Inspiration from the Natural World
Notes from Architecture 101
Today I’m in Seattle visiting family with the kids (it’s their spring break!) and plan on going outside to sketch all the loveliness of the Pacific Northwest spring. I hope you enjoy this brief summary of my design process with one of my most recent architecture projects.
Hello friends,
It’s final project time for my architecture class. I have a few more weeks to go, but I thought I’d share the first phase of what I did for the project, which is to create a sukkah. We watched this documentary in class as an introduction, which was called “Sukkah City” and took place at Union Square in New York City.
Sukkot is a Jewish holiday centered around harvest. Our challenge was to create a prototype of sukkah, share it with our class, and the top 5 projects by popular vote will get a team behind them to create a final version.
Phase 1: The flower and shape.
When my family moved to San Francisco in 2019, we lived in a very modern but small-ish apartment in the Dogpatch neighborhood. Some of the greenery nearby included beautiful abutilon shrubs, with flowers that hang like delightful lanterns. I strongly associate those flowers with that time in my life of great transition and change. I wanted to capture the curves of the petals in my design.
Phase 2: The wall
I created a wavy form with the wooden dowels inspired by the flower petal. But when I started thinking about different ways to hold the dowels together, I started to get a sense of weaving to get the transient feeling I wanted from this temporary structure. I initially thought of baskets and waving grass as what I was going for with this part of the design.
Phase 3: The roof, platform and path
As you can see, after I created the woven wall I repeated a woven motif for the roof. This was inspired more by thoughts of birds weaving a nest. The path mimics the top of a shaft of wheat; I imagine in a further iteration it would actually get woven with multiple complete shafts of wheat.
Well that’s it for this week, I’d love to know what you think!