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Reading Room Margaret Ikeda
Fundamentals of Architectural Design II Fall 2004 Critic: Margaret Ikeda
Project 2: Floating Reading Room on San Francisco Bay This project brought our class to the waters just off the main shipping channel of San Francisco Bay to design a floating structure where up to forty people could gather for group or individual reading. We started our site visit by crossing the Bay on a ferry from Oakland to San Francisco, engaging us with the water to commence our thought process about it as an architectural site. While on the ferry, I focused on the movement of the boat, listing from side to side as it moved forward, every moment a negotiation between the intended trajectory of the vessel and the fluctuations of the water. I started tracing this movement in my sketch book, over and over drawing the same wavy line, throughout the trip to the City. As we approached the dock and slowed, I naturally slowed my hand, eventually dropping the line down the page as we gently came to a stop. From this sketch I generated thirty unique section drawings, all slight variations on the same motion. I applied a scale to
these drawings, and cut these section outlines into bass wood strips which, when laminated together, modeled the given size of thirty-six feet by twenty-four feet of our floating structure. I sanded the undulating surface smooth, creating a model of our barge which was also a graph of the motion of the boat on the water through time. To complement this, I also made a wooden screen of many small strips of bass wood. I spent hours holding these models under a lamp, watching the shadow lines focus and blur with their change in proximity. I found tide tables and nautical charts indicating depths, currents, and tidal movement on the Bay. I was fascinated with the constant motion of the water of our site, and set out to heighten the sense of this movement through my design. I used the depressions of the undulating floor for seating and social gathering. A screen at a fixed height above the floating structure would be a constant datum which would clearly show the dramatic movement of the reading room below.
Site of barge
Above: Original sketch expressing the listing motion of the boat on our ride across the Bay. Thirty unique sections were extracted from this drawing to generate the form.
Above: The resulting plan of the sculpted surface. At each foot along the length of the barge, the section evolves. The surface is smoothly lofted between these lines.
Left: The location of the site in the San Francisco Bay, at the intersection of the extension of Channel Street and Main Street.
Right: Study model of the changing shadows cast on the surface by the screen as they move.
Mapping the daily flood and drain cycle of San Francisco Bay.
Scale diagrams of the tides in San Francisco Bay over one year, and the movement of the floating barge due to wave motion.
Perspectival studies of the approach at high and low tide, as the caretaker would see them.