Final+Project

media type="youtube" key="HWoGALT3UiE" height="315" width="420"

This trimester I am coursing "Design I", wich is a basic design course where we designed three buildings: a building shaped like a cube, a vertical building and a horizontal building. For the first exercise, which is the one that I am going to talk about in this project, we had to find the relations between architecture and one of the seven traditional arts, which are: painting, sculpture, theatre, dance, photography, architecture and writing. We also had to choose one famous artist that represents that art. I chose dance because it inspires me, and I used that inspiration to design the cubic building. This building has to transmit the essence of the art and also has to serve as a workhouse for the famous artist. We have to evaluate the requierements of the artirts to design the program of the atelier. According to Leonardo Da Vinci : “Dance concentrates on the movement of the body in space, and architecture tries to create this space in an organized secuence of movements and rhythms”. Architecture is a choreography of movements for the human body, and dance is the architecture of the movements of the body. Both disciplines works with the space as their principal tool to develop their art. So, a building is a body who has life, arteries and veins. I chose Zhandra Rodriguez as my client, she is a venezuelan ballerina born on march 17th, 1947 in Caracas, Venezuela. With more than 50 years of professional career, she has been dancing around the world as the principal ballerina of very important ballet companies, such as the ones from Moscu, Berlin, Cuba and Argentina. She is the creator of the International Ballet of Caracas and the New World Ballet Company of Caracas. In my project, I try to represent the twisting, the motion and the flow of dance in the building, the twisting was represented in a stretched cubic shape that I bended, and in the position of the circulation system, the stairs, and the fluency was represented in the air between the volumens that create the building. I used as a reference The Ladera Park in Medellin, Colombia to see how they create a floting volume that is communicated with the location. The building was placed in front of a public square at the Caribbean coast. In the back façade it has a service street. The house is between two other houses. So, the principal façade, which is the square one, has to be different so that it can stand out and be communicated with the public space more directly that the one on the back. The program of the building is organized in this way: it has a living room in the entrance and a cafeteria in the first floor. It has a secundary rehearsal salon ,a dressing room and a bathroom in the second floor, the third floor contains a big salon that is to be used for dancing, a solarium and a bathroom. Over this big salon I designed a hall for the people who want to see what's going on in the dance salon. The stairs are illuminated by the light that comes through a perforated wall, this gives an important roll to the circulation in the house. The materials I used were concrete, wood, glass, and. I used concrete for the structure of the building, because it's a strong material that can hold up a lot of weight. I used wood for the floors because I consider that wood is a very elegant material. I used glass for the skin of the building because I want people from the outside to see the dancers while they practice. I hope you have enjoyed this presentation, thank you for your attention, have a nice day. Maria A. Ortega
 * English Final Project**