So las Friday, Febuary 22, was the first formal presentation for our section(class thing). There are three groups, the kitchen, the spa and my group the greenhouse.
The first group to present was the kitchen group, they choose to destroy most of the structure of the old building to manipulate the space so that the people that went there walked through exactly where they wanted them to, a controlled "tour", I guess I am going to call it. I for one like a design were there is certain control over the space and paths that people take. The professors critic was that they had to develop a bit more the program (which is true for most of us) the private part of the house is not really all that private. I did however really liked how the kitchen itself was like a show, the design also had a bar which I didn't really care for much at all, I think that the idea of the kitchen itself being a source of entertainment was rather clever of them and has options for development. Now there were a few things that bother me a bit of their design and I think, for me, it was the lack of color, everything was white or metal and the stair which were another color, perhaps adding the rmaterials, like Carlos suggested could give the project more dimension.
The second group to present was mine. Now with our project we ran into a couple of technical, out of our hands, problems that made it difficult for us to finish the matrix and everything. Our project is "Casa Jardin" a greenhouse. I was the one who insisted that we stay pretty close to the original structure of the house, mainly because what I really like of our project is the mix of a small metal structure with the big brick structure, how we make something unusual in an uncommon space. Our group had the most issues with the "fachada" of the house, we can never agree on the typology of the design that we are going to be using.
The third group is the Spa. The spa have a door design that they use through out the design, which I really like, is how they slowly deform the design so that it has more used and more personality. That group, like ours, has had trouble with the front design of the building, they also couldn't seem to agree. The program was pretty good, slightly less private than ours, if I am not mistaken, both the other groups put the store on the first level and the private area on the second. All of our groups need more time to clarify and polish a few things but all of our concepts are pretty solid.
