A Buddhist Temple

After Scheme 1 the next step in design was to refine some of the concepts and relationships established in the first sketches. During this charatte, materiality and structure were also explored. At this time, I wanted to explore how different materials interact and influence each other. I explored how concrete and wood structures changed each other, and how different ways of manipulating wood express different meanings and tones. Conceptually i tied this to an inner identity that was abstracted and joined together with different identites, curious how they react. At this stage I discovered Shou Sugi Ban, a method of burning cedar planks to create a burnt wood siding. This material expressed a very intersting texture and I was curious about what it could do for the project on all sense, beyond sight, it had a rich texture, interesting smell. It seemed to express a sense of the profane's affect on a natural element. This material was used on all exterior facades, and to contrast it, the interior used a natural cedar, allowing the material change to become a sort of threshold between the profane and the intimate natural environment inside. During this time I became too complicated with the relationships I was trying to establish with the structure, trying to reflect the joining of two different systems, a problem of which I refined later.