STUDIO OVERVIEW
Buildings participate in the formation of our shared public experience and rightly consume the majority of our focus in architecture schools. However, as the painter must know how to build a canvas, this studio focuses on designing a building together with the essential elements of the city that frame it - the sidewalks, streets and spaces that knit a building into a memorable urban place. The idea and presence of the ‘sidewalk’ was the spring point for investigations into urban architectures.
Site
The site for your project is located a 10-minute walk from the School of Architecture - just west of Marietta Street, in a parking lot where a bridge used to carry a road that linked Washington, DC to San Diego, California. The site is bounded by railroads, apartments, offices and an art museum, and is soon to be a gateway between the Westside BeltLine trail and Georgia Tech’s pedestrian network – both sidewalks in their own way.
Program
Each student will design a generic mixed-use office building, developing an architecture that exploits the role of sidewalks to create an intense, diverse urban ‘culture’ in and around your building. Ground level ‘mixed uses’ will be incorporated and developed in relationship with designed sidewalk conditions.
Research
Sidewalks - conceptual and physical devices, “abstractions” as Jane Jacobs calls them, that accommodate urban life and connect here and there
Passages - research into the relationships between corridors and rooms, sidewalks and plazas
Thresholds - research into the psychological affects of thresholds, and sidewalks as a type of threshold both for and between events
Non-Referential Architecture - we will study Valerio Olgiati’s idea of the ‘experience of space’
Bibliography
Death and Life of Great American Cities, Jane Jacobs, 1961
Figures, Doors & Passages, Robin Evans, 1978
Close encounters with buildings, Gehl, Kaefer and Reigstad, 2006
Why Walking through a Doorway Makes You Forget, Brenner & Zacks, 2011
Non-Referential Architecture, Valerio Olgiati and Markus Breitschmid, 2018