Design Studio 4 -- Developed Design Final Panels and Concept

By studying the Aboriginal arts, I found that the circles stand for meeting places, and I hence decide to develop my design based on the circles. I made the circles my gardens, by doing so, the gardens are “wrapped up” by the building forms and meanwhile, the building is surrounded by gardens.

Focusing on circular gardens, my concept is to create contrast in terms of sensory, materiality, circulation etc. The coal loader itself is creating contrast to the surrounding bushes. I made my first contrast at the upper site; I demolished a tiny little bit of external brick walls and wrap the external up by using white concrete or build on top of the brick walls. Some of the internal walls were demolished for creating larger spaces such as the internal theatre and the space for large sculptures, and these two spaces have high ceiling with special type of openings for controlling light. After entering the information space, people would enter to a darker internal gallery, then they void open the space up, then they would choose to enter the darker theatre or sculpture space; then to the outside garden. The green roof not only provide people access to the platform, but also provide people inside of the theatre and sculpture space with green natural elements.

I removed the central part of the coal loader as I think people would come from every direction; and also, this makes other contrasts such as the linear dark tunnel to the more open light courtyard in the center of the coal loader. On top of the platform, the circulation is still around the circular gardens. Different from the internal gallery space, I made the external sculpture space sunken (so that people would go down) for creating higher space.

Some of the art studio are located around the edge of the removed coal loader, some of them located more towards the inside since I think different artist would have different personality, some of them might like space with ocean view, some of them might like garden view, some of them prefer darker spaces, etc. So I created different studio spaces for different kinds of artists.