It has been three days since the RIBA judges have chosen my concept 'HOLLOW' for the pavilion competition hosted by the UWE architecture society at UWE as the winner to be built on-site.
And as the situation has calmed down, the idea of it almost sounds unbelievable. Having participated in almost 12 competitions recently (haven't posted all of them), I have understood the difficulty of actually winning one so winning a competition is big. I usually enter them personally, to gain a broad knowledge of all the different projects an architect can come across and understand the challenges that come along designing of such projects.
To be honest, I wasn't planning on participating in this competition as it was summer and wanted to take the time off from constantly drowning myself 'unintentionally' in competitions and uni work. I decided on a whim, at the last minute thinking about the fact that I always drown myself in work so might as well before I regret it. If someone told me that if I participated, I would LITERALLY win the competition, I wouldn't believe it for my life. I usually consider myself winning whatever competition I participate in because I learn so many new things, and that is enough if I don't win the competitions.
And since I never got the opportunity to discuss my design process and how I came up with the concept, here I go.
The first idea that came to me when I read the brief before ever thinking about participating, without looking at any precedence is the image on the left. Yes, this is the first time I design something purely based on an idea without any precedence. And throughout the competition, I only looked at precedence to help me structurally design the pavilion so what you are seeing is purely my idea. And I am happy that this is the way things turned out; a pavilion designed by me with no precedence.
As the concept phase continued, I tried, as a matter of fact, to drift away from this concept and do something different but whenever I designed a new concept, this one remained the most original. Throughout the modeling phase, I realized that the dome concept I followed was impossible to build with the tools I got so I went back to my original concept. The problem I faced with this one is that it couldn't be bent in a way to look exactly like the drawing. Drawing is easier than modelling that actual concept.
As the first model I was trying to build looked disastrous, I didn't want to continue so decided momentarily that it wasn't worth it. When I left it and came back to it, I noticed it looked like a hollow building, you know? Those buildings you see in dystopian movies that somehow manage to stand but are in awful condition? I knew that there was more process work that needed to be done to understand what I am supposed to do with the original idea. It needed to be developed into something more than just two pieces twisting.
The problem became drawing the concept on paper. Because the triangles would look like they are overlapping each other, it became difficult to showcase the concept I had in mind alone. I needed to find a new way of modeling the concept otherwise drawing it isn't going to get the idea across. When I was designing the model, I designed it in a stacking method, and that is how I came up with the way the actual pavilion is going to be built if it ever won.
Of course, referring back to the concept and how it became 'HOLLOW'; as I thought about the idea of dystopian buildings and why the concept existed in movies, it became clear that the direction the concept was heading to was the idea human actions that lead to severe consequences. And how does this pavilion say that and relate to my studies as an architecture student? It is a representation of a building, devoid of any human life, fallen apart as a consequence of our own lack of interest in turning our wordy solutions to actions and bring down the burden we carry of having contributed at least 30-40% of the total carbon footprint.
I would like to thank the RIBA judges for choosing this concept and thank you to UWE and the architecture society for giving me the opportunity to design.
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