Senior Year Bauhaus Dilemma

How can one achieve creativity?

Hexagonal Model

During my last semester in architecture school, I was given the task of creating a Bauhaus School, a school that enhances creativity. I began my project, wanting to play around with shapes, with the idea about how hexagonal shapes could potentially be morphed into an interesting design.

I didn’t want to just make a design based on ideas, I wanted to explore shapes before coming up with an idea. That’s been the most difficult process of this whole ordeal. Architecture school allows for a lot creativity. But that creativity can become lost as we start to think about actual buildings. For me, I didn’t really understand the full capacity of the freedom that I learned during the first two years of arch school. After all the exploration, during the two foundation years, I went back to what I thought was the norm in Architecture.  Unfortunately, the design eventually turned static, as a result of being critiqued, and it slowly turned into rectangular spaces. 

The irony in all this was that we were trying to achieve creativity for the students. Because I was losing creativity during the process, I felt the design was also loosing its end goal. How were the students supposed to be creative when the architecture doesn’t exploit its own creativity? This is one of the reasons why I was disappointed
with my Bauhaus School. I wanted the students to notice their environment, but because I lost my initial exploration, the project became stale.

Complexity

Exterior Back Render

Exterior Model View

Building a school that has a museum, a concert hall, a library, a tech shop, a food court, a tech lab, and studio space was a monumental task in itself. I also had a lot of limitations during this process. This is because the space that I was building actually already had exteriors. So we were using the old rectangular hollow space and then adding an extension that could be any shape. Now that I look back, I do like the space that I created, but I wish some of the space had more dynamic elements integrated.

Thus I didn’t have the time that I wanted to have. So for this blog, I’m going to slowly experiment and create some designs that will showcase what I mean by organic creative space. Since this is a school, I propose that the students are the primary occupants of this space. Even though there are teachers and other community occupants who will visit the library, I want to focus primarily on the students that will be learning at the Bauhaus school. This school is for honing one’s creativity. So by understanding how natural shapes can enhance the creative experience, I’m going to argue that, one’s creativity increases based on the surrounding that one is exposed to.

Hypothesis

My hypothesis comes from the fact that, natural shapes are more interesting visually, thus the consciousness well recognize and care for the surroundings even if habituation takes control. If the body unconsciously associates the natural shape positively, then the students will have a better time in the space. By pushing the limits on the shape, the whole experience for the students will become more positive. At least that's what I hope the experience to be. But regardless, I think it'll be an interesting experiment.