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ARCH 131 – DESIGN III
Professors Stephen Rustow, Felecia Davis, Michael Young, and Elizabeth O'Donnell
As in past years, Design III was structured around the exploration of a single building type in a series of analytical and design exercises over the course of the fall and spring semesters. The museum was again the programmatic subject. The emphasis throughout the year was on the formal and tectonic possibilities that reside in site and surround, in structural systems, in materials and the technological aspects of construction, first as axes of analysis and then as parts of an integrative design process. Programmatic issues specific to the type were also of particular importance, fromthe analysis of use/space components and their combination into a parti, to an extended exploration of the viewer’s confrontation with works of art.
A list of museums, from John Soane’s House and Frederick Esp Schinkel’s Neue Galerie to Diller Scofidio + Renfro’s Institute for Contemporary Art and Steven Holl’s Nelson-Atkins Museum of Art addition, provided the subjects for analysis. Each student began by developing a complete set of orthographic drawings, which became the basis for an iterative sequence of exercises. This portion of the work culminated in a presentation of plans, sections and elevations at 1/4” scale, as well as physical and computer models that documented an “analytic concept:” an original hypothesis or physical conjecture intended to reveal an aspect of each building’s meaning.
A complex site adjacent to New York City’s Madison Park was selected for the design project. Starting in December, a four-week class effort was devoted to analyzing the history of the site’s development and its physical and environmental context, along with creating base documents and a site model to support the work of the spring semester. The program chosen was for a museum of three-dimensional art from 1960 to the present; the total built area was to be roughly 70,000 square feet.
Each student’s design was initially developed as a collection of nonspecific spaces for art with different characteristics without reference to specific artists or works of art. Thus, questions of volume and light, of sequence and materiality, all had to be confronted at a certain level of abstraction. In the last six weeks, a selection of works from fourteen artists were introduced from which each student chose between twelve
and sixteen pieces with which to test these nonspecific assumptions and refine the design as a whole. The work for the final review, in addition to full plans, sections, elevations and models at two scales, included representations of the interior spaces for the works selected.
Throughout the year, several in-class charrettes were assigned to engage students in the confrontation of complex design issues in a highly constrained time frame, each was preceded by a lecture that provided context for the issue at hand. These exercises provoked a range of responses in diverse media and helped to crystallize preliminary insights into site organization, type and parti, the use of light, structure, the development of elevations and the interplay between spatial sequence and works of art.
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