Alternative Musings

Today another student in my class gave a presentation and discussed attitudes to preservation. I hadn’t thought much about this before but it pertains very much to my project.
He mentioned a Blog entry on an Architect Student Blog Project site by a student at Taliesin, the Frank Lloyd Wright School of Architecture. The issue that this student brought up was one of the temporal natures of architecture; buildings are intended to be used, get worn, change over time, and die. Why do we tend to preserve them as if, when you step onto the site, you are to only appreciate the building as one might have the day it was erected? Better yet, is it appropriate to preserve something recognized for its livability as if it were a museum and not a house?

Check out the student’s Blog entry:
http://www.archinect.com/schoolblog/blog.php?id=C0_247_39

In addition, Hajo asked us to begin to prepare for the mid term review by generating some alternative schemes (not variations, but bona fide “alternatives”, not just different but distinct from one another). He asked for three to five volumetric alternatives to present at the review next Wednesday, with one more favored and clearly developed than the others.
When I spoke with him this afternoon he asked me specifically to develop an alternative scheme that does not involve having the new building volume over the old exchange, and to try to find a precedent to show of a successful vertical augmentation of a neoclassical building. He also asked me to be sure that I understand my “basic attitude” about the project in order to limit and guide these alternatives (I am sure that I have one, I just need to discover it a little more).
I would like to also have some alternatives in the form of exploratory models of the interaction of the “new and old”, and variations of the interior space. However, I also need to make my site model and a new set of plans, sections and elevations demonstrating the favored alternative. Therefore, I have a lot of work to do.