Professor Terry Boling Spring 2022 ARCH 4002
Lyceum 2022:
Studio Brief: The project is sited on the Friesenhahn Cave site outside of San Antonio and owned and managed by Concordia University in Austin. The cave is one of the most important paleontological sites in the United States. Homotherium serum or Scimitar Tooth Cats lived in the cave more than 15,000 years ago and used it as their den. This 20,000 year old single room den is located on an approximately four acre site, situated in the midst of the suburban sprawl of San Antonio. The impressive feline remains originally found in the cave are in the Texas Memorial Museum on the UT Campus. Besides the La Brea Tar Pits in Los Angeles, no site in the United States has yielded a greater variety of significant Pleistocene (Ice Age) vertebrate fossils. The primary task is to create a boundary and threshold between the buildable portion of the site beyond the cave offset and the interior portion of the protected historic cave area. Conceptually it is a boundary between the “present day suburban condition” and the interior protected cave or “deep time” of the Pleistocene epoch (ice age). The program is a 6100 sf visitors center for the cave, and includes general landscape elements and considerations i.e.: arrival, boundary, threshold, paths that allow people to tour the cave sink hole and entry areas. The buildings include a field house for visiting researchers, archive to house all the fossil remains, and a flexible classroom. The site buildings are intended for private research use only, due to the sensitivity of the site itself. The studio will examine the themes of arrival, boundary, threshold, coupled with research into innovative detail, construction, and landscape techniques. We will rely heavily on physical model building and advanced representational tools for the final submission.
Underland
Students: Byron Armacost Benjamin Arnold Catherine D’Amico John Duke Jordan Gantz Derrick Hackett Stephanie Mahon Jacob McGowan Michael Prophater Brooke Ritzler Emma Smuskiewicz Nicolas Stetkevych Coly Tabberson Samual Thurman Paul Tully