P003 → Meshing Together
Course: 200B, Core Studio 2, Winter 2024
Instructor: Andrew Atwood
Winner of Design Excellence Award
This project seeks to disrupt a conventional notion of a classroom building. The organization of interior walls follows a grid determined by the existing columns of an original parking garage located in Berkeley, CA. These walls then get disrupted and adjusted based on the insertion of amorphous mesh blob-like atriums. The function of these voids is to derange the organization of space, allow light into lower levels of the building, and can serve as tactile surfaces or surfaces that can be used to grow vegetation.
The design aims to read conventional from the exterior with a rectilinear form encasing the original parking garage structure. However, the frosted glass facade allows the mesh atriums to be seen from the outside of the building, provoking viewers to visit inside.
Throughout each floor there are 2 rectangular towers (their size determined by the organizational grid) encased in frosted glass mimicking the exterior facade. One of these holds the public stair which creates another interior atrium. The other holds the elevators and restrooms. Both of these towers have mesh covering the top of them to match the other mesh.
Every floor is different because of the interjection of mesh. This is the crux of the project.
There is a continuous notion of slippage throughout each floor. Walls curve around the shifting meshes to create rounded pathways slipping around them. When they become engulfed in an interior room, the walls around them become glass to allow visibility to remain. Slippage continues on the third level where the facade extends past the original floor plates allowing there to be a view of old and new meeting together.
The third level is the main entry point of the building and has very little programming. Visitors would enter on this floor and see an open floor with the mesh atriums. The auditorium is the only programmed space on this level, making it a gathering and communal space.
The top level functions as a cafe and open seating. The mesh atriums and stair/elevator towers continue up to the roof, however, the frosted glass facade does not reach all the way to the roof. This results in a semi-outdoor seating condition outside of the enclosed cafe.
This project takes a gridded format and pushes against it. A multidisciplinary classroom building that aims to be weird. A building that wishes to create new experiences and allow folks to “mesh together.”
Drawings created using rhino, illustrator, and photoshop
Renders created using V-ray and photoshop
1/4” scale section model created using foam-core, bristol, mylar, acrylic, and spandex mesh.