Interstice
Galveston, Texas
May 2021
Project Description
Kanazawa 21st Century Museum of Contemporary Art, Kazuyo Sejima (妹島和世) and Ryue Nishizawa (西沢立衛)
Interstice emerged through the ambition to generate a space that is at once an artificial, rational structure and a soft natural landscape for the bird-related research institution. Located in Smith Oaks Sanctuary of High Island, Texas, the project examines SANAA’s “contradictoryspatial logic”1 as a methodology to produce ambiguity. Their formal approach results in a “maximum independence of parts with the closest possible interrelation”2, a system of looseness that leaves space to align pluralistically with multiple identities. Looking specifically at the 21st Century Museum of Contemporary Art in Kanazawa, Japan, Interstice extracts the orthogonal contents and superimposes upon it a circular organization of program. A third system, the boundary, encapsulates the assemblage and delimits the field of overlapping structure, program, and voids with the context.
As the systems architecturualize into columns, volumes, and a canopy respectively, the constant interference between these systems forms a series of coincidences through boundary-object alignment, establishing both formal and informal spaces of living and working. A realization of the unexpected, Interstice prioritizes neither spaces nor landscapes. The three systems (orthogonal/structure, circular/program, boundary/canopy) exist in symbiosis, generating scattered and unpredictable liminal spaces throughout.
Footnotes
1: Blau, Eve. “Curating Architecture with Architecture.” Log, no. 20 (2010): 18:28
2: Ibid.
Captions170: Formal exploration of a “soft” programmatic system extracted from the dense canopy context around Smith Oaks Sanctuary
175: Diagram of programmatic and structural system interfacing to a form an assemblage of “looseness”
176: Plan oblique of the architecturalization of the loose plan into a canopy, grid of columns, inhabitation volumes, and work voids
184: Ground floor plan
185: Second floor plan
189: Perspective section
190: Rendering of wet research space
191: Rendering of dining
192: Rendering of housing unit
193: Aerial exterior rendering
*Winner of the AIA Dallas Award in the student category
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