Week 9

Small plan on the structure of my essay.

Intro: what is the framework that defines your investigation? Define a research opportunity - are you looking at how we can create a symbiotic relationship with nature? This will link to sustainability (making a smaller footprint on the natural environment) and also to how natural design can positively impact on us.

Para 1: Why did I choose this? Giving some context to my discussion….what is a home? Historical understandings of home; historical design;

Para 2: Why do we need new design? This could be the who part - so we have families with a limited budget building on a smaller section. What parameters inform design? What happens in this space?

Para 3: talk about the previous examples of courtyard houses and dwellings with nature inside. What theory underpinned these types of design?

Para 4: Connection to nature - Why do we need nature? What does it do to us? To our understanding of ‘home’?

Para 5:  Talk about the benefits for the dwelling and the occupants

Para 6: Talk about the idea of a courtyard house for the 21st century within a new zealand context

Para 7: A focus on Maori; the linking of kai and community as a means of bringing us all together

Conclusion: what have I learnt? What framework will now underpin the development of my project in semester 2?

House and Home: Architecture, domestic space and Bourgeois culture 1880-1930 in Japan by Jordan Sand

“A house is a site, the shelter for a household, the bounds and the focus of a community. It is also an artifact, a product of human manufacture, a material extension of its occupants’ lives.” page 1

“Modernity destabilizes, relocates, and reinvents community at every level of society.” pg 1

“The house as artifact and the artefacts it houses are affected in turn.” page 2

“...the preservation of an intimate family refuge was a man’s proof of his freedom and success in a competitive working world.” page 2

The Timeless way of building, Vol 8 by Christopher Alexander, Oxford University Press, New York, 1979

“[building] is  process which brings order out of nothing but ourselves; it cannot be attained, but it will happen of its own accord, if we will only let it.” Page ix

“...every place is given its character by certain patterns of events that keep on happening there.” pg x

Alexander maintains that these patterns form a language and this language is what informs our design.