Pile Party
CORE III—HARVARD GSD
FALL 2020
INSTRUCTOR: JENNIFER BONNER
FALL 2020
INSTRUCTOR: JENNIFER BONNER
This is the pastiche-pile proposal for the new Headquarters for the Municipal Art Society (MAS) of New York. MAS has greatly influenced New York City and in this proposal New York City influences the imaging of the headquarters in a pile of found facades from across Manhattan. The site is located at the Northeast corner of washington square park. The building houses MAS offices, leasable offices, a rooftop cafe, interim terraces for both work and leisure, public galleries, seminar rooms, a library and archive, and an auditorium.
Looking at the context of New York City, we see a pattern of the wedding cake building typology which seem to always operate as stacks of things, or legible repeatable modules that more or less scale down as they move up. If a wedding cake were to become a pile instead of a stack, what could that afford architecturally, programmatically, and contextually?
In the pursuit of the pile, I looked at Timothy Hyde’s essay, Piles, Puddles, and Other Architectural Irritants. Hyde discusses criticism of the architectural pile through the lens of brutalism, focusing on one building in particular, the Southbank Arts Centre in London. From this reading, I realized some criticisms of the pile should be reinterpreted as positive attributes. For example, the disparate parts within the pile presents an opportunity to draw from many portions of the surrounding context and challenge the critique of the “unassimilated image.” This project attempts to contest that piles do have form. Piles can have visual logic, hierarchy of movement, and a fixed relationship to their site.
Modules in stacks have little to no autonomy, they belong to the order of the stack. Piles are composed of different and autonomous objects. Each object in a pile has its own structure and agenda. They intertwine into each other and exchange qualities and transgress boundaries. I designed the modules for the pile based on programmatic requirements and assembled them into the pile based on structural requirements, programmatic adjacencies, and compositional goals. Although the compositional strategy began to achieve pile qualities, I ran the objects through a physics simulation to see if I could increase the pileness. On a scale of stack to pile, I think the best project would happen somewhere in between. Stacks are too ordered and produce no spatial conflict but the pile on the right becomes too disordered and impossible to architecturalize.
Situating this pile on site: I rotated the massing to produce two plazas and clipped the geometry with the site bounds to frame the form by the city. These newly clipped forms required a new structural understanding. Each module maintains structural autonomy through a monocoque resolution. The modules are broken into major bits, middle bits, and minor bits. The major bits have a dense structural distribution while the minor bits have a sparse distribution of structure so that the load traces down the pile hierarchically. The cores act like skewers through the pile of structural modules, anchoring the pieces together and working to resist lateral forces. The sections help to demonstrate how the two cores anchor the auditorium that floats within the pile. You can also understand through the thinning of the columns how the module becomes lighter as the pile grows taller. The sections also demonstrate the use of transfer plates and cranked columns to control the load tracing to the foundations.
The wedding cake building typology of course refers to buildings with distinct tiers, but may also refer to richly ornamented buildings, as if made of sugar icing. Icing works in two ways: single surface fondant application and the discrete ornamentation of piped icing. These two understandings became the rationale for developing a façade logic. The fondant façade application attempts to underscore moments of coplanarity within the pile while the discrete ornamentation becomes a surface encrustation that tries to blend the pile into its context through a strategy of “color-picking” from found facades around Manhattan. There are 5 façade types found in the pile:
Looking at the context of New York City, we see a pattern of the wedding cake building typology which seem to always operate as stacks of things, or legible repeatable modules that more or less scale down as they move up. If a wedding cake were to become a pile instead of a stack, what could that afford architecturally, programmatically, and contextually?
In the pursuit of the pile, I looked at Timothy Hyde’s essay, Piles, Puddles, and Other Architectural Irritants. Hyde discusses criticism of the architectural pile through the lens of brutalism, focusing on one building in particular, the Southbank Arts Centre in London. From this reading, I realized some criticisms of the pile should be reinterpreted as positive attributes. For example, the disparate parts within the pile presents an opportunity to draw from many portions of the surrounding context and challenge the critique of the “unassimilated image.” This project attempts to contest that piles do have form. Piles can have visual logic, hierarchy of movement, and a fixed relationship to their site.
Modules in stacks have little to no autonomy, they belong to the order of the stack. Piles are composed of different and autonomous objects. Each object in a pile has its own structure and agenda. They intertwine into each other and exchange qualities and transgress boundaries. I designed the modules for the pile based on programmatic requirements and assembled them into the pile based on structural requirements, programmatic adjacencies, and compositional goals. Although the compositional strategy began to achieve pile qualities, I ran the objects through a physics simulation to see if I could increase the pileness. On a scale of stack to pile, I think the best project would happen somewhere in between. Stacks are too ordered and produce no spatial conflict but the pile on the right becomes too disordered and impossible to architecturalize.
Situating this pile on site: I rotated the massing to produce two plazas and clipped the geometry with the site bounds to frame the form by the city. These newly clipped forms required a new structural understanding. Each module maintains structural autonomy through a monocoque resolution. The modules are broken into major bits, middle bits, and minor bits. The major bits have a dense structural distribution while the minor bits have a sparse distribution of structure so that the load traces down the pile hierarchically. The cores act like skewers through the pile of structural modules, anchoring the pieces together and working to resist lateral forces. The sections help to demonstrate how the two cores anchor the auditorium that floats within the pile. You can also understand through the thinning of the columns how the module becomes lighter as the pile grows taller. The sections also demonstrate the use of transfer plates and cranked columns to control the load tracing to the foundations.
The wedding cake building typology of course refers to buildings with distinct tiers, but may also refer to richly ornamented buildings, as if made of sugar icing. Icing works in two ways: single surface fondant application and the discrete ornamentation of piped icing. These two understandings became the rationale for developing a façade logic. The fondant façade application attempts to underscore moments of coplanarity within the pile while the discrete ornamentation becomes a surface encrustation that tries to blend the pile into its context through a strategy of “color-picking” from found facades around Manhattan. There are 5 façade types found in the pile:
- The metal mesh screen, derived from the new museum.
- Metal cladding used on the auditorium and derived from the surface quality of the whitney museum.
- Brick with punched windows found on every street in the neighborhoods surrounding Washington square park and across the broader context of New York City.
- Metal piping which acknowledges the constant migration of scaffolding across Manhattan that becomes a part of the city’s façade identity.
- Finally, glass which in this project, takes on several tones and levels of opacity to either conceal, reveal, reflect, or obscure.