Precendent Studies and Site Analysis

Site options (taken from Anuradha Chatterjee 2008 blogsite)
Our project might

1 set on the side of a cliff face

2 set in a valley

3 submerged into a sloping hill or cut into it to join two roads at an upper or lower level

4 bridging a creek or a river

5 set at the waterfront (harbor or river)

6 inserted into an existing urban fabric or a building or set in an empty car park


My final model is cut into a sloping hill in Katoomba, which is the largest town in the Blue Mountains and is home to the famous Three Sisters.



I looked at Tadao Ando's architecture mainly for my precedent. The first picture is the Church of light, notice how the openings on the wall bring light to the room. The wall casts a cross of light down the aisle. I also looked at his Place for Contemplation in Paris and Koshino House. All of the buildings use concrete as the material for the walls. Concrete has a hostile sense to Japanese people. It had to bring a sense of softness and refinement. Ando was trying to make people understand that it is about space, not concrete; light within the space and how the space receives the light. This is exactly what I want to present in this project.

I also gained inspiration from a 2008 student who used corrugated paper as materials for site making. First I tried to use Hebel block which is a kind of soft concrete material but I found it hard to shape without any professional tool and it produced a lot of dust. Then I found corrugated paper best fit here for it has a very representative cut pattern for the rock. And by stacking up corrugated paper layer by layer, a beautiful section can be revealed.