ARCHITECTURAL STUDIO 2 - STUDY IN TECTONICS
CLASS:
Architecture Studio 2 develops a student’s understanding of tectonics; the constructed relationship among building elements that forms a building language. Through the projects the student will generate a design out of systemic relationships within the site and initial studies into how tectonic assemblies perform. The building composition is determined through inquiry into relationships among: parts to the whole, natural systems, and phenomena and human experience. Students are expected to bring forward practices learned in preceding classes and seek new rigor in thinking, drawing and model making. The first night of class will include an important discussion of course goals and rules. Registered students who are absent from the first night of class may jeopardize participation in the course.
CURRICULUM:
The curriculum for this class has a base set of requirements as per NAAB (National Architectural Accreditation Board). Within these guidelines each teacher is was allowed to alter or re-write the assignments given to students. Below are links to the class curriculum and syllabus that was given to students in the semester of Spring of 2016. Although the curriculum changes from term to term the pages below are an example of my classes curriculum.
JOHN MAZZOCHI
Design Statement:
Organization of the whole: datum parameters respond to context and design intentions to generate a project matrix from which floor plates, voids, and surfaces are generated or prevented. The building’s overall organization is wedded to design intent rather than ceding to a Cartesian grid of strict orthogonality.
The boundary of the site plots provides the envelope parameters of the project. The specific triangular shape of the site allows the urban puzzle piece to speak for itself and lend identity to the project. Rising above lower commercial spaces, though recessed, the site still participates as a character in the intersection.
Connection and social mixing: Subtractions from the matrix create a continuum of outdoor space through the project, allowing participants to connect with contextual vistas and other public spaces. Similarly, each program is internally connected to better facilitate their use: in the business incubator, double height spaces connect multiple levels to create an open, dynamic social work environment; in the cidery, double height floors allow for flexible production; and in the residences, voids provide individual outdoor space, that with doubled height can provide more window placement for other units (while retaining privacy).
Visual interference and reveal of the structural concrete tectonic assembly is made by the wooden screen skin of the project. Appearing as a surface from the exterior during the day, visuals still read through from the interior. During the night, lights turning on reveal to the outside the rectangular space formed by the long floor slabs, and even the shadow of the floor slabs between levels. Walking into the voids of the project surrounds participants with the concrete structural floor slabs and walls. The thickness of structural verticals creates moments of threshold, when instead of quickly passing through the door cut, a 3’ thick floor allows one to linger inside the wall, inside the structure, in circulation rather than place.
Sun/privacy/lighting/reference: the wooden screening performs additional roles. It alludes to the assembly of the conventional triple decker siding up the hill while shielding from solar heat gain, retaining privacy with additional light, and challenging normative opaque exterior wall conditions. Connecting the exterior with the changing natural light of the sun drives home the tectonics connectivity theme, bridging the gap between the interior and exterior with an experiential gradient rather than a conventional duality. The trees of the site similarly screen the rear of the building and provide a moment to not have the glazing.
DAWID WIESZCZEK
KAREN WANG
Design Statement:
An immersion of experience within a tectonic is only fully drawn out when that tectonic is able to address tactile experiences such as touch and view. My tectonic involves an inversion of properties; wood columns hold up the concrete floor plates and roof while the metal beams form a structural framing to augment this support and create windows and views as it holds up the slabs of concrete skin. The immersion in material and tectonics is brought out by the sharp contrast between exposed parts of wood, concrete and steel which create light and views based on sightlines created by the offsetting of material at different circulation points (entrance, hallway, café, street). This creates a human experience where the user is drawn around and interacts with the workshop at four different levels of exposure (a disappearing view at the entrance, a blocked view in the hallway, a fully exposed view in the café, and a hint from the street level).
Start: 2 tectonics
Piercing of heavy planes and planes holding up other planes
Wrapping/weaving of material
Change: combination of 2 tectonics brought out a need to choose material and combine the tectonic ideas previously developed. Concrete slabs were poured due to a breakdown of one solid pour and in order to hold the slabs together, wood was built in a frame that wraps the concrete together.
1/3 midterm: Playing with how to wrap wood around the concrete and how to further push the idea of concrete and wood interaction by inverting wood as the structural and concrete as the decorative.
Site and program added: the sloping site was perfect to test out utilizing wood beams to hold up concrete slabs. The program was developed to show this tectonic so that the metal workshop (the heaviest program) would sit at the top of the building, surrounded and supported by the other programmatic elements.
This lended itself to an idea of inverting hot and cold, the heat from the metal forge would start at the top of the building in the held up metal workshop and would fall to the bottom of the building, slowly cooling the workshop as well as heating the building. This created a pouring of molten steel, a burning waterfall.
Change: The burning waterfall presented logistical nightmares and safety concerns. The heat and cold relationship was kept but the need to pour steel and thus the need to create a tall exposed building was taken out. The metal workshop would naturally be extremely hot so the surrounding program would be much cooler and could be developed so that the workshop is naturally cooled by the surrounding program.
Because of the very experiential nature of the previous iterations, the project focused on human experience and the interaction with the workshop through the tectonic language in the building.
Final iterations and Final: The human experience was developed in a rhythmic set of
Workshop separated from the circulation path with steel beams holding up concrete slabs and where the steel breaks the concrete, glass is inserted.
Wood columns separate the user from the major walkway and the steel columns form the outermost barrier, interspersed with glass or concrete as necessary in that part of the circulation path.
The entrance was the most exposed, the lighter steel beams separates the entrance pathway from the exterior green space; they are interspersed with openings and short concrete slabs forming a direction into the building. The hallway next to the workshop is the least exposed; instead the user is allowed to enter the gallery and their focused is directed toward the metal sculptures and finished work produced by the gallery. The last part, the café, has full exposure to the workshop created by the disappearance of the workshop wall and the wood columns form glass walls in an open space surrounded by steel beam.
DAN SWARTZ
MOEKO HARA
NICOLE PEARSON
Design Statement:
My project is about shaping space by using a banding technique. My goal was to band site and building as one physical and conceptual entity. The banding technique holds and releases space according to program. Program and experience, as well as material, was generated from the design matrix.
I was inspired by the construction of a wine barrel, where metal bands hold wooden planks together. Banding a wine barrel puts the wooden members in compression and tension, which made wonder if I could achieve the same thing in special conditions. That’s when the idea of holding and releasing space came about in my design. The large public area where the café and market is acts as an anchor to the three large bands. Holding space, or taken it away from the community (making it private area) is like compression, where something is tightly bound together. Releasing space reminds me of tension because structural members in tension want to break free. In areas that are semi public, I wanted to have this affect. And then of course I wanted an area that was completely free from compression and tension. As I iterated the design, the wooden banding turned into GRC sculptural bands.
The GRC bands may not have seemed like they shaped my spaces in the final design, but they did early on in the design process. As the design progressed they became more of an accessory, but still aided in the experience of the space.
Although, I think banding space can be achieved without using curves, this design made for an interesting spatial condition that was challenging to draw and model.
