PREDILECTIONS
EUGENE SU
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PREDILECTIONS ACADEMIC WORKS
EUGENE SU
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CONTENTS
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Delirious Bricolage
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Shell or Skin
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Infinite City
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Take Out: South China Sea
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On Hallowed Ground: Arlington National Cemetery [Practice? What, Practice?]
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Laminate: Re-Thinking the Haussmann Block
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[Snake: A Superblock Story]
Span: Organizing the Spanish-American City
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Bonsai Center: A Civic Diorama
Left: Ballistic Missile Testing Site Historical Society of the Upper Mojave Desert Archives, Ridgecrest, California Funded by USC Undergraduate Provost Research Fellowship
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OPTICS
Delirious Bricolage
Shell or Skin Infinite City
Left: Observatory Towers at Naval Air Weapons Station at China Lake, California Historical Society of the Upper Mojave Desert Archives, Ridgecrest, California Funded by USC Undergraduate Provost Research Fellowship
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Delirious Bricolage: Strategies in Social Organization
Creative chaos defines the urban interactions and constructions of India. The elevations of its street fronts are a mashup of different structural systems, materials, and programs. Time and events have built up this variance of layers, yet through all the chaos of the ad hoc buildings and repair, life functions fluidly. The most impressive example being everyday Indian traffic, where somehow a three lane street can become eight lanes of staggered mopeds, rickshaws, cars, and cows, combined with perpendicular crossing pedestrians. Indians take pride that their busy intersections have no street lights but everyone is able to efficiently make their way. As a city center to Bhartiya, the site has as much a responsibility to give back to the city as it does to provide for the program of the building. Responding to technology company’s modern informal settings and long hours, the project wants to create a 24-hour metropolis. From the early morning coffee, afternoon work-out, and night time partying the building provides a framework to supply them all. Bri-lirious De-colage is interested in the multiplicity of Indian urban life as a distinct cultural underpinning. The delirious bricolaging of India’s urban level is often looked down upon by traditional urban planners as poor or unintelligent; however, I believe that its accomplishments and roots differentiate India from globalization. The delirious bricolaging should be a part of Indian’s modernization.
Left: Interconnectivity of Adjacent communities using the porous block
Delirious Bricolage begins by questioning the core of the different programs. Trimming out the fat of traditional program and pulling out all the amenities, it is able to re-use all amenities as communal and circulatory space. The project consists of the retail layer on the bottom, the workplace floating above, and the live work blurring the 9
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lines between. This is arranged in a spiraling spring of program whereby pulling the spring apart, the negatives become the connection and amenity. By raising the offices, the bulk of the program, up into the air, the ground floor breaks up into a more intimate scale of the small streets of India around a main pedestrian walkway. Creating these porous boundaries allows for users to meander and experience the space. Utilizing the large footprint of the floating office, the amenity spirals through and then spills over the roofscape, where the it becomes a collage of iconographic objects/pavilions. The live-work spaces then cascade down the in-between space of the ground and the floating offices. In its most simplistic form, Bri-lirious De-colage harbors multiple fragments of utopias in the air while connecting it to its urban environment through thin strands of circulation. While urban form can be critiqued based upon its physical and mental arrangements, its utilitarian arrangement remains the traditional, albeit Modernist, measure of success. Through scale alone, the city can be understood as a single program, yet it consists of elements, such as, streets, parks, and blocks that are as interrelated as they are independent. The faults of the city have repeatedly been blamed upon a holistic failure of planning; the patterns are either physically or mentally deficient in its arrangement. In Modernism, the part is always subservient to a compositional whole, enshrined as such without truly understanding the independent capabilities of its elements. While BrasĂlia’s greatest critique has been that it sacrificed functionality for the physical grandeur of its pattern, it could be argued that it was not the plan that failed, but its independent elements. Programmatic elements of the city are often more independent than we imagine, yet its functional potential is often stymied by a mismatch of adjacent program. By definition, programmatic elements are exclusive in its operations, insofar as to categorize a program is to exclude all other program. The breaking of such exclusivity is usually done through a single element of planning. The street is used to capture a catalogue of program in the same way a park might capture different types of excercise. The reliance of singular elements to activate program results in a sterile repetition of
Previous Page: Street level view of office space as organizing program with iconographic insertions of amenities. Right: Roof Plan showing compositional organization of amenities allowing for individual intervention of the object and future changeability.
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functionality. Instead of harnassing diversity, an allencompassing attempt to capture all program leads to the collection of all the different architypes of program, instead of different program itself. In this regard, programmatic arrangements are only interested in the city as a set of problems waiting to be solved. In this light, the functional arrangement of the city will always be measured by the problems it inherits against the problems it can potentially solve. As long as there exists program, the city, in all its permutations of shape and context, will be regarded as a problem.
Previous Page: Section, note office atop of ground floor retail with large opening above for light and the establishment of an artificial ground that provides new datum for social space, specifically for the project. Next PageLeft: Hedonistic Tower showing arrangement of amenities within a sea of office space. An archipeligo within the field. Next Page Right: Office Plan, Note the grid frame of cores and terrace offices that create a hierarchy of sub-spaces for intimate collaboration while providing a large open plan
Although mainly an agrarian society, India maintains a long and rich history with urbanism. Since antiquity, the Indian city has been home to a tradition of statecraft rivaled only in China and Persia. Ancient cities, like Delhi and Mumbai, have been successively layered and stitched since pre-colonial times. For the most part, however, the Indian city is still perceived to be undisciplined. Parts, like the Indian slum, are almost anti-architectural in its rejection of order. Even so, at times the anti-architecture of the slum seems more capable of navigating the city than its contemporary counterparts. Urban form in India produces a method by which sequential and parallel logics can operate simultaneously. It is here that disjointed arrangements, whereby ancient monuments have adjacencies of slum and high-rise, are justified. The navigation of Indian cities is built upon a layered system of iconography and symbolism. While some buildings, like the Taj Mahal are visually uniquely Indian, others are especially colonial. The subtle difference between British colonial architecture in India and those found in Canada and Australia is often mundane like the placement of a palm tree. The British Residency in Hyderabad is stylistically similar to countless other Neoclassical building built by Colonial Britain, yet the presence of tropical fauna immediately places it in India. In this way, the iconography of a foreign architectural brand is immediately localized. Subtle elements of local aesthetics can begin to inflect upon a generic iconography to chart a coherent experience to what, at first, seems like a disjointed collection. The iconography of geometry is likewise a unifying element of the city. The clichĂŠ of geometry is fundamentally relevant insofar 17
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as it exaggerates a basic truth. While forms harboring a geometric purity is as easily digested in the Egyptian desert as it is in front of the Louvre, they are, more often than not, disguised. The iconography of architecture touches upon a potential origin myth of form that can rationalize theoretically infinite permutations. Cities have always been categorized in various fashions through various times. These categorizations underscore not just a specific reading of a particular city, but its means of production. In Marxist fashion, the forms, whether they be buildings, monuments or infrastructure, are capitalistic tools of production. A toy factory, filled with workers, is operating akin to a triumphal arch, populated with tourists. Urban form produces networks and relationships both locally and globally. In this sense, the toy factory does not make Christmas presents, but localized routines of worker life, which is then transported through the toy and reimagined by the receiving child. If interpreted this way, the value of the toy is neither economical, nor entirely ideological, but rather systemic of human habitation. To understand this view, it must be accepted that the form is an entire embodiment of its systems. While the form of the factory does not make the toys directly, the physical arrangement of the machines within must follow a technical and economical logic, leading to its overall form. From these systemic overlays, a Chinese City or an American City can be separated from a European city, just as a Baroque city might be understood from a Modernist one.
Material Study: Hybridization of local materials that encapsulates both modernity and tradition
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[ Shell or Skin: Tectonics in space ]
shorts
Shell or Skin investigates surface, structure and tectonics as a basic tenant of place making. This project investigates whether an exterior structural system can be both a shell, an rigid exterior system that protects the interior while systematically supporting it, or simply skin, a surface treatment requiring fundamental support and is only capable or acting in a supporting role.The project utilizes standard structural tools such as columns, beams and diagrids in a collage manner to create an architecture that is both predictable and disjointed. It is apparent from the elevation that layering and masking is a key identifier of place, yet a slight distortion of that elevation reveals unexpected spatial qualities.
Left: Investigations of structure as porous or solid.
Next Page Left: The creation of soft forms through the use of hard elements by hierarchal ordering. Next Page Right: Dynamic formal composition through the minute distortion of individual elements.
Situated within the downtown core of Los Angeles, Shell or Skin serves as a new architecture and design museum for the city. The exterior structure provides stability that eliminates the need for interior columns, thus providing the space for large scale installations. The entire structure is a large column anchored at the back to a core that provides shear capacity while the primary structure supports a clear freespan interior space. The exterior rainscreen provides shade but also a dynamic visual cue, making the building seem taller and spinning in the wind.The building investigates the complementary use of primary and secondary structure to define a hierachal order . Instead of spatial relationships, the exterior tectonics act as cues to denote the relative importance of local space while allowing the interior to remain flexible, ambiguous and relatively generic. The generic concieved of not as unprogrammatic but deliberately deprogram, that is its ability to support external readings , even if its formal qualities may be dominant. 23
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Infinite City: Is Sprawl only Horizontal?
Infinite City speculates on possible ways of constructing vertical communities. It acknowledges the destructive abilities of repetitive floor plates for community building, while at the same time unlocking the potential of the skyscraper. Infinite City is a programmatic excercise aimed at understanding the balance between spaces formed by program and spaces that house program. It is a project built solely as a framework. Thus, it makes no distinction between a five story or a hundred story tower. Within the tower are a series of live/work units designed to provide features normally given to a suburban home, including front and back lawns. These various features blurs the hard boundaries between individual apartment units make high density urban living competitive with existing suburban dwellers. To this end, Infinite City indulges in the fantasy of infinite possibilities.
Left: Exploded Street Perspective, contrasting the vertical language of domestic space against a horizontal plane of work and play.
Infinite City is a project I think every architect induges in quite early in their career. It is a primal hope for architecture to embody an expansive array of functions without flexing. In many ways, its a naive idea of a master framework, an almost unrealistic expectation for architecture to approach something divine. Its a series of ideas that relies upon archetypical imagery to convey. Thus is draws heavily on a history of architectural narratives that also relies on imagery. Architects such as the Metabolists or even Ledoux comes to mind. 27
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POLITICS
Take Out: South China Sea
Left: Grumman F-14 Tomcat testing AIM-54 Phoenix at Naval Air Weapons Station at China Lake, California Historical Society of the Upper Mojave Desert Archives, Ridgecrest, California Funded by USC Undergraduate Provost Research Fellowship
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Take Out: South China Sea, An Architecture of Spatial Denial
Left: Strategic Overview Power projection of Chinese missile batteries with operational range of US aircraft carriers
Take Out examines contemporary techniques of national expansion based on the close coordination of military and civilian assets. This project looks into the South China Sea as manifestations of this condition. The presence of the military, under the guise of protecting civilian and ethnic interests, is used to justify the occupation and subsequent expansion of national borders. Although these occupations have been met with international criticism, the unwieldiness of regional political climates have fostered the growth of these gray zones. Since the maturation of the United Nations after WW II, territorial expansion by traditional annexation has been extremely difficult. Territorial treaties that marked the end of conflict have delineated national boundaries and frozen key postwar interests. While Cold War gave rise to the use of proxy states as a tool of state building, it did not redraw the limits of sovereignty. The confines of national borders written over half a century ago, coupled with a dramatic geopolitical shift, have resulted in quasi-national spaces that are outside the bounds of any nation. These spaces are the product of national interests staking claim to external territories without formal declaration or occupation. Instead, these spaces are governed by an eclectic mix of civilian uses backed by unregulated military enforcement agencies. 35
China’s meteoric rise as an economic superpower is paralleled with its increasingly assertive military operations. The story of South China Sea territorial disputes is a legacy of semi-colonialism and China’s role in a new millennium. As its military budget has grown, China has started reclamation processes on many islands, including the Spratly and Parcel Islands, as a means of justifying the occupation and expansion of its national borders. International treaties define sovereign waters as a 200 mile radius from the nearest sovereign land. By reclaiming land on shallow reefs, China hopes to apply these rules to gain control over valuable resources and shipping lanes. The situation is complicated by the fact that the South China Sea is home to numerous countries with competing claims against China and each other. China’s expansion of its military capabilities is seen not only as a pursuit of growth, but also one of retaking what was lost. The Century of Humiliation was a national and cultural memory engrained in the Chinese psyche since the Opium Wars, further aggravated by Japanese occupation in WW II. The Chinese memory associates these territories with the cultural greatness of Imperial China. As such, these territories are an intangible part of Chinese culture. In the modern era, territorial sovereignty is legitimized through the use of treaties that define national boundaries. However, China’s claims to these lands are based upon historical anecdotes. China’s territorial loss is the result of colonization and western imperialism that the country now seeks to reverse. The scale of operations in the Spratly Islands is due to the extreme asymmetry between China and its neighbors. By 2050, China’s economy is forecasted to be twice as large as that of the US and its military expen diture would roughly be on par. Additionally, China is twice as populous as the rest of Asia combined, thus contributing to the sense of fear throughout the region. The imbalance of wealth and power has thus allowed China to construct and operate makeshift bases in the Spratly Islands without serious conflicts. As the world’s largest trading nation, China also uses its economic prowess as leverage in territorial disputes. The smaller countries rely heavily on trade with China and often rather appease the giant than to aggravate it. This has created a situation in which architecture is being deployed not as a symbol of power, but as a container of real might.
Settling Old Debts
Right: Exclusive Economic Zones (EEZ) in East Asia
Right: Exclusive Economic Zones (EEZ) in East Asia
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Economic data comparing China with rest of East Asia
Typical strategic bomber flight procedure during take-off and landings
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Area Denial Capabilities DF-21 “Carrier Killer� Missile which can evade incoming defensive systems
Pushing America Out China’s Regional Hegemony
China’s use of architecture as real power is a product of China’s increasing regional hegemony. Regional hegemony allows the country to operate unimpeded in its own backyard, thus freeing up capabilities to be deployed elsewhere. The United States’ focus in the Middle East has given China room to expand its regional influence. As geopolitical theory goes, a country cannot attain superpower status without first acquiring regional hegemony. In the United States, this is most evident in the Monroe Doctrine of 1823, which stated that European interference with states in North and South America would be interpreted as an act of aggression by the American government. China’s attempt to attain regional hegemony is hastened by technological developments that threaten the deployment of American hard power. The DF-21 missile is the first anti-ship ballistic missile capable of sinking an aircraft carrier. The DF-21 missile can track a moving target over a thousand miles and correct its trajectory to evade intercepting missiles. The anti-ship missile’s expansive range limits the operability of carrier battle groups and thus America’s ability to protect its allies in the region. The DF-21 allows China to establish a series of imaginary lines of national interest. The so called First, Second and Third Island Chains are areas that the Chinese would like to establish a freedom of naval operability that allows power projection in other parts of the world.
Reclaiming the Sea Constructing Reef Islands
The Spratly Islands pose an interesting architectural problem for the Chinese government. Occupation of the reefs legitimize territorial boundaries, yet the reefs themselves are too small for any purpose. The government has decided to reclaim land by dredging sand from the sea floor and piling them atop the reefs. These artificial islands provide a stable platform to construct larger installations such as runways and naval supply ports. The Chinese government uses local fisherman as justification for the reef construction. These islands supposedly provide shelter for fishing crews and a point of contact for naval rescue. The point of departure for this project looks at the expansion of these reefs as an entity of its own. The integration of the military and civilian uses for these 41
Reef Construction Activity Images from CSIS
Terraforming Island procedures, involving dredging and filling
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Dredgers at work Images from CSIS
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Reef Operations Coordination of military assets with civilian industry as a guise for occupation
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Bomber patrol intercept patterns
Military reef base typologies with weapon classes and size
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Militarized Reef projections combining industry with military capabilities
Territorial Connections to the mainland within network of strategic island chains
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islands allow an unending propagation of this condition. The islands are seen as an integral component of a dynamic system in which the military provide security for commercial interests in the area. The area however is not under direct control or subject to national laws as the islands themselves are an imaginary construct. Take Out’s projection of the South China Sea imagines an unregulated future whereby China regains its economic prominence, acquiring over twenty percent of the world’s GDP. The reclamation of the islands expand in all directions with increasing density. Military assets become embedded into the civilian framework to share economies of scale. The area becomes under de facto Chinese rule, but still rejected by the international community. With its rule over the areas assured, China taps into the large oil reserves and fisheries to fuel its consumer economy. Treating the oceans as green field developments, Chinese corporations build and expand without regulation or geographic limitations. China’s control over vital sea lanes in the area force its smaller neighbor to accept a contemporary tributary model.
Spatialized Reef Network
Island Sprawl South China Sea 2050
Projections for militarized reef with distribution of services and airstrip
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PRACTICE
On Hallowed Ground: Arlington National Cemetery [Practice? What, Practice?]
Laminate: Re-Thinking the Haussmann Block [Snake: A Superblock Story]
Span: Organizing the Spanish-American City Bonsai Center: A Civic Diorama
Left: Ejection Seats Testing at Naval Air Weapons Station at China Lake, California Historical Society of the Upper Mojave Desert Archives, Ridgecrest, California Funded by USC Undergraduate Provost Research Fellowship
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On Hallowed Ground: Arlington National Cemetery
On Hallowed Ground revisits the role of monument in commemorating and defining our conceptions of sacred spaces. Arlington National Cemetery, America’s most hallowed shrine, has been the center of intense spatial investigation since McKim, Mead and White were commissioned to design an entrance that reconciles the violent history of the Civil War. The cemetery’s overall design masks clever interventions that puts together an intimate human scale with a monumental field befitting of the sacrifice held here. The chaotic state of the entrance today is the result of numerous interventions made since the original plan .While the original plan emphasized a calmness and clarity in the axis, future interventions would add a parking garage, visitor center and funeral attendee spots without consideration of the larger narrative. The result is a confusing experience where pedestrian circulation is in direct conflict with vehicular paths. The attempts at remedying the problem are patchwork and done without considering the overall experience.
Left: The Columbarium sweeps across the landscape, highlighting the role of Memorial Avenue in connecting North and South.
This project addresses the pragmatic concerns of the project by separating funeral attendees from the general public, using Memorial Avenue as the dividing line. The funeral attendees are housed on a sloping terrace, giving them views south into the cemetery while providing privacy and intimacy to each family. The general public is split from the funeral attendees and directed towards a large columbarium. The columbarium acts as a porous boundary between the everyday space and sacred space, while providing a new datum above the height of the gravestones.The columbarium also acts as a frame for the addition of extra internment spaces along Memorial Avenue, mediating between the earth and the sky. 57
Remembering a National Cemetery
American graves following the Civil War circa 1870 Library of Congress
Current entrance to Arlington National Cemetery. Note the adhoc arrangement of buildings resulting from increases in vistorship after JFK’s funeral Library of Congress 1985
View across Memorial Bridge with Arlington House with the former estate of Robert E. Lee in the background Library of Congress, 1920
Aerial view showing the physical connection from the Lincoln Memorial to Arlington House across the Potomac River. Library of Congress, 1935
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View from the Pine Forest Showing the articulation of the Columbarium in relation to the look and feel of the cemetery. The monumentality of the form is broken up by the similar of the roofscape to the natural environment.
View from Inside the Columbarium: Presenting a new datum, just above the height of the graves, to see the cemetery and feel its expanse
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View frramed by Columbarium showing creation of parallel axis that recedes for more graves the distant landscape to step down to an more intimate scale
Left: Model, parallel axis framed by the columbarium connecting to the back of the hemicycle and Arlington House in the background, completing the Line from Lee to Lincoln
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Serial Sections depicting how the Columbarium frames the tombstones and performs as a threshold between living space and sacred space
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Laminate: Re-thinking the Haussmann Block
This project reimagines the typology of the slab housing, epitomized by projects such as Le Corbusier’s UnitÊ D’ habitation, as a Haussmannian perimeter block. The traditional slab typology, unable to turn corners and define a perimeter, resorted to being placed on a tabula rasa. The result, uncontrolled edges that isolate its inhabitants and separate the projects from their urban context, contributed to the accelerated decay of precious urban fabric. The project utilizes the efficiency of the slab typology to define an edge condition that fosters a better urban condition through increased porosity to the existing city, terraced views and the diminution of corridors. Organizationally, this project addresses these problems by stacking slabs in alternating grains that simulate the distances of streets and thereby allowing privacy across the courtyards. The stack grain minimizes the microscope effect by interweaving the courtyards and public plazas in multiple axes of varying degrees of openness. To maximize privacy, the units are point access, sharing a small landing at the node where the grains intersect. These landings connect to larger terraces, accessible only to the units that share the landings. These terraces visually connect to the surround area and to the public ground floor below.
Left: View from within the Courtyard. The flying bars articulate the different boundaries of courtyards at various levels, giving a high degree of porosity.
The grains defining the perimeter, bends to create small plazas at the edges of the site. These plazas define the boundaries of the site, while at the same time breaking the monotonous nature of a long edge condition. These bends create natural entrances into the project, leading to diverse visual levels of activity. The ground level is occupied with Live/work units with small amounts of retail. The vertical stacking of the grains allows the ground level to remain public and open while still providing outdoor spaces available only to the community in the form of the overhead terraces.
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The Stack Slab Block exeeds the Haussmann block by connecting the interior courtyard spaces to the exterior spaces while providing more surface area relative to volume, giving more units access to daylighting and air. The lamination also provides a platform for social activities that are semi-private, shared only by units with direct access to the spaces. This block encompasses a series of spatial hierachies, starting from the courtyard, to the terraces and finally to the balconies that step exterior public life to the domestic interior.
The Haussmann Block was careful at preserving the perimeter edge, providing program to engage the sidewalk. The main drawbacks of the Haussmaan block was the disconnect between the perimeter edge and the interior courtyard. This disconnect clearly subserviated the courtyard to anemic program such as storage or simply light and ventilation.
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Ground Plan The cores are located at the intersection of the slabs with two units between each core. The core are minimized as there are many cores servicing many slabs, but the the benefit is the elimination of corridors, giving each unit more greater privacy.
Section While the project may seem relatively short, the density of the slabs and the building up to the perimeter means this type has much higher densities than the Haussmann block while providing more light, air and spaces for recreation.
Right: The efficiency of the laminated bar allows many different unit types ot be embedded within the same space, from lofts to maisonettes to tradition bedroom multiples.
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[ Snake and a Superblock Story ]
shorts
The perimeter block’s ability to stabilize the spatial conditions of 19th century cities was revolutionary in its simplicity and frankness. By flattening the city to a matte condition and introducing a highly developed field structure, especially in relation to interior/exterior spaces, the perimeter block finally pacified then stabilized urban space. The resulting preservation of the perimeter block and its export to Latin American countries demonstrates its capabilities. The partition of the block to individual parcels gave it a flexibility and its resultant enduring capacity.
Left: Diagram showing arrangement of programs along a spine that breaches the perimeter blocks allowing for localized interventions. Next Page Left: Series of formal investigations for operating on a perimeter block, such as opening, infilling and distorting the exterior program to create new relationships between interior/exterior and public/ private space. Next Page Right: Diagram showing parts of a tower complex occupying the interior of a block, with public space on the bottom channeling adjacent program, increasing density and activating the block interior.
While the perimeter block successfully solved many urban conditions, it still had problems especially regarding changing spatial requirements resulting from downstream programmatic modifications. Thus, the perimeter block of Barcelona suffers from the same predicaments as its cousins in Latin American and Paris. Namely, the homogenization of large swathes of the city to housing and an inability to densify or add new program of different scales. This project’s name, Snake, alludes to the 1980s video game whereby the snake eats a fruit to get longer but more unwieldy. Snake is a strategy of penetrating the interiority of the block by selectivity repurposing program along a path that allows the city to build localized zones within the flat structure of the city. The center of Snake is a tower complex that moves the housing displaced from the perimeter to a tower, allowing them the same access to daylighting and ventilation. The interior ground floor of the block is modified with public program, integrating adjacent program and a new scale of civic space. 77
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Span: Organizing the Spanish-American City
Span, situated in the historic core of Quito, advocates for the renewal of the interior of a Spanish American block by combining multifamily housing over a public park to serve as a model for the re-thinking of a protypical block in a conserved center. By carefully editing and removing the block interior, the project preserves the sanctity of the perimeter while introducing a new public space at the scale of the block. The housing units span over the park by connecting to the existing perimeter buildings, reconfiguring the existing buildings as either the primary program or a service space. The housing bars act as a canopy for park, providing shaded programs such as covered tables or bleachers, while emphasizing the vastness of the block interior. The design of the housing focused on emphasizing the role of privacy in each of the units, as they occupied the center of each block. Coming off the street, an occupant would enter the project through a passageway in the existing building before entering their units. Private access to the units would remain restricted on the ends while providing unobstructed views of the park on either side.
Left: Interior Bars providing shade to facilitate recreational program in the center of the block.
The park itself is oriented along the grain of the block and perpendicular to the housing bars. Underneath the park is a series of public programs such as daycares and classrooms. As we enter the park, the housing bars above shade the path and more importantly, frame the descent away from the city and into a new civic space created in the center. The combination of housing bars over a park in the interior of an existing historic center will bring a level of density and organization to the interior of the block, while providing a scale of civic program previously unknown to the historic core. 81
Case Study: Buenos Aires
Typical Blocks
1700-1860s
1860-1930
1930-Present
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Preservation of perimeter buildings,taking advatnage of existing retail and office spaces to blend into existing context while utilizing the block interior to service the housing bars.
Left: Site Plan; Main Entrance into the block along main length of block with alternate entrances facing main commerical street. 87
Sections showing Block interior/exterior and Bar to public/private space relationships
Model showing housing bar connection to existing perimeter blocks
Unit Plans depicting rooms arranged to maximize privacy and access to ventilation and daylighting
Site model : the scheme preserves the santity of the perimeter blocks, while creating a new scale of civic space
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View from the balcony of an apartment unit. Continuous ground plane provides public space at the scale of the block.
View from the street. Main access into the block is prefaced by gathering space allowing circulation control at the perimeter.
Left: Site Axonometric; Depicting Modification of key perimeter blocks for better integration of housing bars
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Bonsai Center: A Civic Diorama
This project engages the Tange building by creating an interior public landscape at the scale of the original gymnasium, allowing the people to experience an exaggerated scale of what was achieved by the original cantilever structure. The program is a Bonsai Center because the creation of an artificial landscape is closely tied to Bonsai’s inherent qualities of miniaturizing exterior landscapes for domestic interior consumption. Bonsai is an art manifested from the hierarchal and scalar relationship between the Japanese home, the garden and the distant landscape. Like other traditional Japanese art forms that bring the environment into the home, such as landscape paintings, Bonsai is interested in perspectival distortions, scalar ambiguities, and structural illusions made from collapsing distant figures to pictorial layers. Bonsai can be thought of as a spatial model of paintings, which themselves were made from real distant landscapes.
Left: Proposal including surrounding neighborhood. The berms acting as a buffer space to integrate the existing building to the nearby residences.
The project imagines an artificial topography occupying the slope of the original building down to the main ground floor. The project utilizes the original slope and foreshortening towards the back as a giant diorama to alter the perception of the original space, making a seemingly larger space. Within the artificial landscape, the catwalk serves as both a visual ordering element from afar and an experiential rhythm from within, pulling the guest through a series of peaks and valleys, reminiscent of linear infrastructure such as bridges and tunnels. The project, like Bonsai, is about hierarchy of spaces. The outdoor mounds creating small intimate public spaces within an urban environment, the lobby as an expanding transition space and finally to the back, where the full spatial expanse of the building is revealed. By closely reading the existing geometry for potential programmatic alignments, it is possible to reimagine the magnification of future Japanese culture through an architectural form built over fifty years ago.
Top: Original Kagawa Prefectural Gymnasium Section and Plan Courtesy of Kenzo Tange Archives at Harvard Graduate School of Design
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Ground Plan
Ground Plan 1:200
Top Plan
Exhbit Room Plan 1:200
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Top: Interior of Gymnasium, showing layering of articial landscape and distorted perception.
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