After getting some feedback in my formative presentation, I have decided to develop my space further and look more into refreshment area. The reason why I didn’t put these in my design as of Week 7 as because I wanted to spend some time to really look into these spaces and make them more of a design feature and fit in with the rest of my design so far. After some further research into the benefits of rainwater, I started developing a concept for a water tank conecting to a refreshment area.
I wanted to keep the refreshment area simple as it isn’t a key factor in my concept but I still wanted it to be a feature within the space. In order for it to link to my concept of nature infiltrating the space, I wanted to make it as organic as possible. I decide to have exposed piping in the north west corner of the space looking out to the forest. The piping is a very urban feature but exposing it makes it more organic and natural, blurring that threshold between nature and urban and furthering the idea of nature and the forest infiltrating the basement of the Dadley Building.
At this point I haven’t decided the path of the piping but I know I want it to be gravity fed to create a more organic flow of the water. At this point, I have focused more on the tank its self and sizing and how I can position it underneath the overhang of the upper levels of the building. Below are my quick process and development sketches I did while working out how I could best design the tank to hold the rainwater.
I decided that the best way to design the tank was to have an angled bottom to allow water to flow down towards the pipe as it is gravity rather than run by a pump. Below is the final measurements I decided on for the tank.
Spatial Design by Ciara 