After working through some more designs individually, we met together at the site as a group to discuss ideas. Whilst at the site, we began discussing the surrounding natural environment focussing mainly on the river and the mangroves. We thought we could use the mangroves as part of the learning by abstracting the form of the mangrove. After researching the structure and biology of mangroves, we discovered how vital they are to the ecosystem because of how the filter the water and create a safe haven within their root system. Below is a sketch of the basic root structure of a mangrove.
Incorporating vertical structures into our designs to represent the root structure was the next stage of our design process. We drafted a variety of plans the incorporated water flowing in and around vertical elements. Some examples of our designs can be seen below.
Our idea of incorporating the river water in our design would mean that pumps and filters would be needed to ensure constant water flow. Although this idea would be aesthetically pleasing both visually and acoustically, we believed that there may be issues with the quality of the water, safety with children and maintenance. We decided to design structures that represented the water and river but did not include running water. Still using the vertical structures to represent the mangroves, we drafted ideas of how we could represent flow of water. We came up with the idea of using people moving through a structure to create the illusion of water. The structures would run loosely parallel to each other to represent how mangroves line the river and would snake along in a line, loosely following the form of the Brisbane River. As people wonder through this structure, they follow the flow of the river and important views are revealed to them. The pictures below show rough sketches of this plan which will be refined and used for our final design project.
