The Story So Far

Since it was brought to my attention that my narrative for my project was in need of a lot of work, I decided that it would be one of my mian focuses for Friday's sort-of-deadline. I've been thinking about it quite a bit anyway, but I decided to put pen to paper this afternoon after I got my model together and wrote out my inentions for how the project would go.

To start my narrative, I had to develop a few conditions that I had to abide by for the project, such as how many people would inhabit the space and their methodology regarding the site. I decided to have four different people inhabit the outside of the building, each with a different area of expertise. These four people would work together to create a functioning building on the fringe of another building.

In order to live on the outside of a building, there were four main problems I have to address:

• Structure

• How the pods and spaces are actually resting on the building and interacting with each other

• Electricity

• How am I going to provide power to each person to accomodate their needs?

• Heating and Cooling How can I keep people comfortable without resorting to on-the-grid techniques?

• Water

• How do I ensure these people don't die or reek to high heaven?

There is a nice coincidence with all of this, of course, in that I have four people, four problems, and four sides of a building. The question is, how can I make a plan so that all four people can actually get going?

The first step is to choose which sides each person is going to inhabit. To do this, I had to look at site conditions to figure out who would benefit the most in which area.

• West Side

• The West side would be occupied by the structural specialist, and this is also the jumping point for the whole project. The reason I chose this side for the structural specialist is that there is a parking lot directly below this side. That way, a truck could come in and deliver materials to the person on the west side, who could use a shop to create the rest of the structures for the building.
• This is a really important side as well, because the size of that shop will determine the maximum size of any piece that can be used for the rest of the project

• South Side
• The south side is the side that is exposed to the maximum amount of light on the building, and this makes it the perfect spot to gather solar energy in many different forms. This is where the electrical specialist will reside, and it will be his or her job to harvest, store, and distribute the energy that can be obtained from the south facade.

• North Side
• The North side is the least enviable spot to be in for this project, and this is where the heating/cooling specialist will have to reside. The reason I chose to put this person back here is that I wanted to create a computer controlled system for operating the heating and cooling devices around the building, and since this will probably require a few computer terminals, it means that this person is naturally going to have a couple of heat sources to rely on when it gets cold out.
• This is the toughest side of the building to live on, and will require the person on it to have a lot of mobility, and this person will most likely have to be the biggest draw on electrical resources due to its shaded facade, meaning that things like solar cookers and radiators will be much tougher to employ.

• East Side
• The only side left is the East side, and this is where our plumbing/water specialist will have to live. This is a tricky thing to stick to, as the water will have to be gathered and stored in many different spots about the building, but it is the only side left to work with. The plumbing system will more than likely be gravity fed, but there may be some kind of pump involved for things like showers and waste removal, but this is all preliminary.

So that's where everyone will live and what everyone will be doing on the building. I think that the premise for this exterior inhabitation will be that these four hackers will rent out a single floor on the building to start their first platform, the workshop, and when they can start to exist on the outside free from the rest of the building's systems, they can simply stop renting that floor and then move on to living on the outside of the building exclusively. That's my hope, and I think that's my project.