CONTENTS
The
Social Lighthouse An Elemental Highway Of Hope Library located in Bridgeport, CT which makes the case for the agency of the phenomenology of light.
THE SOCIAL LIGHTHOUSE
BRIDGEPORT, CT :: ELEMENTAL STUDIES
In the State of Connecticut, Bridgeport is both the most populous city as well as a highly significant port. A former industrial powerhouse, Bridgeport ranks sixth in terms of population in New England, with a total population of 148,654. Located at the mouth of the Pequonnock River on Long Island Sound, it is 60 miles (97 km) from Manhattan and 40 miles (64 km) from The Bronx.
THE SOCIAL LIGHTHOUSE speculates on the agency of the phenomenological as a bulwark against social and urban decline, beginning with a series of very elemental studies of sun, shade, shadow, and radiation , and proceeding to form an indelible link between the objectively elemental and the subjectivity of a site’s socio-political history.
Concept Plan :: the grainy city & the effervescent highway
An attempt at rectifying Bridgeport, CT’s urban decline
ENGAWA
The idea of “Engawa” or in-between was central to our studio’s investigations and for me it became this structured negotiation between the elemental physicality of a site and its socio-political history.
Working through a series of conceptual drawings, I landed on the idea of the grainy city and the effervescent highway as an overarching site agenda. It reads on the macro scale as a cohesive urban fabric, but when you look closely you realize it’s a disjointed amalgamation of urban detritus.
Effervescence brought up the idea of light as inhibitor against urban depreciation, which then led to a series of studies on the phenomenology of light.
Built ground Excavated green belts Dissolvable connective circulatories
orientation affects light’s character, with Northern light being cool, Southern light being more colorful.
The max build volume, an armature for collectivized site history and narratives, placed at location with cool elemental properties.
Immediate void conditions act as catalyst for porous, volumetric reconfiguration.
Void embrace with build volume presents dialog for increasing urban porosity.
New open, site narratives emerge from fracturing of site history (max buildable volume) and void entanglements.
Catalog of fragmented past site history and future hopes begin alignment, conformational distortions choreographed by conceptual ‘effervescent’ city.
Pristine shard seeks further engagement with Bridgeport, CT by morphing into volumetric light armature; continuous engagement with the city; renewal ignited.
Apertures act as active signifiers, and etch interior elemental and programmatic activity as continual registrations of dynamic light and shadowThe Social Lighthouse
Ephemeral cohesive. Stitching by 2 classes of inhabitable voids of light (direct, subsumed). Continuous circulation breaks into inhabitable light voids.
Collated massing. Segregated porosity joined into continuous bars of circulation.
Fragmented, yet cohesively stitching by embedded porosity Terrain of more subdued lighting
Photos of daylighting model showing seasonal interior transformations Photos of transform
The Social Lighthouse dual mode showing the etching of interior elemental and programmatic activity as continual registrations of dynamic light and shadow
Climate Studio analysis of inhabitable light voids; moving from “Z” form to “parallelangled” form improves environmental response across board.
The modus operandi for Yale’s Architectural Foundations is PLAY. This does not mean the class was frivolous, quite the contrary. We approached play with the seriousness it deserves, allowing it to expand our capacity for creativity, architectural ideation, development, design, and production.
NATIVE KUNSTKAMMER starts from a close and critical reading of An Artifact (in my case a sprinkler) as described through the careful measurement and construction of orthographic drawings: Plans, Sections + Elevations.
The collapsed 2D drawings are then transformed and manipulated through a series of discrete, explicit, formal moves into a Cabinet of Curiosities for Madam Donkor, an avid traveler with a penchant for collecting both the mundane and the extraordinary cultural artifacts that embody the metaconsciousness of a society.
Madam Donkor’s reverence for everyday geometries necessitated an exploration into the spatial possibilities of pure lines, squares, rectangles, circles, and spheres.
Gradations of decay: Graphic from Bio SoCal HQ
Stirling Engine
