DOMUS-presentation

DOMUS-plans and elevations

completed wall sections.

overlapping roofs to differentiate the different spaces

DOMUS-concept development

DOMUS

Task
Domus: Extend your minima project to design an autonomous sustainable shared live-work environment that can accommodate three to five people in a specific climate zone.
Objectives

Understand the relationships between individual (private) and collective (shared) spaces within a living environment;

Explore the relationships between buildings and their environment (landscape, climate and culture);

Explore the impact of energy (passive), materiality and external site constraints (shadow, breeze, topography) from the environment on making architectural space;

Introduce the notions of ordering, organisational principles, repetition and composition in architectural form making;

the project must address the local climate with an emphasis on environmental sustainability and passive low-energy architecture. You are required to develop a prototype for your climate zone. Specifically, your prototype must show how the external physical environment (temperature, humidity, breeze, heating, cooling, light and precipitation) can be addressed through architecture.
The live-work envelope must cater for two types of spaces, individual private spaces, and shared collective spaces. Within these, you can define how a sleeping space, study or work space, a living and dining space, and services (wet areas, food preparation, storage) are allocated.



















































Publish Postakadu is located in the tropics, 12 to 14° south of the Equator. The climate is monsoonal, characterised by two major seasons: the dry season and the wet season. The 'build up' describes the transition between these two seasons.

During the dry season (April/May to September), dry southerly and easterly trade winds predominate. Humidity is relatively low and rain is very unusual. At Jabiru the average maximum temperature for June-July is 32°C.

During the 'build up' (October to December) conditions can be extremely uncomfortable with high temperatures and high humidity. However 'build up' storms are impressive and lightning strikes are frequent. In fact the Top End of Australia records more lighting strikes per year than any other place on earth. At Jabiru the average maximum temperature for October is 37.5°C.

The wet season (January to March/April) is characterised by warm temperatures and, as one would expect, rain. Most of the rain is associated with monsoonal troughs formed over Southeast Asia, although occasionally tropical cyclones produce intense heavy rain over localised areas. At Jabiru the average maximum temperature for January is 33°C.

Annual rainfall in Kakadu National Park ranges from 1,565 mm in Jabiru to 1,300 mm in the Mary River region.

The following charts provide an indication of rainfall, temperatures and humidity within the Kakadu region. Data for the charts was sourced from the Bureau of Meteorology, Darwin.

MINIMA-research

Living Cubes and Resource Tower from Nomadic Furniture vol.1

It is not clear to me precisely where and when the Urban Nomad movement started. Books relating to it I have found seem to have emerged in the 1960s and then fizzled out by the late 1970s, the movement being more-or-less absorbed into the more generalized Soft-Tech movement. But it was clearly distinct, with its own version of a Post-Industrial ideology. The Urban Nomads were a scattered community of young designers who shared a common image of an emerging highly mobile and very sophisticated youth culture which sought liberty through simple technologies of self-sufficiency. It wasn't a 'back to the earth' ideology based on recreating an agrarian lifestyle. It was about living light for the sake of mobility with a reliance on self-made artifacts made from common materials and industrial cast-offs for the sake of economy and efficiency, the off-the-shelf products of the consumer culture simply being impractical -too expensive, cumbersome, inefficient in their use of materials and space- for a nomadic lifestyle. Some anticipated an imminenent break-down of the consumer and corporate cultures as a result of their inherent non-sustainability and the dominant trend of technology evolution toward systems of decreasing size and increasing capability, ultimately restoring the power of self-determination through the decentralization and eventual personalization of industrial production. Put simply, they saw a future where most everyone could maintain as high a standard of living as they could imagine through the products of their own labor and ingenuity and by virtue of increasingly capable tools and clever design.

The Urban Nomads were not designing static artifacts for their aesthetic value or novelty but rather were cultivating a new kind of vernacular technology -a system of DIY fabrication which could be freely employed by anyone with simple tools and materials. So when they shared the results of their design efforts it was in the manner of sharing DIY instructions, not objects. In essence, these people were the Open Source programmers of their day. And no system of building epitomized these ideals better than Ken Isaacs' Matrix, the veritable Linux of modular construction.

Not much documentation of the Urban Nomad movement exists. Because it was characterized as relating to the 'youth culture' with its attendant 'hippies' and the like, it did not have much respect with the mainstream publishers. But its proponents were effective self-publishers and the record of this movement exists in the interesting form of an assortment of DIY building books by grass-roots small-press publishers. The Urban Nomadics movement was not about design style or theory but rather about a culture of appropriate technology. So the books the proponents of this movement wrote were intended to share the technology they had invented, much like the handyman and hobby books from which their writing and illustration style derived. This ultimately became the standard for the many Soft-Tech books which followed in the 1970s. I was able to find a few of these Urban Nomad DIY books including Ken Isaacs own How To Build Your Own Living Structures and the Nomadic Furniture vol. 1 & 2 by Hennasy and Papanek.

cube shaped house - Germany, designer unknown




first generation Microhouses




















Loft Bed and Hopkins house from High-Tech

MINIMA

Tablinum

these are my measurements
this will come in handy when assessing the relationship between the space and myself