Second Semester Core: Introduction to Design and Visual Studies in Architecture
10,000 & 100 The second semester Core studio focuses on the synthesis of program and form. There will be two projects: one four-week urban project in downtown Boston and a second eight-week project on the Brandeis University campus. 10,000 The first project \”10,000\” is an addition to the Fleet Center that has two primary aims: forming movement and forming program. Your project will provide a new entry to the Fleet Center that is capable of handling the arrival and departure of 10,000 people per hour; it will also include spaces for ticketing, a cafe/waiting area, the Hall of Victors, administrative offices for the Fleet Center and its home teams, and an exterior public space. The second role of your building will be that of an identifier, a signal for what is currently an extraordinarily (and paradoxically) anonymous urban behemoth. Situated among spaces and urban conditions that range from the highly public (the \”T,\” the soon-to-be Central Artery area, North Station, and nearby streets) to the commercial/private (the Fleet Center), the design of the new entry building will require that you develop a clear concept about the movements/exigencies/potentials of a mass public ebbing and flowing between the unrestricted spaces of the city and the highly controlled interior of the Fleet Center. On one level, your project will solve a purely organizational problem: how to efficiently move this populace from outside to inside and back again. From another point of view, your project will be charged with possibilities that go far beyond problem solving. Your building holds forth the promise of creating a new urban public space, a new identity for the Fleet Center, and even a new sense of the city itself. 100 The second project of the semester \”100\” will be a museum on the Brandeis University campus. Founded in 1948, Brandeis has embarked on an initiative to mark its first half-century with a living museum, a record of the world\’s events that have paralleled the University\’s own life. The museum will house a special collection of 100 objects, one from each year spanning 1948 through 2048. Fifty-five of these objects are known today. The remaining objects will be added, one per year, until the year 2048. As a consequence, you will have to design the museum with a highly specific, but only partial, knowledge of its contents. In addition to the display of these objects, the museum will include galleries for temporary exhibitions, an auditorium, archival areas, administrative areas, a cafe/reception area, classrooms, and necessary support spaces (restrooms, HVAC, storage, etc.). The University is undertaking this endeavor with a double set of interests. The new building will be both a historical repository and a sort of periscope aimed at the future. The University\’s Building Advisory Board is unequivocal in its ambition: the museum will not be a passive institution. Its holdings will be carefully curated to provoke a reading of events/histories that cannot help but ripple forward. PROGRAM AND FORM \”Program\” and \”form\” are implicated by several aspects of this semester\’s two design problems. Both projects are functionally explicit; their programmatic demands must be met in order to satisfy the requirements of the assignment. Both projects are serial in nature: the first project carries its seriality in its large number of occupants and the second in the series of objects it houses. Both have formal and programmatic dependencies: the first to its urban setting and the Fleet Center; the second to the fabric and institutional structure of the Brandeis campus. In short, both elicit a twin duty: performance and identity. Program has come to mean many things in contemporary architecture. Here it is used as a descendant of function, albeit a more malleable iteration than that suggested by the sachlichkeit-laced Functionalism of canonical mo