NICOLAS
TURCHI Harvard GSD ‘18 M Arch II
00 OPTION STUDIO 01
Water\Music
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Futurism 2.0
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Frozen Memories
THESIS 04
Competing Chronologies
01 Water\Music Harvard Graduate School of Design Tutor: G. La, J. Dallmann Year: 2016 Location: Boston, MA, USA Programme: Philarmonic Hall, Theatres, Cultural, Bath
Using the program of a bicameral Performing Arts Center located on Boston’s waterfront, the studio embraces the site as it transitions from terrain vague, towards a new, terraformed urbanism. Can the architecture and remnant site infrastructure be recast as an integrated experience of land, water, space, and sensuality that regenerates a calcified, and isolated site‌ where an intuitive sculpting and terra-forming go hand-in-hand to unfold and re-stitch the building as a catalytic participant in the remaking of the city? And given the need for innovative types of gathering, how will the consideration of the land form inspire the auditoria themselves, the shape of the seating bowls or the spaces which support them?
https://www.youtube.com/ watch?v=naaqa_BHeuY
A New Water Edge...
Located in a developing area of the Boston waterfront, the project stands between landscape, urbanism and architecture, in an effort to set a new interdisciplinary approach for the renovation of an abandoned industrial area. As host to the new Boston Music Hall and a series of associated facilities like studio theaters and performance spaces, the project aims to merge music and water. As such the water’s edge is not strictly marked by a straight boundary which ignores the bathymetry. Instead the new edge is more fleeting, allowing the water to enter the site and interact playfully with the landform ( in a way suggestive of the “Flyshes� of Zumbaia on the northern coast of Spain) while defining a new civic surface within the artificial landscape.
Meeting people natural flow to the site
Using in-site facilities
Water and Music are gradually mixed
Discover several facilities around the site
Redefining the water boundary
Water is part of the site and leisure areas
Existing warehouse will host back of the house
A mixed experience, enriched by diversity
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The Project... Wherever the landscape “stripes” opens they become collectors. Collectors of water, so swimming pools; collectors of people, so entrances to the building and main public areas; and finally collectors of music, hosting the auditoriums’ bowls.
As the landscape slowly flattens towards the water, the visitors will experience the outdoor pools and the public spaces that define the new water edge.
The main body of the program is allocated next to the existing building. The existing building hosts the back of the house, staff ambiances, rehearsal rooms, administration offices and a parking garage.
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“Music is like water, it flows, it has no boundaries, no limits...�
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Water and Music: What, How and Why... The program has been expanded to include public baths and indoor/ outdoor pools where people can relax while listening to live musical events, and in so doing rediscover the almost lost relationship which the city of Boston once had with the water’s edge. The fragmented and layered nature of the landform enriches biodiversity and encourages nature’s role in the future development of this
area, leaving a large part of it to its headphones. However, people still feel the citizens in the form of a public park. need of living an experience and sharing The conception of architectural objects it, That is where architecture can play a gets lost as the building’s boundaries primary role in defining new scenarios for are blurred within the landscape. unprecedented experiences. In the same way, the new landscape perfectly integrates with the water edge on one side, and within the industrial harbor on the other one. This project aims to exploit the potential of natural formations and their possible use in a contemporary architecture that aims to attract people to share an experience. Nowadays, everyone can get the best quality sound experience simply staying at home and listening music on his
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02 Futurism 2.0 Harvard Graduate School of Design Tutor: G. Lynn Year: 2017 Location: Programme: Office Building, AV integrated
Autonomous vehicles, Robots, Drones and, finally, humans: looking at the last progress in the technology field it is not difficult to imagine a near future where artificial intelligence plays a more and more crucial role in human’s life. In such a scenario, for instance, Robots are part of human every day’s life, both at work and during recreational activities; Buildings are “smarter”, they adapt faster to our needs; Autonomous Vehicles took over common cars, becoming part of the architectural experience of a building and saving space for parking. The project particularly aims to address the question of why and how AV should integrate with the architecture (specifically in an office building).
https://www.youtube.com/ watch?v=JIqFbLQAwbI https://www.youtube.com/ watch?v=q4kKT98UK4c&t=4s
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Site: 4 roads w different speed qualities and # of lanes
Site Dimensions: 195 m x 88 m, 18.580 sq m
Shared AV service stations dynamic locations
Shared AV service stations dynamic locations
2 Public Transports Line. North: Fast Route; South: Slow Service
2x2x2x2 Private Uber SUV stations
Sidewalks / Pedestrian friendly spaces: South, East, West
Slow mobility sides provided with bike sharing + electric stations
Shared AV service Parking and charging stations
Drones free fly Area / Drones are part of the delivery system
Private AV Parking-charging stations at specific locations
AV Taxi service with priority drop -offs privileging North side
Double Dock System for heavy deliveries on West side
60 AGV x hr Delivery station on the West dead end road
Underground Parking Platforms are chargin Pads for Electric AV
Futurism 2.0 The project is also informed by the feeling of fascination for technology and advancement that has always intrigued humans, within all the utopian and dystopian literature that goes with it. In both this conditions, there is a series of analogies with the futuristic Avant-garde
movement, a little more than a century later: “Impermanence and transiencestructures must have shorter lives than humans to avoid the growth of linear or formal habits. Every generation building its own city ensures constant renewal that facilitates the success of futurism in
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fighting traditional cowardice.� Considering AV, robots, drones, and humans living together. What if the line between those entities becomes thinner and thinner until they start to share the same spaces, they emulate each other, they learn from each other?
The north elevation opens its interiors up to the view for passengers in the highspeed lane through a series of glass facades and semi-open spaces that enhances the dynamic and fragmented nature of the building. This elevation conveys a sense of incompleteness
(Boccioni’s city that rises, the big machine that is constantly growing). The South elevation instead recalls Sant’Elia’s more elegant and sinuous “linee di forza”, those invisible lines that used to guide his sketches into dynamic representations of stationariness.
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Why AV... Given the possibility provided by car sharing services, an increasing number of people do not own a car and find it useless. Everyone can just use an app on your smartphone and the destination is literally at the fingertip. AV will save much time if considered that on average a commuter spends 20 minutes a day looking for parking (which is 106 days in a lifetime!) AV will save money and space by moving parking lots in inaccessible areas like underground: a typical large city may have hundreds of millions of dollars of real estate value tied to parking, that space can be reused for better purposes like public spaces. Furthermore, owning a parking garage where electric AV are charging can open to a new kind of business. It will provide a service to the city and might result in incentives in constructions percentages or concessions to the owner of the building.
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“Impermanence and transience- structures must have shorter lives than humans to avoid the growth of linear or formal habits. Every generation building its own city ensures constant renewal that facilitates the success of futurism in fighting traditional cowardice.�
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A mutual advancement... In this Office Building Cars are safer, they neither produce pollution nor acoustic issues, they can literally start to interact within the architecture, both around and inside it. A smart gate system sets the access to the mixed open groundspace where cars slow down and start to become like a pedestrian, learning from their movement and behavior to better camouflage in this environment. The AV permits immediate drop off all around the building; they can stop in dedicated areas where they become an actual part
of the interiors and the work activity. The project’s take on futurism and AI is the following: the spectacle of technology is not an end in itself; I am exposing humans to technology and vice versa in a working environment in order to stimulate a reciprocal learning process. This a more specific idea of progress developed through a close reading of the movement’s scopes and vigor together with a conscious and realistic projection of the previously listed possibilities the technology we are approaching might bring to us in a few
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decades. Exposure becomes a possibility (thanks to AI) for technology to give something back to its creator, making him learning from its efficiency and functions. All the environments in the office are somehow affected by moving objects, screens, cars that drive by themselves and surely park better than humans. The architecture is a wise actor for all of this interchange, it suggests, it adapts, it shows the contradictions of having all of those entities sharing the same spaces.
03 Frozen Memories Harvard Graduate School of Design Tutor: M. Scogin Year: 2017 Location: Antarctica Programme: A pilgrimage cathedral for environmental scientists, operatic performances, and tattoo artists
A pilgrimage cathedral for environmental scientists, operatic performances, and tattoo artists...in Antarctica. Antarctica is the ever changing continent: its shape is defined by the seasons; the time change is artificially set by the slices produced by the running through meridians that converge to the pole (without any distinguishing character or result in nature); its population also varies by 80% within the seasons. Those who adventure themselves in this white desert often lose their way in the hope of finding it. This explains the number of monuments and crosses found in Antarctica. It is when we start too see that our memory is fading that we realize how important is to remember us who we are in order to understand where we are going, no matter if what we call facts are actually artificial memory constructs...
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Frozen Memory I
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Frozen Memory III
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Frozen Memory V
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Frozen Memory VI
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04 Competing Chronologies Harvard Graduate School of Design Design Thesis Advisor: A.Holder Year: 2018 Location: London, UK Programme: Physics department and research center / Overground metro station Architecture is a discipline that has always been associated with the idea of Space. It was only in 1941, with the publication of Sigfried Giedion’s Space, Time and Architecture: The Growth of a New Tradition, that the supremacy of a three-dimensional structured discourse in Architecture was first strongly undermined. Building on this discourse, my thesis, emblematically titled Time, space and Architecture, seeks to unsubordinate the dimension of Time to the dimension of Space in/through a design process that deploys Time-based techniques and reflections to solve architectural questions. Therefore, an unprecedented architectural vocabulary will be built around thematics of memory, entropy, relativity, trace, multiverse, etc. This new approach is informed by crossing disciplines, borrowing notions from philosophy and recent physics theories while attempting to address Architecture by both enhancing the theoretical discourse as a pedagogical source and the final design as tangible authorship.
Memory as a mental construct
I. Recognition/Filtering The way we perceive reality is extremely artificial. It is all happening in our brain and simultaneously changed by it. This is also how memories are firstly baked. Yet such a complex process does not happen without data loss. Recognition alters reality at so many levels. One way it does so is by filtering and selecting information. To understand the distinction, think
of how difficult it would be to store thousands of cakes. It would require a small warehouse. But thousands of recipes (instructions for making cakes) can be stored in a filing card box or small computer database. When it is time to “remember” a cake, the recipe is retrieved and the cake is baked again, following the instructions. This is much more efficient than storing
whole cakes, and the same is true for memories. Memories are not “stored whole.” Instead, we store data used to generate an image or word or scene from our past.
not frozen frames perpetually stored and fully preserved in our brain. The change within the accumulation of other information and start to aggregate, merge, clash together. Fragments of them get lost in the process, only the useful part is kept and it adapts in order to form a larger and more useful piece of information with other fragments.
- Entire pieces of the city are collected in the form of abstract blocks - They are clustered together - They city-fragments are projected on a neutral entity (extrusion of the site, a platonic solid) - The pieces of information collapse in a single yet multi layered entity - This is metaphorically happening by Projecting, Booleaning and Intersecting between solid objects.
- Data Information Loss - Abstraction of reality highly influenced by other memories and experiences - Tendency to modifying our perception of reality according to future vision (scopes, etc.)
II. Fragmentation/Merging Once a certain reality recognition is filtered and stored, it becomes part of our costructed past, a memory. An entity we can draw from in case of necessity. This is not recognised as the living “now” from our brain anymore, and the filtering process, while still happening, starts to deal with a larger set of stored informations. In fact, all the gathered memories are
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III. Projection/Manipulation The reason for the entire process of storing and filtering information is the advancing of humans’ capabilities of foreseeing future comings. This relates back to our inner survival instinct. If we have stored information about what can be dangerous, we will try to avoid that. The entire process is actually far more complex than that. However, just by observing these three
stages in sucession (althought they are indivisible parts that constantly overlap and loop back in an organic flow of information) we can draw a pattern that is actually a mental bridge between past and future. We elect pieces of information that has been altered already and we manipulate them in order to best serve our purposed or our projected goals.
- The single entity starts to compromise its nature by being manipulated in order to serve the purpose, a future goal - For instance, by breaking in pieces for allowing an infrastructure to pierce through the volume - Part of the volume might be scattered instead of remaining a full solid, playing with the train passengers perception and triggering different reactions - This phase is highly affected by arbitrariness and contingencies
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Some manipulations are conscious, others are not, but the fake nature of memories makes them malleable mental constructions. In this sense, there cannot be any projected future if there is no past. If there is no memory there is no past, hence no existence recognition and no future goal.
Within relativity, the role of the observer is not related anymore to the passive look, he actively shapes reality modyfing the observed. What came first, the railway or the cube? Build your own truth...
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(Above) Overground station level: the interiors are still affected by the multiple grids insisting from the urban asset and the previous stages of the cube. Those memories ‘grounded’ in the experience are the most difficult to be effectively manipulated. (Below) Upper level, laboratories: more clarity and order is coming from the ‘fixing memory’ effect. The diagonal matrix is still persistend while the ortogonal grid is taking over the overall organization.
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The Ruin (The Building) I am interested in the idea of ruin from the point of view of the metaphor to human finitude transposed to the human artifact, in this case, buildings. A sort of false beliefs of eternity that has always been deposed in architecture. The shell, built around us, must be stronger than us, it must be standing longer, surviving the events. The building I am proposing is the
result of a human-like memory the transparent layer in the upper part construct, therefore is explicitly ov the building. suffering human limits, including its finiteness and time dependency. The closeness to a platonic shape (the cube) and the materiality gives the building a sense of massiveness and and monumentality that is contradicted by the fragmented nature and the gradual fading out of materiality within 36
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The Program If on one hand, the finitude of the building becomes a manifesto of humans’ dependency on time (through memory), the chosen program aims to set a strong tension. The Physics Department is a place where people are advancing their inner spirit of curiosity and unsatisfactory passive dependence from the human limited condition. The aim is to reverse the process that sees humans building timeless
objects for feeling safe in it, making them confronting with reality and so enhancing and reinforcing the program. In a Physics Dept. teams of researchers might spend their entire life on studies which they might not ever see the results. Certain explorations can cross multiple generations of scientists. I like to think about this inner force as the manifesto of humans’ effort to fight time and limits, a shared effort to advance humanity on a broader 38
scale. I am extremely interested in the dichotomy produced by the relationship between the design of the building and the proposed program. I ultimately also feel that this is the real aspect that makes a building alive, by the stimulation of its occupants’ feelings and memories. An interesting building should not deliver answers but raise questions.
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Fragments of memory VS the whole idea... The fragments that compose the main building are coming straight from the second phase, where the clusters of memories form and fragments begin to emerge. This allows a
compartmentation for the program as well as the subdivision in wet and dry areas that the physics department labs require. Occasionally the different departments can open up to neighbors if there multi-teams researches in process. The continuous slabs leave that connection possible for future 40
purposes. This idea of flexibility and fragmentation at the same time can again be found in neurology where information is stored in sectors but can be combined for the sake of forming a larger idea or thought. They work independently but can also work collectively, as memory indeed.
Fragment A
Fragment B
Fragment C
Fragment E
Fragment F
Fragment G
Fragment H
Fragment I
Fragment J
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THANK YOU