assignment 3-1

assignment 3-1: due tuesday, march 18


Read David Leatherbarrow and Mosheh Mostafavi’s essay “Window/Wall” from Surface Architecture

Use Arches, Fabriano Artistico or Utrecht cold-pressed 90 or 140 lb, 22” x 30” watercolor paper.

First, draw a schematic wall section through at least 2 walls of the building at 1/2" = 1'. Use the vertical orientation of the paper. Choose locations that are of particular importance to your scheme. You will determine now how deep you define your skin to be at these locations. Is it thick enough to inhabit?

You may consider a new wall at the interior of the building to be part of it’s reconfigured ‘skin’. You may also consider the thick interior walls dividing the three buildings to be part of the ‘skin’, just as the body has interior membranes that define its internal organs.

This wall section should be a focal point of your conceptual approach to the building. It requires you to be specific to what is there (which you know in detail; it is documented in the drawing set). It begins at the line of the roof, ends at the foundation, and includes any floors connected to it. Consult the RCP drawings for accurate accounting of the floor joists and their direction. You are of course free to propose an entirely new skin, but you must reconcile how the floors that bear on the current skin are then supported.

In other words, be materially specific and conceptually clear.

Then, consider how the wall section can be the generator of the plan. How is the Center for Movement and Dance organized by its skin? Do not be afraid to be simple.

Develop plans for each of the floors of your scheme at 1/8” = 1’ and arrange them on the page. You may arrange all the plans on one (or more ) page(s), or you may leave space for future sections to be drawn in projection adjacent to the plans. Consider the future of the drawings.

Finally, be prepared to discuss how the wall sections have generated your plans, and to describe your process for arriving at a programmatic organization.