circulation

This drawing shows exaggerated perspectives of some of the most important hallway areas in the house. It starts with looking into the house from the entrance, then walking along that and turning to the left is the next image, showing the hallway through the dining room, kitchen and maids room, then moving along the circulation line of the first image is the courtyard which is the last image, showing the courtyard in the middle of the house, looking out to the wall and stairs to the garden.
This drawing is a circulation diagram showing the lines of circulation that I see in the design of this house, exaggerating parts of the house that I see as circulation tools and shows parts of the house as being more welcoming than others in terms of circulation. An example of the changes that I made to the plan in this diagram for this is that I changed the two columns in the dining room to a wall because the columns stop you from walking in that area and create more of a hallway between the dining room, kitchen and maids room in the bottom section of the diagram.


This model was based on the drawing above, showing literally where circulation is easy and obvious and where in the house is less circulation-friendly due to things like columns and small walls. When I first looked at the plan of the house, I thought it looked disorganised and confusing, and it really reminded me of a maze, so I took this totally out of context and abstracted it to create an actual maze (using astroturf to represent hedges of a maze) showing the circulation of the house.

This model is a 3D diagram of the circulation of the house, with coloured edges. Green represents outside, light blue is low ceiling inside, and dark blue is high ceiling inside, but as my tutor said, it is hard to see the colours unless you look closely. I wanted a way to differentiate between these different areas, but really this model was more about the shape of the circulation rather than the ceiling heights.

relationship between interior and exterior spaces

For these two paintings I used black ink because it was the blackest I could get out of all the painting and drawing tools I could think of without printing from a computer. For this I wanted to show the shape of the interior and exterior spaces of the house, classing the interior spaces as those with roofs, and all others are exterior. In doing this I discovered that the main courtyard really does separate the house and goes straight through the middle of it.


This drawing shows where all the windows and doors are in the house, and therefore where light can come in to the house, showing a gradient from these areas into darker areas of the house. Some of the windows are merely for access to natural light, not for views, like those for the childrens bedrooms look onto the large wall built around the house.


This model shows the outside walls of the house and has holes cut out of it where doors and windows are in the house, then some very light, thin material is pulled out of these orifices to show how many there are, and where around the house they group, like the courtyard. There ended up being so much material coming out of the house in the courtyard that that area ended up looking like an interior space itself, which was very interesting.

public/private

This is a model showing site-lines of a person walking on the footpath past the house. I wanted to show the only area of the house that is visible from the street which is the front bay window, and I wanted to also compare the wall heights of the wall at the front and the wall that was built all the way around the outside of the house.


These are exaggerated perspective paintings showing the entrance of the house and the antisocial affect of the tall wall built around the house. It shows the house to be intimidating and perhaps even too private. This study had the community in mind when thinking of public and private spaces and community etiquette when it comes to building tall walls around your house.

This drawing simply shows that I studied the shape of the courtyard as very significant in that when the walls are extended into the house it separates the house into Private at the top (bedrooms and bathrooms), Public in the middle (living room and courtyard), and Shared or Confused space at the bottom (maids room with large window- private, but not all that private. kitchen- belongs to maid, but can be accessed by all. dining room- used by all)

architectural proposition

My proposition at the end of this assignment shows in the model on the left that I think of the Siza House as a box with a complicated 'maze-like' structure. However, there is organisation in this house, even though it seems chaotic at first there is a certain pattern to the chaos. Everything about this house is deliberate.
I also make a point about the large wall around the house, being oversized and extremely anti-social.
In the middle of the first model I have shown a 'courtyard' area with a person holding a book, representing Antonio Siza, the architect's brother, and his love of reading in a private space like a courtyard.

The model on the right is my new design of the house, in a purely representational manner. I showed that building a wall around your house for privacy is a good idea, but there is a fine line between private and anti-social. Then I added a way of making the house look slightly more welcoming by putting in a more obvious entrance-way, but still gave the house-owner a private space for reading that could not be seen from the outside of the house, and tried to keep the same chaotic but organised type of layout for the new design.
These models are purely conceptual and abstracted from the building's actual design so that they do not resemble it at all, they are purely for representing the main concepts I discussed in my assignment.

SIZA HOUSE Scanned Drawings for Project 1

I chose to draw what was originally planned for the building, as we built what was actually built for our model. I was very interested in the comparison of these.


These are the sections I chose to use for this assignment. They show the planned stepping and contouring of the house. Section B is particularly interesting as it accurately shows the changes in ceiling height of the house and I have represented in scale a person to show how low the ceilings are.

In this I showed the relationship between different parts of the house using colours representing public and private parts of the house. (I had to go over the original colour of my drawings because it didn't come out in the scan).

Here is a diagram representing the structure and the circulation diagram. In the circulation diagram I used yellow curvy arrows to show the freedom of the circulation in the house even though in plan it looks like a bit of a maze.

This diagram shows the attitude of the architecture to the landscape. Here I represented this with different line weights, particularly outlining the large wall that Siza built around the house.
This is the axonometric of the house.

Photographs of SIZA HOUSE