Correlations between levels

By Daniel Roman

 My name is Daniel Roman, I am a second-semester masters student at Southern Illinois University. As the fifth week of school comes to an end, many more advances in our classes have occurred. The most important aspect of the progress is focusing on the actual thesis, the following is an excerpt from an outline from which we had to write out to plan for a future paper we have to accomplish.

“Human needs may vary from person to person, but according to Maslow’s hierarchy of needs, there are 5 levels of necessities that a human being needs in their life to have a stable and happy life. Implementing architecture into this scenario of complexity and designing a housing complex or some sort of housing that implements all five levels. Taking this idea and implementing it to a modern day epidemic such as housing in a low income area in a city or inner city location. In the process creating a chart in which mimics Maslow’s to implement what is needed in a residential setting for it to work and be able to double as a safe heaven for its tenant or owner. Pre fab becomes a suitable method, because if the solution is effective, to be able or have the ability to reproduce and distribute in a high quantity is greatly needed. There are many places in the country that have low number happy people, for various reasons.”

I find the idea interesting, of being able to take a concept from a different field and possibly be able to design a structure along the principles of those. By finding the correlations between the five levels and implement them into an architectural feature.

In studio we started to develop our actual sites, we broke up into the groups that we had been given at the beginning of the semester, I was partnered with two other gentleman and we began to work on different ideas. We decided to put half of the site on a risen pedestal. This allowed up to place parking on the bottom of the site, throughout the site. By doing so, the buildings above are all walkable and so will the lower portion of the site. There will be one main road that would feed the whole site and allowed people to come in and out of the parking. After our first critic we realized that a mix use building is more acceptable and makes more sense. We have gone thru about 3 different renditions on the site, but we are getting closer to a final set, for we have to all design one building, and we all decided to design a hotel. One of my partners was able to talk to someone who runs a large hotel in Chicago, he was able to ask her questions as in the needs for a good working hotel, the amount of information we received, is really helpful, I did not expect so much was needed, let alone the small details. It is impressive how much research is required. It looks like a really large complex building that I am looking forward to design. In the class with Thad Heckman we are learning more and more about zoning. We have turned in two assignments; they are both in spread format. The first was of pure zoning, we had to look up the ordinance, what we are allow to do and not do, along with statistics of the area of our site. The second was a site analysis, sun path, wind directions, soil reports, all those basic things that go into a detailed site analysis. We are getting more into the building code, we are learning to be able to allow the building code to make some design decisions. It is interesting how some regulations can and does go a long way.

Moving forward to next week our individual pin up for our buildings are due. Those are for studio, even tho they want some graphic representations and visuals. They are not looking for revit files yet.