Program Thoughts

Activity over Time

Systems: Restoring Productive Landscapes in Urban Environments

Nature: The natural landscape results from human manipulation and forces that are out of our control.  Both cities and wilderness can be considered nature.  Cities are natural because we congregate instinctively.

Aesthetic Landscape: This land has been cultivated to look good.  Gardens, cemeteries and hiking trails are examples of this.  It has no functional use.

Recreational Landscape: This land has been cultivated to create a space for people to play or to simply enjoy being outside.

Productive Landscape: This is land that is used to grow plants, graze animals; essentially it exists to make things.  If it is also aesthetic, it’s purely coincidental.

Thesis:

The way landscape has been cultivated for use in the past 100 years has been for aesthetic or recreational purposes.  Parks such as Central Park and the High Line are examples of this.  In the post-industrial 21^st century, humans need to make the most of land in densely populated urban areas.  Brownfield sites need to restored and put to use again, while also providing spaces for recreation.  With the pollution that has built up both in the air and in the ground and the technology humans have acquired it is both reasonable and necessary that architecture today goes beyond the rooftop and below the foundation.  It must act as part of a greater system.  Productive landscapes could be restored if buildings were able to eradicate toxins within the soil using rainwater and natural means.  Simultaneously these buildings would also fulfill all programmatic needs of their occupants.

Program Statement:

As I am using my building to clean and restore the landscape on a former industrial site, it seems only fitting that the buildings serves the public as a place to restore or cultivate culture.  I propose a performance space that acts as both a place for kids to go after school to dance or practice martial arts as well as a place for professional performances and schools to use.  This will act as inspiration to the up and coming performers as well as draw in other members of the community for shows.

Narrative of Spaces:

This performance studio will be a place for all members of the community to retreat to on the regular basis.  Young children will practice here in rooms in spaces adjacent to the much older performers.  Lounges geared toward different age groups will be available as places to socialize and take a breather between practices and rehearsals.  This series of spaces should be made available to connect.  Various changing facilities and practice rooms will be found through out the building as well as a kitchen area.  In addition to this there must be offices and seminar spaces.  At the center of the space will be the main performance space.  This is where shows for lectures, dancing, martial arts, comedy and theater will be held.

Visual Abstract

Idea Map: Round 3

My Favorite Buildings (I've visited):

These are all buildings that I visited durning my Study Abroad Semester in chronological order:

I loved Norman Foster's reconstruction of the Reichstag in Berlin.  Walking up the ramp provides an excellent panoramic of the city.  Visiting it at different time of the semester enabled me to see the different positions of the sunshade.  And I loved being able to look in the mirrors and see the reflection of the Parliament meeting below.

This is the Museum fur Naturkunde in Berlin.  It is a typical late 19th century museum building.  I'm partial to it because the central atrium has the largest mounted dinosaur in the world.

This is the CaixaForum in Madrid.  Herzog and de Meuron were commissioned to convert a "historic" power plant into a forum for the arts.  They raised the brick facade, removed the granite base so it would look like it was floating and added additional stories above which are wrapped in a corten steel skin.  Herzog and de Meuron commissioned French Botanist, Patrick Blanc to design a green wall for the adjacent building.  I love the juxtaposition of the materials and the plaza they create.  It doesn't hurt that there was an upside down elephant statue on display while we visited.

This is a stand at the Grand Bazaar in Istanbul.  The Grand Bazaar is a massive indoor market that opened in the 15th century.  It is a maze of vendors, I visited it everyday when I was in Istanbul, but that's mostly because I like buying stuff.

This is a Medusa column base in the Basilica Cistern in Istanbul.  The cistern was built in the 6th century.  The weight of the ground above the cistern is supported by columns and a vaulted ceiling.  The columns were brought from buildings all over the empire.  I like it because the amount of aesthetic detail that went into a water storage system is incredible... though only par for the course at the time.

Peter Zumthor's Kunsthause in Bregenz, Austria is another one of my favorites.  I like the double ceiling system that allows for the different lighting conditions on the interior.  I also like how everything is based on a unit and is detailed accordingly.  The width of a glass pane corresponds to a ceiling tile, interior concrete walls are one half of the width of a ceiling tile, so on and so forth.

The image on the right is a house by Gion A. Caminada in Vrin.  He bases his design on typical building typologies in Vrin (left) and is trying to bring people to this small village in the Alps through his architecture.

I loved Palladio's Villa Rotunda in Italy.  It's a classic, so you can't not like it.  I loved it because we visited it on a gorgeous day, and we sat outside with other architecture study abroad trips from America and you could just talk about architecture.  It epitomized an architecture study abroad trip.

My other favorite building is the Thermal Baths in Vals, Switzerland, but it was previously discussed in this blog.

Thesis Abstract

For centuries people have had a direct connection with nature, they harvested food, they hunted animals, and they used resources from the land to build shelter.  This gave them a direct connection with the natural world.  This connection is essential because it restores the human spirit.  This environment is stimulating but not in the way a city is.  Here, a person can reflect.  Here they can reconnect with the innocence that is found among wild species.  Additionally the scale and natural phenomena people witness in the wilderness is humbling and leads us to examine the validity and authenticity of our daily lives.

As settlements became cities across the United States, natural resources were depleted and some creatures were hunted into extinction.  The pristine landscape was being destroyed.  The first restorative measure taken was the inception of the National Parks.  Visitors could once again connect to nature, if they had the time and money to spend.  Simultaneously, the industrial revolution was occurring, cities were growing and life’s pace was increasing.  Landscape urbanism was introduced at the turn of the 19^th century, which offered some of the qualities of the untouched landscape.  These urban translations of the natural landscape were able to conjure some of the reflections and playfulness of the natural world.  This thesis is an exploration of what specifically stimulates us in nature and how it is successfully translated over the course of the 20^th century in American cities.

Image Map

This shows how landscape urbanism has progressed and how people have left the city to experience nature in the U.S. in the last 150 years.

Idea Map: Round 2