The Solar Lounge was a resting place for students who were visiting either the Research and Demonstration Facility, the Vibrations Testing lab, or the VT Foundry. It also serves as infrastructure for the testing of various wall panel systems including the pallet one that was used in the Solar Garage project. Future project include installing and testing vegetated assembly systems for installation into the Solar Garage project in the future. Finally, all members that were in compression structurally are made of wood, while all members in tension were made of steel wire. This also the types of forces to be expressed in the structure itself to the viewer.

The Solar Lounge was and is a learning opportunity for other projects yet to come personally and for projects that other students working at RDF have yet to design. Just as the project informs similar project and designs, the learning informs the underlying process of how design ought to be. The process of designing and developing and then building a project contains the knowledge for the weight of architecture. This weight shows us as designed what it means to suggest a certain material, or composition and what these lines mean for the builder. We cannot simply note that an assembly should work by persuasion fit, nor should the assembly be so complicated that only the architect can visualize the system.

This process of interaction is unique to the designer, the architect. This process reveals to us that the Solar Garage is a single step along a non-linear path of revisiting ideas, updating, and iterating and informing what our own architecture is yet to be and how we fit into the architectural profession and the world that is around us.

 

The project from the ground level looking towards the Vibrations Lab.

 

The joint were the repeating bay system meets the bench and the installed test wall systems.

 

The wire system wrapping over the wooden frames that made the bays going up an over the wall. The structure was not allowed to puncture the wall and was treated as a temporary system.

 

Looking down the top of the wall and the light barely coming through the shading slats.

 

The shading overhang on the southern side of the concrete masonry wall. Each bent responded to the ground level as it could not be mounted into the ground.