Drawing to Find Out

To the group, drawing to find out meant distilling the many ideas and drawings that go into the design process into one single visual piece. Some of the key architectural ideas the group personally believes in are the idea of critical regionalism and contextualism previously mentioned. Both meaning that architecture has to meaningfully connect to its surroundings and ultimately become part of it rather than act as an object placed into the landscape. One of the best examples of this is the Ningbo Museum by Wang Shu constructed in 2008. The Ningbo Museum shares an intimate connection with its context. The facade is comprised of rubble salvaged from nearby demolished villages as a result of China's rapid urbanisation. The rubble is then assembled using the local Wapan construction method, which dates back thousands of years. The overall form of the building is inspired by the surrounding mountains based on Wang Shu's belief that architecture has to incorporate its entire surrounding landscape, not just the immediate context.

Thus to capture all of this into a single drawing, a Chinese landscape painting was used as the base (which Wang Shu obsessed over as a child) for which layers of the different characteristics of Ningbo Museum were added. China's urbanisation is depicted in the foreground, leading to the destruction of the traditional Chinese village before culminating in the centre where the Ningbo Museum sits as the temple would in a traditional painting. The mountains in the background lead to the valley created in Ningbo Museum's roof, reflecting the inspiration behind the overall form. This level of relationship with context is the aim of The Community Fulfilment Centre by thoroughly investigating the history of Old Aberdeen and abstracting it into the design process.