TABLECITY
REIMAGINING THE CULTURAL INSTITUTION
GSAPP Fall 2020: Open Work Studio
Instructor: Enrique Walker
Team: Begum Karaoglu, Chengliang Li, Joel McCullough, Oliver Bradley
Tools and Fabrication: Rhinoceros, Illustrator, Photoshop
Project Description
Our project is the product of collective work.
How can a building that is diagrammatically so simple carry so much meaning? The same structure was once a place of gathering, a place of culture, a place of oppression, and a place of destruction. Externalities have exacerbated the complexities of the UNCTAD as it becomes a physical manifestation of the obsolescence of intent and program. The result? The UNCTAD has evolved into a place of alienation that has drawn repulsion to the Chilean people's imaginary.
We utilize four tools. 1. Ground that extends to the city through different patches 2. Roofs that reorganize the block through covering 3. A datum of roof that transforms the tower into a progremeless totem of the city. 4. Liminal space between roof-ground that is activated by props.
The ground becomes a programmatic device that activates the ground through different city patches. The juxtaposition of ground, roof, and in-between offers various conditions that foster a range of engagement possibilities.
There are five types of tables that are mobilized on the site: found, occupiable, hanging, vapor, and frame. The specificity of the tables cancels out individual authorship for the collective whole integrating into the cityscape.
The project builds ten structurally independent tables. Due to the consistent effort to maintain the datum above and below the roof, the lifted archipelago becomes a unity of parts.
It is not as skepticism in the built by relieving the ground of built program, rather faith on the elasticity of the architecture over time which relies upon the design acknowledgment of the collective's capacity to both shape and be shaped by the built environment. By staging the tables' assembly over ten years, the design also aims to elicit engagement with the city as the site is developed and occupied.
We introduce props that utilize the theatre's logic to provide a framework without creating enclosures between the ground and roof.
The props allow for cultural engagement to happen through events instead of fixed programs. The events occur under or above different roofs depending on their structural capacity and seasonality.
The new cultural institution becomes an open framework and cultural condenser. Simultaneously, the project produces a moment of pause and self-consciousness of preconceived ideas of space. Our architecture is an actor that instigates political friction, and therefore societal change.