presentation and final review in Barnsley

Last week flew by and our concrete creations were dried out and loaded in to the van on Thursday afternoon. Friday 27th of February was the date of our final review in Barnsley where we set up our flipping podium installation on the pavement of May Day Green and took in the varied reactions of the public over the course of the day.

so far so good..?

The molds have started to come off in order to increase exposure to the concrete and speed up the curing process. So far it’s looking something like this….

hoorah!

A very busy day..

…and now we wait. all the molds have been cast this afternoon/evening, with a huge team effort until about 9:45pm meaning that everything should now be well under control

Saturday stint

9 hours straight in the arts tower at the weekend..some serious commitment going on here

We first had to finalise the individual designs and work out what molds we needed…

…then spent all afternoon and evening reliving the good old days of Handy Andy

…until we could take no more and called it a day

design development

Further meetings today and yesterday saw us talking through various possible refinements of the idea. We agreed that the initial thoughts on how to combine our concepts were rather disjointed (the single seat, 2 debating podiums and 2 anonymous forms we had ended up with didn’t strongly represent anything). We discussed alternatively having a simple, recognisable concrete slab developing along two different paths towards being two different interesting podiums for debate. From here we decided that a direct translation from one extreme of design to the other might make more sense visually and we discussed whether the first design should lose its unique features, becoming something very plain before gaining different unique features to become the other podium design, or whether we should lose the ‘plain slab’ idea and merge straight from one podium to the other.

Today we merrily landed on the solution to base all of our five units on one design, which appears very different either side up and seems to flip over in the interim steps. To us this represents the 2 sides of an argument and the visual realisation that neither exists without the other. We would like to incorporate a well-engineered design of voids and weights in the leaning forms to push the limits of what you would expect capable of standing up. We will also be using the textures and colours experimented with in the intial design stages to define the two different sides and maintain a continuity throughout the sequence. Once the design had been set in concrete (yes this was actually said..as a joke..) we settled on dimensions, materials required and-bizarrely-the plan to meet up tomorrow on Saturday.

first meeting with group A2

From now on we will be working together with A2, who had proposed to use concrete to form two debating podiums imprinted with text. We had a productive first meeting, finding a way to move the design forward in a way that is strongly influenced by both initial ideas. We would like to retain the concept of a developing series of objects which culminates in a unified feature, but now will be considering the first pair of slabs to be stands for debate. The whole series wil therefore represent opposing points of views being discussed and compromised to result in a single interesting solution.

design competition

Today we presented our design proposal and won the majority vote (just) to develop our design further with the other concrete group. Our proposal in summary is to produce a series of forms which start with a pair of recognisable concrete slabs and end with an unusually shaped unified form which can be sat on. In the stages inbetween, the 2 forms will develop alongside eachother but seperately, with one set becoming more interesting through a change in colour and the other through a progression in texture. As the forms come together at the end of the series, all the accumulated modifications will  merge to form something which we hope will be beautiful and unexpected of concrete.

progressing towards the design competition

Tomorrow we will be putting forward a design proposal for ‘the public’ (in fact only the department’s staff & students) vote, so over the weekend we have individually been trying out possible forms for our final proposal and today carried out more material experiments.

our shiny new blog

The P5 project is just about underway and we are going to start talking about it to people other than eachother, so here it is – our blog…

We have previously met on Tuesday 10th after an introductory presentation  by the Barnsley Development Agency,  discussing our initial thoughts on the brief for P5 and the outcomes of R2 (a research project on concrete recently completed by the members of D2 studio group). We also urgently needed to find a good source for our material and tools, before designating the roles of Project Manager (Olivia Radford) and Project Reporter (Freya Townsend). In the interim between then and today, experimentation with concrete has been underway and today involves several scheduled tutorials to further this development. A visit to Kieran Nash in the concrete laboratory of civil engineering provided a more reliable concrete mix which will be left to dry over the weekend along with various other samples.