Eduardo Martínez-Mediero Rubio (MArch I ’19)

The studio investigated variations on the theme of island and archipelago organizations (mono-use spaces and their subsequent agglomeration) in architecture and their generative potential in urban design through the design of a new building for an Art Depot built with CLT construction on the campus of the Menil Foundation in Houston.

The building presents itself to the exterior as a quiet, ordinary warehouse, completely covered in tar paper, an industrial material that talks about the frugality of the program while conveying body memories through its craft and implementation. The blank exterior facades are topped with a series of tilted planes acting as roof cornices that dialogue with the neighboring prewar bungalows of the Menil campus.

The Art Depot is internally structured by a 15´x15´ chainlink grid that organizes the warehouse in nonhierarchical rooms where the art is exposed, allowing for unexpected cross-relations and dialogues between the various pieces of artwork that belong to the Menil Foundation.

The grid, understood as a geometrical tool of control, is challenged by abruptly interrupting it with a series of rooms that act as islands inside the building’s boundary and structurally support the roof. Built with CLT construction, these rooms accommodate those programs that require specific temperature, sound and humidity conditions while bringing indirect light inside.

The limits of art storage in contemporary architecture and the possibilities they trigger through uncurated exhibition spaces are explored in this project. It raises questions on the dissolution of boundaries and island configurations that, rather than understanding these as fissures, promotes connection through the demarcation of borders in a place where disorientation has become the norm.

The proposed design methodology in this project examines form‐based code as a potential model that has the ability to address these three deficits. It proposes an alternative urban development model that fulfills the FSI density requirements that high‐value land like our project site demands, yet still provide a humane housing model that maintains access to a scaled set of open spaces, amenities & guardian institutions, and allows for a diversity of building typologies, densities, and aggregations to encourage flexibility in lifestyles. By dictating the larger form‐based coding of the block configurations, the model allows for a multitude of potential housing lifestyles & architectural aesthetic scenarios to take place within this maximum buildable zoning envelope, while a rigorous urban relationship to a scalar subdivided set of open spaces (from the neighbor to the entire district) is strictly maintained. In doing so, a gradient of building typologies, from the tower to the single‐family home, can successfully coexist on the same parcel of land, while dually ensuring that a wide range of unit sizes can accommodate household incomes of all ranges.

Fundamentally, the project shows how alternative models do exist and can be both financial performative and also urbanistic‐ly humane, without resorting to the severe cluster developments that the SRA schemes default to. In doing so, it both critiques the current SRA housing policy but also offers a new model of urban housing development for a city of such dire affordable housing needs.

Yoeun Chung (MAUD ’19), Luke Tan (MAUD ’19)

Situated in Zhengzhou, China, this project reconfigures a highway interchange, reclaiming its previously- inaccessible residual areas to introduce a pedestrian-oriented development that leverages on an existing metro station for densification.

Convergent systems and ambitions produce a site that is characterized by contingency and disjuncture. The highway interchange is along an edge that is shared by the Zhengdong New District, historic area and an emerging station city. It is also the threshold of a symbolic axis inscribed by a highway that connects the airport with the Zhengdong New District and marks the intersection between two major metro lines. These are the existing Line 1 which is the east-west backbone that links all the vital functions of the city, and the vertical Line 4, which the studio proposes to develop as the new spine of Zhengzhou.

The project aims to bring the site’s confluent forces into a synergistic relationship in three operations. First, by reconfiguring the interchange to liberate its previously inaccessible residual areas. Next, by introducing a programmed green spine to increase access and influence of the adjacent metro station while preserving the city’s symbolic axis. Finally, by gridding the adjacent regions to enhance connectivity for densification.

The higher ambition of this project is to formulate strategies to engage the aberrant conditions produced by infrastructural artifacts that are characteristic of rapid urbanization and automobile dependency. It is conceived as part of the studio’s larger scheme to establish the planned metro Line 4 as the future spine of Zhengzhou.

This thesis proposes an architectural typology of the supermarket. By extracting formal representations of the habitual rituals that we go through on a regular basis, architecture becomes a cognitive system that defamiliarizes the familiar. My interest in redefining the ordinary started with a towel, which features in the novel The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy (1979) as a multifunctional device in circumstances across the universe. An object as banal as a towel suddenly obtains new meaning by taking it out of its ordinary context. The spectacle is not rendered by never-before-seen novelties, but through the reinterpretation of banal things.