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POLYomino  

A plan of a building is thought to belong only to that building, but a renewed interest in transforming existing context in contemporary architecture may insist on a different set of formal resolutions.  This thesis begins with a figure/ground map of a piece of St. Petersburg, and reinterprets this as both plan, elevation and section for a building.   By manipulating  multiple existing plans of city blocks and connecting them to one another, a series of labyrinth like structures create interesting intersecting spaces. The new geometry also punctuates the facade in a volumetric manner to house a Cultural Center for the city.

Working in this way, the existing formal and aesthetics circumstances in most Saint Petersburg architecture is retained - namely, the courtyard and the sculptural facade. St. Petersburg is known for extravagant buildings that act as typologies often contrasted by their ornament and color against the more normative and banal building structures of the city. The effects of color are studied in this thesis as ways of discerning surfaces and spaces, and color is used here as a technique to highlight the complexities that arise from working from plan to elevation.

This procedural thesis embraces the fundamentals of architecture - the site, the context, the plan,the elevation, the section, the color, the aperture, the space - but it does so by stressing continuity.  Each design decision affects the next - each aspect is contingent upon another.  In so doing, the project exemplifies a way of working in design that will provoke a similar seamless of experience for the viewer.

I wanted to go about this project in a larger urban scale. Alberti had the idea of the city being like a great house and the house in turn a small city. This is relative in the way the cultural center and the city of Saint Petersburg reiterates one another. This project became a game where I was going back and forth between the city and the cultural center. Playing into real conditions but at a level of abstraction that can be called architectural. The game starts with reiterating the existing rules but soon forms its own. 

 

The density of the city creates an interesting site plan. It was a kind of misreading of the site, the smaller individual buildings ,which are so close together, start to appear as larger aggregations. I saw them as a different scale which opened the operative possibilities for contextual moves. I was intrigued by the urban characteristics of Saint Petersburg and that led me into a way of working. 

 

St. Petersburg is also known for extravagant buildings that act as typologies often contrasted by their ornament and color against the more normative and banal building structures of the city. The effects of color are studied in this thesis as ways of discerning surfaces and spaces, and color is used here as a technique to highlight the complexities that arise from working from plan to elevation. The color is another way of outlining the geometry, but it is also again, a way of contextualizing the building.

This project departs from the idea of the elevation as a face of the building, both interior and exterior.  The “face” of the building, rather than saying “the elevation,” describes it as a geometry, and it’s this tension between the building in its context and the multiplication of geometries that drives this process.

 

As faces, the planes can evolve and transform into a continuous and seamless set of spatial relationships. A plan of a building is thought to belong only to that building, but a renewed interest in transforming the existing surrounding in contemporary architecture may insist on a different set of formal resolutions. This transformation is derived from the conversion of site plans to elevation. The plans were placed in horizontal and vertical manner then connected by in a rotational extrusion. New sections of line work were taken. This gave an inner and outer facade to be connected, which was still derived from the original context. The four new volumes were then connected to appear as if they were seamless, as seen in the diagrams. The cultural center poses a similar problem - it’s contained and diffuse, it’s varied and coherent - and so, this is the essential challenge here.

 

The existing formal and aesthetics circumstances in most Saint Petersburg architecture is retained - namely, the courtyard and the sculptural facade. The exterior spaces were created by a new reading of the courtyard, which is used in almost all of the existing plans of the city. The courtyard which was once read as a horizontal open, outdoor, space, is now read as a vertical outdoor space that is immersed between the volumes. This creates an occupied facade, which also speaks to the idea of the face of the building, but less abstractly. The plan of the cultural center was also influenced by a plan from the city. The inner/horizontal courtyard spaces were created using an additive process from the newly created volumetric geometries.

This procedural project embraces the fundamentals of architecture - the site, the context, the plan,the elevation, the section, the color, the aperture, the space - but it does so by stressing continuity.  Each design decision affects the next - each aspect is contingent upon another.  In so doing, the project exemplifies a way of working in design that will provoke a similar seamless experience for the viewer.  The way in which architecture works often is from abstraction to setting, as in Le Corbusier’s Maison Domino - but in this project, I understand it as a multiple and complex back-and-forth movement between abstraction of geometries. The specific setting allows more of a complex game.  It’s PolyOnimo, and this is what the thesis is titled.

 

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