wk4

     For our fourth assignment we finally had to gather all of our, brilliant and also not so brilliant, ideas on to the digital 'paper'. Off course we couldn't use our pencils or pens for that, but none other than Adobe's almighty Illustrator.
    Jokes aside, the task we had was actually really practical and we could learn a lot from it. I'm saying that because we live in a world that is getting digitalized on every level possible. And we as the 'future' architects will rely heavily on the computer technology and what it brings.
   Well, everything aside, the task we had was basically to represent our idea and our concepts; how we got to them and represent them according to the unwritten rules of information design.

    Here I've sketched how most of the basic traditional houses look like. Most of wich have simple two sloped roofs. Even though, this shape does a pretty good job of keeping the weather out and our heads safe, I've decided to start here and build my own concept around the roof itself.

     As I've already mentioned in the previous post wk3, my site has an awesome southerly orientation. Therefor it has a potencial for harnessing the solar power in every way possible. And I'm not just talking about generating electricity and hot water.. I want to bring as much natural light as possible into the building. This will help save a lot of energy, it will lower the heating costs and it will also improve the quality of life for it's residents.

    This is where I started thinking, how could I make this possible without ruining the basic shape of the roof and keep it in some sort of boundaries, so it wouldn't disturb visual appearance of the wider area to much (because of the building permits, etc.).

     Here is how I've approached the problem. First I took the top and the side view of the two-sloped roof house. And then I divided the top view into three equal parts. Then I sort of pushed horizontally  first and second half together as if they were made from some ideal material. Then I flatend the middle part just for a little bit and pulled that side out a bit. The image above shows how my final idea looks like from the side view.

      For better understanding how all the elements would come together at the end I've also made a perspective view of the building. This part actually took me quite some time to figure out, but it proved to be extremely helpful to me. I tried a couple of different methods, for creating sun reflections in the windows and I've learned a lot from that. And I got to say I am really happy with the end result.

Here is a link to the tutorial that helped me a lot with this assignment:

Tutorial

     For conclusion I can only say, that there is no other way so efficient and so easy, for transfering our ideas from our heads to some other media, as paper and pen. Until now at least... But we can only guess where the future will take us.

wk3

     For this week, we had to work with Adobe Illustrator for the first time, at this course anyhow. This is in my opinion one of the most useful and one of the most fascinating programs of the whole Adobe Creative Suite. Of course I still haven't seen all of them, far from it, but from where I'm standing now it's seems like some really really powerful stuf. 

     The assignment was to gather and analyze information about our site (average temperatures, amount of sunlight, connectivity to electrical grid,...), and to create some visual representations of that core data.

The designs had to be simple and meaningful. When talking about information design, we first have to ask ourselves, what do I really want to show, what is my information talking about, how am I going to make it as clear as possible, etc... We had to take all of this things into consideration.

Here's the result of my work. I tried to gather and represent the information about my site, that I think is the most important to my project and therefor most useful in my further designing.

      Here is one tutorial , among many others I watched, to better understand how to use in and how to work more efficientlly in Adobe Illustrator:

Link

This assignment was a really nice way to get to know the methods of finding and visualizing useful information and off course, how to use the programe Adobe Illustrator. 

One of the things I did was to analyse the way how the site would actually connect into the surrounding area (plumbing, electricity, transport, etc.). I aslo analysed the sun and how it interacts with the site itself. Especially because the site lies on a very sunny slope, that offers a lot of sunlight during the year and I thing that the end project should reflect the atributes that it has.

      

wk2

      For this (our second) week, we had the task of actually choosing the site and the project, that we are going to work on this semester. And, when we did that, we had to start thinking a little about, how our project (building) is going to look like. We had to start brainstorming and draw our first conceptual designs.

      Only now, we could really start working on the given assignment. Which was to photograph our idea on the paper and experiment how to improve the picture in Adobe Lightroom (adjusting the “temperature”, exposure, contrast, highlights, shadows, etc...). And the second part of our assignment was to photograph a sequence of pictures of our site, and then merge them together into one panoramic photo of the site. For this we used Adobe Photoshop.

    Here is how I approached the first part: improving the representation of the conceptual design.

First I intentionally took a picture, that wasn't shoot from directly above and is therefor in perspective and it has a vanishing point. And I placed only one light source from the left.

Now I started improving..

First I used the Transform panel. I changed the value to the point, that the vertical lines were perfectly aligned. That way I got rid of perspective look and the vanishing point.

Now I had to fix the darker right side. For that I've used the Gradient Tool:

Here is the result of the Gradient Tool:

And now for the finishing touch I had to crop the picture, so that there isn't any insignificant white space around it. 

For that I used the Crop Tool:

After that I just played and experimented a little with some of the other functions and 

this is the final result:

And here are my results of making panoramic pictures:

Even though neither one of these two panoramic pictures represent my project location, I understand the concept and will definitely use Photoshops Photomerge function in the future, for creating stunning panoramic photos as well as for documenting site information for architectural purposes.

      For better understanding of the principals and simply for some extra information regarding this assignment I watched some tutorials. Here is a link to one of them: 

Panorama Tutorial

This was also what I've stumbled on and it was quite fascinating.

      I personally didn’t find this weeks assignment to hard to do and I actually enjoyed doing it. But I have to say, that I was a bit confused at the beginning, when I lunched Lightroom for the first time. I sort of got lost when I tried to add some new files to the library, but then after a few minutes it got quite easy. You just have to find some kind of connection to the other Adobe programs, because they are all practically developed to simplify the user experience.