Tower of Retreat
Undergrad Studio Project (2015)
Character Building was an advanced studio course at RISD led by Architect Nick Safley. It explored the ideas of shape and form and how they can come to produce new methods of massing, spatial tectonics, experience, and programming. With that prompt and end goal to design an office tower in Boston's Seaport District, I began work on a new kind of office experience... shapely buildings.
Intended to be a occupied by Silicon-Valley Companies who constantly look towards the unconventional spaces and practices to help catalyst their own innovative ideas, this building is meant to challenge the very concept of work space. Every corner, every boardroom, every corridor is meant to be accompanied with a set of problem-solving experiences. How else to keep the most innovative people in the world on their toes, then to not even allow the space around them and ahead of them become predictable. With such a liberating vision of my dream clients, I was able to take this question and build a portfolio of compositions and shapes. We ended up with 30 unique masses, upwards of 150 rooms, and free clearance catwalks to go from one space to another.
Keys things learned:
1. Allow yourself to invent clients which inform architecture and not the other way around,
2. Space could paradoxically be both fixed and liberated, and ;
3. Take part in the challenges you also intend others to experience.
 new 16_color-5 |  new 16_color-3 |  new 16_color-1 |
|---|---|---|
 new 16_color-2 |  new 16_color-7 |  new 16_color-6 |
 new 16_color-4 |
Drawing became a clear guiding force for how I could understand the consequence of my compositions. To begin connect the void on a blank page to a real you could enter and experience, I added human silhouettes.
These scale models grounded the drawings, and now I could see fields, solid masses, rooms, lobbies, bridges, and more.
I began to diagrammatically overlay these color compositions with the proposed building massing from the City of Boston's real Masterplan Development site model.
I began to resolve conditions which were yet to be addressed. First I had to think about the street presence at grade level. Then the connections between various levels. During these stages also emerged the idea of suspended catwalks.
In the next stage, I was not satisfied with the ambiguous blogs of color I made previously. To help make more shapely workable forms, I took blue foam to a bandsaw and make dozens of shapes which could be my actual spaces.
From blue foam models, evolved new 3D compositions. These were edging us closer to the final building stage. From the series I selected my favorite 30 blocks. I then modeled those blocks in rhino and started to drop them in the pre-determined building envelope. In the next few phases, the blocks were scaled, chopped, and multiplied until we reached the final 'Tower of Retreat'.
 elavation |  30 X 5 final |  section perspective-blue |
|---|
