IAT 233 Seattle Design Charette Day 3 - Post-presentation

Arriving home back in Vancouver, it's a relief and nice to be able to just relax from the exhaustion that set in. The less than 3 hours of sleep for the last 35 hours is ridiculous and clearly showed during our team's presentation.

We didn't win the design charette, though we, the Rem's Righteous Rebels, did come a close second. Ramy and Jason had come up with a solid urban space concept about focusing our space on highlighting the existing landmarks of Seattle, and Mark came up with the design for the current form we have in mind.

The proposal was meant to create a space that helps channel the people from the area to either channel them to the market or at least re-direct them back up the hill so that the flow is not merely going down towards the waterfront. It's hard to sum up the entire concept as there are so many elements that are going into the proposal including movement of people, way-finding and highlighting the landmarks of Seattle, incorporating denial and reward in our structure into the center of the pavilion space, entry/exit flow from the 3 streets flowing into the site, affordances built-in to the structure of the lighting and shade with our light fixtures, and the focus on the citizens of Seattle and the surrounding area instead of drawing tourists.

That's about as succinct as I can put it although hopefully our presentation next week with better fleshed out conceptual renders will be able to elaborate it more thoroughly.

Overall, I think we're happy with what we learned and the bond we've created through our blood, sweat, tears, and sleep deprivation. For me, I'm a little disappointed we didn't win first, though that's a little greedy as I'm surprised we even got second because our presentation was so fractured even though our concepts were mostly(not all) there. [N.B. We left out some key aspects because our slides broke and we forgot to mention them]

The trip to Seattle was awesome. I really enjoyed seeing the Olympic Sculpture Park, Seattle Public Library (a Rem Koolhaas building!), and the tour of Knoll's Seattle office. I am sad we didn't get to visit the Chapel of St. Ignatius, especially so because my team did a previous precedent project on a building by Steven Holl. I was really hoping to see and experience one of his spaces incorporating his ideas on phenomenology and parallax.

Rem's Righteous Rebels