Addition Development

After finishing the main core structure of my office space I wanted to go back through the brief and make sure I had completed all that was required of the task at hand.

Firstly to make it a more homely office space I went onto the Second Life website, visited the marketplace and with the purchasing of 2500 Linden Dollars I set out on a buying a number of furniture that I could place inside my building. This included:

• A dentist chair
• A number of normal office tables for the separate office areas.
• Workshop benches for the carpenter.
• Bauhaus and a mixture of Le Corbusier furniture for the space to fit in with the style.

The only problem I did not for-see was that each piece of furniture is made out of a huge collection of individual prims with the likes of the dentist chair containing around 28 prims connected together and with the lack (ie. no prims available on Second Life) I have been forced to not include them, which although wont be a major setback seeing that I can add them later if need be for presentation in my final hand-in at end of term.

The biggest problem I have found with the reduction in prims is that I still haven't quite finished building my three thresholds and doors as specified in the brief, meaning I will have to delete a number of objects to make this possible. However, in retrospect this sort of constraints can be a good learning curve in working with restrains posed by future clients, budgets, etc that have to be adhered to hence I will have to do some rearranging to make completing this part of the brief viable.

An addition to my project on the second image down is the addition of a big sculpted prim from Tessa Forde in my class which fully utilizes the idea of the space being organized around a sense of lightness even if a lot of concrete is used within the space itself. Again I would like to reiterate the sense of creating a space that capitalizes on views, the play of dark and light within it through a number of light chimneys and direction windows and through this very open and light space it also complements the two office spaces underneath used by the artist on the mezzanine floor space and the architect below (both termed as artistic professions), with the sculpty visually emphasizing this concept. As seen further I have the entire structure draping around the top of the building and falling away towards the back access entrance leading to the carpenter's workshop. The sculpty is held up by a number of columns which have been flexed and that have a slight wind effect on them making them sway slightly, created the effect of a fully floating structure that aims both to work with the ideas expressed through the building but also in a sense contradict with the heavy aspect of the concrete and blocky figures around it.

As seen also in the second picture down, the slats to the left side of the higher ramp have been given an alpha channel texture, consisting of a very engineering criss-cross truss pattern that aims to create a direct connection to my lamp templates as seen earlier in my blog. What I like about this is that the patterns work directly in context with the Victorian made train bridge next to it but with the prim being flexible it also creates a sense of contemporary architecture with a form that is quite Victorian industrial in pattern but behaves in a way exemplified by the use of modern material such as perhaps carbon fibers block that offers some bending, acting as a vertical cantilever.

This alpha channel motif has further been carried on down on the bottom slats of the dentist clinic allowing optimum light to enter the area but also with making all the bottom dentist slats flexible aswell, on a windy day, one on the inside of the building would experience a rhythmic movement of interior shadow criss-crossing over each other with the swaying ('breathing' of the building), making this an important aspect of furthering that feeling of controlled and effective use of light within the building.