LG

The Museum of World Writing

Songdo, South Korea.  

14,600m2 / 158,000ft2

collaboration with Hou de Sousa

2nd place -international design competition, S. Korea Ministry of Culture

The National Museum of World Writing in Songdo pairs two conditions at odds with one another. The first is the purpose of the Museum: exploring the ancient universality of human communication in written form. The second is its site: the city of Songdo, built in the past decade on a tabula rasa of reclaimed land. Our proposal for the Museum addresses these opposites, creating a container for the study and exposition of writing as an ancient manifestation of culture in a city whose culture is so new as to be undefined. In the process, we are writing this new city’s culture through architecture.

Our strategy addresses these conditions by proposing a form evocative of the very thing Songdo lacks: a history. But rather than employ stereotypical historic architectural forms, we looked for the places where the fundamentals of writing and architecture overlap - solid to void relationships, the trace of gesture on surface, the meaning in the depth of a mark, penetration, or extrusion. And we expressed these on the tabula rasa of the site, cutting into the surface with abstractions of these formal elements. The result is a museum one discovers as if by accident, revealed in the earth as an archaeological site, its repeated modular geometries evocative of the ancient Cuneiform writing system of marks cut into a flat clay surface.

Rather than a singular building, the museum reads as a below-grade, unearthed village. Two levels down, visitors circulate on open-air plazas that connect the program components. The components are contained in a ring of circulation and support systems that is entirely below grade. The village components themselves are composed of 7mx7mx5m modules, each of which has a carved void element. These carved elements are inspired by typographic maneuvers shared by all writing systems. The result is a “roof” that is actually a ground plane of unexpected openings and penetrations that encourage investigation and discovery. Additionally, the voids of each module serve as light wells, clerestories, and small courtyards while simultaneously providing a means of partitioning spaces. It should be noted that as a design strategy, this porous modular system is highly reconfigurable and can be tailored to the specific needs of each program. Our proposal reflects just one arrangement of nearly infinite possibilities.

This design addresses several criteria of the brief in unique ways. The public can wander into the museum alleyways and open pubic program - the store, cafe, restaurant, and research library - without ever having to go into the museum itself. The roof functions as an element of the park, so no open area is lost, and views of the park are maintained. The iconic form of the museum becomes defined by its voids, rather than its solids, this makes a distinctive reading both at the street level, and from high elevations, such as the surrounding skyscrapers and Google Earth. Indeed, from above the museum is utterly unique, reading as a massive abstract hashtag.

Finally, the sub-grade character of the building allows for numerous sustainability features. Substantive efficiencies are to be gained environmentally by taking advantage of the thermal mass of the surrounding earth and the green roof above, minimizing the need for the high powered mechanical systems needed in museum and archival settings. Rainwater is captured within the roof and runoff is channelled into water features within the alleyways below. Finally, the alleyways and repeated penetrations allow for sufficient daylighting through all critical program areas.

Washington DC, USA     5900m2 / 64,000ft2

Project realized at Studio 27 Principal in Charge: Todd Ray 

Design Architect: CM Cook, Team: Andrew Davis, Ray Curtis, Raul Montalvo

2016 SCUP/AIA-CAE Excellence in Architecture for Building Additions /Adaptive Reuse, Merit Award 2016 AIA Virginia, Excellence in Architecture, Merit Award

The Hall Memorial Building is a Frankenstein of mis-matched parts wrapped in a skin of Post-Modern appliqué.

Fused together over fifty years of evolution, the building houses multiple academic departments, including Gallaudet University’s STM programs in science, technology and mathematics.

This project is an overhaul of the top two floors of the 150,000 ft2 building. Taking advantage of the need for long over-due updates to laboratories, the client wished to create new, open, shared spaces that will allow previously siloed departments to interact and collaborate. In the process, we created a unique feature wall for a new two-story atrium space within the building, detailed below. 

The project is also part of a long-term plan to implement Gallaudet’s newly developed Deaf Space design standards into all new work and renovations on the campus.

Successful new public space strategies and design tropes established in the HMB building will be incorporated campus-wide, creating consistent and legible spatial identities throughout campus. 

2018 _ Sakaka, Saudi Arabia 4,439 m2 / 47,781 ft2

collaboration with Hou de Sousa

unbuilt competition entry, Abdulrahman Al Sudairy Cultural Centre

Three critical transformations drive the architectural renewal of the Dar Al-Uloum Library, Sakaka, Saudi Arabia.  First, the liberalization of segregation between genders in the Kingdom of Saudi Arabia creates a need for a gender integrated library that is spatially fluid, open and transparent, where all users are comfortable and have multiple options for individual and collective study and reflection. Second, changing environmental and economic dynamics require that new additions to the built environment anticipate changes in climate and resource availability. The new library must take full advantage of the desert’s environment and material palette to be resource efficient. Finally, as the Kingdom of Saudi Arabia evolves and new economies and industries flourish, the library must be a place where citizens can educate themselves to participate in the next wave of technological and informational innovation.

Our library begins by acknowledging it’s predecessor and setting out in a new direction. Using the existing structural skeleton as an armature and the existing floor plates as datums, we expand outward with a new volume that is rotated to align with the cardinal compass points. This provides a new relationship to the neighboring mosque and creates efficiencies for our environmental strategies, detailed below.

Next we overlay an organizing pattern that establishes solid and void relationships within the library, creating a unique dynamic of transparency and opacity, connection and separation. This pattern is driven by several inputs. Solar chimney towers on the roof project down into the floors below, defining the boundaries of library functions and the location of openings between levels. Rather than a conventional hierarchy of spaces, the interior of the new library is a playful weave of volumes, surfaces and openings that allows for passive visual - and in some places acoustic- connection across boundaries, creating a sense of solidarity and safety where users can work in studious isolation or collective creation. This pattern functions to democratize the space, allowing what urbanist Jane Jacobs called an “eyes on the street” effect, where aggregations of users create their own safety.

The pattern of solid to void relationships established by the solar chimney towers on the interior are also legible on the exterior. As the gently scalloped rammed-earth walls rise, solar chimneys abutting the envelope are revealed. The resulting geometry is evocative of ageless settlement- building techniques found throughout the Arabian Peninsula and Levant, but deployed in a completely new way.

The new library anticipates a future of total gender integration. To phase in integration, the design calls for limited areas of exclusive use by women, but these are part of the overall pattern language and thus easily transformable into shared spaces in the near future. Areas with this designation include spaces that share some visual connection with the rest of the library, but can function autonomously.

The new library combines a system of solar chimneys with a ground source heat sink to substantially reduce the load on the mechanical cooling system. While the solar chimneys are a legible component of the overall design, the ground source heat sink sits discretely below the surface of the gardens to the west north west of the main building. Air is drawn into the system through inlets distributed throughout the garden that capture the prevailing northwest breezes and are augmented by fans. The air passes through serpentine ducts buried at an optimal level beneath the garden surface to capture the cooling e ect of the packed earth. This pre-cooled air passes through the reduced-size mechanical cooling system from where it is drawn into the main body of the library where the stack effect of the solar chimneys augments the mechanical  flow. This heat sink and solar chimney system, while labor intensive to build, minimizes mechanical equipment footprint and expense and is economical to operate.

The solar chimneys also provide the bulk of daylighting within the library. Diffuse daylight from above offsets the substantially opaque rammed-earth envelope wrapping the library. Through the use of rammed earth to clad the building, and the reuse of the existing structural skeleton, as well as the redeployment of the original stone cladding of the existing library as both floor and wall elements throughout, our proposal for the new Dar Al-Uloum Library includes significant economical strategies while also creating an innovative and original work of architecture.