Urban Treehouse
Gateway of the City
To the north, Sudbury's downtown is a tightly knit set of streets running east to west. To the south however, the blocks running north-south are highly underutilized and in need of greater density and activity. Most of the southern downtown is a field of parking lots, which may easily be consolidated into a single building bordering both the train station and arena and the open area rebuilt. The new school of architecture is created as a gateway which, along with memorial park and Tom Davies square, unites the development of the southern downtown to the existing city in the north.
Design through movement
A school of architecture as a creative environment is founded in playfulness, tension and exchange, architecturally manifested through spatiality and movement which act externally to transform city dynamics and are embodied internally through a language of provocation. The new school of architecture in Sudbury is thus sited in the central vacuum of the city - the point at which Memorial Park breaks the existing northern downtown from the potential of the undeveloped southern lots.
A Faulting Landspace
The first act: a ramp spills off the edge of Minto alleyway becoming an extension of Memorial Park and inverting the backalley into a fluid gateway between the two halves of the city. Sprint from the ramp: the school building is constructed as a vertically layered landscape. The main ambulatory, twisting through the structure composed of two intersecting cubes, makes it possible to traverse the entire building through a continuous spatial sequence without a single break in movement.
The ambulatory is a study in the architectonic progression of the dynamic created between two bodies through doubling, torque, and tension. At the first point of intersection the plane of the lower cube doubles. The two bodies are then displaced by torsional faulting on the second level, and at the last level pulled apart and through into tension.
Spatial and visual playfulness, the joy of observation are integral to the education of an architect. The school is a landscape - there are no corridors and in passing from one part of the school to another one will always encounter the work and presence of other students and faculty creating a conducive ground for the fermentation of ideas.
(Competitor's text)
23 scanned / 16 viewable
- Presentation Panel
- Presentation Panel
- Presentation Panel
- Presentation Panel
- Axonometric Drawing
- Schema
- Perspective
- Perspective
- Perspective
- Plan
- Plan
- Plan
- Plan
- Plan
- Section
- Section
