Your Dream Project

Why? What? How? Interpretion

Below are three project statements.
Read them all and choose one that you prefer.

How does (a) discipline/mediums and (b) techniques of the project fullfill the (c) motivations conveyed ? Can you trace individual connections between these aspects and consolidate that connection within a single sentence? If not immediately clear, can you interpolate or extrapolate those connections? From the project description, can you gain a sense of their overall ambitions in practice, i.e. the concerns that drive them to engage in this discipline or profession, or the reason they prefer certain techniques or strategies over others ?

Example #1

In the award winning scheme for two libraries at Jussieu, a technical university in Paris, [----] radically reconfigures the typical library layout. Rather than stacking one level on top of another, floor planes are manipulated to connect; thus forming a single trajectory - much like an interior boulevard that winds its way through the entire building.

The implantation of the new library represents the insertion of a new core, which should at the same time resuscitate the original significance of Albert's project.

However beautiful, Albert's campus is windy, cold and empty. Rather than being a singular building it is a network. Its endlessness psychologically exhausts in advance of any attempt to 'inhabit' it. Intended as the essence of the campus, the pedestrian parvis is experienced as a residual, a mere slice of void sandwiched between sockle and building.

To reassert its credibility, we imagine the surface of the parvis as pliable: a social magic carpet. We fold it to form a stack of platforms, which is then enclosed to become a building, which may be read as the culmination of the Jussieu network.

These new surfaces - a vertical, intensified landscape - are then 'urbanized' almost like a city: the specific elements of the libraries are reimplanted in the new public realm like buildings in a city. Instead of a simple stacking of one floor on top of the other, sections of each floor are manipulated to connect with those above and below.

In this way a single trajectory traverses the entire structure like a warped interior Boulevard. The visitor becomes a Baudelairean flaneur, inspecting and being seduced by a world of books and information and the urban scenario.

Through its scale and variety, the effect of the inhabited planes becomes almost that of a street, a theme which influences the interpretation and planning of the Boulevard as part of a system of further supra-programmatic urban elements in the interior: plazas, parks, monumental staircases, cafes, shops.

Example #2

Parliaments, assemblies, or other types of discussion spaces have usually been thought of from an exclusively human point of view. Debates are always led by humans around human issues. But the latest revelations from science, ecology, and climatology studies are calling into question the viability of this anthropocentric policy in favor of other, more plural and diverse cosmovisions.

Crxnolxne tries to echo these new perspectives in the construction of the new auditorium for the FRAC Center – Val de Loire museum, the third collection of modern and contemporary architecture after MoMA and the Center Pompidou. To achieve this, the project is organized through three fundamental design strategies:

1. Multispecies enclosure: The skin that surrounds and defines the scope of the new auditorium is built through a multiplicity of elements against the typically modern homogenization. Flowers, branches, shells, toys, or plastic animals coexist in the exterior enclosure demanding their presence in the debates.

2. Transparency: Debates should not only involve those directly interested. To do this, the exterior enclosure opens through large windows or openings that open the field of vision to those who are outside, literally and symbolically, inviting them to participate while moving away from the closed image characteristic of this type of space.

3. Assembly: In the same way, the classic unidirectional organization of auditoriums, with the focus on a single speaker, makes the emergence of horizontal forms of discussion difficult. The project incorporates as its main furniture a perimeter bench that snakes around the museum structure and enables a multitude of focal points and crossed dialogues in addition to freeing up the central space, thus allowing the incorporation of other forms of representation at specific moments.

Example #3

At least one version of Modernism began with a public greenhouse, a so-called crystal palace with steel painted sky blue. This is aluminum. No paint, although possibly someday. Lighter. Recyclable. Reflective in the right lighting. Easier to carry and put together. Made from a kit of parts. Imbued with Gothic clarity, maybe. Crystalline-ish. Crystal Lite. 290 pieces, bolted connections. Manufactured in a factory. Assembled on site within a week. An instant bubble. An atmosphere. An environment. A totalizing experience. Ol factory. Designed to move, to travel almost anywhere. And plants can visit from anywhere. An instant garden. An instant community. A community greenhouse. An exotic display of difference. A collective. A place for people to visit to restore themselves and unwind and work and meditate and rest. An allotment to grow food, outside of the marketplace, outside of work. An alternate economy. A place to cultivate care. The possibility of something better.

Why? What? How? Description

To facilitate initial development and coordinate discussion, this exercise will take the form of three paragraphs.
Each paragraph should not exceed 150 words.

Paragraph 1 — Why?
What observations about the world informed the reason for the work? Were you influenced by any significant references, texts, philosophies, data, research or other materials? What motivated you to act? Was it a commitment to something humanitarian, ecological, social, historical, urbanistic, psychological, aesthetic, political, etc.? Was it a curiosity or interest? Were you motivated by something true, but unexpected?

Paragraph 2 — What?
What discipline, mediums, systems, infrastructures or typologies did you engage and why did you engage it? What agency does that discipline or medium (etc.) have to support or challenge your motivations?

Paragraph 3 —How?
How did you develop strategies and tactics to imbue that medium, material, or actions with agency in fullfillment? How did give order or shape materials, processes, systems, to generate aesthetic, techincal, or practical outcomes in relation to the observations and motivations you described earlier.

Rewrite the Project Statement for next week.

Revision, Expression & Portfolio Design

Revision, Expression
& Portfolio Design