Today's crits

Most of you have already launched off and are tackling the hard issues of the brief and site. And that's good. The more you try to put it down on paper TO SCALE and with a full understanding of the SIZE of each room, the better.

In order not to waste your efforts you MUST ALWAYS DESIGN WITH ROOM SIZES and SPACE SIZES in mind.

UNDERSTAND THE SITE, FEEL THE SITE. You have already analysed the site, so you should know everything good and bad about it. EXPLOIT ALL THE GOOD POINTS TO MAKE YOUR SCHEME THE BEST IN THE WORLD! (I'm using subjective language, but you know what I mean.)

Some of the interesting ideas that some of you brought up were:

1. The more you overlap the functions so that more spaces have MULTI-FUNCTIONS the richer your design becomes
2. You can use more than 1 level (but not more than 2) if you can gently connect the 2 levels and make the journey eventful so that people don't tire from the journey
3. Making green spaces part of your design can really loosen up the hard building
4. The PROW seems to be an attractive site feature to many of you, and rightly so. You know that you have got to really make this so much part of your scheme that people feel that YOU designed the PROW, and not MPPJ!
5. Got to use water features carefully, discretely, cleverly, and not splash them noisily all over the place (if you like water features, that is)
6. If the building is a performance directed by a Master Architect then there must be some Stars, some supporting actors, some background actors; there must be some loud parts, some quiet parts; and the performance must address the audience all around.
7. Concentrate on the most happening place, and the rest will follow.