A Rain Shelter

The first task we have been given in Public Landscapes is to design a rain shelter.

"When the shelter is sure, the storm is good" - Henri Bosco

The site which were given to place our rain shelter was the land next the stream which links the main campus with the engineering block shown below:

For me the most exciting thing about this site was the Taxodium distichum (swamp cypress) trees, so i decided to take this inspiration further and look into where trees originated from, i found that they come from south west USA down to the Guatemala rainforest's, from this i them started to look more into the Guatemala rainforest's and found that this was the location of the Tikal National Park: the ancient Mayan city with large stone buildings I also looked at local rainforest communties and what they used as rain shetler using woven palms as roofs.

All of these thoughts i sketched down onto paper (shown above) something that i found extremly useful to collect my thoughts. I also looked into the swamp cypress and how they have "knees" which allow the tree to breath. The knees were also prefect for the brief and the fact that they are on the thershold between land and water exactly. (Shown below)

From all of this research i then made some models to try and express my ideas, to start with i could only think about the community rainforests, but then i began to think my conceptual looking at the knees again and produced a shelter out of paper mache which syblolise the knees of swamp cypress trees - i then wanted to use my research that i had done on the Tikal buildings and decided to make my next model out of stone inspired by the stone Mayan buildings i also used the trainaglar shape that both the buildings and knees have and came up withe the following ideas: 

The final image being my final design. The image in the middle shows the model being tested to see if it could was water proof and whether it could hold and release the water. Which it did and it made an exciting shelter for people to explore and experience the thershold between land and water.