2022 Steel Competition

[A Story of Vernacular Canoes, Courage, Oil and Steel]
The Site: Retrofitting Decommissioned ‘Platform Holly’

The ocean is a reminder of our small place in the universe. Chumash Indians, a seafaring tribe native to Santa Barbara, CA, are no stranger to its grueling force. Using ‘Tomols’, a type of vernacular canoe, the Chumash people traversed the rugged waters, living humbly off what the land has to offer. Their way of living demonstrates great courage, sustainability, and resilience, standing in stark contrast with today’s exploitation of nature by the oil industry.

In 2015, Veneco decommissioned one of its oil rig, ‘Platform Holly’ off the coast of Santa Barbara. The rig is located within the Chumash marine preserve and thus became the selected site for ‘Tomols’, a cultural center dedicated to the protection of Chumash heritage and values. It serves as a reminder of the bleak past and a vibrant outlook into a more sustainable future.

In North Carolina, furniture has been a way of life for centuries. Craftspeople from all walks of life have used creatitivity to elevate themselves economically and spiritually. This museum seeks to assist in the creation and display of furniture. The craft has long been neglected by culture due to mechanization and globalization. The architecture and its site work with the surrounding communities to create a connected art district that brings together craftspeople from many different crafts. The program was inspired by the river arts district nearby. Workshops and gallery spaces allow artists to create and display their work in the same museum.

The spaces are organized programmatically according to assembly and display. Galleries showcase furniture created from the workshops within the museum. Spaces work in tandem creating an interactive and immersive experience. The assembly spaces allow visiting artists to create while continuously supplying the museum with artwork. This mutually beneficial relationship accentuates Asheville’s artist/creator culture.

Furniture is something that sets the stage for our everyday interactions. It controls our social settings. It interrupts and interjects. The function is primal and the aesthetics functional. Every culture from every corner of the world has their version of the furniture archetypes, each revealing something about the culture that created them.

The site of this museum has a deep history and culture of furniture making. Largely influenced by the millions of hardwood trees native to the area, furniture making became one of the most prominent businesses in the state early in its history. Crafting became a vehicle for financial mobility and remains one til this day.

So the question poses itself: How to design a museum for a place with a strong craft culture and how can the spaces serve the craft?

The answer comes through looking at the museum like we look at our furniture. The building then becomes the setting, while the furniture becomes the active participants in the drama. The objects are displayed in a way that changes the viewers perspective. This perspective shift creates an environment honoring the craft by glorifying the object.

The museum is unique in that it features creation and display. Display spaces serve as a setting for the drama of craft. Creation spaces make the craft the object on display. The process is glorified and on view. By elevating the craft, the objects become something other than tools for sitting or storing. The spaces serve the craft and create a perspective shifting experience.

Programmatically the spaces are divided into two volumes. Spaces for creation are highlighted and put on display. The creation spaces are designed to enhance the experience of the craftspeople, taking into account the crafts-peoples needs. The large display spaces serve the craft by changing the perspective of the objects, creating a more dramatic interaction between the user and the objects. Two large vertical towers serve as “lanterns” for the museum. During the day they flood the interior spaces with light and at night they act as a beacon, a guiding light for the lost craftsperson. Other programmatic elements are a library space and a theater space that serve as spaces for education and instruction. The site features many opportunities for interaction between user and craft. To the north of the building is the more formal park space, with outdoor gallery spaces, event spaces, and spaces for recreation. To the south east of the building is the less formal park space. These spaces are designed to create interactions between users and the natural landscape. Spaces for relaxation and isolation create the setting for reflection. These spaces help decompress users after the museum experience. Programmatically the site and the building seek to serve furniture craftspeople in Asheville, North Carolina.

A Hillside in Napa Valley

An odd lot sits on the border between a suburban neighborhood and a vineyard in California. On the edge of the city of Napa this lot, lush with native vegetation follows the curve of a ridge and a seasonal stream. The stream, Redwood Creek, which flows into the Napa River serves the important purpose of directing water down and out during heavy rains. The particular portion of Redwood Creek captured by this lot also hosts a pleasant dividing wall of trees and shrubs supported by localized runoff. The surrounding neighborhood is a typical middle to upper middle-class suburb. It’s too far away from any destinations to walk so most, residents here need a car to get around. For these reasons and more, this site is best suited to house middle class households of two to four people. This design brings into harmony the aforementioned factors. It provides room for a couple and children, parking, office space for a remote working future, panoramic views of the adjacent vineyard, and importantly, on this difficult terrain, it remains minimally invasive to the existing landscape.

We gravitated towards interrogating the intrusive inundation of material transactions that facilitate and perpetuate the overstimulation of the urban experience, which was informed by the programmatic and infrastructural absence of a significant commercial node (in particular grocery stores) that anchors the population of Downtown Syracuse, NY. We looked towards the vending machine as a metaphor that signaled such sitelessness and omnipresence which puts materialism and our blasé consumerism on display as a mass spectacle.

Our proposal takes the conventional linear supply chain and the enfilade of spaces (unloading, back of house, floor space, storefront window display), and collapses their relationship and processes into a series of planar moments. So much like the vending machine, the window display, the inventory behind, the transaction interface, and the projected social bubble all exist within a thin slither of space. Each programmatic element takes on multiple agendas; doing your groceries is also a social opportunity or a recreational moment.

The building as proposed is comprised of three cores, with the main bulk being a grocery store and restaurant stalls. Each core respectively houses either fresh, frozen, and fundamental goods, which cover things like canned foods or condiments. It is capped by a greenhouse on the roof and the entire massing is wrapped with an exterior circulation that acts as a continuation of the street. Mechanics and fulfillment are located on one end of the basement and the street front has an articulated topography with a restaurant beneath it.

Occupants engage the cores (transactions) through kiosks where they can browse, select, and add to their carts that track them, the same way one would shop online. When a specific product is summoned, pallets in the core would bring the storage unit from the display window, meeting the occupant at the kiosk, which could also extend out to form countertops or kitchen units for local eateries to set up pop-up spaces.

These cores are functional, tectonic, and structural and the entire project branches out from them. The cores are columns tied in bands that allow for the interlocking floor truss to run through and cantilever outwards. The exterior façade is hung from the roof truss and drapes down both sides of the building. The circulation of people and goods also take place in and around these cores, with a series of escalators bringing people up and down the interior space.

In addressing the passive systems, we looked at the daylighting and how the built massing creates massive pools of shadows on the ground. There is also a large gap in solar gain throughout different seasons as well as relatively significant prevailing breezes. We are therefore proposing a double skin enclosure. A dynamic façade and summer balconies let air pass through and up the outer skin. The flaps on the façade can be locked in place via electromagnets during winter and an ETFE screen can be drawn out on the roof to shed rain and snow. There are also independent hydraulic pistons that allow for specific flaps or windows to be held open to meet specific interior microclimates.

The exterior dynamic façades are polycarbonate flaps held in 11×11 frames that have thin rods running through and stoppers in front. As the prevailing breeze moves along the façade, it would cause the entire skin to flicker, thereby turning the vending machine and the people inside it into moving art of different transparencies.

The polycarbonate panels also have different opacities depending on the amount of annual glare the façade receives. The result is basically a gradation where pockets of the interior are more visible to let more daylight in.

At the urban scale, the project in site would read as a mass spectacle, a billboard, a pinball vending machine that signifies the potential dynamism of downtown Syracuse, performing as an essential civic node for locals, and an attraction point that can in turn activate and reinvigorate the city.