Grid vs. Courtyard
Still working on articulating what this means for my project, but in looking at collection and urban housing, two main architectural types came to mind - the courtyard (or perhaps more generally, the boundary) and the grid.
The courtyard aggregates and contains. This typology can be applied at different scales - from the table in a dining room, the patio of a flat, the courtyard of a building, the park in a city.
The grid separates and allows expansion in repetition of the cell. It can be seen in the modulation of a bookshelf, the section of a dense housing block, the grid of a city
I took two examples at the urban scale which deal with the tension of the grid and courtyard:
First Barcelona, combining the grid at the city scale, courtyard at the building scale:
then Manhattan, the grid forming the streets with Central Park as a courtyard for the city
Finally, I'm working on drawing my own scenario which jumps to various scales within one drawing:
At the scale of the room - Barcelona's grid is embedded in the dining room table, which sits on its carpet on the gridded floor:
At the scale of the building, a double loaded corridor wraps around the building's courtyard filled with a gridded hard and softscape:
At the scale of the city, the urban block is repeated in its grid of the city streets:
This drawing(s) still needs some work, the jump from scale to scale isn't always successful yet. Also, I'd like to try another set which focuses on the elevation/sectional view and emphasises the grid.
