Critic: Wonne Ickx
In the design of this Museum of Architecture, I became interested in exploiting solid void relationships by nesting program elements together. Taking this notion further, the basic site massing was sliced into segments in order to diminish the presence of the 10, 000 square meter building on site.
Circulation routes are distributed in the breaks between the main volumes, further emphasizing this scale diminution. With entries on the southwest and north east tips of the building, the ground floor contains the lobby, library and cafe spaces with various means of circulating upwards. Other programmatic features (the bookshop, wood-shop, auditorium and offices) are distributed around the main exhibition space.
In order to dismiss the reading of a monolithic stack, the internal spaces are differentiated into 4 seemingly distinct bars that are interconnected to accommodate differing program adjacencies. The exhibition space sits at the heart of the museum and unifies the individual bars with a meandering experience that allows for the archive spaces to be dispersed in the voids left by this snaking path.
The museum develops an external posture and internal character through this program composition and by promoting some figurality in section, an overall sense of spatial dynamism is felt as one moves from space to space in terms of expansion and compression.
Critic: Georgina Huljich
As Fumihiko Maki Writes in his essay on Collective Form, urbanity is characterized as a dynamic field of interrelated forces relying on a set of mutually independent variables in rapidly expanding infinite series. With this in mind and after a close analysis of the existing site qualities surrounding the center of Kaliningrad, Russia, two conflicting attitudes about figure and spectacle were exposed.
The exuberant (in terms of the monumental, iconic, and specific) and the banal (in relation to the domestic, standardized and ambiguous). The former is manifested in the historic castle and House of Soviets buildings that previously / currently occupy the site and the latter is expressed by the surrounding context.
Continuing down Maki's line of though in terms of developing an undifferentiated field of collective forms, these distinct but relational elements within this cultural complex embody a shared raison d'etre that relies on a unifying functional, social and spatial agency. Further investigations into the establishment of regionalism for a place who's identity has been in constant flux due to hostile takeovers and historical skirmishes led to this conclusion: rather than rely on direct references to Kaliningrad's troubled history, the complex seeks to invert known relationships of space and function as they are associated with figure and form. Specifically employing formal gesturation as a catalytic agent for revitalizing this currently stagnant landscape.
The planimetric spatial organizations draws primarily from characteristics of the former Castle and other contextual references (neighboring datums, defined street axis etc.), however the formal composition is developed specifically in relation to the sites existing 'urban robot' the House of Soviets. This Brutalist brooding mass has many distinct intricacies but most apparent is the dichotomy expressed by its small base and large appendages. The development of this cultural complex references specific aspects like its excessive fenestration and superfluous fragmentation of the whole to imbue a new sense purpose into the HOS.
Consequently this Cultural Complex respects the critical site adjacencies while producing a new spatial relationship to the aforementioned forgotten figures. Its combination of the exuberant and the banal with some abstraction of historical / contextual forms establishes a strong image for the city; one that capitalizes on conformity, relative muteness, and monumental iconicity.
Since the world itself ultimately has no existence outside the human imagination, determining the future needs and demands required to be met by an LA house is a seemingly daunting yet stimulating task. By extrapolating from contemporary trends however, we can optimistically envision the future of technology divorced from conventional Utopian predictions about high speed air travel, space exploration, energy generation and telecommunication. It’s important to remember that these notions along with the so-called laws of nature or logic are products of human ingenuity.
When conceiving this house of the future, we asked how the house typology will evolve to become a tool for mediating our psychiatric states. Rather than a vacuous stage that’s merely the backdrop for mental maturation, how can the house serve to quell our anxieties about the ever changing external world and begin to function as an inhabitable, responsive piece of emotional technology.
The tradition of Los Angeles houses is rooted in material experimentation, formal gesturation and capitalizing on the surrounding natural world via panoramic views into the landscape or dematerializing envelopes to produce spatial slippages and vary the relationship between internal and external space. Instead of relying solely on external factors we advocate a stance on our need to employ nature as therapy and look to develop an updated housing type that employs developments in artificial intelligence, sensory and syncing technology with locally traditional framing techniques to produce a house that is organized around thresholds that adjust their spatial qualities to match the mood of its inhabitants.
From the moment you enter this moodHOUSE, data about tendencies, preferences and motivations are synced and the atmospheric qualities (sight,, sounds, smells) are internalized into the house mainframe in order to calibrate spaces for the rituals of life. This emphasizes these rituals as ephemeral thresholds that allow for the separation from the externally expected roles and routines, overcoming restlessness, alienation, apathy and boredom. Instead calling for an invigoration of rhythm and texture that’s articulated by calming sensory sensations activated my mood cores and specifically designed internalization rooms that provide that desired escape from the pressures of the external world.
Critics: Kevin Daly & Dana Cuff
L.A. Mayor Eric Garcetti called for building 100,000 additional housing units in the city. There are close to 500,000 backyards in Los Angeles, and cityLAB has found that around 100,000 of those backyards are large enough and flat enough to easily host a small backyard home.
The low-cost, low-impact Bi(H)ome could serve as housing for an elderly parent, a returning college graduate, or a rental unit. It is designed to be easy to install, requiring no sewer hookup and just a hose for water supply, and easy to remove. It is almost entirely recyclable. And rather than requiring a mortgage, it could be leased, like a car, so it does not need to be permanent, but can flexibly serve the needs of homeowners for as long as they want, and then be removed.
The BI(h)OME’s tectonic resolution re-imagines the essential elements of architecture proposed by German Architect Gottfried Semper in his mid-19th century canonical text ' Die Vier Elemente der Baukunst.' . Here Semper describes the hearth, platform, enclosure and roof as the necessary ingredients that, when skillfully combined, exemplify an architecture that emphasizes the materials and processes associated with it’s use. The formal ramifications of these composed elements can be seen in the primitive hut, a disciplinary motif that’s explored by various philosophers, theorists, and critics including (but not limited to) Eugene Viollet le Duc, Claude Perrault (1674), William Chambers (1759) and Marc-Antoine Laugier (1753).
The environmental impact of the structure over its entire life cycle is between 10 and 100 times less than a conventional auxiliary dwelling. The 500-square foot backyard home contains a bedroom, living room, kitchen and dining room, and bathroom. The floor is mounted on a temporary low rock wall and posts that can be screwed into the ground, so it doesn’t require a foundation. The entire structure can also be compacted to fit within a 8' x 8' x 12' POD storage container.
As one of the core members of the structural frame design team and in collaboration with Kevin Daly Architects and cityLAB UCLA, I facilitated various details about the conceptualization, fabrication, and construction of the BI(h)OME skeleton including: cutting, bending, drilling, fastening Steel EMT members, designing base angle and drag strut details and developing framing hierarchies.
*Photos by Nico Marques*
Critic: Andrew Kovacs
In rationalizing the studio proposition: Parking + Hotel, I interpreted the parking as the catalyst for inducing sensations similar to that of a John Portman atrium but amplified and expanded at various scaled. After multiple formal exercised interpreting how the two programs could nest together, I chose to hoist the hotel programs up on an airy parking plinth that provides the visual spectacle of stationary cars in motion.
By lifting the hotel amenities, the aim was for the edifice to embody the destination hotel by physically removing guests from their familiar ground plane and introducing them to unique programmed planes at various inclines and scales. This provides a hotel experience that emulates the circulation around a spiraling parking garage with specifically placed shortcuts for ease of access and egress.
In order to celebrate the sense of spatial ambiguity allotted by the circular floor plan, seen most notably in Bertrand Goldberg's utopic forms, I incrementally elongated and rotated the floors around two vacuous atrium nuclei that split and combine dynamically to emphasize their verticality. The result is a monumental lifted building that multiplies a self-similar architectural language to produce an internalized resort whose procession emphasizes intentional ambiguities about interior and exterior boundaries.
Critic: Wil Carson
This California Steel House is situated on the historic Case Study No 8. Site (designed by Ray and Charles Eames), so in line with the late modernist tradition I began working with a pure platonic solid and became increasingly interested in how the site relationship and structural adjacencies could work together to distort this pure reading.
By using rotation as a catalyst for generating posture and dynamism along the house exterior allowed for the primary diagonal structural members to exist external to the living space. As a result the interior becomes pavillionized and the spaces blur together from room to room.
The cladding strategy explores the notion of occupiable thresholds as the facade delaminates to create a perimeter deck akin to early Japanese house designs. This exterior walkway is partially covered with a ETFE membrane skin that provides sun and wind protection while allowing for a cool and controlled climate inside the thin membrane.
The house is fully accessible because the master bedroom and all clearance / turning radii accommodate a handicapped client. The second floor consists of additional bedrooms and terrace spaces to enjoy rotational views out to the pacific.
Critic: Neil Denari
The roof of the “Meiso no mori” (forest of meditation) crematorium seems to float above the ground with a quality of lightness not necessarily associated with reinforced con- crete. Built in the park-like cemetery at Kakamigahara, a town of 150,000 inhabitants in the prefecture of Gifu, the building nestles between wooded hills on the south and a small artificial lake on the north side. As the old crematorium on this site was to be demolished, Toyo Ito was free to realize his idea of a funeral hall not constrained by religious content. The architect wanted to create a place for quiet reflection, a space whose organic language of forms would suggest a close- ness to nature. The 20 cm thin roof, made up of concave and convex forms, flows into twelve tapered columns; its weight is also borne on the two-storey core.
One of the deep similarities between the natural and artificial worlds, of which architecture is firmly rooted in the latter, is a profound reliance on structural systems. As such, the Buildng Design Studio focuses on the relation of structure to architectural design and examines different techniques of expression and form finding through the development of a multi-level, contemporary office building in Los Angeles. The design problem was set up in order to increase the knowledge of the discipline and emphasize transformational techniques within the regime of an architectural system responsive to structure.
After the structural module was derived, variation was introduced by one dimensionally scaling the module to generate different spatial conditions relative the the programmatic requirements.
This 1D scaling results in modules defined as “Studio Trees” where the module itself is inhabitable with a spiral circulation core leading up to mezzanine working spaces with each supporting a small private patio space.These modules then became the perimeter elements to define the proximity limits of the project, housing the offices, Studios, and smaller auxilliary aspects, leaving the central void for the open office space.
Since this space was so formally distinguished from the perimeter structural system, The roof of the space was figuratively lightened by incorporating structural ETFE pillows. This contrast generates a warm and vibrantly bright space for the workers to fiddle away on various tasks while being naturally lit.
