Studio project under the direction of Wes Jones at the Harvard Graduate School of Design, Fall 2006. Collaboration with Adriel Mesznik and Christopher Parlato.
Innovation / Mastery
For the purpose of this studio, Jones proposed that creative acts may be divided into two categories: those striving towards mastery of an existing idea and those actively seeking new ideas through innovation. While contemporary culture seems to be addicted to innovation as the solely-valid creative goal, Jones points out that mastery was alive and well as recently as the era of high modernism. In the era of Corbusier and Mies, goes the tale, trajectories of architectural thought were maintained and tended-to not only by their progenitors, but by vast groups of participating architects, The Modernists as a class. There was, in short, an active and explicit discussion of the perfection or mastery of categorical architectural knowledge.
By studying the works of Paffard Keating-Clay-- himself a master of the modern language whose work is a direct commentary on Corbusier, Mies, and Wright-- Jones asked the studio to begin by designing in the language of modernism, as if suffering from a sort of amnesia that had erased pomo, decon, and the other fits and spurts of the last forty years. Once we had developed a modernist scheme (not depicted here) we were then asked to evolve the scheme towards our own contemporary interests.
Better Living Through Voltron
At the center of Henry Cobb’s brutalist SUNY Fredonia campus (1972) in upstate New York sits the original building of the school, an unassuming colonial-style structure that currently houses the music department. What would modernism look like if it were forced to deal directly with a colonial context, to physically touch a colonial building to create an annex? Like Voltron, the conglomerate robot, this project resolves the disparate languages of colonialism, modernism, and contemporary aesthetics into a single whole. The opportunity to create an extension to the music school allows for a formal negotiation between the logics of modernism and colonialism that results in a new organization for the campus as a whole and a more integrated relationship between the Cobb buildings, the colonial buildings, and the new music school itself. In the end, the geometry of the annex allows Cobb's campus dominated by a right-angle axis to be understood anew as a constellation of buildings populating a malleable field.
By starting with an extension of the colonial pitched roof, our annex building is developed through acts of folding that form a new courtyard captured between the colonial host and the new annex. Inside, the brise soliel which is typically reserved for environmental performance is allowed to expand into the building to produce a habitable cell wall of practice spaces. Outside, another large fold is introduced to the ground plane adjacent to the building to provide a ceremonial connection from the music building, a site of production, to the nearby performing arts center.