architectural plots, 2016

architectural plots Ruth Chang 2016 Compiled works

“Into the invention of the plot, the reality (and the architecture inside) appears in a special way, with special light, in a special frame, in a special context.”

— Josep Lluís Mateo August 2011, dAP – Issue 4. Cinema

cranberry bog Harvard University Option Studio with Kersten Geers & David van Severen, Fall 2015 The project is a design for a cranberry bog located in Middleboro, MA. It aims to create a spatial enclosure that best support the theatrics of the farm while taking into account the pragmatic specificities of dikes, bog dimensions, resources and seasonal patterns necessary to the cranberry operation. I wanted to capture the poetics of a working farm that disappoints neither farmer nor visitor, by designing thresholds that mediate the scenes of the spectacular, once-a-year cranberry harvest.

The intervention therefore is purposefully minimal, almost imperceptible.

Borrowing from Jefferson’s UVA and Monticello, the bog establishes boundaries and thresholds across the vast landscape through delicate extensions of architecture (such a trees, fences, sand piles, dikes and ditches). Layers of the threshold from nature to artifice overlap and sometimes gap, becoming an intermediary architecture with windows, doors and offering precise scenes of engagement with the cranberry fields.

The design constraint was to work exclusively in perspective and plan/ section drawings at the four scales of 1:10000, 1:1000, 1:100, and 1:10.

Water control structures from Paul J Whippel 1950 Patent (Left); Dike section from National Park Service (Right)

Process image: Into the bog, from flanking country road

Process Perspectives

The project began with the interest in the phenomenological potential inherent in the cranberry farm. I was particularly drawn to the notion that, within a studio whose aim was dealing with the industrial sized agriculture, I could nevertheless select a large-scale operations that operate within very small architectures. Early, the project was crafted around man, nature, delight and folly in the park.

Process image: Along central axis from road, through farmhouse gates

For the 5-week cranberry harvest phenomenon, the farmers need 47 weeks of prep work. In a few hours everyday during this time, America celebrates pilgrims and Native Americans, Thanksgivings in the USA, and Cranberries, forever. This kind of spectacle, the removal from reality, and the temporal activities of the farm, calls for an architecture whose function is to provide a platform for the theatrics on the farm. It wants to celebrate and partake of the energy of the day. The project believes that farms are not industrial parcels but integral and valuable systems to enjoy: like a park. And on this park, Architecture changes like the bog, sometimes dormant, sometimes abloom with the seasons

Process Drawings

Five farm units take root amongst organically-shaped bogs that have existed for 100+years. These new farm units choreograph the entrance into the landscape, and are key to reframe the industrial farm as an agricultural park. Each unit encloses an 80-acre farm. The farms are rooms, that have the potential to unveil oceans of cranberries in the autumn months in New England. Trees orchestrate the views and the cranberry landscape. A long, flat facade of the farmhouse conceals the phenomenon of the cranberry harvest from the street. It acts like a thin shell containing an unknown interior.

Sketches: Sense of enclosure on the territory at strategic moments

Sketch of dikes and dike-ditch-dike variation (Lower): Design considered how pragmatic elements of the farm could be redirected towards architectural desires.

The access points and doors are located on the main dikes, which also organize the travel paths of the farmers and machines.

Flume gates form transportation intersection over the cranberry beds, and structure precise intervals in the landscape that reflects back to the orchestration of the farmhouse and truck strorage design.

Final Perspectives

10 km

1 km

The intervention is purposefully minimal, almost imperceptible. Borrowing from Jefferson’s UVA and Monticello, the bog establishes boundaries and thresholds across the vast landscape through delicate extensions of architecture (such a trees, fences, sand piles, dikes and ditches).

100 m

10 m

Layers of the threshold from nature to artifice overlap and sometimes gap, becoming an intermediary architecture with windows, doors and offering precise scenes of engagement with the cranberry fields. Ultimately, the aim is to produce a sense of farm-ness, via the outdoor enclosure of a vast territory with a set of small outbuildings.

Final Drawings

1:10,000

1:1,000

Two axes were established. Working dike and ditches running North-South and visitors walking path running West-East. To the north, a band of farm buildings including, garage, tool sheds, temporary housing, warehouse and offices is the central core of the farm. Using tractors and trucks, farmers move tools and replacements up and down the central axes, through which the bogs are also flooded via a series of dikes and water gates. Outside the gridded bog system, workers also move in large amounts of sand before freezing, as a part of the cultivation of cranberry.

1:100

1:10

Visitors infiltrate the bog from the side, with parking just off the side of the road, where they can walk in on the elevated dikes.

Along the main East-West axis there is store where jam and cranberry goods are made and sold. A necklace of trees and a wire and post fence separates the park from the farm except for platforms that are set up for viewing located throughout the park (alternating with toolsheds to store gear for workers for convenience). This is the moment where farmers and visitors can occupy the same boundary line in the off season.

oyster condo, nyc Harvard University Core Studio with Renata Sentkiewicz, Spring 2015 Team Research with Maia Peck and Chang Su Team Statement: With the threat of rising sea levels, water pollution, and increasingly frequent weather emergencies, New York’s coastline requires an alternative model for the future.

Our proposal is a development prototype for the inhabiting of the New York coastline. By integrating water treatment system and oyster farming with housing blocks, the project reinvents new, amphibious living conditions for the city.

Each team member in this studio focused on a productive living housing model that derived from our midterm proposal. Our vision entailed a living in the city that would not panic but embrace flooding as new opportunities for programming along the coastline that capitalizes on the specifics of the oyster industry.

Group Vision of Living Oyster Reef

Oyster Pool Prototype Process

OYSTER SPECS

Oyster Production Specs

Individual Proposal for Oyster Living: The Oyster Condo

The three members of the team took on three approaches towards the powerful shaping of the site for oyster farming.

My stance was one that involves a water-centered, oyster-informed lifestyle, in which housing form is organically shaped around particulars of the oyster industrial pools below. The curvilinear form is lifted up from the ground, accomodating and capitalizing on its potentials for a rich housing culture. Water, therefore, became a primal concern as reuse of the greywater informed the residential units not only formally but also programmatically.

Process Model

Section through Residential units, commercial floor and oyster industry at ground

The unit design took into considerations the creation of a ‘culture’ from the particulars of oyster farm living. The sectional cant of the block provides opportunity to curate views; the kitchen, therefore, enjoys a view of the oyster farms below, while the greywater filter gardens look up at the sky. Moreover, every apartment has two levels with designated wet and dry zones, projecting the need of oyster farm workers to clean up shoes and garb before proceeding into the furnished domestic comforts of the dry zone.

Condo Plans: Oyster industry at ground; Residential typical above; Block motor access at lifted second level

veil hotel in phoenix, az Harvard University Core Studio with Maryann Thompson, Fall 2014 This hotel, situated in hot and dry desert of Phoenix, Arizona, questions the binary relationship of fantasy and reality.

It acknowledges that so much of reality is a constructed fantasy: the persisting human reliance on mechanical cooling, the pretense of abundant waters, the paradox of the hotel program, in which the fantasy of the served sometimes collides with the reality of service.

The project poses an alternative fantasy, between air conditioning and unmediated heat, between served and serving. It unveils the systems that support us. The architecture of the desert hotel loosens and unseals itself, and leaves its doors slightly ajar.

Hotel is not hermetically sealed and, except for private hotel rooms, are not conditioned artificially. The entire building is shaded under a ceramic screen, and takes advantage of the mandatory water pools and thermal sequences by capitalizing on the phenomenon of evaporative cooling, which is especially effective in the dry heat of Arizona.

The laundry sequence is a part of this process, where workers’ spaces are lifted into view and are part of a separate circulatory path in the hotel.

Instead of using machines, cleaned laundry is hung out to dry.

Phoenix as a site of constructed Paradise: In the hotel the fantasy is supported by a host of workers and hotel staff.

In the desert, the fantasy is the mirage sustained by imported water, and sprawling infrastructures.

Early Collage: Manifesto for a tower in Phoenix. The tower program is clear from the inside out. There is no more hermetic seal, no distinction between the standard glassed-in interior and the environmental exterior.

Locker rooms and ending Laundry sequence (Sort, Package and Distribute) Locker rooms and ending Laundry sequence (Sort, Package and Distribute)

Beginning Pool Sequence with Tepid Pool 1, Poolside Apartment, and Washers Beginning of of Pool Sequence with Tepid Pool 1, Poolside Apartment, and Washers

Screened Basketball Courts, Path down running track Screened Basketball Courts, Path down to to running track

Ground Plan , Restaurant and View into Kitchen, Garden Ground Plan , Restaurant and View into Kitchen, Garden

Locker rooms andLobby/Directory ending Laundryand sequence (Sort, Main Building Training poolPackage and Distribute) Main Building Lobby/Directory and Training pool

Beginning of Pool Sequence with with Staff Tepidlounge Pool 1,and Poolside Hotel Lounge overlapping officesApartment, and Washers Hotel Lounge overlapping with Staff lounge and offices

Screene

NN

Selected Floor Plans: Plans selected to demonstrate the shift of program that accomodates the service elevator on a cant, shifting and informing other served hotel programs

Renders:

Planar organization was determined by a turn of the service elevator that effectively interrupted and lifted the services into view. In this case, the laundry sequence is lifted above the basement level into plain view, as a part of the pool sequences in the hotel.

Thermal Baths- Hot

Hotel rooms

Thermal Baths- Cool

Elevated Park

Basketball Courts

Lap Pool

Diving Pool Thermal Baths- Tepid Laundry Sequence Staff Lounge

Ground Level Restaurant Kitchen

rare books library Harvard University Core Studio with Jeffry Burchard, Spring 2014 This is a proposal for a library to house Boston’s Museum of Fine Arts rare books collection, preserving important rarefied documents while serving the general public on Boston’s historical Emerald Necklace.

The project embraces the contradictions of being a monument on park grounds privy to less imposing architectural solutions. The facade tells the story of this dissolution, in which an abstracted pediment-column type (housing the main reading room and rare archives) cracks open and ramps upwards through general stacks, until it concludes in a private treehouse among the treetops of the park. An outdoor staircase sinches the treehouse back to the beginning.

Els pub

ELSA MORANTE PUBLIC LIBRARY ANALYTIQUE: PARTS TO WHOLE RELATIONSHIP, EXTERIOR / INTERIOR

READING THE FACADE

abstracted tin shed

unfinished belltower

gable roof barn

oratory

classical residence

Varese Italy 2008

skybridge existing plans

service a

General reading study a newspa check o Library

Multipurp REGISTRATION POINTS BETWEEN INTERIOR SPACES AND LOCATION ON EXTERIOR FACADE / BETWEEN FLUID SPACES AND SINGULAR PARTS OF WHOLE

My projec mapping volumes dealing w whole of (some of are pulled

For the a Library, I the stack sequentia Through the parts their spac

simple flip

no vertical circ,rooms only dedicated vertical circ to nowhere sample path of travel,repeating rooms

program by numbers

reverse programs

follows original sequence generally

visual connection sills and doorways

Ruth Cha

Analytique study of Elsa Morante Library, Varese, Italy (2008): Exploration on how the discrete elements of the facade register on various fluid cognitive mappings of the interior. The building is unrolled sequentially into one planometric drawing.

Demonstrates an early interest in how exterior/facade fragments to reflect the interior, and how the user in discrete spaces register with the entirety of a building

Site plan: Project is located on peninsula site across a small stream askew from the classical facade of the Museum of Fine Arts

Early concept models

LEVEL -1 GROUND ENTRY FROM BRIDGE

Rare Books Library, MFA/Emerald Necklace: BALANCING MONUMENT AND TREEHOUSE

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Ruth Chang | J Burchard Studio | Spring 2014

Plan Level -1

Entry from bridge

Rendered View (Opposite): The corridor is like an alleyway between two discrete buildings; it cuts straight through the mass of the building to see the trees outside. This view strikes you as soon as you enter the monumental facade.

LevelLEVEL 22

Rare Books Library, MFA/Emerald Necklace: BALANCING MONUMENT AND TREEHOUSE

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Ruth Chang | J Burchard Studio | Spring 2014

LevelLEVEL 0 0 ENTRY GROUND FROM PARK Ground Entry from park B

LEVEL Level 33

Level 1

LEVEL 1

A

Rare Books Library, MFA/Emerald Necklace: BALANCING MONUMENT AND TREEHOUSE

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Ruth Chang | J Burchard Studio | Spring 2014

Plans: The stacks are situated on platforms, which themselves are stacked. The upper stackes are arranged perpendicular to passage and accessed via a ramp system; they do not have a direct view of the exterior. The lower stacks are arranged to create nooks and accessed from individual platforms via stairs; they receive full view of the exterior.

MAJOR PROGRAM DISTRIBUTION

TREETree HOUSE / SYNCH STAIRS house/synch stairs

LG READING RMRm Lg Reading TOP LEVEL / CIRCULATING STACKS

Top level/Circulating Stacks

SECRET GARDEN Secret Garden

Sm Reading Rms SM READING RMS

Auditorium RARERare STACKS Stacks

Offices/Workshops OFFICES/WORKSHOPS CAFE/BOOKSTORE Cafe/Bookstore

A

B

/Emerald Necklace: BALANCING MONUMENT AND TREEHOUSE

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Ruth Chang |

J Burchard Studio | Spring 2014

brookline athletic center Harvard University Core Studio with Jeffry Burchard, Spring 2014 The proposed gym is situated off a small downtown street of Brookline, MA, a narrow parking lot squeezed between a raised main street, a local bank and sunken train tracks.

The project explores the ideas of fantasy to create desire in the ordinary streetscape. As such, the project maintains a stance of being removed from the site, in two paradigms: by conspicuously floating above and by nestling under a constructed ground, as island and ant-hill.

The two paradigms took shape in a basic distinction of programs by scale.

The biggest programs (swimming pool, basketball court) are trussed and lifted above by large columns, while smaller programs (weights, wellness center, changing areas, squash courts) hang below through a field of thin columns. Though the structural systems are independent of each other, yet one is a response to the other, taking cues from the Mosque-Cathedral of Cordoba. Six large piers take precedence, to which the field of columns elongate and platforms ‘crush’ down to generate sectional difference in the underground. Thus the gym, in its audacious structure, entices interested passersby. But in the desire to go up, one happens upon its imprint below ground.

The design reflects a search during the second semester at the GSD for a methodology in which idiosyncratic spaces are the result of a consistent logic that is mined from the irrational desires of intuition.

Floating in situ/Removed from the ground Brookline Community Athletic Center Floating in situ/Removed from thefrom ground Floating in situ/Removed from the ground Floating in situ/Removed the ground Brookline Community Athletic Center Brookline Community Athletic CenterCenter Brookline Community Athletic Floating in situ/Removed from the ground present access/FLOW

Floating in situ/Removed from theCenter ground Brookline Community Athletic Brookline Community Athletic Center present access/FLOW present access/FLOW present access/FLOW present access/FLOW present access/FLOW

Floating in situ/Removed from the ground Brookline Community Athletic Center

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present access/FLOW

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ISLAND

ISLAND +

ISLAND ISLAND ISLAND ISLAND

ISLAND

+

+

= =

==

ANT HILL

ANT HILL =

ANT ANT HILLHILL ANT HILLANT HILL Projecting 2 potential systems: The island and the ant hill

Collage (lower right): Floating castle and inversion underneath

ANT HILL

=

=

Brookline presents munity and yet the with a one sided ac ready busy Boylsto maintains a stance digms; by conspicu site invisibly (Ant tems must negotia ground, striving to meeting, new strati craters of open sp tions, and new “is moments rising up

Process Image: Structure from above and platforms below

Field of columns

Rule for sectional difference

1

0

-8 5

-11 -14 -17

Plans Plans

B2 B2

4

Plans

Plans Plans

-8

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Stretching Open spaces

-8

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B2 B2

-14'

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B2

-17

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B1 B1

B1

-11'

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B1 B1

GGG

Sauna Steam Lockers Machines Elevators

G G

Street level Entry

Rules for Sectional Difference (Top); Plans (Bottom): Piers and Pilotis

F1

F1 F1

F1 F1

Wading and Lap Pool

F2

F2 F2 F2 F2 Ruth Chang

Basketball

Burchard Ruth Ruth Studio Chang Chang RuthSpring Chang Ruth Burchard Burchard 2014 Chang Burchard Studio Burchard Studio Studio Spring Spring Studio Spring 2014 2014 Spring 2014 2014

Basement Level Plan

Basketball court

Suspended Pool

Piers, accomodate elevators, stairs

Hypostyle Hall, small column 4”d configuration organizes circulation Shifting module 10’x10’

Squash courts

Process Sectional Model

Process Image Sectional Model

“ I mounted into the window seat: gathering up my feet, I sat cross-legged, like a Turk; and, having drawn the red moreen curtain nearly close, I was shrined in double retirement.”

hidden room Harvard University Core Studio with Megan Panzano, Fall 2013 In defining ‘Hiddenness,’ I was drawn to the idea of the boundary in Jane Eyre, in which Jane hides to read in a windowseat and “sits precisely at the point where inside and outside meet, converting a boundary line into a new interior space” (Peter Bellis, “Vision and Power in Jane Eyre”).

At the moment of seeking and finding a personal space, the hidden room reveals itself.

In the project, four walls shift in plan through the four levels to clue and reveal the idea of another hidden room, as if hidden in the boundary. The four walls tighten into a single boundary at the top, revealing the void that has been present all along the upward trek.

RUTH CHANG

SECTION A 3/32”=1’-0”

STUDIO PANZANO

CORE STUDIO

PROJECT HIDDEN ROOM

SECTION B

SECTION C

microscopes & tubes laboratory Harvard University Core Studio with Megan Panzano, Fall 2013 As the last project in the first semester, students were asked to design a laboratory, with 100 hot and 100 cold rooms, aimed towards a “calibrated porosity.� In a program implying a high-tech space of limited public access, and high-tech spaces that require the regulation of heat and air, I conceived of porosity in two ways: through microscopes (people view and access) and through tubes (flow of hot air in building).

My goal was to develop a mini culture, a porous city, in the laboratory—the devices are angled towers to maximize solar gain for hot labs and shading for cold labs. Within the towers, setback of six feet in every floor plate intra-towers/tubes supports the appropriate heating of each floor, as hot air rises and is drawn up through stack effect, but is retained at the top to maintain high temperature in the hot lab and cool temperature in the cold labs.

People, heat, and gazes, are caught between these horizontal and vertical pores, as a culture under the eye.

hot direct lab hot indirect lab cold indirect lab cold no light lab offices public event + common space

DIAGRAMS CALIBRATED POROSITY / MICROSCOPES AND TUBES, ENTRAPMENT AND FLOW RUTH CHANG STUDIO PANZANO FALL 2013 DIAGRAMS CALIBRATED POROSITY / MICROSCOPES AND TUBES, ENTRAPMENT AND FLOW DIAGRAMS RUTH CHANG STUDIO PANZANO FALL 2013 DIAGRAMS

form and shade

horizontal

vertical

access to above

form and shade

horizontal access to above

rake/angle/oblique gaze across void

vertical

divergent light

passing between towers

no access, gazed at

compression

release

divergent light

passing between towers

no access, gazed at

compression

release

rake/angle/oblique gaze across void

heat

light

access

view

heat

light

access

view

SECTIONS 1-16”=1-0’ SECTIONS 1-16”=1-0’

access to above

gaze across void

divergent light

passing between towers

no access, gazed at

compression

release

access to above

gaze across void

divergent light

passing between towers

no access, gazed at

compression

release

Microscopic Moments (Section B)

Microscopic Moments (Section B)

flight hotel Princeton University Junior Studio with Paul Lewis, Spring 2011 Emerging from the base of the Wright Brothers Memorial (Kittyhawk, NC), the project is a 20 unit hotel for visitors of museum and monument.

The need to deal with flooding and summer sun led to a mat building design that both shades and lifts off from the ground.

Each hotel room is south facing designed to maximize winter sun and minimize summer sun. Additionally the room is reconceived as a part of the circulatory ramp. The experience of the hotel thus echoes that of the memorial at the top of the hill.