Alexandra Cole | The UnConventional Center

The UnConventional Center _A Master of Architecture Thesis by Alexandra Cole

The UnConventional Center

Abstract

This thesis tests the role of architecture in the fragmented city of Seattle, Washington, which functions as the largest company town in the nation. As the effects of a single corporation control an existing community’s infrastructure, this city questions if functional differentiation is the primary factor in societal differentiation. This proposal creates an architecture to foster the inexorable blending of fragments, an architecture that functions as the city Seattle never quite is.

The design of the UnConventional Center will intensify and concentrate urban effects in its program and representation. The preexisting notion of a convention center’s form, program, and relation to the public and its host city will be questioned. Seattle’s UnConventional Center will stand as a perfected collective destiny.

The UnConventional Center

Conventional in its banality, yet unconventional in its representations, the convention center epitomizes a space of architectural plurality in compositional unity. Through the investigation of varying artificial environments producing urban effects, this thesis proposes an architecture of a self-contained internalized world.

Through the marriage of the magical and the banal, this proposal re-conceptualizes the preconceived notions of a convention center.

The UnConventional Center

Seattle, Washington

The UnConventional Center

The city of Seattle lies on a narrow strip of land between Puget Sound and Lake Washington. It is a city built on hills and around water. It is the island like qualities of this city which has contributed to an experience of density in isolation.

The UnConventional Center

_City of Neighborhoods

The UnConventional Center

Seattle is a city of neighborhoods.

With a repeatable formula for the services offered, each neighborhood takes on its own persona both through its presentation and clientele.

The UnConventional Center

_City of Corporations

_1: City _2: Industry _3: Housing _4: Suburbs

The UnConventional Center

The city of Seattle is governed by corporations. While typically thought to belong to the past, the company town is ever prevalent in Seattle, Washington.

One is quick to observe how a corporation has begun to control nearly every facet of an individual’s life.

The UnConventional Center

Scene_1: Whole Foods Grocery

Scene_2: Carrier Service

Scene_3: Carrier Vehicles

Whether we chose to partake in the control or not, a company town is just that, a company first.

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The normalcy of everyday events are fulfilled by single entities.

The sites of the city still remain familiar but with branding that now monopolizes the mundane.

Scene_4: Public Bus Stop

The UnConventional Center

Scene_5: Street Signage

The UnConventional Center

_The UnConventional Plan

Plan_1: Sprawl of Fragments

Characterized by a plan filled with fragments of architectural plans, the architectural field of the UnConventional Center is complex, and always shifting.

Plan_3: Sprawl of Fragments

Plan_4: Sprawl of Fragments

The UnConventional Center

Plan_2: Sprawl of Fragments

The UnConventional Center

_The UnConventional Plan

The city is a homogeneous soup.

The differences in building qualities have become so minute, there might as well be no differences at all.

The UnConventional Center is an attempt to undermine such conditions.

The UnConventional Center

The UnConventional Center

It has been observed that people desire artificial environments; over the top shopping malls, airports, theme parks, office towers etc.

The UnConventional Center

The UnConventional Center

It has been identified that the internalized worlds which are created within these artificial spaces is where architecture is taking place.

The UnConventional Center

The UnConventional Center

Various scenes have been identified within the plan of the Unconventional Center and each of them corresponds to an existing metropolitan situation.

The UnConventional Center

The UnConventional Center

Transportation + Dining

_Dining

_Transportation

The UnConventional Center

The UnConventional Center

Holding a condition of congestion, hybridizing and stacking of programs in section (bus station, shops, dining, dwelling). It has been observed how we often build incredible amounts of infrastructure all to support the most banal of common ideals.

The UnConventional Center

The UnConventional Center

Dwelling + Retail + Dining

_Dining

_Retai _Dwelling

The UnConventional Center

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The UnConventional Center

There is a continuous information exchange amid the world of retail. Characterized by systems which match the consumers demands, we are placed in an environment entangled with connections allowing constant deconstruction and reconstruction.

The UnConventional Center

The UnConventional Center

Operating as a shopping mall which refuses to be defined as a shopping mall, this retail area of the building begins to demonstrate a sense of non-belonging among the labyrinth of retail connections.

The UnConventional Center

The UnConventional Center

Expressing a kind of netherworld of storefronts, undefined by hard boxes, the floors offer a continuous run of consumerism.

The UnConventional Center

The UnConventional Center

Retail + Lg Exhibition

_L

_Retai

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The UnConventional Center

Lg Exhibition

The UnConventional Center

From the infrastructural network of streets which surround the building, to the utility and natural systems at play underground, there is power in what can’t be seen.

There exists activity in object’s latent tendencies and also its interactions with other things.

The UnConventional Center

The UnConventional Center

Although observed as objects which are seemingly fixed in place, there is a constant circulation of information which occurs in a sort of perpetual motion.

The UnConventional Center

The UnConven

ntional Center