Gloucester is a fishing community on the shores of Massachusetts.It has a rich tradition of sailing fishing and boat building.Currently the downtown of Gloucester is undergoing a renaissance.Buildings and storefronts are being renovated and redeveloped, and Main Street is being revitalized as the center of the community.This proposal for a local arts center comes from two conditions.The first is the city’s desire for Main Street to spread towards the harbor and reconnect with the water front.The second is the need of a new venue for the thriving arts community which resides in Gloucester.The center meets these needs by providing a performing arts space for the community, a gallery space for local and regional artists, event spaces for gatherings and celebrations, and a restaurant featuring a menu of locally produced ingredients and the highlights of the fishing community in Gloucester.
Concept for the walls of the Preforming Arts Center
The design of the Center celebrates wood construction.The walls are constructed using vertical pillars and the floors are made with plywood sheets which flow up and down along the walls of the building.The experience of walking through the building conveys a sense of current, like water flowing between rocks.The intention is to create a strong contrast between the solid, stiff walls and the amorphous undulating floor.By contrasting the structural walls with responding floor, the feeling of movement from between and among the walls is enhanced.By giving the city a unique, dynamic design, the building enhances the area, attracts those from outside Gloucester, and marks itself as a place of celebration for the arts.
Section - conceptual sketch
Two parallel sections - one of within the theater and the other in the adjacent passage
Wood exterior
The building is also celebrating the philosophy of Phil Bolger, the boat designer.His work and designs will be on permanent display in the gallery and throughout the building.Phil believed that everyone should have the chance to enjoy and experience boating, and he devoted his work to reconnect people with the water.In a similar way this center will reconnect the people of Gloucester with the waterfront.The design reconnects with the waterfront, not only by having multiple and broad views of the harbor, a local seafood restaurant, and a theater space which allows the harbor itself to be a backdrop for performances, but by acting as a community anchor for Gloucester.The construction of this center will facilitate further development near the waterfront, which will further encourage the tourism, industry, and growth of the downtown area.In this way The Gloucester Center for Art and Performance will become the flagship of the new reborn Gloucester.This center not only celebrates Phil Bolger, art, architecture, food, theater, music and the harbor itself, but it celebrates and enhances the people and community of Gloucester.
It seems to me that there are three distinct lenses to architecture these days. Almost every architectural viewpoint I encounter, once broken down, seems to fit into these three perspectives. Note that I do not assume these three lenses are in any way a complete understanding of architecture, but for the time being I find them an interesting frame work with which to understand, and analyze architecture.
The first and most familiar lens is Form. This aspect of architecture is the most detached from reality and the most prevalent among designers. Form is the purest, most ideal design of the building. Often it is a design without context. It is what the designer pictures when she/he imagines walking through the spaces. It can be seen in a model on the computer or in a sketch on a page, but the Form possesses no footing in reality. It is the idea the designer tries to communicate through models and sketches. It is what the architect strives to replicate when construction of the building begins. No building can ever be truly what the designer envisioned, only a shadow of the ideal Form.
After construction however, the Form of the building becomes less prevalent. The ideal is no longer an ideal, but an actuality. The fantasy gives over to a reality. Once it is a reality, very rarely can one separate Form from its context or surroundings.
A good example which illustrates Form is the Eiffel Tower. It is an iconic shape that is replicated again and again and is instantly recognizable. Every mini statue, souvenir, or novelty which can be identified as an Eiffel tower is chasing the iconic Form from Paris, France. Although every replica has its own unique context, tangibility, and existence, they were designed as less perfect forms of the original.
Champ de Mars
The second and most long-term lens is called Flow. This is the influence between the building and its environment over some period of time. This includes the flow of people through the building, the changes created by the building on the surrounding area, and how the building is changed by the surrounding area. It is important to consider Flow in the design of building as well as the Form. When I think of Flow, I imagine a current or stream. A stone in the river changes the flow of the water, but in turn the water weathers the stone and changes its shape. Very often, the dynamics imposed by a building and the dynamics acting upon a building move towards agreement, so that over time the building and its context are seamlessly intermingled.
Paris never looked the same after Gustave Eiffel directed the construction of his design for the 1889 World’s Fair. The impact the Eiffel Tower had on the city of Paris was profound, and one can understand how the Flow and dynamics of the city were changed. This bold construction was originally hated by the local Parisians, and yet today it would be inconceivable to think that it would be removed. The tower and city have changed together over the past century, and now Paris would not be Paris without it.
The third lens is called Moment. Moment is the individual experiences of each person at each time. No point in time is the same and no other point in space is the same. This means that every viewpoint is a unique experience which cannot be exactly reproduced. I believe that as Architects we must understand that Architecture is not a single experience which is the same every time. It is not like a movie which has an unchanging sequence of events. Nothing in life, including movies, is without context or consequence. Each Moment is built upon the one before. In this lens, architecture is a place for these moments to take place. If the moment is a movie at home, or a good night’s sleep in a hotel, or an unforgettable kiss at the top of the Eiffel tower, these moments are framed by the architecture.
La Tour de Gustave Eiffel
I’ve found that these three lenses are really ways of abstracting buildings into three temporal frameworks. Moment is the analysis of a single point in time, Flow is mapping change over a length of time, and Form is a perspective of architecture devoid of time. I still maintain that the best way to design is to experiment and explore, from as many perspectives and in as many ways and as possible. However, these three lenses provide insights to frame architectural problems and facilitate analysis in new ways.
The Challenge was to take this bus and turn it into a Dwelling. Many factors had to be considered, such as continued mobility, economy of space, economy of material, as well as the ever present firmitas, utilitas, and venustas.
My solution focused on emphasizing the band of windows which run through the bus. I used black panels to create storage and create functional surfaces. In the front, the passenger is in a confined area, like a submarine or ship, but in the rear the windows become larger and create an open seating area for entertaining or relaxation. From the rear there is also access to the roof balcony, which is sunk into the buss to both imitate the deck of a ship and reduce the profile of the railing.
In this design I've provided facilities for Cooking, Storage, Seating, and Sleeping.
Programmatic diagrams section - plan - section of proposed design
In the philosophy of Immanuel Kant, the thing-in-itself (das Ding an sich) as opposed to what Kant called the phenomenon—the thing as it appears to an observer. Though the noumenal holds the contents of the intelligible world, Kant claimed that man’s speculative reason can only know phenomena and can never penetrate to the noumenon. Man, however, is not altogether excluded from the noumenal because practical reason—i.e., the capacity for acting as a moral agent—makes no sense unless a noumenal world is postulated in which freedom, God, and immortality abide.
Although we may never experience the noumenon, we all understand these abstract ideas in the form of senses, memory, and story. We never experience the neumenon directly, but the phenomena around us tell us stories about our reality.
