Environment Description:

Within our Draft Fabrication Environment we aimed to portray a sense of our building, the Bodo Culture Centre within its proposed landscape, highlighting the surrounding urban and harbour areas. The vision for our building was to create a culture centre that is ‘intrinsically linked’ through its various architectural elements and by the spaces within and between these elements. These spaces needed to be ‘cohesive, connected, fluid and dynamic’ in order to create and define the culture centre within the surrounding urban setting as well as creating a connection to ‘other public spaces located in the immediate vicinity and in other parts of the city’. The culture centre was aimed to create a foundation for diverse activities including:

- recreational
- cultural
- communal
- commercial

Within our draft environment we have aimed to portray and create a sense of all these underlying factors and elements which were intended by the original designers. We decided to include and focus on the immediate urban areas surrounding our building as well as the harbour and the pier. We also included the island beyond the harbour as in reality this could easily be seen from the building as well as from the pier.

We constructed our landscape and terrain using an imported heightmap which showcases all the relevant information about our building, the surrounding terrain and landscape as well as how our building is situated on the site. We aimed to portray the terrain and landscape that could be seen by a visitor to our building, particularly the pier and the harbour as this is a focal point for our building and its surrounding spaces. We aimed to create a sense of what the pier would look like in relation to the landscape by constructing it on wooden pylons which rise from the water to meet the pier. We chose wooden planking as our material for the pier as this is similar to the actual fabrication of the pier. We established from plans of the area that there was an L-shaped element within the harbour that was not connected to any piers, and from research we concluded that it must be a rock wall to stop ships from entering the harbour too close to land, so we chose to create this rock wall within our environment as well. We also included some roads surrounding our building and showcasing its relationship and distance from the surrounding urban landscape.

Through the creation of our draft building we chose to portray a sense of the overall shape and size of the building in relation to the surrounding landscape. We felt that this would showcase how our building relates to the urban landscape as well as the harbour, and also how it is situated within and on the terrain. We also chose to create several of its internal and external spaces to portray how the building circulates internally and externally. We also added a basis element of daylight to enhance any materials and textures which we applied within our environment. Within the building itself we also created artificial light in certain areas where artificial light was necessary in portraying a sense of space and allowing the viewer to gain a sense of being within the space. We have also chosen to highlight certain areas of our building by applying various textures and materials to enhance the overall aesthetics of our building within the surrounding landscape.