Thing inside a thing inside a thing

Knowlton school of architecture

Spring 2019

Instructor: Sandhya Kochar, Erik Herrmann

An urban art hotel is the program that continues developing themes from the “thing inside a thing project”. The conceptual idea for this investigation is the “city within a city”, a concept for urban mixed-use development most often associated with Rockefeller Center in New York, but developed simultaneously in Cincinnati at the Netherlands Plaza Hotel. Architectural concerns in this project include the relationship of the project to a specific urban site and far more demanding programmatic requirements. The three conditions of adjacency, tangency and intersection come into play to create space and to determine the form of the project.

This Project is basically a thing inside a thing inside a thing, the ultimate container being the site. The formal gesture of the building and the openness of the ground floor all work to engage the site with the building.

The public circulation and interior urbanism of the project are of particular focus. Visitors to the hotel’s galleries should have access to a rich public realm of linked spaces located above the ground plane.

Embracing the theory’s demand for programmatic density, but evolving beyond a simple “stacking” of plates, this project uses strategies of volumetric nesting. The wrapper creates gallery spaces, works as an agent that weaves everything together and works structurally to hold the project up. There is a constant shift between the somewhat regular pink masses of the hotel and the fluid interstitial space between the wrapper and the cubic masses, the galleries.

The form that is created outside of the site is later placed within a site. This act of placing a foreign object inside an unchangeable site forces the object to adjust and adapt formally to be able to fit in.