3rd Semester Studio Project | 2022
Design a house for chairs.
At the conclusion of final reviews at architecture schools, one can observe a decided messiness. Cardboard scraps, scattered papers, large plots, and piles of study models litter the floor, overwhelm tables, and nestle in corners. This is the detritus of architecture schools. All is to be thrown away or recycled, abandoned and wasted…or is it?
The Detritus House is a house dedicated to experimenting with the detritus of architecture schools. Sited on the Fall Creek Gorge near Milstein Hall to enable quick transportation of detritus, its primary gesture is a line oriented northwest-southeast in response to solar and wind conditions. To open up towards the view of the gorge, five different spaces are extruded along the minor axis. These spaces are the same floor area, but are extended along the minor axis and shortened along the major axis to differentiate the spaces.
The first space is for processing the paper detritus into pulp in order to create an MDF-like material that can be shaped and formed with power tools. The second space has more tools to manipulate the pulp, but no power tools. The third space is a space for the creation of parti diagrams and models from the detritus. The fourth space is a completely empty room for larger-scale detritus models to be assembled. The fifth space is a room for relaxation and for experimenting on ways spaces can enable relaxation, appropriate given its proximity to the gorge. Interrupting the programmatic and formal logic of the spaces is a mini-mediatheque situated between the second and third rooms, elliptical in plan and made of cardboard tubes bolted together. The occupiable roof contains skylights that can also be used as experiments in manipulating natural lighting.
To enable an open plan suitable for experimentation, the primarily structural system utilized is a series of buttressed rigid frames along the building’s major axis. The distance between the frames varies in an exponential fashion so that it becomes a wall at the very end. The bracing elements embrace the terraced surroundings to create two outdoor-indoor interfaces: one that is more open, another that is more closed. The gaps between the frames are designed to enable experiments in fenestration. Beyond the archways is a terraced landscape only interrupted by the necessary retaining walls.
