THE FOREST + THE FILTER

Academic Group Project: Jane Van Velden

Professor: John Casbarian + Fedrico Pedrini (XDGA)

Paris, France

Spring 2022 - Awarded Fossi Prize

- Equal parts conceptual, all graphics included are my own.Sited on the Saclay plateau, our project serves as the built threshold between the forest and campus. The forest operates as the filter through which one moves from the small residential scale of the town below, to the monumental scale of the still-growing campus. It synthesizes the perimeter condition of the channels with the filter-like qualities of the forest. Dominated by young, transient students and workers who leave the campus often vacant, a missing element of the campus ecology is a more permanent presence of people. We aim to provide housing that supports populations that are in more diverse, yet stable, stages of their lives. Specifically, families. The architecture will provide an infrastructure that is parallel to the ‘natural’ ethos that our design enforces with an educational component that intertwines nature with learning at all stages of life. The physical perimeter of the school will be inherently fuzzy, blurring the boundaries between interior and exterior, domestic and public. A synthesis of the developmental ethos of open-air and forest school models, this will serve as the charge of the project; the reason families move here, stay here, and grow here. A continuous landscape strategy unites a combination of housing typ-ologies and forest school. The pathway alongside the screen, the pinch points of the residential bars, and the ground floor become the space of the collective.

1 _ SITE CONDITIONS

We explored the relationship between nature and artifice, studying the network of man-made ditches; a trace of the development through time, that can be read at the scale of infrastructure and embodied experience.