C I V I Q U E

AUDITORIA AS TERRAFORM

 Fall 2016
Instructed by Grace La
Distinction; Nominated for publication and exhibition in GSD Platform X

This project imagines a civic building as terraform, between object and landscape, a shaped container that owes as much to its terroir as to its internal contours. In counterpoint to the conventionally pragmatic, generic, and introverted objects that typically house our cultural destinations, the terraform is understood as tectonically and materially specific in a reciprocal relationship with its environment. It aspires to reconcile the productive conflicts between a programmatically rich but detached interior landscape, with an architecture of sculptural, ecological and civic presence. Utilizing the pro-gram of a bicameral Performing Arts Center located on Boston’s waterfront, the project embraces the site as it transitions from terrain vague, towards a new, terraformed urbanism. Given the need for innovative types of gathering, how will the consideration of the landform inspire the auditoria themselves, the shape of the seating bowls or the spaces which support them?

This project studies barchan sand dunes as directional and dynamic terraform surfaces. Analogous to the laminar flow of sand particles across a surface, an unfolding and stretching of a civic surface might begin to redirect the way people enter a civic space and re-stitch the building as a catalytic participant in the city. Understanding the way people would move across this surface became a key parameter for manipulating the terrain vague towards a new terraformed landscape. A surface that gets stretched from the landscape and folds back onto itself to form the seating bowl of the auditorium underscores the ambiguity between inside and outside, landscape and building. Vomitoria, originating from the periphery of the site and culminating into entrances of multiple seating aggregates, are the architectural tools used to subvert the inside outside, object landscape, binary. The result of treating the seating bowl and circulation as landscape, is a freed up ground plane which becomes a new public space that recasts an integrated experience of land, water, space, and sensuality that regenerates a calcified and isolated site.