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working narrative

How can the city of Leeds build stronger connections with its surrounding areas and wider region, and through these connections become better recognised as the regional capital and one of the primary cities of the north of England?

The Olympic games coming to London in 2012 presents exciting opportunities for the people of Britain to become part of a global community and showcase the best the country has to offer in all areas of society. This opportunity is probably greater still for the country’s elite athletes and Olympic hopefuls, who have the chance to compete on a world stage in their own country. As the regional capital, Leeds should be a key conduit between the regions athletes and their progression to the London games, connecting the city with the growing Olympic community throughout the country in the build up to 2012 and also creating a strong feeling of participation for the people of the Yorkshire region. 

I therefore propose to design an Olympic training facility in the heart of the city, raising the profile of Leeds involvement with the 2012 games and providing a state of the art training facility for the regions athletes. This facility will help athletes achieve all they can at the Olympics and share in the principles of the 2012 legacy program; going on to become a permanent sports facility for the development of future talent from the Yorkshire region.

tutor comment

nice work; do a bit more to get consistency of graphics across the pages, eg layout dimensions, dark / light areas, fonts. the design looks more convincing in the physical model - montage especially. work to keep that quality of emerging from the earth, avoid 'details', make the canopy more like the rest, it looks a bit hesitant compared to the expamet version. keep at it, its a good idea!

>propose presentation

model renders

>key ideas

there are a number of key concepts that have generated my proposals for briggate; keeping in mind the points raised through definition and redefinition, through proposal i have aimed to change the perspective of briggate for the average user, i aimed to create an island of respite providing shade and shelter, to create greater connections between briggate and leeds and leeds and the wider region, i have aimed to promote sustainable practices and provide a missing function for the improvement of the street.

in providing a sheltered gathering space above street level, i have tried to create a lookout on briggate where the buildings and streets surrounding can be viewed and decisions can be made about the journey to come. taking people off street level changes the normal perspective of the street and eases tension on the user away from the constant flow of people. 

rainwater collection is a key aspect of the design. this will be collected using the canopy structure, stored and used to flush toilets in the public wc below. the inclusion of such a system will be highlighted through the creation of a feature water wall, where a visual sculptural effect will be created by the water collected on its way to storage tanks for the toilets, raising the sustainable profile of the proposal. 

the shard window fecade relates to the alternative perspective i have tried to provide the users of my proposal. the nature of the toilet areas being below street level dictates there will be high level glazing from the perspective of the interior spaces. the windows are designed to appear like shimmering coloured jewels in the rough concrete walls, like a subterreanean cave or mine. these jewels not only provide natural light to the interior, but pick out and frame key features of the surrounding fecades on briggate above street level, highlighting the historic jewels of the street. at night these will be lit and will glow providing an attractive sculptural feature to passers by.     

>facade idea

The urban water wall is an interactive fountain system in which falling streams of water can be controlled by digital means. The streams can be started and stopped or their pressure changed. The wall is urban scaled, like a canal running through the city, but twisted into the vertical plane so that one can experience it from a distance. 

on briggate this idea can be used to show images of the wider city creating a link with leeds as a whole.

>initial model

>tile-tastic!

while researching the humble bathroom tile for my briggate wc, came across this. interesting.

>model in context

>sketch proposals

propose>sketch model

Create by Kumiko Inui to celebrate the new bullet-train station in front of which it stands, this pavilion in Kumamoto Prefecture serves as a waiting area for travelers. From a distance, the pavilion recalls a typical house as drawn by a child. But as visitors get closer, the building seems to dematerialize, thanks to a blizzard of openings cut into the glass-reinforced concrete walls and roof.

Public toilet provision has become increasingly unsatisfactory, because of closure of existing facilities and a general neglect and marginalisation of toilet issues by urban policy-makers.’ Why are public toilets of relevance to architects, or to the creation of Great Architecture? Architects are increasingly taking on the roles of urban designer, regenerator and policy leader, as legitimated by the Urban Taskforce agenda (Rogers, 2000). New Urbanism and urban renewal policies demand that architects contribute to meeting social needs through enlightened design. Public toilets are a necessary component for users of the built environment in enabling user-friendly, sustainable, safe, equitable and accessible cities. 

>ref: inclusive urban design-public toilets.

toilet art (?)

Public toilets have become cultural artefacts in their own right. Because in our society excretory functions, like using the toilet or sex, are seen as ‘dirty’, it is inevitable that the avant garde, seeking to shock, will use toilets as ’art’, often in association with depictions of ‘sex’. It is easy to be alarmed by those women artists who appear to have bought into the whole ’male thing’ about the ‘dirtiness’ of bodily functions and, as a manifestation, the ’ladette’ who mistakenly imagines ‘girl power‘ to be like the boys seeking to shock their audiences, But when it comes to attitudes to street urination presumably they find they are not really one of the lads after all?

The artist, Sarah Lucas, included a full toilet bowl in her exhibition at the Arnolfini Bristol, while Tracy Emin hastaken this trend even further. ’Disgust’ is the operative word infusing such art, not its antonyms ‘delight’ and ’pleasure’ which are words seldom associated with excreta. Lucas’s work was part of an exhibition entitled ‘Minky Manky’. This oeuvre was entitled TX: Two Melons and a Stinking Fish, no doubt alluding to the fact that many men say that women’s genitals smell of ’stale fish’. In reality many women clean out toilets, put down lav seats, wipe the bottoms of the very young and very old, and clean up after male, elderly and/or careless family members. So such ‘art’ is probably more annoying to ordinary women who do not have the luxury of being disgusted either by sights or by smell, but simply have to get on with it (Curtis, 2000).

This genre of art has its precedents in the origins of ’Modern Art’ in the early twentieth century - for example, in DuChamp’s painting of a urinal from 191 7 entitled The Fountain. DuChamp saw himself as an anti-art artist (see exhibition ’DuChamp‘s Suitcase’, 30.8.2000). More extreme is the work of Herman Nicht, an Austrian, who undertakes public performance art involving blood and entrails, and also Damien Hirst and his sawn-up sheep. Is this their way of resolving the clean/dirty dualism? Efficient sanitation and investment in public toilets would seem a better way to do so.

The work of the late Helen Chadwick is far more healthy (Cullis, 1993: 23-4). In 1991 she produced a series of sculptures entitled Piss Flowers. These consisted of bronze casts of the fantastic shapes created by her pissing in the snow in Canada, and were intended to be both beautiful and a way of breaking down taboos about it being dirty or naughty for women to urinate in public (or urinate at all!). Avant garde artist Andy Warhol also went through a phase of producing ‘oxidisation paintings‘ based on himself and his friends pissing on canvas and chemically treating the stains to create interesting patterns.

>ref: inclusive urban design : public toilets.

worth a read....

http://www.guardian.co.uk/society/2008/apr/23/localgovernment

would you pee here?

sketch idea.....

as an intervention with a dual purpose, here the functionality of the wc is hidden or not overtly obvious concealed within a structure that could be an extension to the existing makeup of the street, with more emphasis on its impact on the surrounding urban landscape and the possible gathering spaces created. 

public lavs, westbourne grove, london

Public Lavatories

Westbourne Grove, London

The local residents’ association took the initiative of commissioning this design as an alternative to the Council’s own mediocre proposal. An area of triangular paving was reclaimed from the centre of two diverging roads and furnished with benches and trees. The plan of the building echoes the triangular site with the lavatories at the wide end, entered from either side via a lobby leading to the disabled lavatory to one side, with the remainder split into male and female by a central service corridor. 

public toilets, gravesend - plastik archtects

Gravesend, a small town on the River Thames in Kent, is undergoing significant regeneration. The site for the public toilet lies at a key junction along a new public footpath linking the heart of Gravesend to public parkland to the south. The brief was to provide a new toilet facility on the edge of a car park within the Lord Street / Parrock Street regeneration area.

 

Gravesham Borough Council required the building to be an eye-catching, 'minor-landmark' as a centrepiece to the adopted masterplan for the area. The basic form of the building is derived from the slope of the topography and the geometry of the site. A simple conceptual diagram provides four main load-bearing internal walls, defining the internal spaces, with sanitary items serviced from the eastern wall. The slope of the roof facing the new tree-lined avenue emphasises the slow incline up to Windmill Hill, reinforcing the view of the hilltop and creating a welcoming and bright entrance at its high point. A more fluid and faceted form was developed for the Parrock Street side in response to the fast moving traffic. The roof form is a distorted and inverted cantilevered pyramid, consisting of four triangular facets that meet in the lobby space. Roof planes fold upwards to hover above, but never touch the irregular external walls. Four faceted structural walls and two distorted columns are positioned to allow the roof seams to lead directly to the primary internal spaces - visually connecting the heart of the building to each corner. A single triangular roof-light was positioned along one seam in the heart of the plan, allowing the entrance space to be awash with natural daylight.

 

The mass concrete roof is separated from the tile-clad, concrete block walls by a continuous glazed clerestory; achieving a visual tension in the composition between architectural elements and allowing all internal spaces to be naturally lit. Structure is set away from the external wall to emphasise this separation. The design achieves a building that functions both as a landmark structure and as an efficiently planned toilet facility, housed within a sculptural form.

 

sketch ideas