Peer Review - Unite

Team Unite had drawn on the experience and knowledge of previous design workshops to create two distinct hotel designs and hotel facade elements. They felt that to convey this idea of a Utopia-like atmosphere, their design should emphasize a feeling of freedom and an in-flight sensibility and then juxtapose this idea with a deepening sense of of claustrophobia and entrapment. 

These ideas were then given structural form and presented in Secondlife to convey their philosophy.

Their Hotel facade design for Waiheke Island incorporated very organic, sinuous forms that rise up into the air to highlight verticality and the idea of flight and freedom, through these seemingly free-form elements. Unite's primary goal for this design was to create an environment in which this hotel could be related to a utopia and used to create, and to showcase, "new experiences" for the visitor. To further express this overall sense of freedom and openness, the design remains an open structure. This spatial treatment expresses the theme and atmosphere of what an expected utopian setting would be.

For the city, Unite felt that in order to properly contrast a utopia-like design and feel from that of a dystopic one, the design of the building facade should be juxtaposed in quite an obviously relevant way. The design incorporates shards of moving earth protruding from the ground in a very chaotic and cataclysmic like display. To contrast the idea of freedom and spaciousness, the entry into the design integrates a very low ceiling design element to emphasize claustrophobia and the sense being trapped within a space and have an uneasy feeling about the cavernous like atmosphere, with an almost fragmented-like application to the design process of the shattered earth.

Team Unite also presented a short discovery movie of their two designs that very much placed it within this almost, fantasy-like setting and atmosphere and it created it helped to convey that sense of having a new experience when visiting these two hotel designs and being able to read their philosophy and their place of architectural design.