SIX PROJECTS Completed in 2007 and 2008.
Lift and tuck The narratives of a small luxury department store are strung between a tight column grid like architectural tissue pulled tight by a plastic surgeon on a celebrity’s face.
sound loud quiet
Diagramming At top right, a diagrammatic approach to assigning programmatic volume for each brand based on a unit cost of each product. Brands were given to the studio at large. Here, the unit price is given for one cubic inch.
sound loud quiet
display integration storefront transparency opaque
contextual isolated
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display integration storefront transparency contextual
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Shopping typologies presents a method to chart store types. I found that stores tended to defy neat characterizations, so I rated various architectural attributes, and charted them on a histogram, so that one store may be compared with another.
Based on these findings, a simple comparison between brands is derived: how much of each item could be bought for one Zeiss camera lens (the most expensive item)? An examination of the prevailing wisdom about multi-story retail layout is examined in light of the product unit price comparison. Two strategies emerge: the elitist and the populist model, which yield exactly the opposite deployment of brands.
tenant Lucien Pellat-Finet product Casmere clothes, accesories unit price $1,280-$3,675 unit dimensions 12” x 10” x .25” price per cu. inch. $76.33 product available ???
tenant Terroir Coffees product Organic coffee beans unit price $12-$22 unit dimensions 10” x 4.25” x 2.5” price per cu. inch. $0.20 product available about 40 varieties tenant Other Music product CDs, vinyl records, mp3s unit price $12-$22 unit dimensions 5” x 5” x .25” price per cu. inch. $1.31 product available ???
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tenant CB I Hate Perfume product Perfumes and sprays unit price $12-$60 unit dimensions 3” x .5” x .5” price per cu. inch. $25.33 product available 60 scents
1 lens from Carl Zeiss, Inc.
3 sweaters from Lucien Pellat-Finet
10 vials from CB I Hate Perfume
166 CDs from Other Music
1,225 pounds of coffee from Terroir Coffee
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tenant Carl Zeiss, Inc. product Camera Lenses unit price $1,000-$5,000 unit dimensions 2” x 2” x 1” price per cu. inch. $250 product available 50 lenses
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The elitist approach
The populist approach
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A hybrid approach is drafted, one which conceives the most popular (and the least expensive) brands as a conceptual pan of consumers from which the elite brand select, suck (vertical circulation) choice consumers into their stores. Once there, shopping is a continuous circulator path, a hallucinatory alternate reality.
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Plan/Sections/Front one-point 1. Office and support space 2. Fire stairs 3. Glass elevator 4. Roof lawn 5. CB I Hate Perfume 6. Lucien Pellat-Finet 7. Zeiss Lenses 8. Other Music 9. Terroir Coffee 10. Delivery Truck
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Other Music (tm)
CB I hate Perfume (tm)
Zeiss Camera (tm)
Lucien Pellat-Finet (tm)
Sectional Model 1/4” =1’-0”.
Dormitory A dormitory is not a fortress. The irresistible economy of mashing multiple typologies together creates an unwanted juxtaposition of private and public uses and activities.
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Existing Studies The dormitory at 15 Westminster Street hulks above RISD’s library and a cafÊ, open not only to residents, but all students, faculty, staff, and to some extent the public. If theses semi-public program-spaces were removed, seven stories of student housing would lightly touch the ground on a bank of elevators. These elevators open onto a loosely-regulated corridor as a front door opens onto a public street.
Dorm and Library at 15 Westminster
student: they won’t find me in here!
As the year progress, one would bet that this fussiness would slip and a certain casualness towards the performance would take its place. These students are SeaWorld’s Orcas, with drooping dorsal fins in the strange ambiguity of the space right outside their front door. A new dormitory for RISD
student: they won’t find me in here!
A front door serves not only as a threshold between a home and the street, but also a proscenium under which the first scenes of the day are played. Get the paper in a bathrobe. Kiss the wife. Off to work. Students play a similar drama all day, coming and going to class, to eat, to smoke. They embark and disembark in various states of dress. I would suppose as the year beings, newcomers to the dorm dress more modestly, well aware of the cruel exposure of the sliding metal doors.
The project attempts to clarify this tenuous ecosystem of a private dormitory, a semiprivate transition zone, the front door, and public programs. A central vertical void marks an extrusion of the train tracks which once fed a tunnel entrance. This space is a physical and psychological divider between public corridor and front door.
Public galleries Extending the ground plane of Benefit defines a place for large scale works of contemporary art, open to Main Street. Above this plane, restrictive zoning regulation restrict building heights on Benefit Street, creating an intimate gallery.
Students in the rafters Increasing interstices of floor and ceiling creates a place for student residences. In section, the domestic lives of the students is pervasive, though visitors to the galleries suffer a certain obliviousness to their close proximity.
is the roof getting lower, or is it just me? is the roof getting lower, or is it just me?
Looking east toward Benefit Street
Longitudinal Section (Next page) 1. Main Street 2. Kitchen and Bath module 3. Living module
4. Residential corridor 5. Environmental wall 6. Benefit Street 7. Residence level 8. Paintings gallery 9. Large-scale works
Transverse Section 1. Public assembly 2. Residence level 3. Painting gallery 4. Large-Scale works 5. Student Center
6. Loading dock 7. Public corridor 8. Student front door 9. Outdoor lobby
Longitudinal Section / 4th Floor Plan
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Detailed section: Environmental wall 1. Vents controlled by the computerized building management system open or close depending upon conditions within habitable spaces and wall cavity. 2. Structural Steel Lattice supports ETFE pillows. 3. Wall Cavity moves heated air up and out of the wall assembly. In the summer, this air is heated, creating a vacuum that draws return air from interior spaces and fresh air from the outside. In the winter, heated air is vented into interior spaces. 4. ETFE Pillows insulates the wall cavity. An applied mirrored film provides occupational privacy and added visual interest. 5. Sunlight heats the wall cavity and provides modulated daylight through the ETFE pillows. 6. Compressed Air Distribution System monitors the air pressure within each pillow and reinflates as needed. 7. Cross-Ventilation from opposing aperture.
Mob Mentality A tattoo is not a Facebook profile, though both seek to externalize identity. The tattoo parlor spacializes the community feedback attributes of social networking internet sites.
Divide and conquer Splitting and pivoting the solid volume of the tattoo program forces a exhibitionist procession. Tattooees are paraded in front of partygoers, who inhabit the leftover spaces between solid and the existing storefront.
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The diagram below describes the relationships and activities between the three constituent parts, the parlor, the party, and the website.
blogging
networking
tattoo design
Study model (1/8” = 1’-0”) examines the relationship between the split volume and the existing store, the difference between which becomes the party.
Final model 1/4” = 1’-0”
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Duplicate Ground Cousteau was given his first pair of diving goggles in 1938 as a hurricane flooded the downtown of Providence. He would have needed them to go shopping that day.
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Impetus Captivation with the flooding of downtown Providence propelled the project. Imagine the city block as an island, disconnected from its context and street grid. The block creates its own life on the high seas. It is survives the flooding of the city as a relic, waiting to be activated. Providence, September 21, 1938
Google Earth, downloaded April 2008
Structural plan and elevation of block
The site extrudes above the vacant lot at 169 Westminster Street and folds itself over RISD’s CIT building and the adjacent Alice Building.
Justification If the planometric view is the preferred tool for urban designers, then it shouldn’t be weighted to the ground, docked. Lift the plan, duplicate it, and reconnect downward to terra firma.
Suburbanity and the city 1. The city. 2. The megablock favored by developers is formed by demolishing historic infill, making way for large-scale, one-time development. 3. The city. 4. Instead, the character of the historic block is retained. The megablock is lifted aloft.
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Weybosset Sky Mall
Mezzanine level/transverse section (left) 1. Public assembly 7. Public corridor 2. Residence level 8. Student front door 3. Paintings gallery 9. Outdoor lobby 4. Large-scale works 5. Student center 6. Loading dock
Weybosset Sky Mall
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Shop in the skyline!
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Horizontal Section at132 feet above street level.
Horizontal Section at 96 feet above street level.
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Horizontal Section at 12 feet above street level.
Transverse Section at a through a.
The rooftop green and running track
Weybosset Sky Mall
Intergenerational Family Center Time and neglect conspire against the tabula rasa. The park replaces parking. Churning up the asphalt, newly graded dirt is invigorated. New life grows and grows old.
Introverted Topography The green surface rolls and folds to separate programmatic areas and create subtle but secure edges. Topography has shaped the development of Los Angeles; the artificial topography of safety shapes the development of the site. Play surface is created within the site’s protective berms. Encircling the central play fields with housing spreads responsibility of policing the playfields. The individual Grandparent/caregiver can feel freer with his or her time. To the south, a wall of domicile intervenes between the street and the playfield. Nearby, the surface of the green gently peels itself up—the earth warms and cools the senior center and allows passage.
Billboard becomes wall An existing billboard is subverted from display advertising into program subsidy and retaining wall.
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First floor plan Head Start facility 1. Gross motor room 2. Classroom 3. Student bathroom 4. Conference room 5. Office 6. Site supervisor’s office 7. Reception 8. Bathroom 9. Billboard retaining wall Senior Satellite Center 10. Ampitheatre 11. Main entrance lobby 12. Info desk 13. Ramp 14. Administration 15. Green roof Residential services 16. Study room 17. Day care Residences 18. Three bedroom townhouse 19. Planter bench 20. Fenestration core 21 shared terrace Ground floor plan Senior Satellite Center 1. Library 2. Multifunction room 3. Administration and flex office 4. Ramp 5. Warming kitchen 6. Fitness room 7. Bathroom Resident services 8. Concierge station 9. Office 10. Mail slots 11. Laundromat 12. Main entrance 13. Elevator to terrace 14. Playground Residences 15. Three bedroom townhouse, lower level 16. Four bedroom apartment 17. Planter bench
Changing Unit Populations Unit clusters seek to establish a variety of community relationships. Two families in the ground floor apartments share a kitchen and care for orphaned elders; ground floor apartments share courtyards and planter benches with their neighbors. All townhouse residents share a terrace, and circulation path; townhouse clusters share planter benches. A vertical lightwell connects lower apartments with the townhouses above, and so on. Furthermore, the two different unit types attract families with different expectations for communal living. Ground floor apartments attract families with a predisposition to a communal lifestyle, while the townhouses suit families that wish to remain insular.
+0 years, 4 families.
+9 years, 7 families.
+14 years, 4 families.
Residential Unit Clusters Each unit cluster is comprised of four units: two 4-bedroom apartments, and two 3-bedroom townhouses. Reflected pair of 4-bedroom apartments exists entirely on the ground floor, and share a communal kitchen. The 3-bedroom townhouses are accessed from the mezzanine, although two of its bedrooms are on the ground floor. A vertical circulation core for the townhouse fenestrates the lower apartment. The mezzanine level townhouses are more autonomous than the lower level, to better serve different expectations of community among families. The wet services’ core is capped by a prefabricated solar hot water heater, chimney, and vent. Apartments can easily adapt to evolving family demographics. When a family’s grandchildren move out of the community, the grandparents retain their master suite. A new family moves into the vacated children’s rooms, absorbing (if necessary) care of the orphaned elders.
Ground Floor 1. Living room 2. Single bedroom 3. Double bedroom 4. Master suite (becomes an isolate-able apartment when grandparents become orphaned)
5. Storage room 6. Communal kitchen 7. Dining room 8. Planter (typ) 9. Exit to green
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First Floor 1. Living room 2. Master suite 3. Fenestration core 4. Foyer 5. Kitchen 6. Dining room
Facing west, under residential mezzanine
Facing north, on Wilshire Boulevard
Tillinghast Farm Virtual Reality is governed by the rules and norms of Reality, in spite of its potential to create its own culture. Virtual reality changing the reality of reality.
Mapping A mapping project sought to create a 1:1 register small ground deformations (bumps) on a certain path of travel at RISD’s Tillinghast Farm. A Rube Goldberg tool was created which translated movements of lever arms into musical tones, which were in turn recorded on an analog tape. The recorded sounds were transferred to paper. The time needed to walk the path was divided in .5 second increments. Each increment was drawn as a 1� line on vellum as an instance of a possible tone. The recorded sound was divided into increments; silence on the tape was undrawn on the velum with WhiteOut (tm).
Borgian Impetus Like the early 1990’s when the World Wide Web was set to grow into something more than just a computer network, the worlds real and virtual today might be at a crossroads. Hovering just below critical mass, the virtual world of Second Life and other Metaverse-like program/networks have the potential to transcend their current status as shopping/porn/chat room + video game stigma. The Metaverse could make itself into a functioning “reality” with its own customs and cultures that are unique because of its relation to reality, rather than burdened by it. Like Borges’s fictional Library of Babel, Second Life (the Metaverse) is a structure, an armature, a code, and environment in which all permutations of a set of conditions is possible. The Library of Babel is limited by a standard book template: 410 pages per book, 40 lines per page, 80 characters per line, 25 total characters. The Metaverse is defined by a computer code with similar limitations (though instead of just characters on a page, there are pixels within a defined grid) that are themselves changeable. The Library of Babel as an analog for the Metaverse demonstrates that all is not infinite, only mind-boggling large. “I suspect that the human species—the only species—teeters on the verge of extinction, yet the Library—enlightened, solitary, infinite, perfect, unmoving, armed with precious volumes, pointless incorruptible, and secret—will endure.” -Borges, The Library of Babel
Final model 1/8” = 1’-0”
This project seeks to create a new typology by providing a sanctuary for artists to access the metaverse, creating works of art in that world and ours. The public is able to access the metaverse-derived works. The artists are prophets of a strange new world, while the public are pilgrims to their interpretations. Not unlike the temple at Delphi, the enlightened to crouch over the navel of the mountain (a series of individual huts crouched above a concrete slab), and the pilgrim receives enlightenment below (a subterranean space below the slab). Along with the daylight, enlightenment passes down through a concrete slab to the pilgrim below the ground. Longitudinal section (right): 1. Artist Huts 2. Concrete slab at grade 3. Public reading room and gallery
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Longitudinal section
Basement-level plan
Ground-level plan