Cliff Patterns

Group Work

FIRST MEETINGGroup Notes

Problems identified by the group regarding the site:

• how to educate people - how are they going to learn? will the task satisfy intuition?
• access to site
• how are we going to make users stop and engage?
• the structures ability to draw in users
• geography - floods?
• visibility of the structure - where is it to be viewed from? all points? one particular point?
• how do you generate or provoke emotion through the structure
• use and how this changes through the time of day and seasons
• who will use it
• what are we trying to teach? direction? history? location?
• who are we teaching? young, old, pedestrians, cyclists, families, couples, singles

There were two main questions identified:

• who are we teaching?
• what are we teaching?

Tutor spoke to us about not getting caught up with "teaching".  Don't focus on the learning outcome, learning can be done on many levels, for example the interaction with the space.  Think about how you are going to draw the user in and what qualities the structure will have - how this will generate an experience and interaction with the space.  How will this generate a user response?
Refer back to the cliff face and how this could be abstracted into a form: This idea of mimicry.
Refer back to the notion of push and pull. This idea was then explored through an interactive structure where elements of the structure could physically be pushed and pulled.

Materials discussed were that the elements that move be different to the foundation structure - timber was one suggestion, a reference to the history of the wharves and the site.  How this could be interactive, if you needed to push or pull or remove elements to enter the space? If the elements moved in place or if they could be removed and taken elsewhere within the site.

Tutor spoke to us about idea development - showed us the twisty green arch rule and made shapes, suggesting we approach the brief from a non conventional learning perspective.


Tutor spoke to us about the siteless project  - the book with many shapes - taking a form and abstracting it.  this prompted the discussion of voids and solids and how this related to the cliff face, how this could be translated into our form such as mirrored surfaces, openings, elements that could be removed and placed back.  Suggested we look at the South Korean pavilion from the last world expo in shanghai?

Ttutor spoke to us again about learning, how is it defined? wiki it and see what that says, draw from this.  Visit the site again and take into consideration weather, access, views.

We left totally confused and with the key words; push/ pull and a form that was interactive in terms of elements that can be moved within the form.

Some of the sketches discussed about the form and movement through it are below.

Above: The notion of pulling and pushing objects and materials allows interaction.

Above: The framing of views and where ever you are in the space you get a different perspective of the surrounding areas. A metaphoric symbolism towards learning and the different approaches we all take are different.

Action Items:

• research learning further
• revisit the site
• Meet Monday 12th after city until about 1:30pm to discuss research and ideas generated over the weekend.

Week 2 Photos of Howard Smith Wharf

The site visit to Howard Smith Wharf was an adventure; completed days before the DAB525 city walk cancellation. The visits include; middle of the day coming from New Farm along the top of the cliffs and walking down below and a rivercat ride. Some notes of the surroundings were:

• People using the walk/bike path above have a great view of the Wharf and overlooking the city.
• The city as the backdrop.
• Connection to Story Bridge and the historical events which have occurred; flooding and the historcial significance of heritage listed buildings
• The connection to nautre; there is trees and landscape interwoven into the cliffs, along the bottom on site and are connected around to Kangaroo Point.
• The view of the Wharfs extends to under the story bridge, still in view with the fence and gardens. Goes out of view once you progress in behind the hotels. Another viewpoint comes off the walkway from Riverside.
• The parks surrounding the cliff above is optimal for families and couples to retreat offering an surreal atmosphere.
• A walkway is expected to be rebuilt; a connection for people to walk by and enter the site.
• The walkway has activities with people doing leisure, recreation, using it as transport and exercise.
• It is sense from Riverside as the backdrop to the Story Bridge.
• Is not illuminated as night; could be to blend with the Story Bridge's light effects.
• A optimal site for Folies for people to recreate and learn.
• Possible ferry stop in the future on this site.
• A sense of a quiet relaxing atmosphere.
• Cliffs patterns are tremendous in texture, organic and repetitious order.
• The landscape patterns blending in the with surrounding features and repetitious structure offers to the atmosphere.

Some photos of the site are as follows. It reflects my progression around the site.

Above: The landscape on top of the cliff frames the Story Bridge

Above: The site is in the foreground of the City and the Story Bridge. This photo illustrates the elongated size, the bitumen road, the waters edge, the historical differences of time and the various surrounding conditions.

Above: Some of the nature on site.

Above: Some of the nature on site; the interwoven natural steps of a tree surviving on the cliff.

Above: The tremendous pattern, texture, style and colour of the cliff with landscape growing inbetween and throughout.

Above: One of the many views looking towards Kangaroo Point.

Above: The size of the cliffs illustrated by the shadows. It also reflects the nature growing over the cliff face.

Above: The on site features of a road, historical objects and typology.

Above: A possible future access point of the walkway being rebuilt and the use of a citycat/ferry.

Above: A possible place for our Folie; surrounding objects implying the historical events on this site.

Above: The heritage sheds and buildings surrounding the Story Bridge.

Above: Landscape and Nature on site could be used as inspiration for form and concept.

Above: The contrast of views, historical signifance, modernised architecture, nature at its finest, textural and fine patterns of the cliff and activities surrounding the site.

Above: Another image which can be used as  inspiration to nature.

Above: A possible positioning place. The repetitious elements provide inspiration interwoven with the patterns of the surrounding cliffs.

Above: The park above the cliffs.

Above: The various topography and coverings on site.

Above: Location near the Story Bridge and across from mangroves and Kangaroo Point.

Above: Plants underneath the Story Bridge represent repetitious order in nature providing a repeated feature seen throughout the site.

Above: The on site building located near the shed positioned closer to the City.

Above: This view is the closest access point to ground level. The site is closed with construction work; a view from outside the fence.

Above: The Story Brisge backdrop with Kangaroo Point Park and its effects contrasted against the historical building on site.

Above: Possible position for the Folie; covered by shade during the day and accessible to people coming from and to the city.

Above: The surrounding apartment blocks of the Mecure.

Above: The nearby Skyline apartment building.

Above: The acess point from the city along the Riverside walkway.

Above: The ferry and boat docking station near the walkway. It's used at the moment by Koala Sanctuary Boat Cruises and could possible be an area of a possible Ferry Terminal.

Above: A view from the citycat looking towards Fortitude Valley and the park on top. There are residential areas surrounding above.

Above: A citycat elevation view of the cliffs.

Above: The longest shed located towards the eastern side of the site.

Above: The western side of the site has the historical building and one of the three sheds.

Above: The closest of the sheds to the Story Bridge and the strong significance of history they both share.

Above: A great view of the possible area where our Folie might be positioned. This view is at ground level taken from the City Cat looking from the City.

An Urban Park for the 21st Century

READING 2: An Urban Park for the 21st Century
Tschumi, B., 1987. Cinegram Folie: Le Parc De La Villette, Princeton, N.J: Princeton Architctural Press. pp1-27.

-          The Parc de La Villette set forth an “urban park” proposing a combination of variety of activities to encourage new attitudes and perspectives.

-          A breakthrough from the 1970s to now where analysis addressed the issue of activities occurring in the city and organisation of functions and events.

-          It is an “open-air cultural centre” that encourages an integrate programmatic policy relating both the city’s needs and its limitations. The program allocated space for workshops, gymnasiums, exhibitions, concerts, scientific experiments, games; to addition of the Museum of Science and Technology and a City of Music.

-          It is regarded as one of the largest buildings ever constructed; discontinuous building, still a single structure overlapping in certain areas of the city and suburbs.

-          “It forms an embryonic model of what the new programs for the 21^st century will be.”

-          “The park forms part of the vision of the city” where the new urban parks are based on cultural invention, education and entertainment. Under the modern city conditions have invalidated the time when parks were an image of nature. It has been seen as the “exhaustion of the open space concept faced with the reality of the cultural park.”

-          The point grids of folies were developed from an existing figurative element, the abstract cube. It’s the transformation and combination that gives this development its architectural elements.

-          The superimposition of points, lines and surfaces created the park as it generated a series of calculated tensions which reinforce the dynamism of the place. Each of the systems (points, lines and surfaces) displays its own logic and independence.

-          A structural solution used was by exploding programmatic requirements through the site onto a regular grid of points of intensity. Therefore, the different types of activities are first isolated and then distributed on the site, encouraging the combination of apparently incompatible activities.

The New Model
A distinct innovate park that embodies the change of social context which creates a new model of program, form and typologies all play integral roles.

Systems and Superimpositions

The project is located in a populated semi-industrial quarter that includes two existing structure. The solution used was a simple distribution of programmatic requirements over the total site in regular arrangements of points, intensities, designated in Folios.

The scheme permits maximum movement through the site, emphasising discoveries and presenting visitors with a variety of programs and events.

Developments in architecture are generally related to cultural developments motivated by new functions, social relations or technological advances. The scheme takes this to produce itself as an image; a paradigmatic example of architectural organisation. This concept consists of series of relation neutral objects which have similarities which allow them to be qualified by function.

Each folio is bare, undifferentiated and “industrial” in character. Each folio constitutes an autonomous sign that indicated its independent programmatic concerns and possibilities while suggesting a common core to the total system. The theme and variation throughout the park reads symbolically and structurally while allowing maximum programmatic flexibility and invention.

The Parc de la Villette presents a variation on the canonical modern spatial scheme of the open plan. The grid of the Folies is a self-referential meaning: park, program and site. It’s a system of objects movements and spaces that give the park its logic, particularities and limits. The overlay of these systems creates tension thereby enhancing the dynamism of the park.

Frames and Sequences

The cinematic promenade is the feature of the park; a film strip of images, order of events, movements and space. Each part qualifies and reinforces the next and therefore as a sequence produces one story. The park is also inhabited by other events, uses, activities which are created on the structures. Therefore each frame within the park has an unique feel and is single pieces of work. The framing principle is the arrangement of the sequences whereby each frame can be mixed and combined. The content is different and can produce individual viewpoints. The landscape can also help to produce rhythms along with simultaneity of frames and lighting strips. The rhythms can be the movements between folies and the melodies are the spatial ambiances.

Concept of Folie: Madness and the Combinative

Madness is a constant point of reference throughout the park where it illustrates the disjunctions and disassociations between use, form and social values. It’s related the psychoanalytical meaning of insanity and related to the built sense of folly.  The historical connotations are abstract, broad and will develop further with new meanings in the future when people visit and have their impact. 

The folies stress that madness articulates an order to preserve cultural and social order and the park corresponds its analogy with Schizophrenia. To know one’s relationship with such dislocated city parts therefore suggesting transference as the subject. Transference being ‘transport’ a dissociation of fragments that are meeting throughout the park by meeting points. The folie becomes the common denominator between people, events and objects which develops a point of intensity.

Combination is the unforseen regroupings of the fragments. The autonomous fragments are recombined through a series of permutations, following no rules of classicism or modernism. The set of combinations and permutations are analysed as space, movement, event, technique, symbol as opposed to the old play between function and form. It is no longer concerned with composition or the expression of function but as an object of permutation, combining sets of variables, manifesting, domains different acts of pathways and a free plan. It allows for new unimagined activities to occur.

Structural System

They are composed of fragments of cage extended in additional geometric 3D elements. A red steel envelope encompasses the structural frame. The folies relate to the structural grid as a deviation; a distortion of the norm leading to heterogeneity and dissociation.

What is a Folie?

READING 1: Paris/La Villete

Bure, G. 2008. Paris/La Villete. In. Bernard Tschumi.ed.G.Bure, 47-73. Birkhauser: Basel.

• “Change was in the air”: promotion of French culture through architectural policies designed to develop a major public institution.
• Tschumi proposed to redevelop La Villette, originally slated for a modern-day slaughterhouse and shifted to a museum to a 21^st century park.
• Allowed Tschumi to engage theory and practice, the virtual and the real.
• Reviewed the history from its creation 1867 up to the controversial closing of the slaughterhouse in 1874.
• Research: Duras predicted it would be “filed away as a memory”. Carnus recalled the site as a diaspora. -Weyergans described “is indeed a place, that is, a space occupied by a body”.
• Tschumi’s concept of “space, event and movement” and his interest in architecture as a “form of knowledge rather than knowledge of form” were taking shape. It integrated ideas and concepts from Joyce’s Garden, the Screenplays and The Manhattan Transcripts.
• First proposal: more urban project “in the park, the city should not exist”.
• Joyce’s Garden: idea of a common denominator as organising principle for a heterogeneous set of information.
• Screenplays series: the concept of cinematically derived actions.
• The Manhattan Transcripts: which an architectural semiology of mobility was born.
• Resulting in a new concept of urbanism as “cinematic” superimposition of autonomous but interacting layers (points, lines and planes).
• Readability, rigor and simplicity of expression combined with complexity of reasoning and multiple possibilities.
• 25 folios that punctuate the 135 acre park won the competition.
• More than isolated sculptural objects, the folies appeared at once punctuation, animation and action. The simplicity of their assembly system belied the sophistication of their potential configurations.
• -          Folies: Information, ticket, cafe, music, observatory, stair, clock. From the park entrance along the entire promenade; the buildings occupy space, generate movement and amplify action.
• Layers (points, lines and planes) 
•   Lines indication circulation paths across the site
•  Two major pedestrians axes took shape linking the cardinal points of the site
• Offsetting perpendicular axes, Tschumi developed a sinuous “cinematic” promenades that winds its way though almost two miles of garden.
• Folies activated the rhythm of programmed functions.
•  A point-grid of discrete buildings known by their French name, Folies, demarcates the site. These folies, in turn, feed polemics and open a flood of opinions, fueling debate. 26 in number, 36 x 36 foot red cubes articulated to different programmatic requirements and spaced out at regular intervals over the evenly gridded field.
• Red Folies: “activators of space” rather than as sculptural objects.
• Symbolically exceeding their respective function as usable space, signage or even visual markers.
• Tschumi’s vision of an “urban park”: a point grid structure with thematic gardens and area of intense activity interrupting zones of silence.
• Tschnumi’s folies recall the linguistic inventiveness of his earlier work and influences.
• He embraced the notion of linguistic slippage or ‘transference’ in architecture, and the structures were both architectural “follies” and “madness”.
• The folies were conceived in the spirit of linguistic play: they resisted a precise architectural meaning and instead, implied multiple meanings.
• The folies change according to their assemblage and topographical positions. And parameters that constantly transformed their appearance by the seasons, the hours, light and shade, night and day.
• The folies missed “a house with a fold-up stage, a revolving library, a winter garden, a sculptural ensemble, a chapel”.. The range of uses, different activities and movements animate them leading to the dissolution of programmatic specificity.
• They are multi-functional, non-functional, or designed to “collide with” or “respond to” other facilities.
• He viewed the La Villette as being “in suspense”.
• The work was of “programmatic deconstruction” and “general dislocation”.
• His interest was in a “negative grammar” made up of dissociation, dislocation, disjoining and deconstruction with the aim of questioning ‘the things that hold together’, all the while recognising the paradox that architecture and the ‘enigma’ of the work, the signature, is still after all ‘what holds together that which is  not held together organically.”

Week One: The beginning...

The beginning of a project and I'm excited... the anticipation to help allow dreams come true and inspire people of Brisbane through Architecture. The meaning of architecture to many people differ depending on our background, philosophy, culture, knowledge and upbringing. Through this project the recognition of Brisbane's culture and fundamentally designing a Folio on Howard Smith Wharves near the city will hopefully bring out my meaning to Architecture and it reconfirm my knowledge, beliefs and values to this city.


This project will reconfirm our world, our city and ourselves in representation an object of recognition. To encounter this object, will reinforce our being of who we are enabling to appreciate the city and life we have. Therefore, stimulate a thought; a thought away from the challenging world of our hectic busy lives and help challenge and provide a moment of affirmation to your world. The affirmation will proceed with a new meaning, new thought processes, new learning encounters, creative adaption and have a positive effect on your life.


As O'Suillvan (2006) reinforced life is history of all these encounters, which will always necessarily occur beyond representation. Us as individuals have the opportunity in life to take risks, accept challenges, decide which pathway to take in life, we are our master and we determine the life we want. We may or may not want certain memories or encounters, but all make us who we are and influence our lives.

"The life of every man is a diary in which he means to write one story, and writes another; and his humblest hour is when he compares the volume as it is with what he vowed to make it."



J.M. BARRIE, The Little Minister

This quote supports the notion of life being able to take different paths and how our story impacts another individual without us knowing. Your decisions become your story and it has your dreams and your ability to change it to how you want it to be. To reinforce this meaning within Architecture can inspire people to change, to take a different path, and to evoke feelings within a space. The space might be when you are just by yourself or with a friend or family member. Each space will reflect a different meaning to each person; we all take a different view and perspective and recreate it to make it our own and apart of us.

"Architecture is life, or at least it is life itself taking form and therefore it is the truest record of life as it was lived in the world yesterday, as it is lived today or ever will be lived."



FRANK LLOYD WRIGHT, An Organic Architecture

Architecture is the life we live, the built environment makes up 70% of our lives and impacts us more than we think... our route to work, leisure, daily routine, sport trips, holidays, monuments and pathways. It creates a space of order which we can decide to manipulate, break, defy, adore and stimulate an encounter to a person in the space.

"Know what you love, Do what you love, Do it well"

In reading quotes it provides guidance to producing confident decisions and impacting this direction of this design. The process will explore and redefine Brisbane, provoking emotions, impacting on everyday life and enabling new ventures in work and life. As Watz Productivity Design and Development (2012) states life of architecture involves prioritising values and goals, investing in strengths and improving with feedback. The design process is dependent on the actions of our decisions and the methods explored to give achievement to the specific space. The strengths allows the process to flow smoothly; setting a foundation and creating an awareness that will impact the action taken. The feedback in the design process is crucial towards a successful project as it acts to inform and account for the communities values and cultural life. The final design will be achieved in teamwork of group members and qualified architects.


Learning is the fundamental ideal of the Folie and I will conclude with glimpses to the brainstorming task. These images provoke an understanding of what learning is:

Learning is a process that is continuous... You learn something new everyday.

Learning is to be grateful... You start as a small pod while the teacher overpowers you and steers you in the right direction.

This is both of the individual using the space, in making a challenge and allow them to encounter new experiences; and for us as designers, as we take particular steps throughout this design.