Project Two-Final Model-Light Volume

The Glass Tower, with ratio references to Seagram tower and UN NY Headquarters. Translucent, refracts light with its density to distort internal spaces. The two spaces contrasted in its reaction to light.

Project Two-Development Model

Side elevation based on Mies's Seagram Building. Front elevation based on Le Corbusier's United Nations Headquarter in NY.

Superglue corroded the inside of the perspect box, giving a frosted finish. A happy mistake that clarifies the suggestion of enclosed space and smoke.

The negative from making the casts. Dripped with latex to study the concepts of organic growth, and also create this impression of the beehive, where people return to, like a home, or a mother.

Project Two-Draft Model

Cast model with silicon. Exploring qualities of the 'personal bubble'. Fibers formed on the surface of the model due to the porous balsa cast, interesting imprint of organic quality lets the space be read as a 'growth'.

Project Two-Section, Plan, Axonometric

Light additive space and heavy grown space in the urban context from Hopper's Nighthawks.
Sections, front facade references to Le Corbusier's United Nations building in New York, while the side ratio references to Mies's Seagram Building. Internal fabrick and program become the 'wall' mass.

The seven cocoons are organized according to the bar stools in Nighthawks. Undeveloped cocoons represent vacant seats, which has the potential to be occupied by a character lost in thought. The relative position of the characters in the painting's composition is maintained.

Project Two-Precedent Analysis.

Ando's Garden of Fine Arts, occupying a terrace house-like site. After establishing a strong sense of orthogonal axis, a sense of dynamism os introduced with the disruption of axis.

Ando Tadao's Chichu Art Museum, exhibits a sense of 'growth' from site, and also heaviness due to using the context as the wall thickness. In the glass tower, the content of the the tower will be the wall mass.

Project Two-Design Intentions

A few concepts from Eileen Gray's Tempe a Pailla I explored were the contrasting characters of the light and heavy space, and the process of building on an existing architectural element. 

The site is from the painting Nighthawks; Murley Square, intersection of Seventh Avenue South, Greenwich Avenue, West 11th Street. The transparent cafe entrapping troubled and sorrowful characters I translated as the modernist glass tower, which shares a similar clinical, pseudo-utopian rationalist atmosphere.

The two characters are translated into two spaces. 

Representing the couple, a narrow corridor choreographing the meeting of soul mates. Surrounded by smoke as they are in painting, and also in the blindness of love. An additive transparent space just as the date is out in public and out of place in the sorrowful cafe at night.

The other, for the depressed man thinking about his mother, will be a tumor like growth, in the shape of the womb. Like a personal bubble, the observers from inside the building can see him but not approach him. By day it is lit by a single ray of sunlight, and by night by the fluorescent lights from the interior, so that even tho he escapes the darkness at night, it is the cold and empty artificial light depicted in Edward Hopper's paintings.

Neither space is to have an exit, nor interconnected even tho they occupy the same site. Just as the people in Nighthawks are lost in their own thoughts.

Project Two-Painting Narratve

The design problem is to create interior spaces which choreographs a narrative derived from the Edward Hopper painting 'Nighthawks'. In a sense it is to translate the abstract qualities of ambience, enclosure and dialogue from the medium of paint on canvas to architectonics.

Reveals a sense of injured national pride, loss of national identity, coincides with the Pearl Harbor attacks. The space is without exit, while the cold artificial light penetrates the surrounding buildings.

Realistic colors but surreal hue and saturation, suggesting the schizophrenia of the city. The characters are lost in thought, but the weather is pleasant. Eliminates physical discomfort as a cause of their internal conflict.

Edward Hopper was one of the first artists to depict the newly invented fluorescent light in paintings, used as a metaphor of emptiness and transience.

The narrative is "The man in suit smokes and seduces, the other just wants his mum." The man smoking seems to suggest transience of his stay at the cafe, and of his relationship, just as the cigar advertisement on the cafe represents the transience of activity within. In contrast the other man seems tumor-like in is favorite seat, drowning in his sorrows.