Building design from Australia to the required standards of architectural design - Article Example

Architectural Criticism Introduction This study presents an analytical criticism based on the comparison of a building design from Australia, to the required standards of architectural design. The building under review is an Australian modern architecture, popularly known as the Bayden Goddard Design. The architecture is a sketch of various views of the building in the Central Business District of Melbourne City. It is a three dimensional graphic of a scattered cluster of building and other infrastructural constructions. The visible pictures are tall sky scrapers from the fore ground to the back ground. The fore ground shows tall towers and a pylon, probably a memorial pillar or a communication booster mast. The middle ground shows an impression of a sophisticated transport system, with roads and a roundabout with people walking on foot. Perhaps this is an appropriate explanation of the title of the architecture, “Walking Melbourne”. The background shows a densely occupied city centre, full of tall buildings. It shows a curvature with a panoramic sky view on the background, giving an impression of a long distance towards the background. From the foreground to the background, a viewer can easily notice that the buildings are tilted (Beaver 12). First Critique: Use of Colours The architecture of Bayden Goddard Design provides a collection of uncountable buildings from the front to the background. Incidentally, all buildings use one colour. This does not present an elegant image of a city. The designer did not make a proper mixture of colours for one of the side shows of the building. From the use of colours, the image of the building architecture does not show natural colours but with the application of additional artificial light. The colour mix is especially difficult for a colour-blind person to judge. The side show displays the use of a dominant colour being black or probably dark blue. This is an impression of darkness from the background, and it makes a reader think that some features are hidden. Bayden Goddard Design shows one of the designs with skyscrapers on the background. It creates an impression of the back of a modern building. The back is a traditional structure that does not match the sophisticated view of the former picture. The colour grey here displays an old and worn out construction whose colour has probably faded away. The colours are not consistent in the various designs. For example, comparing a single feature such as the sky, shows different results, some are too dark, almost becoming black, while others are extremely too light, almost white (McCartney 23). Second Critique: Perspective The perspectives of the building in some of the pictures are difficult to analyse, owing to their tilted nature. It is difficult to make an accurate estimation of the dimensions of the construction from the angles of viewing. A viewer can easily think that the building is under demolition or under new development. From the perspective, a viewer cannot approximate the distances, or even identify the side that is longer than the other. He or she can not estimate the height of the building with accurate precision. A good architectural design should be able to present dimensions in a simple way with easily recognizable dimensions for the viewer to identify from the view the length, the width and the height of the construction. The tilt also cheats the eye about the exact shape of the construction, whether it is a cuboidal shape or a pyramid construction. Third Critique: Proportion One of the shows of the building shows the building of two storeys, comparing very closely to the tallest towers in the city centre. The architecture makes a viewer overstate the height of the architectural construction. Secondly, the buildings appear to be in contact with the sky. The height disappears into the sky however short the building is in reality. Proportionality is a critical feature for analysing an architectural design. In one of the design pictures, it is not easy to ascertain the beginning of the sea and to separate the sea from the dry land. There appears to be a horizon line on the background of the sea side photo. Some of the objects in the background appear to be larger than the foreground objects, dispelling the idea of proportionality and balance of the distribution across the architectural presentation (Perren & Kristien 34). Fourth Critique: Reality The interior design of the building does not depict reality of a residential building. It shows a lot of furniture and decoration, which occupy almost 90 per cent of the building. This in reality leaves no space for other objects to occupy. The tilted nature of the building shows an impression of a falling house. In reality, the tilting ought not to reflect. From the designs, the viewer is not able to decide on which side is the front or the back of the building. It is hard in the above photo to establish whether this is the inner sections of the room or outside. The natural features such as trees and flowers illuninate the entire coverage of the photo making the exposure to the outside environment wider. At the same time, the photo presents a view of more than two rooms in the vicinity. This is worsened by the fact that there is no architectural drawing indicating the exterior and the interior designs of the construction. The drawings ought to have been labelled in consistency with the drawing sketch, to enable the viewer understand the building better. For example, there should have been a label like, “Front view”, “side A”, “Side B” Back view, Top view and angular view. Even the angular view should be labelled to enable the viewer identify the building shape; otherwise the viewer may mistake the shape to be either cylindrical instead of cuboidal. Fifth Critique: Distances Most of the buildings as have been observed from the drawing have impressions of the distances to the background or the dimensions of the building. For example, the interior design shows a sudden shift of distances from the foreground to the background. With proper proportionality, it is easy for the viewer to accurately estimate the distances between objects. The locations of the interior sections of the house are not easy to identify, because of lack of the design drawing and the labels of the various design photos. Simple features such as entrances, swimming pool and car park are not easy to locate because of the poor structure labelling and inconsistent presentation of distances. In the picture above it is not easy to measure distances. For example, a viewer may easily assume that the dining set is located in the middle of the room. Works Cited Beaver, Robyn. 100 Top Houses from Down Under. Victoria: Images Publishing, 2005. Print. McCartney, Karen. Iconic Australian Houses. London: Murdoch Books, 2007. Print. Perren, Claudia, & Kristien Ring. Living the Modern: Australian Architecture. Melbourne: Hatje Cantz Verlag GmbH & Company KG, 2007. Print. Read More