Draw EDward Draw: Atmosphere, Choreography and Context in First Year Architecture.

Abstract

This paper examines a First Year Architecture Studio project, Bathe: Atmosphere, Choreography and Context in the Orthographic Section, conducted at Unitec Department of Architecture, Auckland during the second semester of 2010. Tension between discipline and excess was at the heart of this Studio which used only manual processes to explore and represent the design of what Marco Frascari describes as the “numinous place.” The project was additionally restricted to a particular orthographic view, the section, and was designed to extract from this conventional representational device the maximum communicative potential. The paper will describe the processes used, survey the original intentions of the project and review the success of them in terms of the work produced by the students and the learning that can be generated by the designed use of constraint in Design Studio projects.