Elizabeth

What is CRÆFT?

In our initial investigation, we had to define the definition of craft through collage. Many of the people who specialize in their craft came from different backgrounds with different nationality to ethnicity. This is makes each person unique to their craft because they will all interrupt the same craft in multiple ways. In a city, you notice that the many buildings serve a different purpose with their own individual craft. Throughout my collage I tried layering the same crafts on top of each other to mimic buildings. Craft can build an entire city and bring people from different cultures together.

The architect that I selected was Olson Kundig who is a practicing architect duo based in Seattle, Washington. A unique trait about their firm is that they have tradespeople, fabricators, textile designers, and artists. Within their big projects, they have little elements in the project that make up the whole of it. They also focus on sustainability by recycling the environment and incorporating the environment into their designs.

Within my investigation collage, I noticed that ceramics was being used in a lot of our daily lives without realizing it. I wanted to showcase the beginning of how clay comes in and the original colors that it can come in. I expanded my collage further to the different tiles and pottery that are unique to the persons individual culture. I showed the environment and workspace that you would see in many workshops because ceramics is not a craft that you do alone. You’re always socializing with people while working on your craft and asking for their criticism to improve your work.

Concept Sketches - Project 01

In my first concept design, I wanted to focus on the social aspect of the craft and make it the center. So I had everything revolve around the central social place while the steps to ceramics were going in a circle around it. My second design focused more on the steps of the craft as individual spaces because they can become extremely time consuming on each step. I wanted to emphasize that the process to ceramics was not quick but a really slow process. Similar to my first design, I wanted to keep a flow between the different steps so I tried organizing everything in a circular flow. I ended up choosing my 2nd design as my final product.

AutoCAD Drawings

Wunderkammer Drawing + Model

My main focus of this project revolved around ceramics and how the products from this craft function in our daily lives. Through my Wunderkammer model and drawing, I wanted to express the emotions of the user through color. The clay material used in ceramics can molded into anything that the user wants it to be. Often times, the user will come in different types of emotions to produce the end product. The end product always varies from being a ceramic bowl to significant house that people live in. Ceramics is really versatile with how the user wants interrupt their emotions into products. I used the beads as a way to represent the final product coming from the users mind.

Objective : Project 02

For this semester, we continued on with our craft to a different project. We got to choose between designing faculty housing or student housing to base around our craft. I chose student housing to continue with the ceramics theme. Our location West of Lewisville Lake where the rest of the campus was located.

Parti Drawings + Concept Sketches

I used my parti designs as a way to explore the different emotions and how they affect their projects in ceramics. In my first concept, I used my parti design as an inspiration for this concept. Similar to how there is a line barrier between the two forms, college students are often met with a social wall in their first year that they are unable to overcome. In ceramics, you're first given a block of unmolded clay that you have no idea what you're going to do. I wanted to keep the private student housing separate from the public student housing, but have social places in nature to close the gap. For my second concept, compared to my first concept where I have the nature spaces in-between the buildings, I wanted the building to serve as a physical wall for the students from the public world to their private space. My first concept had talked about merging around the wall while this design talks about adapting with the barrier. Often times, students will find themselves stuck on a project because their project did not come out properly after firing it. They tend to get upset then quit over the incident, but situations like these are always going to happen. In my second concept, I have the main social place with the cafeteria and gathering spaces in the middle while the sleeping spaces wrap around to create a private space for the students to enjoy away from the public. To access the middle space, you would go through this outdoor hallway that connects the main space and the sleeping spaces. My third concept was mainly inspired for my parti design that would swirl up like the spinning wheel that many ceramicist use. The building itself was a circular building that had hallways that follow a circular motion with 5 dorms on each floor along with a community bathroom and study rooms. I had a study room that was more geometric compared to the circular building to show that ceramics can have an organic design along with geometric shapes.

Models

I ended up choosing to use the first concept design to continue with my project. I built a study model out of this design, and I decided to draw the floor plan on top of it to get an idea of where the rooms would go. I had to move around the buildings due to spacing issues so it created 2 sharp triangle wedges in-between the building that looked like pieces of broken clay. Along with those changes, I added window panels that were angled differently for each room. I began 3D printing a mass model in 1/16 scale to serve as my reference for my final model. Museum board was used for the final model and it was built at 1/8 scale.