Progress in Work

And here’s another project from last semester: our final assignment, the Air Lab.  A huge project for first-semester first-years to take on, but it was good for us.  Builds character.  

This laboratory was to be placed on a lot along New York’s old waterfront, just south of the Brooklyn Bridge.  This area gets a fair amount of tourist foot traffic, so I wanted to be clear about what this building was supposed to communicate, especially with this very particular (and fairly odd) location.  I wanted to communicate that Science (capital “S”) isn’t just some monolithic institution, something that brings down a few new articles from a secular Mt. Sinai every year.  It’s made up of individuals, interacting and working with each other, often messily.  It’s a human endeavor, not something distant and institutional, so the exterior is active, personal, and a bit disordered.

I’ve been working on my portfolio recently, going back over my work from last semester.  There’s little that I love about this work, but man, I learned a lot from it.  I did a reasonable amount of polishing for the portfolio, and thought I might as well put it up here as well.

This project asked us to design a one-man monitoring station for air quality, and in my work, I placed this station in a highly visible place: on top of a smokestack.  These structures dominate many skylines across the country, and often, as in my hometown, they stand as reminders of an industrial past — one partly responsible for widespread problems with air quality.  So, these monitoring cells sit (and turn) in the wind, perched on top of these strong symbols of pollution. 

We just had our mid-semester review.  I think it went well.  We’re doing a library this semester, which has been a great project: how to deal with a building to house books in the age of the Kindle/iPad/Nook/squinting at a Blackberry?  Or simply (well, not so simply) design a building that accommodates the public in a meaningful way?  

My idea is to concentrate on the silence and privacy that, oddly enough, works in such a public building.  So, taking the thick walls, enclosing spaces, and controlled light of the monastic study carrel, this building begins with a few isolated piers on the ground floor and expands them to create smaller, more personal spaces as one progresses upward.  

Here are a few shots of a study carrel, modeled out of wood blocks.  I based the design on early medieval Cistercian monasteries, focusing on a sense of seclusion, thick walls, and the effects of light on those walls.