Level 3 Architecture Studio
Instructor: Alexander D'Hooghe
Title: The New Monumentality Studio: New Jersey

The “grey goo” of New Jersey is emblematic of first ring suburbs throughout the United States: a vastly undifferentiated and fractured landscape of strip malls, big box retail, homogenous residences, and large infrastructures. Major infrastructures have created fracture lines in the suburbs - severing greenbelts, street grids as well as residential fabrics. Fracturing the physical grain of the suburbs has transcended into a fractured society. Demographic analysis and census studies reveal clear “zones” of different socio-economic demographics that are divided by these infrastructures. Infrastructure, however, also provides an opportunity; the prediction of the gathering of people within the suburbs. This project attempts to reconcile both by-products of infrastructure by exploiting their congestion and stitching back the fractured landscape. This “reversal of fortunes” transforms the most residual and fractured zone lying between two infrastructures to the most central and connective piece within the project.

Level 3 Architecture Studio
Instructor: Ann Pendleton Jullian
Title: Game Theory and Urbanism : Shanghai

Suzhou River has traditionally served as an axis of industry in Shanghai as well as a silent boundary between the historic “western” city to the south and the “Chinese” city center to the north. Industry has now started to recede following the city’s proposal to clean the river and transform it into a recreational zone. This typically western model of separating sites of production from those of consumption has resulted in the declining economic conditions evident on this site. Re-introducing heavy industry over the river establishes a polarity with an assumed future development of high-rise residential towers beyond the northern border of the project site. These linear spines structure the site around the interaction of production and consumption. The “zoning” of the monumental bar mimics the zoning of the site. Industry decreases in scale and elevation as it moves north. Commerce guides high-rise residents along an almost-infinite path, through a series of spatial conditions towards the waterfront civic / cultural zone. Where urban fabric meets the relentlessly continuous bar, roof gardens provide an opportunity for encounters between programs.

Level 3 Architecture Studio
Instructor: Lise Anne Couture
Title: High Performance Architecture

My research was based on the study of the parameters and performance criteria for the design of a high performance object. After identifying the high performance design requirements and conditions of the running shoe, the parameters were isolated and abstracted as specific formal transformations to a neutral field. Following the program of a triathlon center, the formal transformations are applied according to the circulation of the spectator and the transfer and entry/exit between the swimming, biking, and running across the site.

 

Level 2 Architecture Studio
Instructor: Mark Goulthorpe
Title: Tycho Brahe Institute For Inquiry

The Tycho Brahe Institute for Inquiry is a memorial, a research foundation, and a theme park. Obsessed with precision but prejudiced by conviction, the Danish-born Renaissance astronomer Tycho Brahe redefined scientific praxis with his invention of incredibly precise and elegant machines, and by consequence damned himself to the torment of reconciling his faith in a geocentric model of the universe with his own increasingly unequivocal evidence towards the contrary. This project celebrates the man as promulgator of the great lie, and thus by Pablo Picasso’s definition, a true artistic genius. The architecture is an attempt to resolve the will of its designer with the “objective” output of a modern day Tychonian instrument: a generative, parametric machine that attempts to resolve Brahe’s geocentric vision of the solar system with the heliocentric reality. The two jealous systems use gravitational force within a time-lapse simulation to assert prominence within the machine. The architecture becomes the victim of this battle, as it is molded by the residual forces of the two competing planetary systems.

Level 2 Architecture Studio
Instructor: Jan Wampler
Title: Coming together: Housing in New Orleans

The context for the design was composed, using elements from the existing urban fabric of New Orleans to create a composite whole. The Programming aim for the design, is to create nodes of interaction, by using elements that in most situations unite people irrespective of age, social or financial status. Incorporated in to this is an economic cycle/Income generator. My design approach mediates the Interaction, intertwining and layering of overlapping volumes and uses by creating one volume within which smaller volumes exist and interact. These smaller volumes, consist of housing units, a library, a gallery and commercial space for shops and offices all of which are porous and permeable to the flow of space.Communities,are arranged to provide micro-level private open spaces as well as private communal spaces, which come together to form a communal whole that fosters interaction and community development.

Level 2 Architecture Studio
Instructor: Shun Kanda
Title: Community Aquatic Center - Magazine Beach, Cambridge, Massachusetts

Water is by nature formless and passive, only showing particular qualities when interacting with its surroundings. The slightest stimulus is enough to produce a number of rhythmic patterns in a pool or the sea, or even in a small basin. The Community Aquatic Center in Cambridge establishes relationships between sky and water – light and temperature – to create environments for casual and competitive swimming. Steel extrusions modulate from dome to skylight, column to screen to create a system with local response for formal and informal use – alternating pockets of hot and cold water in the recreational pool, evenly distributed light for racing and sports – allowing for diversity of use, inside and out. Reflection, depth and color of water reveal the nature of program.

Level 1 Architecture Studio
Instructor: Juan Du
Title: Building in Cities

An interface is a place at which independent and often unrelated bodies meet and act on or communicate with each other. Charlestown and the neighboring Boston areas are populated by many such bodies: residents of all income levels, tourists, and commuters of all frequencies. The new Charlestown inner harbor water transit serves as a crossroad of multiple functions for these varied publics. Situated at the tip of Charlestown Navy. Yard's pier number 1, the station is composed of a series of continuous ramps that take the occupants both down into the water and up into the sky, challenging the mundane meaning of a terminal. Formed out of the boardwalk that traverses throughout the entire Navy Yard as well as the larger Charlestown neighborhoods, and taking the language of the site, dry docks pushing in and piers pulling out in both horizontal and vertical directions, the transit station introduces a new way to experience the water edge.

Level 1 Architecture Studio
Instructor: Paul Lukez
Title: "Building in Cities" - Charlestown Navy Yard

What I envisioned in Charlestown Navy Yard: crowd in the prime spot of Boston, central axis of movement along the dry dock #2 towards the ferry terminal, revival of the old Boston fish market in the Navy Yard, bringing tourists to enjoy the historic monuments and to absorb the view of Boston, different sorts of neighbors from different parts of the area to buy market fresh food, the city people coming in by water, and visitors to wander around and find food, street performance and vendors along the rhythmic breaks of the axis, market place stepping down to the water under the flexible cover supported by the crane structures, market fresh food stretching towards the view of Boston, transitory eating space raised above the busy axis of movement, stationary eating space positioned towards Boston hovering over the market place, massive walls controlling the view and movement of the area, a sense of livelihood, celebrating the food, history, and people of Boston in the Navy Yard.

Level 1 Architecture Studio
Instructor: Andrew Scott
Title: Perceptions and Narrative: Light and Landscape

The design of this school is based in the belief that liberal arts education has to facilitate a dialogue between the various forms of arts and sciences. Wellesley College Art School has to be a place to learn from your peers and faculty, as well as the environment around you. Hence, the architecture aims to bring curiosity and play into this school and ease the collaboration between various art disciplines. Studio spaces overlap to facilitate visual and physical awareness and dialogue between different fields of arts. The flow through the building allows for the perception of different programs at once, both indoor and outdoor. Each studio has an access to a courtyard, which becomes a college community space for work, play, and rest. The roofs of the ground floor studios become outdoor courtyards for a studio and a study space on the upper level. The orthogonal rooms turn and fold around the hill forming a back spine corridor, which encourages undisturbed passage from the main library entry to the gallery space. The gallery is a final destination for the visitors. It directly faces a lake rewarding a visitor with a delightful view.

Level 1 Architecture Studio
Instructor: Fernando Domeyko
Title: Artist Residence in Nahant, MA

The project is a design for an artist hostel where visiting artists could be accommodated for stays of three to six months. Experientially the building is a series of moments of compression and expansion organized to reveal to the inhabitant his or her relationship to the horizon, the sky, the landscape, and thus their relationship to the environment. Circulation through the building is directed by the building's three main retaining walls which reveal or conceal the horizon and surrounding landscape. Vertical movement occurs in compressed spaces where the visitor is given access to the sky and the horizon. Moments of expansion occur once they leave the compressed circulation spaces where each interior space opens towards a specific segment of the landscape. The hostel is approached through a slice cut into the hill where visitors walk atop the preexisting concrete roof of the bunker as well as alongside the new retaining wall which guides them into the building. The visitor can see the relationship between the immediate environment of the bunker, the hill, and the initial wall of the new structure, to the blue horizon of the open ocean.