Architectural Microcosm: From City to Building

STATEMENT OF THESIS/HYPOTHESIS This thesis explores the reciprocal relationship of the building and the city. I argue that the building can be a microcosm of the city, as Alberti has said: . . . for if a city, according to the opinion of philosophers be no more than a great house, and on the other hand the house be a little city . . . 1 In demonstrating the interrelationship of building and city as reciprocals, I have analyzed three precedents, which will inform my design approach. Based on Kevin Lynch\u27s analysis2, I have identified five fundamental elements: District Path Edge Node Landmark While these elements are common to most cities and buildings, I argue that specific design is developed based on transformative factors in two broad categories: Socio-cultural factors, arising from cultural tradition and social norms. Physical factors, arising from physical settings. Furthermore, I will demonstrate that a building with physical and spatial continuity to its city environment can be fully involved in the urban context. It connects the urban fabric physically and programmatically. In my design thesis, I will argue that the building can be interpreted as a microcosm of the city in this way. I have selected Knoxville, Tennessee, because it is a typical example of 20th century American urbanism: a grid with a central business district, pockets of urban decay, and ambiguous sprawl. I have selected a specific vacant site in downtown area, which is the best representation of Knoxville\u27s urban fabric. I have decided to provide a multi-use Institute of Culinary School, because the programmatic and structural diversity of such a building represents the diversity of a city, in both physical and programmatic aspects. Through my design, I will demonstrate that a building can be a microcosm of its city context in a reciprocal way. EXPLANATION OF MY HYPOTHESIS A city is a network of spaces, in which Kevin Lynch identified the importance of paths, nodes, edges, districts, and landmarks. The city is defined by particular parts within it. A building, as one of the units of the city, has structural coherence with the city. The building is organized to some degree much like a city. In a building, paths are the circulation zones, nodes\u27 are more active areas within the building based on program or movement, edges define spaces, districts are differentiated areas in a building often for differentiated users, and landmarks are the critical focal points within a building. In this way, a building can be understood as a small city. A city and its parts exchange their analogies of structure between the spaces, e.g. corridor/street, courtyard/square, etc. We can suppose that these two systems, a city and a building, can have the same geometrical characteristics of spatial forms, but at different scales. They are differentiated only by the dimensions of the walls which bound them and by the patterns of function and circulation which characterize them. 3 We can picture this sort of unity by taking the logic of a public place into the interior of the building. Moreover, a building can also have the same diversity of functions. Both cities and buildings are platforms for events. Buildings are not isolated and self-contained sculptures. They play an explicit part in the continuity of the urban fabric and the urban social life. Thus a building can be a microcosm of a city by the similarity of physical structure and programmatic structure. I advocate that the city and its buildings form a reciprocal relationship. The more involved a building is with the form and content of its surroundings, the more those surroundings become appropriated by the building. And just as a building changes the image of its surroundings, so the surroundings will change the image of the building. This reciprocal relationship states that a city and its buildings reinforce each other and interact. I will explore this hypothesis in three ways: 1. Through program (mixed use) 2. Through a design strategy which focuses on the utilization of path, node, edge, district and landmark 3. Through a design in which the building and its context are inextricably linke

B + B BARCELONA

Tématem projektu je stavba nového gymnázia v Barceloně, v místě, které je typické svými pravidelnými bloky navrženými architektem Cerdou. Stavbu jsem navrhla s respektem k tvaru parcely. Mým cílem bylo, nevytvořit jen vzdělávací budovu pro studenty, ale také kulturní a společenské centrum pro lidi z okolí. Urbanisticky je parcela koncipovaná jako město samo o sobě, které zve kolemjdoucí k návštěvě. Zůstalo příjemné měřítko pro život.The subjekt of the project is the building of a new secondary school in Barcelona, the place, which is typical with his regular piles designed by architekt Cerda. I projected the building with the respect of the shape of site. My tendency was to not only make a educational building for students, but also the cultural and social centre for local inhabitants. The site is conceived as a small city, which invites passers-by to a visit. The pleasant scale factor stayed on.

Travel Log

Artists generally begin their craft by relating to what is most familiar to them. It is in this comfort zone that my journey into painting began. From my first painting of the Chrysler Building in New York City to the countryside in Tuscany, my work tells the story of my travels. When I began to create jewelry that contained elements of my paintings, I expanded on the concept of documenting my travels. Further experimentation with new materials used in jewelry making allowed me to create a visual correlation between my paintings and my wearable jewelry

Layer City: Redesign Skyscrapers

My thesis is dealing with the urban construction---skyscrapers,nowadays, the urban fabric is pronominally skyscraper driven in major cities. I started my paper from my own city experience. While the skyscraper in New York City is a passive existence to fulfill density demand, most of the world’s big cities are building skyscraper purposefully other than functionally. This is the main reason that causes rampant consumerism within City of Beijing. Culture heritages are now gradually replaced by decorative buildings in order to obtain the title of “metropolis”. Skyscraper is more a political measure. The concept of metropolis is developed from tribe, where in the ancient times people gathered together to exchange stuff and communicate with others. Therefore, city has nothing to do with skyscraper, building skyscraper is just one of many solutions to solve the density problem. Furthermore, skyscraper is causing chaos and disconnecting us from urban fabric by vertically heighten us above the cityscape, which further on disconnecting culture connectivity that sustains a healthy city. In order to fully realize the relationship between architecture culture and humanity, it’s necessary to utilize certain features that are overlooked in current cities, such as horizontality compactness interacting with streetscapes, façade development depth, and enhance horizontal circulation between skyscrapers. Therefore, by adding multiple layers to skyscraper not only enhance communication within the city, but also provide buildings sufficient sunlight, through my research, I am looking to redesign skyscrapers to create a better living experience in the future

Architecture of Power in Philadelphia, an Analysis of the Comcast City Campus

Before 1987, Philadelphia had no significant skyscrapers to speak of due to an old “gentleman\u27s agreement” to preserve the architecture of power of the civic monument of city hall. This situation in which the power of the city was presented as above all else was shattered by the forces of capitalism which, from the late 1980s, have determined the city skyline. The two tallest buildings in the city both bear the name of the telecommunications conglomerate Comcast. Humans have long used architecture to convey power, from soaring cathedrals to massive castles. From the kings of antiquity building palaces to the corporations of today building modern towers, architecture as a means of projecting power is nothing new. In this modern case-study of the physical architecture of power, I reveal in particular how the Comcast Building in Philadelphia conveys the power of capital over the power of the people, of democracy, via tearing the city’s central focus away from its City hall. My analysis of the architectural style of these buildings and how it contrasts to the previous city center helps illustrate why this commercialization of city space alongside a realignment of the city center to the benefit of corporations is ultimately an unfortunate event for the people of Philadelphia. The tyrannical and dictatorial nature of capital monopolizing space and using that space to affect power structures, as the Comcast building does, have been to the detriment of the populace and their lived environment.https://orb.binghamton.edu/research_days_posters_2022/1126/thumbnail.jp

Uptown Chicago Energy Benchmarking Research​

Through the City of Chicago’s Energy Benchmarking Ordinance, buildings over 50,000 square feet must report on the building\u27s energy information. After reporting this information, the building is given a Chicago Energy rating and required to display their number to the public. However, information on the buildings architect, developer, and engineer are not required making it difficult to hold buildings with low rating accountable. The research for my project consisted of trying to collect that data and seeing if there would be a way to hold poor rating buildings responsible to hopefully spark more eco-friendly building developments

Palau d'Esports Sala i Badrinas, Terrassa

My project consists of the making a sports arena in the city of Terrassa, specifically in Sala & Badrinas industrial complex, and old textile factory, built by the end of the nineteenth century and the current status of the place it’s abandoned. The idea of projecting a sports arena in Terrassa, is because the city doesn't have a proper indoor sports center able to host an important sporting event, for example, the biggest place is Can Jofresa Sports Centre with a capacity of 600 people. The other places present a similar architecture (box-shaped) and similar capacity around 400 people. This building will have a capacity around 4.000 people. I chose this place because of to the location. Which is in a position equidistant from the interesting points of the city. One of the reasons that will explain the appearance of this building is mainly that that I want to differentiate this sports arena from the other sport centers of the city. I searched curved shapes mixed with straight forms, this fact will create inside the Sala & Badrinas complex a play on shapes that I think will be interesting because you can distinguish the old from the new. But at the same time, with the northern roof-lights the new building will remind us of the old industrial constructions of the industrial revolution. Inside, the different heights of trussed beams, will give us a different sensation, not experimented in any sports building in the city

I Had a Career on the Companion

It was a stifling summer day in New York when I set out to make a good impression on the Crowell-Collier Publishing Company. A strange city far from home, seasonal but uncomfortable weather and the strain of my first interview made me wish my proper summer suit were taking me sightseeing instead of in the door of the Postum Building on Park Avenue, up the elevator to the sixth floor and down the hall to a large forbidding door with a shiny brass plaque inscribed Woman\u27s Home Companion Home Service Center

“The Fall of a Sparrow”: The (Un)timely Death of Elmer Ellsworth and the Coming of the Civil War

On the morning of May 24, 1861, a group of Union cadets marched into the city of Alexandria, Virginia. The cohort looked peculiar in their flamboyant Zouave uniforms with bright blue shirts and flashy red sashes. They were led by a dashing young colonel named Elmer Ephraim Ellsworth and charged with occupying the city. Noticing a Confederate flag flying high on the roof of a hotel called the Marshall House, Ellsworth and a few of his men entered the building, determined to bring it down. The trip up the stairs was easygoing and the flag was quickly retrieved without incident. But on the way down everything went wrong. The innkeeper, a Confederate sympathizer named James W. Jackson, appeared with a shotgun and fired, piercing Ellsworth’s heart. As he stumbled backward he uttered his final words: “My God!” Almost immediately, Corporal Francis Brownell aimed his rifle directly at Jackson’s forehead and shot his colonel’s murderer. In the coming conflict scores of men and boys would be slaughtered in similar fashion causing Americans to rethink the grim and brutal realities of modern war. The deaths of Ellsworth and Jackson constituted the first official battle fatalities of the Civil War, but many more followed. [excerpt