Department of Architecture Faculty Design Award- MArch II
Post-Shaker Art Colony
Instructed by Preston Scott Cohen
Shakers are a millenarian nontrinitarian restorationist Christian sect founded circa 1747 in England and then organized in the United States in the 1780s. The Shakers believed in and practiced pacifism, gender and racial equality, and celibacy. Their belief in separation from the world created a distinctive culture related to utopianism. Similarly, their buildings exhibit characteristics of dualism and symmetry that are embedded in spatial organization, circulation, architectural elements, furniture, objects, etc.
The design investigates dualism and symmetry in Shaker’s buildings, and invents new building types that seemingly belong to Shakers but haven’t been done by Shakers. Four buildings — workshop, artist studio, single-family house, and gallery forming — are proposed for the Shaker Village in New Lebanon in New York state.
Overall MassingWorkshop DrawingsWorkshop ModelWorkshop InteriorArtist Studio DrawingsArtist Studio InteriorSingle-family House DrawingsSingle-family House ModelSingle-family House InteriorExhibition DrawingsExhibition ModelExhibition Interior
James Templeton Kelley Prize, Masters in Architecture II
American Brick and the Difficult Whole
Nothing engages more in the dialogue of “rationalism in material” than brick. On the one hand, the structural nature of brick was rendered meaningless in front of the modern need for large and flexible spaces; on the other hand, the critique on the new construction systems as cold and indifferent makes the cultural aspects of brick more important than ever.
As a multicultural center in Rice University, this project tries to establish a new ground for brick architecture in which the brick fulfills both its structural value and cultural purpose.
In this project, the image is a brick architecture that inherits the material tradition of the campus; the content, which led to the use of timber, is an architecture with various scales of programs. However, the coexistence of the timber interior and brick facade immediately breaks the continuity between the content and context.
To address this discontinuity, the brick facade was designed to speak to the campus with order, symmetry, and proportion while responding to the interior with “material transfer” which gives it the characters of timber. Moreover, the facade uses “diaphragm bonding” to perform structurally with timber. In this way, the brick not only “decorates the shed” but also participates actively in other fronts of the architecture.
The four columns at the center are the architectural summary of the project that reiterates the theme – material transfer. The details to distinguish the four columns focus on how they meet the ground and the roof, expressing clearly the construction logics of the original and transferred materials.
