Studio 1B; Dialogue of the Void

I was invited to review studio 1B
mid term projects alongside with Michael Rotondi,
Marcos Sanchez and
the studio instructors Gary Paige and David Gerber in SCI Arc.
The spirited nature of projects with their highly intimate expressions
via charcoal and pencil drawings, cast plaster and
cardboard models and project booklets were enough to
set an exemplary effort by the students and
I was personally impressed with their focus as first year architecture students.
Keep the dialogue solid (no pun.)
Beautiful work,
it is one of those projects that will stick to student's mind for a long time.



Studio statement;
“...it is always the question of a space constructed or destroyed by form,
animated by it, molded by it.”
Henri Focillon, The Life of Forms in Art

Space is the medium of architecture.
In addition to structure, performance, form,
material, and light, space (and spatial experience)
is the intrinsic and defining medium of the discipline.
Moreover, it’s important to note, that, i
n spite of the fact that geometry remains one of the central topics of architectural education,
as opposed to an end in itself it’s only a tool to
realize a broader set of goals that involve a
comprehensive idea of space as form and experience.
Materializing this idea will be the focus of our efforts.
The principal objective of this project is to develop conceptual strategies
for generating spatial forms and relationships.
In this case, one that involves the formal relationship between an existing building,
a new volume(s), and a movement system.
Subtraction and addition, excavating and voiding
will be some of the operations for materializing
and studying these relationships as well as issues of performance,
that is, how a building works, and spatial form, sequence and affect.
Our point of departure is the former Hollywood Terminal Storage Warehouse
(Morgan, Walls and Clements, 1925 located in Hollywood.
Think of this building as a “found object” that we’ll operate on,
surgically removing parts, restructuring and/or reshaping others,
and adding new ones in order to develop new
and critical relationships between interior spaces
and the exterior envelope and landscape.
Initially conceived as a storage warehouse and
radio broadcast studio,
the building is a hermetically sealed volume lacking any connection
to the city except as an immense armature for billboards.
Morphologically, it’s a monolithic slab consisting
of concrete cast-in-place column and slab construction,
while spatially the building is defined by repetitive floor plates,
producing a stratified set of similarly proportioned volumes
that are punctuated by stair towers and elevator shafts at the front and the rear.

Random snapshots (click on picture to enlarge)
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