I started this assignment by collaging photos of fences throughout my neighbourhood, drawing overtop of the site photos to identify similar and unique characteristics including materiality, location, alignment, lighting, and proximity to vegetation.
I then started to group the objects. Almost all of the fences had primarily vertical alignment of the pickets, while the three that had lighting on them all had horizontal pickets. One unique feature that I thought was interesting was the variation in height.
Starting from the variation in height, I started to question: Why are all the pickets either in the horizontal and vertical dimension? From there I started experimentation with angled posts serving as pickets.
For the final assignment, I decided to use a collection of ‘doorway’ photographs I had collected on a recent trip to Europe (summer 2022) with which I have previously not done anything with.
The natural progression starts with the order the doors were encountered on my trip.
The next grouping is roughly based on color/brightness of the doors and photographs, starting with white on white and progressing to a silhouette. This was not an exact science as attention is paid to both the door color, but also the brightness of the photograph.
When starting to analyze, I note the general shape of the doorway (curved, straight). Next I was focused on the ornamentation, if any, on the doors and what style and where this was evident. but separating and examining the elements on their own I could gain a better understanding of individual techniques and how they come together.
Finally, I plotted all the doors on an x/y plot focused on ornamentation (or minimalism) and edges (or curves). Additionally, I generalized some door sketches in attempts to make the graph more immediately legible.
For these visuals, I walked around the neighbourhood and took pictures of the various paving materials. The second visual is a rethinking of the location of where the paving would typically go within the community, using tiles on the building façade, and using the boardwalk elements and rocks as the entrance pathway. One of the houses in the neighbourhood is the base for the visual.
For this assignment, I decided to analyze single-family residence entrance gates in my neighborhood. I first organized them based on material.
Single family residence entrance gates, organized by material
Recently my upstairs neighbours dog escaped through a hole in our gate, and this made me more aware of perhaps why there are so many gates in the area. I then reorganized the entrances that I had taken photos of based on how inviting they looked and whether or not they would keep pets inside.
Single family residence entrance gates organized by more/less inviting
From this analysis I started to notice that some of these gates seemed more inviting than others, and that the entrances with a more visually permeable gate, or no gate at all, and those with more planting, seemed more inviting to me. Additionally I found gates that were wooden as opposed to metal were more appealing (this is very subjective, of course), however, the entrances with metal gates would all be successful in keeping pets inside. Another observation was that the gates that lined up perfectly with the front door of the house seemed more formal and intimidating in some way, while entrances that were offset from the front door were more engaging.
From this I designed my own simple gate, with visually permeable wooden slats that has integrated lighting. On either side tall shrubs act as “bollards” to keep with the style in the area. A stone wall then acts as a “fence” which hosts small shrubs, which allows semi-privacy while still keeping pets inside safely.
typical entrance gate sketch – gate aligns directly with front door which seems very formal / intimidatingentrance gate sketch – gates offset from front door seem more invitingentrance gate design for semi privacy, lighting, and safety for petsEntrance gate design for visual semi-privacy and safety for pets
I’m an avid biker so for this last assignment I decided to look at bike racks. I’m sometimes endlessly frustrated by the poor design of bike racks so I documented a few examples around Vancouver and decided to look at the design and shape of the features as well as tried to design some new shapes that might be easier to use.
For the final assignment after wondering my neighbourhood I decided to focus in on residential doors. Upon first inspection I noticed is pretty much every single door in my neighbourhood was white, black or red/brown & there really wasn’t very much variation in shape and height.
My process of analysis was to first organize the images in one document on my iPad and then isolate the door shapes by tracing over top and separating the files. Without the context of the house and the surrounding objects each door looked very similar.
