Otherwise I spent much of my time adding details to the model and building Revit families.

Street

South

Interior

Plans

• Jacking up the diagonal commuter railway on piers and letting the mound landscape flow below – solving the problem of the railway by eliminating its impact on the site.
• Using the piers to to envelop the raised office bar, rather than piece it.
• Add a roadway in front of the building running north-south.
• Preserve the idea of an exterior southern courtyard, as well as add an interior one.
• Bury the west elevation into the hillside and let the landscape flow over it.
• Add a bar to be used as a beacon as well as for light above the production area on the west side.

I also had to break my model into worksets and shut off the majority of the site and tree, etc so that I am able to effectively work on only a portion at a time.

Below are some plans and images of this weeks’ work:

 

Unfortunately, the committee did not care for my site change. I did it to solve issues with the diagonal railway, but as Kyle pointed out, it simply created bigger problems of access, orientation, etc. They also criticized the varied systems of organization and all the stupid ramps.

However, not all is lost. My committee did appreciate the usage of channel glass for the stairway and corten steel panels for some of the facades, as well as a number of other design choices with the office level especially. But, overall, back to the drawing board.

Below is the presentation:

 

During the course of my research I came across an article in Wired magazine from January which seems like it was written for me! The title of the issue was “Atoms and the New Bits” detailing how do-it-yourself has moved from software to hardware, i.e. people now have the capacity to make their own products and sell them worldwide without a huge investment in equipment – which is exactly one of the ideas for the Milwaukee Innovation Center.

From the article:

Tech Shop

In June, Local Motors will officially release the Rally Fighter, a $50,000 off-road (but street-legal) racer. The design was crowdsourced, as was the selection of mostly off-the-shelf components, and the final assembly will be done by the customers themselves in local assembly centers as part of a “build experience.” Several more designs are in the pipeline, and the company says it can take a new vehicle from sketch to market in 18 months, about the time it takes Detroit to change the specs on some door trim. Each design is released under a share-friendly Creative Commons license, and customers are encouraged to enhance the designs and produce their own components that they can sell to their peers.

Local Motors

Local Motors plans to release between 500 and 2,000 units of each model. It’s a niche vehicle; it won’t compete with the major automakers but rather fill in the gaps in the marketplace for unique designs. Rogers uses the analogy of a jar of marbles, each of which represents a vehicle from a major automaker. In between the marbles is empty space, space that can be filled with grains of sand — and those grains are Local Motors cars.

Read the whole article here: http://www.wired.com/magazine/2010/01/ff_newrevolution/all/1

Below is a preliminary rendering of the interior office space, and a couple photos I was playing with:

Preliminary Interior

Interior

Exterior

Below are a few images of the first scheme, presented on Monday, which shows the original location of the building. The tunnel and visual connections were only barely effective. Additionally, I was unable to reconcile both the 90° angle between the Amtrak rail line and Greenfield Avenue, and the roughly 60° angle between Greenfield and the Commuter track, only a few hundred feet east.

 

Ultimately there will still be a building on the original site, but it will be a rectilinear building bordered by a new road, Innovation Drive, cutting south across the former Solvay Coke and Gas buildings. The two buildings can be preserved as an urban ruin, or be turned into some other use which I will define later in my schematic site development.

The building on its new site takes two shapes: one is a north/south bar which creates a courtyard between the Commuter line and Milwaukee Innovation Center, the other employs the same bridge-like structure above the landscape. Presently I am leaning towards Scheme B because it is much more dynamic and creates a better space beneath the building.

Below are some renderings prepared for crit on Monday:

 

Next week: pick a scheme and develop it further. I am now working toward my goal of a fairly developed scheme before Spring Break.

Preliminary Wetland Section Overall

Preliminary Wetland Section Detail East

Preliminary Wetland Section Detail West

I was pretty satisfied how it turned out. I placed the plants according to how much water they prefer: lily pads with deep water; cattails, wild rice and switch grass medium; ash trees and taller grasses moist soil; and ash trees liking fairly dry soil.

The wood platforms seen throughout the section are comprised of two pylons and a cross member. I started working on a script last week that generated the angles and elevations within a series of parameters, but the more I learn with Kyle’s Digital Design class I continue to improve the script. The next generation pictured below takes points supplied by the user (by clicking) to generate the walkway. It still needs some improvements, but it is getting closer:

Articulated Walkway Overhead

Articulated Walkway Axon

It has become increasingly obvious that what I really required was a polar script. MicroStation allows users to enter rectilinear values (X,Y,Z) or polar values (Angle, Distance) but scripting thus far only has dealt with XYZ. I first developed a polar function, which takes a start point, an angle and a distance and uses trigonometry to determine the position of the end point and returns that XYZ value. The beauty is that I can define an angle range from -10° to 10° and have it draw a zig-zag line with variation, but overall is fairly straight.

I used the principle to create a series of mound shapes for my wetland terrain. I was inspired by Stoss LU (see last week). The script draws 6 points and 6 lines, with points 1-3 between -20° and 20° and points 4-6 draw in reverse, from 160° to 200° (the first set + 180°). The last line connects point 6 to the start at point 1. The result are 6-sided trapezoid shapes. A check function had to be added to determine if any of the lines were crossing and if they did it would reject the points and start over. Twisted shapes would not work. Finally, two points are extended from the middle of the shape to form the top points of the mound. All of these points and then connected with triangular planes to form a 3D object.

Below are a few examples of the shapes generated:

Mounds v1 Sample

I then chained them along a zig-zag line as described above using the start point of the next as the mid point of the previous to make a snake:

Mounds v1 Chain

The lines sometimes intersect and/or cross which makes nice areas between the landforms for water to collect. Below is a gallery with additional images from the first script:

 

I then re-wrote the script and the polar function to accommodate spherical geometry, meaning that I can sent a polar vector into any place in space, not just along a plane. The polar function was more complex, but made the actual mound-generating script much easier: I never had to check to see if lines crossed because they were all radiating from a central point. Each point got a 60° piece of the 360° pie and was able to randomly place a point within that area. The left and right pieces were supplied with a longer vector, making the overall shape longer length-wise that height-wise. The height points were also based a the same center point, yielding a very similar mound shape, but is much more efficient and easier to modify:

Mounds v2 Sample

I used the polar function again to generate a path framework for the mounds to follow, but instead made them radiate from a single point instead of being parallel. The mound determines the angle of the line used to make the framework, and orients itself along that axis so the long ends are always parallel to the path. Here are some images of the second version script and the radiating and branching effect:

 

Combined with the existing terrain and the branching script (with some tweaking) generated a system which I am really happy with. Below are two perspectives:

Mounds v2 Axon

Mounds v2 Perspective

Next week: back to building design.

 

This first scheme was inspired by the work of Stoss Landscape Urbanism (StossLU) and their Riverside Park proposal for New Bedford, Massachusetts. More info here: http://www.stoss.net/riverside.html

I also did some more site sketches and master planning:

Revised Site Sketch Overall

Revised Site Sketch Wetland 1

Revised Site Sketch Wetland 2

I focused mostly on the wetland area and postponed the building designs for now. I did the initial study in clay with the model, and then moved into scripting a elevated walkway to transverse the wetland. Essentially the walkway is composted of two pylons embedded several feet into the soil, sometimes above the water, sometimes below the water line. Spanning between these two pylons is a cross beam, and secondary crossbeams connect each pylon unit. The script then randomly (within certain parameters) changes the angle of the pylons. As the pylons spread apart, the area between them increases yielding a wider space along the walkway to serve as a gathering area. Conversely when they are bent together, the area becomes narrower and less likely to be used as a gathering space.

Walkway v1 3D

Walkway v1 Side

Walkway v1 Top

The above images are some preliminary script outputs using Bentley MicroStation. The next stage in the script process will be to respond to user input and site conditions and generate the appropriate configuration.

Finally, I had my pre-thesis book reprinted in hard cover with Lulu self-publishing service. They turned out really nice and were only around $30 (though there is a 2-week lead time). Below are some images:

 

Building Sketch 1

Building Sketch 2

Building Sketch 3

Building Plan Lower

Building Plan Upper

Greenfield Ave View

Overhead View

The above scheme features a lower area on the west hugging the elevated railway berm containing the production equipment, and an elevated 2-story glass truss box holding the office space. Services are contained in the solid pillars, with the eastern one also featuring the design gallery. The cantilevered portion over the commuter railway holds the cafe and lounge, open to the public, overlooking the restored wetland area and out to the lake.

Below are photos of the new site model. Everyone stopping in my room tries to turn the bridge, but alas, I glued it down. Duly noted for the next iteration: the bridge will turn.

 

And for those who have experience with Revit: I ran into a number of memory maximum issues with my model, so I divided it into many different worksets and turned off what I didn’t need to keep the model alive.

Site Sketch 1

Site Sketch 2

The first two sketches were an attempt to locate the best building position. In both schemes I am extending Lapham Avenue east, and then have it turn south and cross a bascule lift bridge into Bay View.

Site Sketch 3

Site Sketch 4

Site Sketch 5

Site Sketch 6

The next four sketches continue to examine the potential road access and building location, as well as manipulating the railway.

Site Sketch Final

With my final sketch I feel I have reached some conclusions for site organization, including:

• Open a wide corridor under the railway viaduct, which will give people a better view (versus the present mouse hole) and create a green corridor extending east from First Street out to the Inner Harbor
• Create a dramatic gateway with the north/south railway, and elevate the diagonal railway to allow a 15′ passage below, the bridges will be a statement
• Remove the coal pile and return the area to a wetland, as it is not ideal for developments and would make a nice front yard to the WATER Institute and School of Freshwater Sciences (north of Greenfield Avenue)
• The Milwaukee Innovation Center will span the triangular area between the railways
• The area south of the MIC will have low-to-medium rise industrial and commercial buildings relating to the water and design technologies developed at the SFC and MIC
• First street will feature new commercial buildings and parking ramp for metro station

Below is an image gallery of the first study site model. The model was laser-cut using supplied topography, which I then coated with a layer of polyurethane. On top of the model I applied modeling clay, which doesn’t bond to the paper allowing me to reposition it several times until I came up with the pictured scheme. Scale 1″ = 60′

 

Below are some aerial and bird’s eye photos I have been working with. Microsoft Bing’s Maps + Silverlight interface make for a really slick browsing feature. I also noticed they knocked off Google’s Street View.

Overall Aerial Detailed

Solvay Aerial Aligned

Site Topo Overall

Bird's Eye

Below are some shots of my site model.

Site Aerial Axon

Site Aerial

Site Bird's Eye

Click on any of the images to see them full-size.

Next week: site model and massing schemes, stay tuned!