Author Archives: Robert Smith

Thursday 14th: today is the day where over-tiredness starts to rear its ugly head in the form of sloppy workmanship (from me) and irritation. The day started off as it intended to continue SLOWLY. Myself and Josh carried on making the model and Gabby started to format the information we had gathered into a clear concise A1 poster.

After lunch the model was pretty much finished so we busied ourselves writing up information that we may use on our poster, information gathering and more model making.

Th day slowly plodded on until 6am when we decided to call it quits. However we had decided to info gather when we got home.

Friday 15th: Today started off OK. The kids were in nice and early to help us clean up the mess which was substantial. The main priorities for the morning were to finish the site boundary fence as well as finalizing the internal layout drawings.

(I don’t know why I look so worried)

CRIT TIME

We set up in the adjoining room, the model, small sketches and the poster. Looking very professional.

The lectures were very kind (compared with a crit in the Architecture department) which was a relief. The size of the purposed buildig was a bit of an issue with Noel and Kemi but as we stated early on in the speech the design is modular so there is allowance for far more ground to be covered. However we were commended on our design of movement through the spaces.

Overall I have enjoyed this project and hope to do something similar to this in the future.

Wednesday 12th: day three and it’s certainly getting harder to wake up in the mornings: 6am starts are not nice, anyway I digress. Today we started off slowly not with any real structure of work, however once DJ and Matt arrived we got going.

Firstly I gave (the kids) a quick lesson in using scale rules in order for them to start making the 1:50 models. secondly me Josh and Gabby started to assign jobs to ourselves, for example Josh drafted up a simple CAD drawing of the layout of the inflatables while Gabby started movement diagrams and artistic impressions of the final design.

As the morning slowly rolled on I soon realised that the kids didn’t really understand what they were doing, for example we ended up with a seven sided hexagon, four meter tall buildings that were supposed to be three etc. Not to worry though as we decided to task the kids with designing the A1 page : all of the information that would be required on the sheet and the way that it would be set out on the page.

After a short lunch I finished making the skeletons of the remaking models, then Josh built the roofs for each of the eight models. Once he finished that we worked together to fabricate the tracing paper triangles that sit in between the straws.

Gabby had a few problems of her own: the main one being the movement diagrams which were far more difficult to design than first thought.

Homework: again we were asked to allocate the kids some homework to complete on Thursday. At first we couldn’t think of anything to give them but that very quickly as it became very appear not that we would need to know what Materials inflatable structures are made of, how large the fans would need to be, what horsepower would be required, what PSI change there would be, the cubic litres required to inflate a bouncy castle of similar size etc.

By the end of the day all of the models had been completed, the movement diagrams had been refined and the layout for the A1 page had been finished. Tomorrow will hopefully be a task of collating all of the information and arranging it on the A1 sheet.

Monday 10th: 9am: We are introduced to our brief, which is to create a flat pack field clinic that can fit inside a standard 40 foot shipping container. I have decided to nickname the project the Ikea building. We have also been put into groups constisting of five people, three of them are Architectural Technology students and the other two are students from Hazelwick sixth form school.

The members of my team are: from left to right Josh,Khadijah The blue bit poking out of Josh’s head (DJ), Tom, Gabby.

Once we introduced ourselves we started to decide what type of structure the building would be, what information to research to aid us in our design and what homework to assign to the college students. (I opted for the idea to allow them to do the whole project for us, unfortunately they did not agree).

By the end of the day we ended up with a huge amount of scribbles and a vague idea of what our building would look like. 

Tuesday 11th: 9am in the modeling studio.

Only eight of the class were in at 9. we were given a brief health and safety speech by Noel Painting (head lecture) about NOT drinking in the modeling studio. 

I started the day alone as my team mates were late due to a number of different problems.

When Gabby arrived I showed her the scaled drawing that I had started and we discussed the pros and cons of the purposed design.A little while later Poorang spoke to us and basically said that our design is interesting but an engineering nightmare so we decided to rethink the design which took most of the rest of the day.

When Josh arrived we had come up with a more viable design idea but it still had to be refined. Eventually we all agreed on a series of inflatable hexagons that are separate areas that each play host to one of the key areas. 

Now that we had a good design to hand we then set out information gathering, the information that we needed was: minimum floor spaces needed in the main areas in a portable clinic, materials that are used for inflatable structures, key items found in clinics and the list goes on.

MATHS!!!!!!!! We had found a chart which gives floor areas for the key areas of the clinic, we then had to work out what each length the walls of the hexagons had to be to give that floor area. After much deliberation, uming and erring we agreed on the calculation supplied by Gabby.

Great now we can model this building, this is where my tendency to be a bit of a perfectionist comes in.

Yes I am using tweezers to position a small sheet of tracing paper onto the frame of the building, Kemi said that I looked rather surgical.