Model It! - Week 2

The take home task from week 1 was to build a 1:200 model of the Barcelona Pavilion.






After discovering in the first week that boxboard was a very untidy material for models I purchased a few different thicknesses of balsa wood and drew out the floor plan on the base. Instead of using glue I cut slits along the lines which I had drawn and slotted each wall into the base. For the pool I simply stuck an image of water onto the floor plan and pushed an indent around the outside of it for a shadow effect. For the large glass windows I cut plastic to size and slotted it into the base similarly to the other walls. The two roofs had to be removable to allow us to see the spaces created by the building; I attached them to makeshift hinges made from sticky tape and balsa wood.

In the studio we were given another base shape to create models from (shown below)

My first thought was to have all the walls coming to a point, which made me learn to measure every cut very accurately if I wanted to create a neat model.















For my second model I was more focused on creating a functional building from the shape. I did find that I was limited for time so - as suggested - I started cutting shapes and arranging them in different ways. This worked well and my model eventually looked like a tiered grand stand.

We then collected all the models together and saw a huge variety of designs. We were then told to design our next model as differently as possible to our other two models, using inspiration from what we had seen from the rest of the class. The original shape seemed to have two unique triangles to it, so I made a collection of these and started positioning them to form an open space model, opposed to my solid forms I had been creating.

The most important knowledge I learnt from this studio is that models can communicate very elaborate concepts, even if the model itself is not complex.