furniture.
objects.
This thesis scrutinizes the way much of civic architecture interacts with the citizens it is meant to be serving. This comes as a result of civic architecture, especially projects in which elected officials hold office often seem to serve as fortresses. Fortresses that insulate public processes and isolate officials from their constituents thus providing them with a layer of privacy that’s presence should be questioned. This is explored through two points of view in parallel. The first approaches the issue through the idealistic lens of a ‘panoptic reversal’ in which the central power has now fallen under observation from all angles and those who make decisions are under the purview of the people those decisions affect. At the same time the second approach takes place. This second point of view flips the equation once more placing the citizens back under observation as it is of the belief that government would never relinquish a power unless it knew it had one that supersedes the one that they are willing to let go. This plays out over and over through the project endlessly flipping the equation making it unclear who in the end is truly under observation and where the power really lies.
term: thesis
advisor: karel klein
partner(s): n/a
Andrew Zago’s studio aimed to create alternative proposals for the Discovery Partners Institute Headquarters (DPI), to be located in Chicago’s planned The 78 development in the South Loop. The current design for a 215,000 square foot facility is by the New York office of OMA. In addition to the DPI the studio will develop public space proposals for the four acre site between the DPI and the riverfront, including a new ferry stop. A central component of the institute is the Community Education Unit which intends to “build a suite of programs to guide historically underrepresented students into CS and tech-related fields.” Of the overall project, DPI writes: “The primary function of the building will be to house the work of leading academics, industry representatives, and students while encouraging interdisciplinary collaboration between both these users and the broader public.” The building site is on a disused railway yard that straddles the Chicago River. It sits at the southern end of a large SOM designed masterplan for the area that stretches north to Bertram Goldberg’s River City II project and also to the proposed site of Greg Lynn’s 1992 Stranded Sears Tower. Abutting the site to the south is the historic St. Charles Air Line Bridge, once the longest bascule bridge in the world.
Whether in imagined harmony, conflict, juxtaposition, or inversion, every building project—by design or default establishes a relationship between and definition of building and ground. Since, at least, the early twentieth century architects have reexamined the implicit stability and politics of this relationship. This studio will explore contemporary questions of building form and urban ground—independently and in relation to one another.
term: 5A
professor: Andrew Zago
assistant professor: Sevag Kourounian
partner(s): n/a
This studio tackled a variety of the challenges cinema poses for architecture, both in practical terms – by providing new armatures for cinematic experience - and in conceptual terms, by developing new architectonic responses to an increasingly ‘filmic’ contemporary urban condition. CODA-PLEX will delve into the cinematic, as much as the architectural, relationship between script and projection - the former serving as the template or pretext for filmmaking, and the latter its (increasingly historical) mode of delivery and final fruition. With the emergence of outspoken online subcultures, theatre operators such as AMC might now opt for genre-specific cinemas. CODA-PLEX will explore the parallel concepts of genre and type within cinema and architecture respectively.
The studio will seek outlinkages in these conceptual frameworks as fertile ground for mutating the multiplex type for the future. Developed to screen many different genres of film in the same space, the
multiplex’s modernist and generic nature needs recasting in the face of streaming platforms
and a host of unanticipated cultural and civic demands. The studio will seek new theoretical
and formal strategies for re-enchanting “a night at the movies.”
term: 4B
professor: Joe Day
assistant professor: Justin Doro
partner(s): n/a
Vel Condimentum Quis
Aenean ante purus, consequat ac fermentum!