Week 5 - The cross sections & site observations

To begin with, Howard Smith Wharves is not new to me as this was where my tute group had chosen to site our cinema and public space designs last semester for Design 4. For this reason, I didn't really feel like arbitrary sun paths and traffic diagrams would be particularly useful as it's clear at first instance that there is a defined separation of pedestrian and traffic access to and around the site. Something that I didn't explore last semester though, was the actual river itself. It never occurred to me to document the water's movement. Even though it is such an obvious thing at the site, it's mainly used for views and as a defining edge. Resultantly, I decided to look at how floods affected the site.


Firstly, I produced some sections of the site:

I visited the council website and QldReconstruction.org for an interactive flood map. Due to the relative flatness of the ground plane on site, flooding happens very quickly but due to blockages etc, draining of the site happens very slowly in comparison. I then produced an animated gif to represent this cycle, with the time lapse representative of this.

Although I honestly didn't expect to learn much from this week's site analysis, after having looked at movement on the site by flood waters, it's gotten me very interested in looking at how advancing and receding can work when applied to the next task.

Week 5 - Volatile Bodies: Bodily States

In order to understand the body as a 'volatile entity', Leah, Rudder and I explored binding to better understand how a body's form, scale, and inhabited space changed whilst performing a simple task. In this task, Rudder kept his hands together/bound and picked up his bag and bottle whilst Leah and I filmed in section and plan respectively. The photos can be viewed on Leah's blog so I won't bother reproducing them here. Instead, I traced over the movements, and in each set, tried to mantain the same use of medium to allow for easy recognition of relationships.

Operational speculative section of Rudder picking up his satchel

Using different line weights to accentuate and indicate the progression of the movement made it less confusing to follow the sequence. The use of pen clearly defined the outline and in a way turned the movement static, whilst conversely the gouache lended a feeling of fluidity to the sequence when it was simplified down to just the arm movements. Although we didn't record Rudder performing the tasks unbound, it's safe to say that the range of movements when bound was only slightly exaggerated compared to unbound. 

Operational speculative plan of Rudder picking up a bottle

The change in scale and occupied space was really evident in plan in this sequence. Rudder had to stretch one leg out and bring his entire torso close to the ground, which sees his form diminishing towards the centre of the last 3 images above. Evidently, having your hands bound requires the utilization of your full body in order to perform a simple task, and although somewhat expected, the range of motion he went through in order to just pick up a bottle was still a bit surprising for me.

Operative speculative section of Rudder picking up a bottle

In section, the movement is not as extreme as it could have been if we recorded it from the side and not the front. Regardless, this set still allows for an indication of the kind of space occupied - full range of motion vertically with strong one-sided lateral protrusion.

This documentation I feel is strong in that it clearly defines form and inhabited space, along with changing scale in plan, but is limited in that I haven't really explored coloured media of any kind. I usually do a lot of collage in my design units but I didn't apply it to this exercise as I wasn't sure what images or textures to use (I wanted to avoid just overlaying cut-outs of Rudder as this could easily be done on Photoshop).