Day 1
Today we met our team mates and as my name was first on the list I was put as team leader, a position which I was happy to accept. Our team is compiled of three Architectural Technology students from Brighton, one electrician and a carpenter both from Chichester and one 3d design student from Hazelwick School, the interdisciplinary mixture should give a greater insight into how to fully design and construct our project. Once we had met we were given our task to design an eco-cabin for the charity care co-op Brighton which would be built by us all throughout the week. The cabin in question had some rather restricting aspects which to design around… with a material budget of £7,000, disabled access and a high focus on being environmentally friendly this task does not look easy. We were given a lecture about shipping containers specifically on their affordability and versatility. Most people took away the idea of using a shipping container as their main structure from the lecture but we decided to look at other more complete options like refrigerated trucks. The idea being they’re a solid, insulated cheap option that could be easily transported and would eliminate the problem of damp that regular containers suffer from. Unfortunately this turned out to be a waste of time as the average price was around £2,500, almost three times the price of a shipping container, for this price we could afford to insulate our container with expensive high performing materials and still have money left over. After we decided against the truck idea and for a shipping container we could begin out designs. I set the team goal of finalising our designs by the end of the day in order to allow the construction team enough time to complete the model. I gave the Chichester students the task of looking at the structure, the Brighton students the layout (of which I looked at the kitchen, gave charlotte the living room and Tai the kitchen) and hazelwick the environmental aspects of a shipping container. We looked at a few different designs, placements and sizing’s and came up with this
figure 1 sketch 1
figure 2 fold out roof
figure 3 sketch 2
figure 4 sketch 3
The idea was to allocate a tiny portion of the space to the W.C., a slightly larger space for the kitchen as it requires more storage and the largest space for the living/sleeping area in order to make it more of a social living space. Once the room sizing was complete we looked at various ways of naturally lighting the cabin. The first and most obvious way was to replace the doors with a sliding glass door, a very cheap and easy way of lighting but would lead to a claustrophobic a cramped feel at the opposite end. With this in mind we thought about other places to allow light in and came up with the idea of cutting one large panel of steel out the side and replacing it with glass. We knew this would be expensive but would create a much lighter more open feel making the cabin a more liveable space.
Our thoughts turned to the large panel of steel we decided to remove and what to do with it, instead of wasting it we thought of turning it in to a draw bridge/patio area for guests, giving them a space to relax outside when the weathers good but also making it possible to safely lock up at night. With our design finalised it was time to call it a day.
Samuel Lester
