Assignment 2: Commentary

Some questions and comments in relation to the Stage 1 requirements for Assignment 2: DA submission

Submission is due as a blog post no later than midnight, Thursday, October 10th. There are two parts to the submission, with three deliverables:

1. Site analysis
1. a drawing overlay of the survey showing information relating the site to its environment and neighbourhood
2. a short text description of the site and surroundings, no more than 2-300 words
1. refer to the DA checklist and the DCP (pages 6-7) for some ideas of what the site analysis should include
1. THIS example, from Parramatta City Council, is over the top, but does give some idea of the types of information that could be included
2. HERE is a more typical, if somewhat basic version (as part of a full DA set)
3. Lake Macquarie City Council has a good explanation of what a site analysis needs HERE
4. and you can find discussion of site analysis in place like Wikipedia
2. this drawing can be electronic (Revit, Illustrator, Photoshop, etc) or a hand drawing, but needs to incorporate the use of colour and bold graphic symbology to tell the story of the site.
2. Planning Controls
1. A chart laying out all relevant controls, descriptions of what the controls mean and how they work, and the numerical results of applying those controls to our site
2. Drawings that translate the controls in your chart in graphic form onto the actual site. This will need to be both plan and sectional drawings

You should also be spending time in the next two weeks to ensure you have Revit up and running and to work through some of the training materials, so that you will have a bit of a head start when you get the building design brief  in the week 10 lecture.

Finally, think some more about the exercise you did in week 7 in building a brief for your research designer / artist. That person / company will be your client for this house, so you will be needing to interpret their style in terms of the brief provided in week 10. Make sure you understand that style...

Assignment 2: DA Submission

You are to put together a DA (development application) submission for a house for your research architect/artist/designer. As this is a DA submission, you will find your deliverables list here:

http://www.mosman.nsw.gov.au/file_download/177/DA_form.pdf

• Pages 4-7 contain a checklist of items that must be submitted as part of a DA. Therefore, this is what you must submit for your assignment. Note that not all items on the checklist are required...
• YOU are the applicant
• Your client is the owner

• You WILL need to supply material for items: 1-9, 12-13, 15, 18-19
• You do NOT need to supply material for items: 10-11, 14, 16-17, 20-32
• You will ALSO be required to import your model into Lumion and provide renderings and animations of the DA submission - remember that the DA is also the final opportunity to lock-in or 'sell' your design to the client!.
• Design and documentation is to be undertaken using Autodesk Revit, and visualisation is to be undertaken using Lumion. 
• If you do not already have these programs installed on your personal machines you will need to do so by week 10. It is your responsibility to undertake the training material that accompanies these programs. Tutors will endeavour to help with questions and issues wherever possible, but do not have enough time available to hold your hand all the way through the process.
• Autodesk has free educational versions of its' software available to you, and Lumion has a free version available for download
• note that the free version of Lumion has very limited libraries of objects and it would be worth buying the full version while you are a student.

In order to plan and design your building, and to fulfil the requirements of the DA application, you will need to refer to several documents including the Mosman DCP and LEP. These documents contain planning controls and requirements for development in Mosman:

Residential DCP (PDF 15MB)
Mosman Local Environmental Plan 2012 (PDF 871KB)
Mosman LEP 2012 - Land Zoning (LZN) map (PDF 2MB)
Mosman LEP 2012 - Height of Buildings (HOB) map (PDF 550KB)
Mosman LEP 2012 - Foreshore Building Line (FBL) map (PDF 490KB)
Mosman LEP 2012 - Floor Space Ratio (FSR) map (PDF 608KB)

A client brief (scope of works) will be provided to you in week 10 (immediately post the coming semester break and non teaching weeks), and you will need to relate this to the week 7 studio exercise to determine how to apply the information about your specific client's needs to the site. During weeks 10 and 11 we will use the lecture times (and parts of the studio time as well) to talk about aspects of the DA process.

Stage 1:

Between now and week 10 you are required to research all of the relevant information in relation to the site. It is up to you to determine what information (and controls) are relevant, and what they mean in relation to the site. The links above give you everything you need to carry out this task. You must provide a checklist of all of the relevant controls, with their rules, and the resulting calculation specific to the project site. You must also produce a drawing showing the application of those controls in graphic terms (such as building envelope setbacks, height controls, etc), and another drawing for the site analysis (Item 4 from the DA checklist, as well as pages 6-7 from the Mosman Residential DCP). These must be submitted (via your blog) no later than midnight, Thursday, October 10th.

The site is #5 Wyargine Street, Balmoral, and you can download the site survey, in DWG and PDF format, here. Site photos and other material will be made available in week 10. Please note that the site has a new home on it, but you will be using the survey and other information as if that project had not yet been undertaken; as such a site visit is not deemed necessary.

Studio Exercise 4: Week 7

This week you are going to write a brief, from the point of view of the client. As we have discussed, representation can occur through drawings (both technical and emotive), physical forms such as models, film and animation as shown this morning, and as written or verbal description.

Today you will explore the latter.

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.

If it is a company you are using as your research topic, treat them as a person...  If there is no family that you can identify, then you are defining a bachelor pad....

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, so it should include not only a  list of explanations about room sizes, but also 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.

This material must be completed and uploaded to your blog by the end of studio.

Ahhh, bugger!

Just a quick one to apologise...  :-) The previous two posts (Embedding in PDFs and Note on Deliverables) were intended to go online last weekend, and I'm not sure what I did, but... I screwed up! Sorry! Anyway, here they are, let me know if anyone still has any questions.

Deliverables for Assignment 1

Just a reminder....

You will need to submit:

1. a SketchUp model
2. a PDF file containing screenshots of the views of your SketchUp model:
1. A written description of your project. While this has no pre-defined length, it needs to be sufficient to make the form, relationships, movement and other aspects of your project understandable to your reader. I would assume this would take at least 2-300 words....
2. Plans for each level. This must include Room names and other notes, and dimensioning sufficient to understand the building overall, the individual rooms, the windows and doors. It is not expected that you will dimension it to the level of genuine working drawings, but you must cover all the basics.It is assumed that these are created within SketchUp. You are NOT expected to be producing plans in some other program!
3.  a cross-section. This should also be annotated and dimensioned. Dimensioning can be very basic, and should be more about vertical dimensions than anything else.
4. elevations of each major façade
5. a series of 3D views that explain the form and relationship of the primitives
6. animation that shows your built form. Approximately 10-20 seconds long 
7. a schedule of all spaces
8. a calculation sheet for areas and volumes

Note that for marking purposes, the PDF file should be all that the tutor requires to review and mark the assignment, and should be produced with that in mind. The SketchUp model itself will be used if the tutor wishes to look deeper at certain aspects of your project and so can do so directly. Also, the studio in Week 7 will include time for these models to be put into a Primitives Village in Lumion, which will later be used to discuss some of the Lumion processes you will look at during the last part of the course.

Both the model and the PDF should be uploaded as a blog post to your site by midnight on Sunday, September 8th, so that your tutors can download and review them. Late submissions WILL BE marked down progressively, and rejected altogether if more than 48 hours late (unless by prior arrangement).

Embedding multimedia into PDF files

As the primary submission method for assignment 1 is the PDF file, and you are also required to provide numerous images, videos and other material, you will need to know how to get all of that material into a PDF file. Here are some tutorials to help you with that process:

TeacherLink: Acrobat with Multimedia Tutorial - a very good comprehensive tutorial.
Dig Rep Studio 2012 - Jacky Yuen - tutorial from last year's studio, embedding models into PDF
Embed a model into a PDF - a good one for getting a SketchUp model into your PDF file

There are plenty more resources out there you can find that help with this process. These are just a few to get you started. Indeed, this likely should do all you need, but if you do find a different one that you think is particularly good, please add a link to it in the comments!