will choose to do! i wanna get stuck in straight away...

Going to liverpool!!!!

Found out recently that we are going to go to Liverpool for "work", yea right mate! This should be fun..but need to make sure i do all my work as well, cant get too carried away!

Brighton: from the station to the sea...

This is part of the work that i done for the Project at Brighton. I took loads of pictures along my route from the station to the sea..from this i used some in photoshop to see what kinds of effects i could achieve..i like it very much.

This is a small selection of the photos that i chose to do, but i feel that these are the most effective. This was a digital project so this kind of work was completely appropriate..In addition to this, instead of having a normal map from the station to the sea i done a 3D one on rhino with raised buildings and an animation..unfortunately for me i do not know how to upload these..

History and Culture essay..

Well i had to hand in my history essay today..cant believe i didn't get the books for the reading earlier! stupid me left it thinking that the library is going to be open over the Christmas and new year period, what was i thinking! Anyway i done it all on the last day :) was up till 7 in the morning finishing it, and it was due at 9! I do not wanna do that again! But i think my essay was well written, guess im going to have to wait and see what happens!