M.Arch. THESIS
HARVARD GSD | Master of Architecture Thesis
Fall 2009
PROGRAM: Innovation Commons, Cambridge, MA
ADVISER: Eric Höweler
STRATEGY:
The project is an exploration of the space of social discourse between the academy and the public domain. The academy has surely earned its reputation as the ivory tower since it policies of exclusion are not relegated only to their admissions processes but also to their physical campuses which are frequently surrounded by walls and gates and comprise buildings which are set off from their contexts; deferring to the normative horizontal-vertical plane relationships.
And as progeny of the agora, the academy has enjoyed an historically divergent relationship with the public square, which has evolved into its own horizontal and barren form. Harvard square, with its history of academia and commons, and strict adherence to the normative boundary conditions which have come to define and reinforce them typologically is the site of this intervention.
Internally, this exploration is a reinvention of traditional academic program by locating diverse disciplines in the same space, and creating individual academic territories for depth of expertise, and collective academic territories for broad-spectrum, problem-based collaboration and exploration across those disciplines. Externally, Public Commons amenities, already in place on the site in the form of retail, transportation, points of historical interest and places of assembly, are impressed on the envelope of the building creating an involution of the normative boundary condition.
The first spatial strategy is the creation of a smooth condition to dissolve a discreetly defined horizontal and vertical as part of site circulation and create a continuity between the spaces of public transportation, street-level pedestrian circulation and the vertically organized spaces of academic production. Circulation moves vertically and obliquely a closed looping spiral, broken only to allow access. Staccato movements of the former site circulation yield to the legato openness of the public commons.
The second strategy is performing operations of exceptional differentiation in the friction zones where the public program encounters the collective spaces of the academic program which are enhanced though distillation. These ‘organs’ overlay functionality as disruption, horizontal with the oblique, and respite within instability. The shearing of the form into a klein bottle condition yields hierarchy and when experienced as a whole create an experience of programmatic ambivalence, which defy the normal relationships of these programs.
As an urban object, this ambiguity is further accentuated as the building is deferential to its contextual massing, appearing similar in its solidity from a distance, but also highly porous, cradling the bright center of its creative energy as public commons.
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