Visiting Assistant Professor & Teaching Fellow, Northeastern
Student work by Jessica Wilcock, Amanda Mazie, Nick Trapani, and Chris Slater
The focus of this Comprehensive Design Studio was the integrated design and detailed development of a building and its required systems through a multi-layered approach to past, current, and sustainable future needs. This studio merged topics across the students’ architectural education to produce design solutions which responded to existing site conditions while demonstrating adaptive and sustainable long-term use requirements.
Cities will continue to grow within the U.S. and abroad, but the growing demand for energy performance and carbon neutrality over the coming decades will see an increase in the re-use of existing building stock. In order to prepare for this shift in context, this studio considered both adaptive reuse and sustainable future use across the scope of the semester. This studio placed particular focus on flexible design thinking. Unlike traditional building programs with a fixed list of functional requirements, this studio was aimed at demonstrating flexibility toward future programmatic adaptations and tectonic system requirements.
This studio was structured by a series of 2 week design problems, conducted in teams of two students each, beginning with the detailed documentation, analysis, and representation of existing architectural precedents; adaptive re-use and new construction. Students were encouraged to explore the inter-connectivity of building systems through detailed 3D digital models and layered axonometric drawing. The Mill City Museum in Minneapolis, shown to the right, and the NCMA in North Carolina, shown on the next spread, exemplify two of these selected case studies and their analysis.
