The Narrative of Developing a Layered Architectural Experience Erin Young
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Chris, Thank you for being one of the most dedicated faculty I have ever had the pleasure of working with. Your support in and out of studio was very appreciated. Stay awesome. Erin
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CONTENTS From Precedence to Thesis...........................................................................................6 Manipulation of Planes in Space................................................................................10 Screening and Layering at the Scale of the City: Richmond, VA..........................20 Designing in Layers.......................................................................................................28 The Fairy Tale Bookstore............................................................................................42
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From Precedence to Thesis The tension between what is considered ordered and what is considered to be breaking order, sparked the thesis’ interest in exploring the experience of layers in architecture. Consistent order can be predictable while an architecture that unfolds itself to its inhabitants with hidden moments of reward can spark and maintain curiosity. While the Baroque is often accused of being too distorted and too ornate, at its core it still follows the order and hierarchy of its predecessors of the Classical and the Renaissance, much like how the proposed thesis building aims to keep to the given hierarchical scale of Richmond. There is a certain, commonly agreed beauty in the strict order and proportions of Classical Architecture and of the Renaissance. Everything lined up perfectly to create perfect pictures with perfect proportions. The true beauty of the Baroque is found in its moments of framed perfection, when its inhabitants are rewarded for standing in the perfect spot after moving about the cathedral. The dome of San Carlo alle Quattro Fontane, by Francesco Borromini, is composed of ovals and distorted octagons. From any angle except directly underneath, the dome looks distorted, and its true proportions are, but from standing directly underneath, all the octagons appear true and equal. The goal of the thesis is to explore how manipulating given parameters of a context can provide the base guidelines of designing a layered architecture that plays with placement and transparency to play with light and human movement to create a spatially rewarding experience.
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In the development of a method for creating layered design, a lot of interest was taken into art and architecture where visual assumptions became questioned through human placement and motion. Gerry Judah’s sculpture, Porsche, at Goodwood Festival of Speed, 2013 appears very light and at upon its frontal view. As one gets closer and moves around the sculpture, the heaviness and scale of the steel becomes apparent, as well as the way the steel members offset from each other to balance the structure as it stakes into the ground. It is the essence of motion and appearance of lightness, despite the actual sculpture being none of those things mentioned. It recalls the work of the Futurists, trying to capture the glory of technology and speed of the automobile. Their work did not actually move, but captured its essence. Architecture is remembered and recalled in images, but it is experienced by movement. Thus, the method of designing architecture should draw upon the natural movement and curiosities of people to inform its composition. The Narrative of Developing a Layered Architectural Experience attempts to capture the essence of the way people experience architecture to design it.
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Manipulation of Planes in Space
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Paper Becoming Spatial Objects Through Cutting and Folding Given a at piece of paper, the sheet is cut and folded to explore how a single plane can attain spatial properties. When completed, the manipulated objects cast interesting shadows, and create interesting views that drastically change upon movement about the object. The thinness of the piece of paper is always contrasted by how the piece of paper is cut, making the objects have one side that appears very light and transparent, and another side that is more opaque, but catches the light in a variety of patterns due to folded layers being closer or farther from the viewer.
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From Object to Element After the initial study of exploring the manipulation of planes into spatial objects, one of the iterations was re-examined in order to design it as an architectural element with a given scale. The manipulation of paper creates interesting propositions about space and movement for design, but lacks the speciďŹ city of architectural moments that occur when design occurs in relation to the human scale. The chosen iteration became a wall panel for a traditional, one room teahouse. Made out of stainless steel, the wall panels are cut by water jet in vertical lines at small intervals from the bottom of the ceiling beam to the top of the ďŹ nished oor. The panels are compressed by its attachment to the steel-structured frame to create openings between the vertical cuts.
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Screens and Motion What began as a study of the manipulation of planes became a study of how the transparency of architectural screens reect the motion or lack of motion informed by a space. Activated by movement, the stainless steel screen wall is read with different levels of transparency into the interior of the building. The small size of the teahouse room and its low ceiling, suggests its occupants to be still and sit inside the structure. The resulting experience for the occupant is an opaque-appearing wall. For the curious bystander walking by the teahouse, the walls read as transparent due to the constantly changing view of the bending steel slats that occur from the motion of walking.
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Transitioning From a Question of Planes to a Question of Method The initial spatial study and design of the teahouse wall panel is successful at verifying the thesis’ interest in an architecture that interacts with human placement, light, and motion. The lingering big question becomes, how to develop a design method within the thesis to explore how this interest can cross scales and inform the design and placement of a multitude of architectural elements.
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Screening and Layering at the Scale of the City Richmond, VA
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Unfolding the Layers of the City At a large scale, the city fabric has its own system of layering, providing consistently changing, screened views of the urban environment. A single perspective changes rapidly with the slightest movement of a person, keeping people curious, stitching together the city in their minds like a collage. The drawl of the dynamism of the city is the experience of a world consistently unfolding itself while one moves through its different layers. It is a collection of framed moments designed separately under the uniďŹ ed hierarchy of the city plan to keep a consistent rhythm.
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East Main Street & 13th Street The site of the proposed building is in the municipal district of downtown Richmond, Virginia. Through layering and strategic placement, the architectural planes of wall, ceiling, and floor are designed to function as screening elements that enhance the atmospheric experience of the building’s inhabitants through revealing views and manipulation of light. Much like how the city works in layers of framed moments to create the holistic fabric of the urban experience, the goal is to work within a grid based on the existing scale and proportions of the site to create a layered architectural experience that is informed by Richmond’s urban scale from the street to the deepest part of the building.
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Fitting the Fabric of the City The site of the proposed building is much larger than the existing row houses at about 70x90 feet. To ďŹ t the local context, the street faces of the building are designed at a scale to match the punctured openings of the adjacent buildings. It maintains the rhythm of the East Main Street corridor, becoming part of its own layer in the fabric of Richmond’s municipal area. The eight foot grid found at the scale of the street is brought into the building to reiterate the scale and layers of the city in the structure.
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Designing in Layers Designing through layers of vellum drawing addresses the question of designing architecture with framed moments that line up along a holistic grid system that can openly be broken and unbroken through human movement. The drawings are drawn in frames from the street into the interior of the building since the street corridor informs the grid. The framed drawings limit the design process in terms of thinking about spaces and architectural elements through the idea of narrative and motion. This limitation was created based on the intent of designing a screened architecture that alters the perception of the inhabitants based on movement and positioning.
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A Designed Narrative From designing through layered drawings, all elements of the building throughout the depth of the building align to a consistent order of an eight-foot grid while exploring offsets and alignments that play with positioning. Each drawing and section cut is treated as its own architectural screen, with elements of transparency and opaqueness the hint to what is before or after it in the building’s system of layers.
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The Fairy Tale Bookstore Layered Screening at Multiple Scales to Tell a Story
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“Fairy tales might seem like a foreign topic for the architecture community - but at their core is the power of communication. Fairy tales are relatable, yet sophisticated and nuanced, just like great architecture. As children, fairy tales are our gateway to significance, and to making sense of the intricacies of the real world...They are paradigmatic of experiences we haven’t yet had, decisions we haven’t yet made, and feelings we haven’t yet felt.” - Fairy Tales: When Architecture Tells a Story
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The cut openings of the copper panel facade follow the established proportional order of the Main Street corridor. The transparency read from the interior of the building changes from floor-to-floor with how the exterior wall reaches and touches the copper screen wall. Three layers of copper columns interact with the threshold of the street. The outermost layer is fully patinated, while the inner two layers weather naturally as exposed to mother nature’s elements over time. It gives the threshold at the street a sense of time as people move through the columns.
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The ďŹ eld of columns acts as a three dimensional screen. It acts as a threshold at the street level, serving as a public street space by the sidewalk, and ushering people into the building through a series of planes that play with transparency, wrapping people into its enclosure. The higher up the building one goes, the threshold between the inside of the building and the exterior is more abrupt, but the environment in which it occurs is also more private.
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A Layered Facade The initial experience with the layered facade at the street level is as an easing threshold into the building. Due to the changing nature of how each oor of the building interacts with the outermost copper facade, it gives a different spatial experience to the inhabitant as they venture through the building. At the second level, an open reading area where seating is informally divided by columns, the punctured openings through the exterior brick wall alternate with the copper facade street openings. The effect is a series of obscured views that only align with motion. From the fourth oor reading room, there is a view out into downtown Richmond, but three layers of offset columns divide the view.
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The Courtyard Twelve columns penetrate through the section of the entire building to bring light into the depths of the bookstore while creating a staged reading area on the first floor that is visible from every floor. The main staircase of the bookstore is a scissored stairwell that wraps around the twelve columns of the courtyard. The railings of the stairwell and the columns serve as a screening element that plays with the light coming from the bookstore’s skylight as people are reading or moving from floor-to-floor.
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The Model The white matteboard model serves as a method of validating the layered design method of the thesis. It is a materially-neutral model to focus on the composed layering and interaction with light in photographs. It focuses primarily on the three-layered facade and the center courtyard to see how views and perceptions are quickly manipulated through imagined movement.
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References & Inuences Caruso St John Christian Kerez Gerry Judah Santiago Calatrava Toyo Ito Art Nouveau The Baroque Movement The Futurists The Great Mosque of Cordoba, Cordoba, Spain Borromini by Anthony Blunt Fairy Tales: When Architecture Tells a Story by Blank Space Publishing Studio Collective Volume III, Spring 2015: Layers On Vantage Point and Spatial Collapse, Ryan Patterson
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