Pack Up and Plug In: car charging away from home . . . and anything else When oil has peaked and electric cars become ubiquitous, a charging infrastructure for them will come along for the ride. Often this will be little more than a plug at home or perhaps in parking lots outside places of work and consumption. But what about in the wilderness where there are no plugs? Rather than forgo distant and remote travels, they should now be undertaken with less guilt! This thesis proposes a model for self supporting stations serving tourists and adventurers needing a plug and waiting on a charge. Located in the Taiga near the James Bay, where substantial portions of Quebec’s and even metro Boston’s power originate, it is a mirage of the city living under and feeding off of the transmission lines powering distant metropolises.
In unsettled places without an electrical distribution grid, new stations will need to be built that are not only capable of charging cars with power they source or produce themselves, but are also capable of occupying travelers while they wait for their cars to charge, batteries to be swapped, or simply take a break from the road.
Thesis Project Fall 2010 Zachary Tyler Newton For this station—over 500 km from civilization for travelers going North—cars drive into pods and are literally plugged into a grid to charge. Power is sourced through induction: the building steals its power from the lines traveling overhead. Formally it evokes turbine halls and citiy skylines, while the program is a projection of the metropolises the lines power so far away. In addition to pods for charging, there are ones for shopping, relaxing, visiting artists, eating, and catching a film. This station is a hub of culture in the wild and a destination on its own. One can select a pod for a quick charge, spending a day, or even spending a night or few.
Thesis Project cont’d. Fall 2010 Zachary Tyler Newton
LEFT: view of full sized charging pod with sleeping berths; pods are moved around the station by gantry cranes, seen in the background. BELOW: plans and sections of theatre pod, charging pod, and stair pod.
FAR LEFT: site map illustrating local terrain in regional frame, with important roads and transmission lines marked. TOP LEFT: rendering of charging station from Southern approach. TOP RIGHT: site model showing project from Northwest, illustrating the station’s relation to power lines and line cut.
Plan and two sections of full sized charging module, with berths.
Plan and two sections of theatre module.
Plan and two sections of stair module.
Piecelines: The Specter of Walls This studio was sited in Belfast, Norther Ireland, and engaged the Peacelines erected between Catholic and Protestant neighborhoods as a problematic for developing an architectural grammar to express the rhetoric of haunting.The process began with a reading of theoretical texts and a screening of films by Michael Haneke. We also analyzed the peacelines to begin developing a means for engaging the site and its potentially haunted qualities.
Option Studio Spring 2010 Zachary Tyler Newton
Chipboard and 3D print study model.
2 They are then “bounded” and centered.
"If you want to save life and conjure away the living dead, you must . . . pass through the laborious ordeal of the detour, you must traverse and work on the practical structures. . . Otherwise, you will have only conjured away the phantomality of the body, not the body itself of the ghost." -Derrida
4 The peaceline traces manifest themselves within the blighted zones of the site as gashes in the ground. These gashes begin at ground level at each end of the wall, and gradually slope downward toward the midpoint. In the central diagram, depth is indicated by darkness. Where traces intersect—creating moments of local clarity along a path of otherwise increasing obscurity (as one’s field of view passes below the ground plane)— intersections are made solid. These figures are then reflected above ground and shifted away from the site center to reveal their genesis as an intersection.
1 All peacelines around the city are identified. City of Belfast with its peacelines.
View from inside a shallow path.
3 The traces of the
5 The site continues
centered peacelines are collapsed onto the Crumlin Gate site, creating a field of difference within which to generate the project.
Early 3D print study model.
Enlarged detail, showing the solid intersections shifting away from their centers and the cuts of the trace on the ground. Occupiable ground is green, potentially occupiable ground yellow, and isolated ground orange.
These fragmented figures become blind switches: objects one attempts to enter to continue on his path. However, they always divert one off his current trajectory to a new one. Portions of the site become inaccessible, forming a third landscape, one that belongs neither to nature nor man.
to grow as the blighted Crumlin Gate neighborhood shrinks. The incomplete project’s specter looms over the still inhabited portion of the site in the form of the paths’ unrealized extensions—opaque traces in the central diagram. Abandoned homes are demolished; Site with blighted zones shaded, demolished row houses marked the paths extend. as red bars, and abandoned homes as red squares.
Miller-Heller House as Zadok the Priest First Year Studio Fall 2007 Zachary Tyler Newton
BOTTOM: complete drawing of the dinner party, containing all sections in their proper spatial relationships; final drawing measures 18” x 184”.
The first assignment required us to draw the dinning room of this house in plan and elevation, and then prepare and host a dinner party in that space. We then recorded that party and redrew the space based on our method of recording. This is that redrawing. I recorded the party by noting pieces of music which came to me over its duration. I then used one of these pieces—Zadok the Priest, from G.F. Handel’s Coronation Anthems—to develop a system of architectural drawing arrising from the musical notation of this piece.
ABOVE LEFT: detail; plan of dinning room redrawn based on the first part of Zadok the Priest.
BACKGROUND: detail; elevation of dinning room, redrawn based on the second part of Zadok the Priest.
BELOW LEFT and ABOVE AND BELOW RIGHT: details; extrapolated system of architectural drawing, originating from figures in the first two sections, drawn to the third part of Zadok the Priest.
Speculative Urbanism: cellular automata in Cerdá’s Barcelona This studio began with an investigation of the Cerdá block in Barcelona, its individual configurations, and how those configurations accumulate to form larger urban conditions. Our analysis was then used to break down the block and develop a media center building, using similar iterative techniques. The studio was led in groups of three, my contribution—presented here (including the title-block graphic design)—began with combinatorial investigations of the Cerdá block, their densities, and their aggregations into larger urban gestures. I then used this analysis to develop an organizational strategy for the vertical elements of the building (from structure to circulation cores and library) and their horizontal structural connexions. This organization then informed the placement of program.
Second Year Studio Fall 2008 Zachary Tyler Newton ABOVE/BELOW: model photographs LEFT: map of Diagonal neighborhood of Barcelona’s Eixample, with site indicated in red. SMALL INSETS: floor plates of the project distributed on this page using organizational logic of project. OPPOSITE LEFT: diagram of Cerdá block strategies morphing into building analysis. On the city side, organizational units decrease in size: from the light pink 20x20 block sector, to the darker 10x10 block district, to the darker still 5x5 ward, and onto the darkest—the individual block. Different programs operate at the scales of each.
On the building side, a similar strategy is employed, with solid elements erupting on the grid nodes, from the library core, down to the smallest 10x10 cm columns. Once again, different programs operate at the different scales, with the larger nodes more functional and the smaller ones more structural. Both the vertical and horizontal elements are developed according to a programatic and structural algorithim, which governs pure structure, mechanical runs, lavatory cores, circulation cores, dinning cores, and the central library.