A DEMOCRATIC FORUM BETWEEN THE WALLS

Spring 2022, Comprehensive Design Studio

Instructor: Richard Rosa

Partner: Kaicheng Zhuang

Location: Syracuse, NY

Awards:

ACSA Steel Design Student Competition 2022 Category I, Honourable Mention King + King Leadership by Design Prize 2022, Finalist

A major problem of contemporary architectural education is the elitist top-down pedagogy that focuses on incubated/ isolated abstractions and speculations without addressing the rich entanglement of disciplines and networks crucial to the dynamic civic contexts we operate in. The choice of sitting in an architecture school is a meta critique of our tendency to view the ‘public’ as static scenarios; the intervention of inserting a living archive in its agora, and a campus corridor for the public to access, is a provocation of how the dynamic politics of difference should inform and challenge the way we design for communities. The project introduces two walls of knowledge to replace the original walls which separate professional spaces apart from the public atrium space.

Section East-West Direction

Detailed Sections

Rhinocerous/Adobe Illustrator

Axonometric Section View of Slocum Hall with

The new walls primarily serve the function of archive storage and displacement, each time they enter any program in the architecture school. The two glass walls grand auditorium with a campus corridor that sits above it. The corridor enables academic discussion.

These two glass walls are each composed of a display wall and an archive storage panels, where students and facilities can insert drawings and display them on both storage wall interacts with different programs behind it, it can operate as a studio on the first and second floor, and even an exhibition wall inside the marble room. archives can be displayed, lectures can be held, studio crit can take place, and with masterpieces becomes possible. The archives are no longer stored in storehouses the building, and the public.

Renders by Zhuang

with the Glass Walls Intervention

displacement, they create a grand vertical space for students and faculties to experience walls go down to the space underneath the building, forming the space of a enables public access to the archive and makes them part of the architecture’s storage wall. The display wall is composed of openable double-layered glass both the atrium side and the inside of the wall space. The backside of the studio pin-up space on the fourth floor, a screen for the Selignmen Auditorium room. The two walls work together to form a multifunctional space, where with foldable glass desks, working and studying in front of the displayed storehouses with limited access, instead, they constantly interact with the students,