project description:

* Featured in the SCI-Arc 2009 Spring Show

The rail terminal is an archetype whose function deals primarily with the movement & motion of people & vehicles. Our formal approach takes the kinetic forces of this movement and transfers them to the creation of a set of helical systems through infrastructural tectonics.

Through various prototypical module tests we have settled upon a potentially evolving system whose makeup consists of four primary helical members connected by a series of secondary spanning lattice members. Each one of these elevated modules will then be connected to one another at their aggregated intersections, providing circulation intensities at each designated entrance/exit node.

These intricate geometries are created through a series of deformers and wraps applied to a framework in which one can define lattice, transparency, enclosure, and an array of systems according to its function.

Our project defines a singular prototypical cell and utilizes its growth outputting a mass aggregation of interactions and relations between each. The expansion of the double helix allows for a conceptually sound strategy in providing an infrastructural architecture.

project description:

Born from the seeds of proto-architectural exploration the bipolar house roots itself into the landscape and begins its growth into a matured conceptual entity. Once situated upon its desired perch the organic liner begins feeding from its environment by drawing minerals from the stone plinth as it grows its protective shell through a process of calcification shielding its soft interior liner from the threats of the elements. Once encased in its rigid body the liner begins to lift open surface apertures capturing sunlight into its interior fueling the next phase of its development. Unable to contain its own growth the liner membrane swells beyond the threshold of its shell exposing itself to the exterior. This gluttonous swelling is the liner’s egocentric action to prove its ability to exist beyond the protective shell it once depended upon and thus violating the shell and the notion of poche. In response to its internal programmatic necessity for floor plates the shell responds in kind by thrusting itself back into the interior space violating the exterior/interior relationship. This competition for identity, function, and purpose drives enormous fractures in the shell and tears open large portions of the liner which compromises these two systems’ ability to support each other without a third mediating system, the structural armature. The structural armature was the natural respond to the shell and liner’s destructive relationship. The armature serves as a spatial structure comprised of standardized rods bridging free-form node connectors. The node connectors help to re-establish the shell liner relationship by creating connection nipples on the exterior for the shell to latch onto. The interior liner’s membrane also fixes itself to these node connections via a female reception point and button creating a tufted interior surface membrane. Further, the armature, once developed from the integrated semi-rigid cartilage system once within the interior membrane, now has hardened and detached itself from its parasitic liner and driving its legs and feet into the landscape fracturing the stone plinth it once fed from like the roots of an old tree.

Now a mature concept, the shell, the liner, and the armature have now fulfilled their purpose for architectural exploration. Born from pure formality, this entity has grown through the design process to strive for the bipolarity of the live/work program and then abandon it, and used the affects of poche then arrogantly rejected it, leaving only the 3 symbiotic proto-architectural and proto-structural systems as a model for a design process conceived from the mediation of geometric expression through the reactionary bipolar cohabitation of the rigid crenellated shell and soft cellular liner.