Developments and Precedents

Since I last wrote, my design has changed yet again. 

My current design, the one I'm going to roll with, involves not putting a staircase inside the building but by putting buildings within a stepped landscape. I got my inspiration from somewhere I visited on holiday in Cornwall years and years ago. 

The Minack Theatre, Cornwall

The Minack Theatre was build by Rowena Cade as a place to perform plays that she organised. Set on the cliff top, it makes the most of the topography. Its use of the landscape in which it sits is the reason I chose it as a precedent. 

Our site is steep and I want to make use of that to create an outdoor space that looks out onto the River Severn and the activities on it. 

I began developing my design by working in plan and looking at where my building would be placed and how the whole site would be arranged. 

The Minack Theatre has steps that provide the seating for the theatre as well as access through the site. I want to incorporate this idea into my site but I also want to create flat spaces which provide extensions to the main club space and spaces for activities.

To help me to design the layout of my site, I looked at precedents of visitor centres. Searching on ArchDaily provided me with Orokonui Ecosanctuary Visitor Centre in New Zealand. 

I colour-coded the different types of spaces and marked them on the plan: blue for public, red for semi-public, yellow for private and green for facilities. From this, I was able to see how buildings of a similar purpose were arranged. I noticed that the public spaces were the most central within the building and everything that needed to be reached by the visitors came off this central space. The facilities were more hidden but were still easily accessible while the private spaces were completely set back from the main space, with access hidden on a kind of need to know basis.

I am going to use these precedent to help develop my idea into a cohesive design over the next week and I plan on having my design sorted before Christmas - want to actually have something akin to a holiday this year!