Sine City
In this project, we were tasked with designing a plot of land to be developed for the San Marcos Creek-side development project, which involves building a downtown San Marcos area alongside San Marcos Blvd in the largely undeveloped floodplains. Our group specifically had to plan and design buildings to go in a designated lot that followed all zoning regulations entailed in the specific plan. For our lot, we decided to build a daycare center. The process of designing the building involved surveying our lot and taking measurements of the lot size and everything within it. We then researched all of the building codes in the plan for our lot, and collaborated to decide on a daycare. We analyzed the sun's path over our building and used trigonometry to design an awning to block light in the summer but allow for it in the winter.
Over the course of this project, I learned about the golden ratio and how it can be used to draw the eye to things you want the viewer to look at, and got some more practice using trigonometry to find missing side lengths. One of the biggest struggles we had when designing the building was keeping everything in scale and making everything fit together. I remember we almost submitted the final design with a couch over 100 feet long. During exhibition I think we worked together to teach people about the project and our design, and our interactive Lego table was a huge success.