Jonathon Meier Yale School of Architecture Spring 2013
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Projects
presented chronologically
Multicultural Center......................................................................... Architectural Traineeship................................................................ Municipal Courthouse..................................................................... Yale Natural History Museum Extension........................................ Dance Studios at Queensboro Bridge............................................ Compression Test: Cohabitation Exercise...................................... Live/Work for Entrepreneurs........................................................... Center for Advancement of Science in Space................................
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perspective view from the southwest street corner
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Multicultural Center Ball State University Critic: Ana DeBrea Spring 2009 Muncie, IN *Honorable Mention Prize, BSU Gresham Smith Competition
This project for a new Multicultural Center on Ball State University’s campus, designed in partnership with Jessie Rabideau, was an exploration of form based on the disruption of preconception. Continuous surfaces change roles and create varying functions by folding, intersecting, and merging. The design process began non-contextually by exploring how a single plane was capable of changing direction–how a single surface was capable of taking on multiple roles. The same thought process was applied to the site, where pieces of the ground begin to rise up and intertwine with one another to define space. The fenestration fits between the planes, but folds and angles within itself much like the concrete and grass planes. The angled glass is supported by vertical structural glass fins. Where the angled glass planes meet, they bring together reflections from disjointed locations. One might see oneself in a reflection next to a stranger from the other side of the building, or one might find the grass in a reflection directly adjacent to the sky (see page 11).
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entry and reception area resources library meeting spaces with moveable partitions theater cafe and kitchen mechanical general storage theater storage administration with sliding wall system lounge with flexible gallery space below ground exhibition space outdoor seating outdoor covered performance area ticket booth control room
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Top right: mezzanine level Bottom right: 2nd level
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entry and reception area resources library meeting spaces with moveable partitions theater cafe and kitchen mechanical general storage theater storage administration with sliding wall system lounge with flexible gallery space below ground exhibition space outdoor seating outdoor covered performance area ticket booth control room
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Top left: section A-A Bottom left: section B-B Right: perspective from library
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parapet concrete roofing tiles concrete over metal decking 4. hvac 5. steel structural system 6. 1/8� suspended hardi board panels 7. structural glass fins 8. glass window frame 9. living wall 10. green roof 11. soil over fiber mat and drainage layer 12. interior concrete bearing walls
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Top left: green roof detail Top right: structural detail Bottom left: space frame Right: perspective from the southeast corner
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view of the Maitland City Bowls sectional model pulled apart
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Architectural Traineeship Terroir Architects Summer 2009 Sydney, Australia
These next pages are dedicated to the work completed during a summer architectural traineeship with Austrailian-based architecture firm Terroir. While in the office, I was exposed to foreign approaches to architectural thought, design, and practice. My work in the firm included model building, architectural drawing, graphic design, and exhibition organizing. The Maitland City Bowls Club is in a small town north of Sydney, and it is a five-phase project for Terroir. The second stage involved designing a new entry way for the outdated club and a sleek new roof to unify the previously disjointed building. As the approach to the building is from atop a hill, the roof design was to be very exposed. To help the firm and the clients visualize the design’s complex geometries, I created a detachable, nearly 1.5 meter-long model. After being used in the office, the model was placed on display at the club. The Sydney Laneways competition sought innovative ideas to spark interest and draw attention to Sydney’s unused laneways. I worked with the director of Terroir, Gerard Reinmuth, and photographer Brett Boardman to create a visual package for Terroir’s project entry. After being explained Terroir’s programmatic ideas for each laneway, I designed an image to graphically communicate each idea, and then combined the images into a comprehensive visual package. The project entry was short-listed and presented to the City Council of Sydney.
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Top: Model made for Maitland City Bowls project Left: finished project (photo by Chris Rogers) Right: Sydney Laneways competition entry
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perspective view from the northwest street corner
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Municipal Courthouse Ball State University Critic: Andrea Swartz Fall 2010 Washington, D.C. *Honorable Mention Prize, American Institue for Architecture Students National Competition *Project Published, AIAS Crit Magazine *Honorable Mention Prize, BSU Cripe Competition
This project for a new Municipal Courthouse in Washington, D.C. was designed in partnership with Jessie Rabideau. In viewing the courthouse as a place of transformation (inherent in the courthouse’s function of determining individuals’ futures), the design intent was to embody, through form and function, the courthouse’s role as a transformative yet authoritative and stable place. While maintaining the respected civic ideals of authority, stability, and integrity, the new courthouse exemplifies transformation in form, skin, security, and experience. The idea of a twisting object developed as a visualization of “transformation”. The object, initially itself, twists and becomes something different on the other side. The twist remaining in the center of the object is left as the “moment” of transformation. The user would experience this moment of transformation when walking between the vertical and horizontal parts of the building. The skin, enveloping the building, sweeps over, down, and around just before sweeping upward from the opposite side. The skin wraps around the building as a controlled system of fabric membrane louvers. Each horizontal piece of fabric membrane is independently hinged at its ends, which allows it to twist at any given point across the piece. It transforms spaces by adjusting daylight, visual exposure, and solar gain as the twist moves or is eliminated altogether. It was developed parametrically using solar altitude angles. The skin uses solar sensors to make the louvers become immediately more vertical in overcast conditions (permitting daylight) and more horizontal in sunny conditions (blocking solar radiation). The passersby can see the kinetic skin transforming in real time as the clouds pass over and the skin adjusts to the needs of the building and its users.
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Top: site context, Washington, D.C. Right: model photo, south faรงade
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concrete structural grid kawneer 1600 ss and sloped glazing curtain wall system skin shading/privacy control device
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Top: dynamic faรงade moving in real time as a reaction to solar sensors Left: single component of skin Right: close-up view of skin-toframe connection
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solar sensor fiberglass membrane
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Left: ground floor plan Middle Top: section A-A Middle Bottom: section B-B Right: wall section through skin
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Left: security diagram of public (blue) vs. private (orange) Top: perspectives of circulation sequence (from public to privtate) Right: perspective from courtroom
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perspective view of undulating floor plates merging with the hill’s topography
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Yale Peabody Natural History Museum Extension Yale School of Architecture Critic: Joyce Hsiang Fall 2011 New Haven, CT
This project was for the extension of an invertebrate exhibit at the Yale Peabody Museum of Natural History. The site is situated at the top of a hill on Yale’s campus set next to the Klein Biology Tower and its colonnade designed by Philip Johnson. Displaying invertebrates in their preserved states completely removes the specimen from their natural context, allowing the specimen to be seen as free-standing objects of sculpture. This project seeks to further remove the objects from their contexts by rescaling the traditional vessel (jar) to become long, glass cylinders which stretch up and through the building—dually serving as display case and light well. The horizontal planes flow between the extents of the cylinders to shape circulation paths and create an unbroken topographic experience with Science Hill. By day, the backdrop of the planes creates an intensely graphic display. By night, the tubes illuminate the specimen and expose them as free-floating objects in space.
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Left: unfolded section cut line Bottom:unfolded section through circulation path Right: standard section
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perspective showing volume collisions and piercings
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Dance Studios and Performance Hall at Queensboro Bridge Yale School of Architecture Critic: Joyce Hsiang Fall 2011 New Haven, CT
This project translates the intense noise, both audio and visual, of the program and site into interactive volumes. The volumes, each representative of a dance studio, collide with one another to define new spaces and create internal visual connections (i.e. studio-tostudio, studio-to-cafĂŠ). When the volumes collide to the point of piercing, the mesh skin is broken and transparent glass is exposed, and a connection is made to the exterior (i.e. main entrance). The spatial resultant of all the collisions is the performance hall, where the angles of the collided volumes form the necessary acoustical and line-of-sight angles for the theater.
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section showing the visual connections formed between the collided volumes
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rotation around the physical model
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view from the top looking down into the dark core and bright living units
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Compression Test: Cohabitation Exercise Yale School of Architecture Critic: Peter De Bretteville Spring 2012 Abstract Site *Selected to be published, Yale Retrospecta
This project was an exercise in understanding how to balance the most fundamental living needs within an unusually small space. The site was an abstract 3-meter cube raised 10 feet above ground. It was understood that the unit would be repeatable in a field on all sides. The program had to fit 2 separate living units for 2 unrelated individuals. The design focused on how form could be used to increase the perception of space without increasing the physical space. The concrete core twists up through and beyond the extents of the cube. Its base is very wide and becomes increasingly pinched as it moves upward. This created a very dark and dramatic space on the interior of the core and very bright and open spaces on its exterior. The stairs–twisting up the core–begin on its interior, puncture it at the living units’ points of entry, and continue up on the core’s exterior. Three key elements increase the perception of space in the project: the continuous motion of the twisting form, the physical constriction of the stairs inside the core compared to the openness outside of it, and the dark interior of the core juxtaposed with the bright living unit.
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section cut through both units and the concrete core
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close-up view of the faceted, twisting concrete core
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view of the “void� cutting through the building from the courtyard on the other side
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Live/Work for Entrepreneurs Yale School of Architecture Critic: Peter De Bretteville Spring 2012 New Haven, CT
This project investigates how form can simultaneously address tight site constraints, environmental needs, programmatic innovation, and experiential affect. The program houses work space and private living quarters for 8 entrepreneurs on a site only 17 feet wide and open to a large courtyard on one side. The courtyard is considered a means of advertisement to the public for the entrepreneurs and their ideas; therefore the public is pulled into the building by a voided exhibition space on the second level. The void scoops up into the building as a social space and forms the exhibition hall, creates a 2-story social work space (where entrepreneurs can discuss ideas with one another), pierces the other side, and then twists back around to form a shared roof-top terrace. The piercing draws in day light to both the live and work units—where the site would not otherwise have air rights--and pulls it through the voided space and glass floors to the exterior ground floor of the site. The light exposure on the ground floor (to what would otherwise be a dark space) allows the void to materialize and test the boundary between solid and void.
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section cut showing the void moving from the courtyard, up and through the building, and re-emerging on the rooftop
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top: light causing the void to materialize bottom: structural model
plans showing the void moving from the courtyard, up and through the building, and reemerging on the rooftop
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the underside of the building as the primary facade
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Center for the Advancement of Science in Space (CASIS) Yale School of Architecture Critic: Mark Foster Gage Fall 2012 New York, NY
The new CASIS building was designed to be a new genre of exhibition space–both in how one experiences and inhabits it, and in how the exhibition space affects its surrounding spaces. The exhibition space was thought of as a field of objects suspended between two lattices that moves up, through, in, and out of the rest of the building. By lifting the field of objects above ground and exposing it with the porous lattice, the underside of the building is established as CASIS’s primary facade. One flows through the field of objects on a walkway that is suspended between a porous “floor” and “ceiling”. This creates a feeling of being neither “here” nor “there”, but rather existing somewhere inbetween the ground below the floor lattice and the sky above the ceiling lattice. The exhibition space also interacts with the street and the interior classrooms and offices beneath it by exposing its contents as silhouetted objects. The upper lattice holds a thick space frame for structural support, allowing the lower lattice to be delicate and hang from above.
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left: site plan showing the building as a terminus to the allĂŠ that connects to the waterfront top and right: plans showing the lattice moving through the building
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left: view from the exterior, beneath the lattice, where the building mass begins to disappear as the sky appears through the lattices; objects appear as silhouetted masses bottom: section cut showing the relationship between the field of objects and the office spaces, and the field with the exterior of the building right: suspension between ground and sky while moving through the field of objects
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