DESIGN 2 PORTFOLIOSPRING 2014Maddy Dwyer

THE ANALYSISMaddy DwyerDesign 2 | Spring 2014Prof. Cohen, Nicole Paul, Jeffral Betancourt.

In this project, we learned how to take another person’s work and analyze it. I was given Le Corbusier’s Villa Shodhan. Since we could not personally go talk to Le Corbusier and ask him why he put a wall here or there, we had to use our resources, such as the library and the internet, to solve the mystery. We learned about the location and the culture of that particular location and time. We found drawings and sketches done by Le Corbusier himself. Then we began asking questions about the walls, the floors, the wiåndows, the spaces, the uses of each space, the itinerary, etc.

Villa Shodhan is located in Ahmedabad, India. Ahmedabad is a generally hot place and is not an uncommon place for droughts. The 5-story villa was built between 1951 and 1956. Ground floor (bottom left), 3rd-story (left), section through the dining area looking northwest (bottom right), photograph of the southwest facade (right).

West Elevation

We sketched the building and the spaces inside of it in hopes of answering our questions. We shared our discoveries with each other and then repeated the process as we moved to model building. We explored how to portray our discoveries in a tangible, three-dimensional form using linears and planes, transparent and opaque. And without even trying our models resembled an abstract version of Le Corbusier’s building.

I explored why certain spaces extended into the story above and what the circulation looked like on each floor and how they interacted with each other. While exploring the public and private spaces and the connection between them, I found a spatial joint that was created in the middle of the villa. I, and many others, discovered the modular that Le Corbusier used and that he made the structure of the building first so he could allow the spaces to flow freely throughout the villa.

As our final assignment, we paired up with another student analyzing a different Le Corbusier building. We took pieces from each of our models to create our own villa.

LIGHTMaddy DwyerDesign 2 | Spring 2014Prof. Cohen, Nicole Paul, Jeffral Betancourt.

In this project, we learned about light. We began to move away from looking at light as two-dimensional shadows on a surface and more towards looking at light as a volume. We asked questions about how light affects a space. We looked at the spaces all around us on campus and other architects’ work and studied how the light in that space is created and what it does. We made models to make some of our own discoveries, and learn how we can manipulate light.

I started by making models based on things I had seen in the world around me and then began making little changes and combining ideas just to see what would happen. We then made “light towers” to showcase what we had discovered. We designed an enclosed armature to create a dark place. Then we designed two vessels. One vessel is placed on the inside and was designed to play with the light that entered the tower and the other is placed on the outside of the tower to affect how light enters.

My interior vessel showed my discovery of how much a space can change just because the light is coming in at a different angle. And I played with the layering of dark and light spaces in my exterior vessel. To the right are charcoal drawings of the light in my “light tower” at three different times of day.

LIGHT POOLMaddy DwyerDesign 2 | Spring 2014Prof. Cohen, Nicole Paul, Jeffral Betancourt.

In this project, we combined everything we knew so far about space and light. We were told to research clouds and fossils and to diagram an image of each. from these diagrams we got our ideas for our models. From my diagrams and research, I saw that clouds are layers with the heaviest most dense clouds at the bottom and the light, wispy clouds at the top. I found that fossils are often buried underneath layers and layers of earth and the earth must be ripped away to get to the fossils. We started by making two plinths, a bottom and a top. I made my bottom plinth thicker and heavier and my top plinth lighter and thinner to replicate what I had seen in the clouds.

These images show my diagrams and research of clouds and fossils. This spurred my ideas for my model.

Then we began to connect the two with vertical light cannons. I decided to make my top plinth look like someone ripped the layers away so the light could begin to seep into the cannons. We were told that the program of our model would be a spelunking gym, or a man made place to practice caving. Since some caves are created from the shifting of the earth, I wanted to mimic what that might look like on the interior. I put one light cannon at an angle and completely divided the top plinth in two. When making the enclosed, I wanted to hint at this break like the earths surface does using cracks, so I put a “crack” between the two cannons.