http://www.flickr.com/photos/65213379@N06/

Final Study_693_Spring 02011
Texas A&M University College of Architecture

agricenter

On-Screen Presentation: Midterm Presenation

introduction/This final study proposal is two-fold. Firstly, the project proposes reusing an existing historical landmark in the center of Dallas as a new food market which draws inspiration from the traditional markets of Europe and blends them with a modern food grocer to provide a much needed grocery store to the Downtown Dallas neighborhood as well as a centralized market place for the city as a whole. Secondly, the project proposes creating a system of large and small urban farms from left over sites bordering the highways that ring Downtown which will feed agricultural produce into the newly created food market. This proposal attempts to address urban revitalization at multiple scales from the street to the city and posits that social revitalization and urban agriculture are critically important to the resuscitation of an existing urban form.

context/The site is located within Downtown Dallas directly in front of Pearl Station (DART, light rail) just two blocks away from the Arts District, across the highway from Deep Ellum and just a few blocks away from the Main Street District.

program/The Center for Urban Agriculture adaptively reuses the abandoned Old Dallas High School as an open market, small grocery store, and cafe.  A new building to house the Texas A&M College of Agriculture’s AgriLife Research and Extension Center at Downtown Dallas will be designed.  The research and extension center will serve two main purposes, to facilitate research in urban agriculture and urban land issues, and to become an educational resource on agriculture and gardening within the urban communities around Downtown and city of Dallas.  The rest of the 5.4 acre site will be used as public space in the form of plazas and green space as well as a functioning farm/garden which will act as a demonstration garden, and research garden which will supply the market and local food banks with fresh produce.

Final Study Proposal

I will also be running a blog for an Urban Theory class with Peter Lang looking at current developments and trends in urban culture in the city of Los Angeles. My blog can be found here. The class blog can be found here.

Marcel Erminy Studio_606_Spring 02010
Texas A&M University College of Architecture

132 Ipswitch/Boston, Massachusetts

introduction/Propose a mixed use building within the famous Fenway neighborhood in Boston. The program consisted of a 45 room hotel that caters to the visiting baseball team across the street at Fenway Park, as well as a branch of the Boston Ballet School, retail space, and a large green roof serving as a community garden.

context/The Fenway neighborhood is filled with opportunity. Universities surround the area, and two high schools (one for students engaged in performing arts) adjoin the site. Young residents are the majority in the neighborhood, and the Fenway Park baseball stadium provides the area with a unique vibrancy. The roof top garden echoes the public-private gardens found at the Victory Gardens of Back Bay Fens Park. A triangular surface parking lot converts into an open public plaza at the north end of Fenway Park, adjacent to 132 Ipswich.

drawings/The images above are the final presentation boards displaying floorplans, sections, and diagrammatic models.

Marcel Erminy Studio_606_Spring 02010
Texas A&M University College of Architecture

132 Ipswitch/Boston, Massachusetts

introduction/Propose a mixed use building within the famous Fenway neighborhood in Boston. The program consisted of a 45 room hotel that caters to the visiting baseball team across the street at Fenway Park, as well as a branch of the Boston Ballet School, retail space, and a large green roof serving as a community garden.

context/The Fenway neighborhood is filled with opportunity. Universities surround the area, and two high schools (one for students engaged in performing arts) adjoin the site. Young residents are the majority in the neighborhood, and the Fenway Park baseball stadium provides the area with a unique vibrancy. The roof top garden echoes the public-private gardens found at the Victory Gardens of Back Bay Fens Park. A triangular surface parking lot converts into an open public plaza at the north end of Fenway Park, adjacent to 132 Ipswich.

images/Colors: hotel (yellow), boston ballet school (green), area needed to grow food for one person annually (blue), retail and restaurant space (magenta), garden space (black).

diagram/Program functions and space requirements were realized after a study of the surrounding neighborhood and urban landscape. In order to provide sunlight to the roof garden, as well as maximizing its surface and growing potential, the program was placed below the garden. However, this provided little opportunity for all programs to interact with the garden, and allowed for little interaction between the street and the garden. The hotel was then extracted into a tower at the north end of the site, giving rooms a view out over the city, garden, and stadium. A restaurant sits at the moment where the hotel tower touches the garden, creating a place where the user can sit and eat while looking into the urban garden where the vegetables and spices were grown. In order to bring the garden and the street together, the corner of the garden pushes down creating a scalable hill for pedestrians to enter the community garden. The roof garden’s connection with the street happens at the southern end of the site where there is the least amount of direct sunlight (and therefore the least growing potential) and directly across the street from the new public plaza.

Please contact me at ryan.m.withrow@gmail.com for any information regarding my work.

Craig Babe Studio_605_Fall 02009
Texas A&M University College of Architecture

White Rabbit_Black Rabbit/College  Station, Texas

introduction/Two week academic design project in college station to create a café/lounge/gallery/bookstore/performance space in the commercial and residential Northgate Neighborhood on the edge of the Texas A&M campus.

context/Northgate is the center of college nightlife, yet like most of the Bryan/College Station area, the neighborhood has suffered from suburbanization, and is one of the few areas left with the potential to promote real urban density. The White Rabbit site is at farther end of Northgate adjacent to a chain fast food restaurant, an abandoned groceries shopping center from the 01960’s and a operating bank from the same era. Instead of addressing the adjacent context of upper Northgate, this project focused more on the heavy pedestrian traffic caused by the Texas A&M campus across the street, and the overall context of the Bryan/College Station area. White Rabbit is an attempt to move forward and attract “alternative people” as an alternative to the bar scene just down the street. White Rabbit is an attempt to bring new life and extend the pedestrian friendly area of Northgate.

program/White Rabbit calls for five major programmatic elements: café, lounge, gallery, an independent bookstore, and performance space. The spaces were then defined by the spaces individual needs (for lighting, ceiling height, private or public space, ect.) as well as each element’s relationship to the whole. The café, lounge, and gallery spaces were merged into one indefinitely continuous space, because they share similar definitions. The bookstore and performance space were considered to have different definitions than the café/lounge/gallery. The bookstore is lifted up and pushed out over the sidewalk to create a shaded gathering space at the entrance to the café below. The bookstore also has a small one-piece gallery space overlooking the street in order for the architecture and architectural contents to serve as an advertisement to the pedestrian and automotive traffic below. The performance, needing more control over lighting and circulation, was half-way submerged into the ground. Access to the performance space/basement is handled by an external ramp that opens to the sidewalk. A dialogue is maintained between the gallery above, performance space below, and sidewalk through specifically placed windows allowing separation as well as varying degrees of interaction between the public and private.

circulation/Ramps provide for processional vertical movement.  The ramps are in between programmatic elements, and often serve as buffers between elements. However, these in-between spaces do more than circulate, they accidently congregate. Spaces are provided to both seek solitude in the non-space as well as offer opportunities for socialization with those passing by.

skin/Once the architectural contents of programmatic and circulatory elements were aggregated into a single form, a skin was wrapped around the form to create an interior and exterior. The skin was then panelized for production purposes.

effect_affect/White Rabbit_Black Rabbit is black on the outside and white on the inside. Black Rabbit aims to create a beacon of modernity and progressive urbanism in an otherwise defunct and decaying strip mall environment. White Rabbit creates an enclave for the otherwise neglected demographics of the Bryan/College Station area. The interior spaces of the café, lounge, gallery, and bookstore are drenched in direct and diffuse natural lighting and an ambient white light. The panelized skin is continued on the interior giving the surfaces a faceted form. Socialization and private meditation are provoked through a mixture of open spaces, solitary spaces, calculated external views, lighting conditions, and a garden.

Cross Desk_Spring 02009
FEEDBACK studio

Cross Desk/College Station, Texas

introduction/A desk built for personal, in home, use. Cross Desk makes use of cross bracing in order to achieve ample leg room.

parameters/Desk must be light, for easy mobility. Desktop depth was designed according to the dimensions of my laptop and various computing electronics. Desk must be strong enough to withstand loads from computers, various computing electronics, large books, and general clutter. Desk must also use only two legs in order to allow for ample leg room. Cost was also a factor, this desk was built in under $40 (including mistakes and design changes).

materiality/The desk is made of cheap dimension pine wood found at a local hardware store, one piece of ply wood, and a flat surface particle board.

Gabriel Esquivel Studio_305/406_Spring 2009
Texas A&M University College of Architecture

Easterwood Airport_OVERGROWTH/College Station, Texas

introduction/Project calling for the redesign of an existing airport in College Station, Texas. Redesign includes doubling the existing size of the airport, adding another gate to the terminal and profoundly changing the overall ambience of the flying experience. The studio theme was Turbulence. I will refer to this project as OVERGROWTH.

concept/the existing building led the user through a disjointed and stale experience that only adds to the angst of flying. After concluding that the existing aesthetics and spatial proportions were inadequate but the overall programming was sufficient, the existing architecture was stripped down to its bare essentials (as shown above in [existing, stripped, stripped in plan]). From there, the programmatic elements were allowed to grow out of their restrictive boxes into free forms in an organic manner. I will refer to the programmatic elements as the Organs of the architecture. The parameters for the growth were the amount of walkable space needed measured in feet²) as well as space needed for affect (measured in feet³).

OVERGROWTH attempts to personalize the spaces where the flying experience can feel the most hectic (baggage check, ticketing, lobby, security, etc.) while the secure spaces provide a sense of openness and freedom (gates, sky bar, restaurant).

research/Ideas and concepts explored in this project were that of translucent skin, structural striations to said skin (both concepts are detailed in previous posts), vegetative growth on man-made architectural ruins, contrasting and appropriately exposing the old orthogonal existing building with the new organic architecture, and using a system of skins that work in layers to add to the affect, as well as the structural, programmatic qualities of the architecture.

anatomy/OVERGROWTH uses an anatomical metaphor. Organ + Skin + Bone = Body. Organs are the various elements of the program (baggage check, baggage claim, rental space, offices, security, flight lounges, etc.). Organs consist of space which walls (both existing orthogonal and new organic) wrap themselves around producing one skin. Windows are then punched into this layer of skin in order to provide optimized daylighting even in the hottest of summer days. Image showing exposed Organs is labeled [organs]. Next, the Skin referred to in the equation above is a yellow-tinted performative glass skin that envelopes the program and shades the drop off area. Yellow was chosen for its calming and cheerful qualities. Bone is the structure that allows the organic skin to take its shape and hold it safely.

affect/OVERGROWTH takes on two different personalities, one in the day, another at night. In the daylight the Skin produces a slight yellow glow on the white walls of the Organs. There is an interior Wild Garden that can be viewed from the ticketing area, certain flight lounges, the restaurant, and the sky bar. The Wild Garden integrates itself with the baggage claim and administrative offices. Users experience the twisting of the organic forms as they grow out from the existing program and settle onto the surrounding topography.

At night however, the two layers of skin exude a different affect. Programmatic elements are given alternating blue and red lighting effects. The Sky Bar, filled with bean bags and bar stools floating above the Wild Garden, transforms into a highly personal space and glows with red. The Restaurant, alternately, glows with blue to create a cool and relaxed space for dining. Refer to images [drop off_night, driveway_night, elev_front_night] for examples of lighting effects. On the exterior, the reds and blues of the interior combine with the yellow skin to create a large palette of colors that appear change and dance along the organic Skin as cars drive by along the nearby highway.