Lock Building, First Semester Core Studio

by Eun Jung Yoo (MArch I ’15) [1-4], and Hung Lai (Wesley) Ho (MArch I’15) [5-10]

This project is a study of movement in architecture. It is not only about bodily passage, formal transformation, or implied structural forces, but also movement in time and space, actualized mechanically. It is a project in which architecture becomes the geometric inscription of a series of actions and positions. As such, it kinetically redefines the fundamental tenets of stasis and permanence.
The program is a building whose movement is calibrated to simultaneously perform or engage with the open/shut operation of the gate and produce at least three discrete organizations of spaces and sequences. The project will either be attached to the gate, temporally linked to its operation, or will perform as a gate, thereby replacing the existing condition.
Parts of the building are connected to and move with the gate of the boat lock. The parts of the building will be interrelated in such a way that their movement could have profound consequences for the perceived and understood shape of the building and its internal function. Among the mobile operations to be investigated are folding, hinging, rolling, sliding, pivoting, yoking and swinging. The building is required to enable continuous pedestrian passage across the lock when the gate is shut and nautical passage through the lock when the gate is open. Each threshold, when open and functional, prohibits passage through the other. As such, the project is about the development of two crossing, mutually disruptive paths.