IAN WARNER
Presidential Library
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Art Museum
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Performance Centre
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Bath Complex
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As both the geographical heart and historical cradle of the city, Wolf Point is propitiously poised to invigorate public life along the Chicago River. When approached from the existing River Walk in the East, the new library and convention centre emerges from the ground: fisr as a public park, next as a series of vaulted gathering spaces, and finallly as a museum arm that pulls pedestrians up to the level of the city.
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Barack Obama Presidential Library
Proposal Wolf Point, Chicago
PLAN river level + 20’
Above: conceptual plan of museum arm connecting to street level. Left: sectional diagram interpreting Jefferson’s Rotunda in terms of delaminated levels.
scale: 1” = 16’0”
Below: sketches of Eisenman’s City of Culture, Galicia, Spain.
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Transportation around the city occurs on three distinct levels - river, street, & elevated rail - which can be expressed in three grids. Regulating lines drawn through these grids are superimosed, showing potential directions on-site between river and street levels. Direction is visualized in terms of both the structure as well as the flow of pedestrians through the space: the library thus exploits its location to act as a municipal hub between the river Walk and the downtown districts.
By half-splitting the site plan in opposite directions and “pulling” opposite ends, one creates gestural arm bridging two disparate programmable spaces. The plan (opposite page) exploits the scale of the site by subducting ingress beneath this arm, to create an entrance that does not distrupt the natural incline into the park. Treating the ground’s surface by way of stripping and delamination smoothly accommodates multiple shifts in section, allowing usable parkspace to climb the outside of the rolling vaults. Inside and outside, public and private become intermeshed to an extreme degree.
The sectional delamination of the ground offers new opportunities for structural systems in such a large and polyprogrammatic building as a presidential library. Above are studies of how interpreting both ceiling and floor as emergent properties of a malleable ground creates variations on the hypostyle hall. This conceptualization is married to the desired structural quality in the stripped paper model (right), created by making incomplete cuts through the ground plane (along parallels of the aforementioned grid) and pressing opposite ends towards each other. The resultant bulges are elastic and sturdy, thus eliciting all floors, walls and ramps.
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The grid mentioned previously is further applied to a precedent study of two Chicago marriages of public space and large-scale accommodation: namely, Aqua Tower (left) and the Federal Plaza (right). By reformulating strategies learned from these examples, The method of interweaving circulation develops.
These study models progress from the diagrammatic where predominant programmatic elements are “woven� between strands of the ground plane - to the sculptural massing on the far right. Deformation of the ground’s profile in plan, which is a direct result of the material nature of the paper used, is further exploited to stress the objecthood of the museum arm through its irregularity: the tensile properties evoked in the plan are what justify this incongruity.
Section cut through dining hall as well as some interior and exterior examples of vertical circulation.
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Section cut through library reserves, main convention hall, museum galleries, & riverside park, respectively.
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Art Museum
in Columbus, Ohio
to house the W e x n e r C o l l e c t i o n
The collection, entitled, “Transfigurations,” consists of works by Degas, Dubuffet, Giacometti & Picasso. Design was based on the concept of transfiguration and its application in a modern museum, where the line between art & life is increasingly blurred.
Left: Collage of works from the “Transfigurations” exhibit.
Below: Contoured model of void, which exteriorizes the centre of the museum while encouraging haptic experiences as a series of terraced sculpture galleries.
Surface lofting was used in Rhino to dematerialize the blockish volumes of the void, thus creating a gestural “sculpture containing sculptures� that not only acts as a special pseudo-exterior gallery, but also impresses itself upon every other museum space, which exists between a sumptuous inner wall and a stoic outer shell.
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Left: A foursquare is enclosed within a square on the diagonal; this square is stretched, fragmenting the foursquare and causing vertical slippage; individual squares are doubled to create a massive void cutting diagonally through the precinct. Below: Site Plan. To the West and North are parts of CCAD campus in downtown Columbus; proceeding right are a gothicrevival church, followed by the Columbus Museum of Art. Site is currently the parking lot for the CMA. Right: First and Ground Floorplans
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Plans: Ground to Floor 3, with void outline simplified
Circulation diagram showing galleries wrapped around void: inner staircases (black) are illuminated through the void, while a ramp system (blue) circumnavigates the outer shell, providing a denouement as one descends from the final gallery.
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Axonometric drawing
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An abstract study dealing with ultra thin materials, which are strengthened via “tabbing� - folding tabs inwards at 90 degrees and joining with rigid connections. The immediate aesthetic import of this technique is the illusion of wall depth that it effects, making the supporting of the multifaceted outer shell appear impossible.
Both performance halls are located in either end of the elevated volume. They are both accessible via staircase; the spiral ramp is an outdoor performance and respite area whose springlike character is intended to balance the optical heaviness of the structure above by imitating real support by way of continuous facets. As once ascends through the building, the spiral appears to triangulate and become the origin of all interior facets of the building, which then obtains the character of a bunched snake.
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Dance & Performing Arts Center
2”
32’
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16’
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Above: Ground plan & Hatched hardscape drawing, Below: Preparatory formal studies
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Outdoor Bath Complex (Abstract Study)
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