Author Archives: Jake Hagan

This was the day that we were to present our final poster and the model. As we had stupidly not done any work on the poster before the morning I had a full on morning putting it together.

I was sticking down the floorplans and elavation that I had done previously and typing out some additional boxes of text to go under the pictures. I then went to the library to print these off and stuck them on also. I was pretty happy with the result considering I had put it together on the day, ideally I would have done it on a computer and printed it out but due to the very tight timescale of the project this would’ve been very hard. A picture of the poster can be seen below

Watching and listening to other peoples presentations was very insightful, as every group but one decided to use shipping containers it was interesting to see how they had overcome the problems that we had also incountered. The most interesting prooblem was seeing everyones methods of working around the limited space; there were some ideas which were very similar to ours in the way of haing a folding out decking but also some other interesting concepts like whole sections that slid out.

I feel our presentation went well, we filled the 10 minutes without having to pause or think of anything to make time which was good. We also answered all of the questions with an answer that was logical and answered the question. The only downside was that we missed afew points off the costing sheet that we forgot about. Apart from this I feel we did a good job overall and I’m pleased with our final result.
I also enjoyed the week as a whole, the work load was very high but in fairness we were warned! Pictures of our final model can be seen below

Day 4 consisted of me drawing up a 1:20 floorplan of our final design, I was employing the drawing techniques from the drawwing studio sessions we had with Michaela last year, I enjoying drawing this as it was completely something we had created not something I had to copy.  The one thing I did not do which I wish I did on reflection was draw both single sofa-beds on the decking with dashed lines showing their extension. I also should have labelled what certain things in the drawing were, as when I left it there were only the labels for the rooms

Once I had drawn the floorplan I decided that we needed an elevation of the front of the container showing the raised roof with the panes in and the decking folded out with the awning up. Doing this gave us a much better image of what it would look like with an awning up.

The technical drawings took me a long time, but when I got home I typed out the boxes of text that made up the descriptive parts of the poster.

The third day of the trip consisted of commuting to Chichester Collenge to help our group members from there work on our model. When we arrived we had a brief talk about health and safety as we would be working in a workshop and then we went down to look at the current progress of our model. Paul had made a great start of making the main frame of the shipping containers and cutting out the panels that would make up the steel part of the walls. A picture of our model when we arrived can be found in the picture below.

We started by splitting up the group into individual jobs, I decided that I would begin with work mainly on the walls. I started by creating the fold down section of the wall that woud make up the decking. I did this by cutting the wood with a jigsaw. I then screwed the hinges attached to the decking panel into the frame of the container. As the panel was the right size we did not have to create a fastner for the door, it simply fitted well into the frame. A picture of me cutting the decking piece can be seen below. The next job I did was to create the stud walls which would make up the partition walls for the bathroom, I found this harder than I first thought as getting the very small pins to line up with the bits of thin timber was hard. I eventually made one fo the stud walls and george dd the other. We decided to not finish one of the faces as we wanted to show the structure of the wall inside. By the end of the day I felt like we had achieved a fair amount and was happy with how it looked sofar, knowing that Paul and Rob were going to carry on with the construction of it on thursday. A photo of how it looked after their work on thursday is shown below.

on the second day we met in the drawing studio at 9am, we began to start our allocated tasks from the day before. I started the draw a 1:20 drawing of our floor plan design from the day before. It was when I came to inputting the furniture into the rooms that I truly realised how small the space inside the container was.

We had initially hoped to have an individual bedroom, kitchen/dining and bathroom, but after seeing the limited space we then had to redesign the floor plan in order to achieve all of the requirements but within the enclosed space. For this we decided to create a living space that converted into a bedroom. This would be achieved by using sofa beds, sofas that fold out into beds.

We decided this and then got on to Skype with our Chichester College student Paul to inform him of our ideas to change and what his thoughts on our revised floor plan were. He agreed with the idea and fortunately had not started diving the container he had made yet so no changes to the model had to be made.
Between me Rob and Paul we then sat down and using dimensions of furniture pieces george had found while doing the costings we tried to arrange it in the allocated space so that it would fit. We struggled with the space for the kitchen as the units had to be quite wide in order to provide the services required. But when we made the kitchen the required size it encroached too far into the living space so the sofa-beds would not fit in while ensuring there was enough circulation space for a wheelchair user.

We got around this problem by making the kitchen counters an L shape against the wall of the bathroom. We also at the same time came up with a solution to the sleeping arrangements, if they were all laid out on the floor of the container it would be very shoulder to shoulder. We therefore decided that the fold out decking would be a more permanent feature with an caravan style awning covering it. This meant that the 2 single sofa-beds could be placed out here and stretched out to sleep on with plenty of spare space.

The split decking system was also reconsidered, it was replaced by a full height single decking, eliminating the top shading tier. This was because we needed the space more down below for the single chairs and the awning, if chosen could be used as a shade instead and it would cover the whole decking rather than just a section of it

We started off in the morning by meeting the schools and being seated into our individual groups. We then had an introduction from the client, explaining to us the basic function of the temporary accommodation and the demographic of the client it would be used for. This was concluded as families and people with mainly sensory disabilities, but the transportable, compact living accommodation must also must cater for people in wheelchairs. At this point we were all brainstorming ideas about what we could use to fit this specification while keeping inside the tight £7000 budget.

We then had a talk by John Smith, an ex Brighton Architectural Technology student who had spent a lot of his career involved with projects that focused around building with shipping containers. An idea that I had thought of before his introduction to the idea due to seeing some used on grand designs.
John had been involved in a local project to create housing for the Brighton Housing Trust, they are stacked modular containers with an single apartment inside each container. (See image below)

Straight after this we had a discussion from Noel, he went over some pro’s and cons of shopping containers also. Expanding on what John Smith had said before.

We then began discussions within the group about what type of design we thought would work best while still fitting inside our briefs specifications. We concluded that a shipping container was indeed the best option for our design as it is flexible as to what you can do and is already a contained space to work with. It also works very well with the transportability aspect of the brief as Instead of having to break it apart into pieces. This is because these shipping containers are designed around being moved easily.
We then got down to discussing layouts of our rooms and different ways in which we could organise them to maximise the space usage of our container. Everyone had good ideas and was inputting them into the group, we were also drawing sketches of different ideas which unfortunately I do not have a picture of as they are stuck to the poster.

At the end of the day we decided what peoples job for the following day was and I was tasked with drawing a scale drawing of our chosen floorplan.