Risk Assessment Document

Day 5: Now Stop! It's Hammer time!!

Even before having our coffee we queued for the workshop to get the electric drill and thus the day started early in the morning with great excitement about getting our hands on the used timber and actually doing something to get the process of building our project started.

Waiting outside the workshop at 9.00 am

Unfortunately most of the screws already in our pieces of wood were a bit slanted which made our work even harder. Four drill bits were completely destroyed in the process and most of the grooves in the screws were gone. After removing what seemed like a thousand screws we hammered down the pieces to extract the nails that were still binding them together.

Most of the screws are a bit slanted and rusty

Getting the screws out of the timber posts

Hammering down the timber in order to expose the nails

Screws, screws everywhere

While this was going on at the university, the rest of the group was getting ready to meet Alex at Bank station to discuss our ideas and get some feedback on the models and concepts. We met on the third floor of St Mary Woolnoth church in a small studio space at 1.30 pm. Who would even think that there would be a studio inside the church!!

The group outside St. Mary Woolnoth Church

After the discussion with Alex we held an informal meeting at Pret a Manger at King William Str. to exchange ideas about our progress and organize ourselves for the weekend to come.

Pret a Manger meeting in the afternoon

A brilliant idea is in the process

Discussing about changes and realignments

Over the weekend we will redesign braces, frame and structural points as well as a base. We don't want to get stuck in the design process that much since we already know that it didn't work out well for last year's group and led to an incomplete project. We are positive though that we will start building by the start of next week.

Day 4: Models and Stockpile

Today we had a meeting with Catherine who showed us some pieces of her work early in the morning relevant to our project to help improve our design in the context of thinking about the community we address our building to.

Presentation of Catherine in the morning

We talked about the concept we had already thought of through physical models and started thinking about the materials we will eventually use in order for the actual building to match our concept models.

Models and concept exchange

We started stockpiling all our materials in one place to get a sense of what we can actually build from all the ideas we have and get a bit more realistic about it. In the context of having our feet on the ground, we all gathered in the archive room once again to make some 1:10 models with real measurements from the timber in our stockpile.

The quality of the timber in our disposal (or at least the majority of it)

Stockpiling all the timber behind AVA

Modelmaking in 1:10 

While most of us were busy with the models and brainstorming new ideas, Jas was down at the workshop trying to create a prototype of the junction used for the timber frame.

Creating the prototype of the junction

Mistakes and recalculations

At this point we have a lap junction with pegs for support

Now for tomorrow we need to get up early and queue to be the first outside the workshop in order to get the electric drill and dismantle all the trusses as well as removing all the screws from the timber in our stockpile so we can use it properly. A meeting is also booked for 1.30 pm with Alex in central London to get some extra feedback for our progress.

Day 3: Presentation and feedback

We started early in the morning by compiling all the information necessary for the presentation whilst doing some last changes to the design. We used the computer space in AVA for some peace and quiet from the 2nd year students in order to get some more progress.

10 am meeting at the computer room AVA in preparation for the presentation

At 1.30 pm we presented our ideas to two representatives of Social Life and got great feedback from them and our project facilitators Roland and Alex. We are quite positive at this point that we are heading towards the right way in terms of our concept and thus we introduced new factors to our design process such as materiality, interlock / junction and deployability. 

Presenting Site analysis and original concepts

Presenting idea progression and core idea

One very important feedback we got was that we have to think of our design in the context of the materials in our disposal. Sadly, parts of our stock have disappeared and during our break we head out to look for the material thieves.

Looking for the material that was unfortunately taken from us

We met back at the Archive room once again to discuss our future plans from now on with Alex and our general approach to the project. 

Getting feedback form Alex

We also got some interesting ideas from the wood workshop manager which helped us realize some issues with the junctions and general bracing of our design. 

Discussing junction and interlock systems at the workshop

We held a final group meeting to discuss the final idea and get a first read on the risk assessment document. We like to think that our design is achievable and easy to deploy in a secure and safe way which makes us look at tomorrow's meeting with the client in a very positive way.  

Late afternoon group meeting 

Day 2: Concept Wars

Today Tuesday the 24th of September we held a meeting at 11 am outside Costa coffee in the Campus to discuss our individual perspectives of the project. It is amazing to find out how diverse is our architectural language along with the priorities and goals that we personally set for the project. We started off by looking at some sketches followed by renderings, physical models and research papers that demonstrated just how unique each architect is.

Every architect's bread and butter: Sketching

A more technological approach

Exploring an idea through model

Research and site analysis

We took a brake and met again in the library in full force while the rest of the group joined in to agree on the core idea on which we will base our final design. After many hours of discussion and conflict of ideas we came to terms and chose to combine some of the elements from three individual concepts into one that 

would portray the best result in terms of architectural language, functionality and means of construction.

Discussing our ideas that would lead to our core concept

Key component to what's next in our design process

Day 1: First Briefing

Today was the first official meeting of the group. We started off at 10.00 am with a briefing from Roland regarding general issues of the project. In order to divide the load of work we split into three groups to bounce off some first ideas with each other.

Dividing into smaller groups

After having assigned the groups we all did an inventory check to catalog the materials in our disposal and took a  break to brainstorm and discuss ideas with our separate  groups.

Inventory Check

Brainstorming in our separate groups

 A second meeting was held at 1 pm where we all came back together to present to each other our first concepts through sketching and raise key issues and priorities.

1 pm meeting / group presentation

What followed was the workshop induction to get us ready for what lies ahead in terms of actually making our project and we sat around again to discuss our next steps from now on. Each of us is to create an individual concept for the project that we ll present tomorrow morning at 11.00 am in order to come to a conclusion in the context of function, deploy-ability, construction techniques, users etc.