Finalising Our Floor Plans

Our first studio session since receiving feedback from our current slides was incredibly productive as we had set out goals to achieve and worked towards these throughout the day. We collectively worked on the final floor plans for the cafe, the mezzanine workshop and the retail space. We were tasked with printing our layout on A1, which we then added a layer of tracing paper to sketch out our layout  before finalising. Working on a much larger scale to those we are used to, with the confines of our sketchbooks, allowed for us as a group to be much more creative and free thinking when it came to showing our ideas. It was a great way to collaborate as everybody could add their individual aspects at the same time, working on the sheet together.

Towards the end of our day in the studio, we had a tutorial; giving us time to reflect on and further develop the work we had produced that day. We ran into a few issues which we have worked on fixing, for example, the cafe’s high table facing a blank wall that needed to be changed or altered to feel like a more inviting space. To combat this, we have extended the table round the corner of the space to encourage more social interaction and have also implemented a feature wall behind this to give the nook a more interesting and creative element to it. As well as this, we found that the upstairs was lacking in natural lighting and openness to the rest of the building and so, to fix this, we included a glass wall in the workshop that would overlook an aisle of the exhibition space. We also added a mid height half wall behind the sewing machine desks that will overlook the retail space and will simultaneously let in natural light from the front window. The final change we made was to the walls of the exhibition. It was apparent that the long straight walls lacked creativity and needed to be changed up to discourage repetitiveness in the space. With the last aisle of the space, we changed the shape of the partitioning wall to a curve to evoke a sense of curiosity and ambiguity. As the wall gets higher as it leads towards the staircase to the workshop, we thought the shape would guide the user towards the end of the corridor and up to the interactive space. These changes may seem somewhat minor yet they will play a big role within the overall atmosphere created by our design.

By the end of the day, we had all established an agreed floor plan for the entirety of the building that all made sense, with each space having a coherent design and purpose. Overall, we are all very happy with the final floor plan and now need to work on creating a section of this to display our ideas in a visual way that makes more sense at a glance. Once this is done, we will focus our attention towards compiling all of this work together and developing our A1 sheets even further, ready for our final presentation before submission.