It's the foundation of the project, period. It's your concept, your big idea, expressed in a form that is clear and easily grasped by others, and reinforces the ideas for yourself as well.

Thank you for your input Josh. I feel the Parti is my weakest point in my design. I design on what feels and looks apealing. What tips or suggestions do you have to help me with developing my Parti?

You have to figure out your own parti & develop it yourself. That's the point. Josh gave you a good explanation.

An example-"my building is a basket making factory so it looks like a giant basket"

Finely tuned and too literal in my opinion. It feels like BIG builds their diagrams and that's it.

Josh, you're conveying very little definition in what you're saying.

"teaching tool as foundation of a project"  that could become a method of your own for designing.

"A parti or parti pris comes from the French prendre parti meaning "to make a decision". Often referred to as the big idea, it is the chief organizing thought or decision behind an architect's design presented in the form of a basic diagram and / or a simple statement."

there is a chance you are not that kind of designer., but only at 2nd year undergrad there is no way of knowing that yet, try it out, see what happens, but you may be someone who likes to carve away in the process.  more of Glitch and go kind of person where Parti may actually destroy your process or inhibit it....but you're 2nd year - try it.

Aside, does the 'big idea' always need to be tectonically seized/seizable (which is implied by the parti)? Or oblivious to the experiential disordering of the atemporal allure that the parti bestows on what it encapsulates (for istance, is it sensible to make a parti out of the Barcelona pavilion...or, in the first instance, the reverse. Or for instance, would a parti really convey the 'big ideas' behind Zumthor's architecture). Also, I don't think the parti is a necessity as an absolute. The subject should probably be thought of more in terms of degrees of abiding -or not- by the philosophy of having a parti. On the extreme, complete diagrammatic dedication to an object architecture, where probably even the division of function observes the division of shape and form. Less on the extreme, we use it to tidy up and clarify.

My diagrams are very simple circles,squares on trace paper over a google map plot. I then do a series of movement diagrams, solar diagrams to fine tune my original layout. I have a tendency to write a list of features I want, such as elevating off the ground over reflecting water or shading devices. I then place accordingly to what is appeasing. Then do a few sketches to get an idea if I like it or not. However the ideas in drawing are not clear unless I verbally point them out.

One professor praised me for my sketches and renderings because of my natural artistic gift. Yet has told me that they do not relate to the Parti of my design. It is kind of confusing when every aspect of my sketches,renderings and model look identically to my "big idea". I have also been told to write a poem about it as well.

quondam do you think it is necessarily as being part of a good design process? or is a necessary part of a (certain/learned) design process?

Beyond being a diagram or a negotiation between ideals and constraints, isn't the parti -

1- also a test by which to evaluate the formal rigor of a proposed design solution?

2- itself tested by the success of the design proposal, which determined when and why a new parti must be identified?

i just checked that design project out; thank you for citing it, quondam. very interesting. It is sort of an architectural palindrome. much work must have gone behind finding the dually convenient formal parti that, while diagramatically simple from an isotropic formal point of view, invites very different spatial complexities to resolve when posed in one way or the other. the horizontal house creates more vertical "capillary" associations while imposing horizontal dissociations and the vertical house does the contrary.

wouldn't you see that the point here, quondam, is not so much the parti as a conventional means to answer a design solution ( a conventional role) but rather the parti as the problem (as in the problematic) being posed? What was a tool of simplification (the parti as a diagrammatic structuring of spaces and functions)  turned Inside out to generate further complexity.  

chatter, thank you for indirectly answering my question.

Very interesting. Hell I feel I have gained more knowledge from you all in a day than a semester in college.lol So by visualizing my ideas in a different forms such as changing from horizontal to vertical will allow different perspectives.

Simple clarity of your idea!

 

( get to the point! )