The Kinetic Cinema explores transformative architecture that creates a cinematic experience for the user through its transformation. Located in Park City, Utah the theater services the Sundance Film Festival and exists between two states or “scenes”, an enclosed theater during the winter and an outdoor theater/music complex during the warmer months.
The transition between the two states also creates variation in the building’s form and the function of its spaces. By creating an experience that is cinematic, the Kinetic Cinema establishes a visual narrative between user and architecture where the spectacle is as much the building and one’s own experience within the theater as it is the films on display. The audience transitions forward along a track while the enclosure dissolves around them, transporting them from the interior condition of the theater to the open landscape of the surrounding mountains.
Located along a temple procession in the educational epicenter of Kottayam, the Kinetic Center seeks to create active, educated users. Using a structural system derived from simle kinematic machines, the Kinetic Center allows for spatial variation based upon the active interaction of its inhabitants. This dynamic relationship between the user and their surroundings aims to instill a sense of action within the community towards change, in particular regarding women's rights. By covering the women's crisis center with a library, the Kinetic Center not only alleviates the controversy of such a center in India but also establishes a correlation between knowledge and social change.
The Kinetic Center can be used as a prototype for future centers located along heavily trafficked throroughfares. By maintainging the natural procession of the site, the Kinetic Center does not impose but invite, creating desire in the public to seek knowledge and change. The veiled quality of the center also allows for the secure reprieve for women in pouplated public areas.
Floating World is a design for a rooftop playground at a hospital for children undergoing cancer treatment. The intent is to create a world that displaces them from the negative perception of a hospital. To achieve this the design creates a world that appears to float using ropes and chains. Catenary properties crete the natural elevational change that enforces immersion into this world. Objects are hung from these ropes that are re-purposed from the hospital, such as doctor's gloves, IV tubes, and food cans. Plants are also hung, in a new interpretation of a rooftop garden. Each object encourages multiple levels of interaction with the senses, from touch to sight and sound. The point is to take an object associated with a negative connotation and turn it into something beautiful. These are objects that cancer patients are surrounded by daily but seeing them in another, more optimistic and inspiring light creates a world that is familiar and yet new.
The Switchback Hotel is a project that introduces a public infrastructure that both mediates the topographic character of Ithaca but also creates a link to the commons that further attracts more of the city’s inhabitants to the downtown area that would normally be wary because of the slope. A voronoi system was used to generate spatial clustering around a switchback that cut through the site in Grasshopper, which in turn produced the overall formal organization of the building but not its formal appearance. The project was then designed manually while still maintaining the logic and parameters that were derived from the grasshopper script. What is produced is a project whose form is the derivative of a script that mediates the slope, but its appearance is more of a result of its context.
The project began as an analysis of the Via Tuscolana, one of the ancient consular roads that leads into Rome. The road is characterized by overlapping infrastructure, such as the railway and ancient aqueducts. These overlaps create ‘gates’ between sections of the road. At one point along the road there is no gate but their is a defined break from the organized urban blocks where they meet the Appian Way at Cineciita. The intent of the project is to create a gate at this junction to coincide with the character of the rest of the road. This gate would also act as a frame, both into and out of the city, as well as a frame to the Appian Way. By connecting the various cinema-related buildings in the area, a series of diagonal gates (elevated walkways) are created that cross over Via Tuscolana. These diagonals are populated with buildings at the median which serve as the museum spaces. The museum serves to create a cinematic experience for both the automobile and the museum goer. As vehicles travel along the road they trace the museum as it obliquely cuts in and out of their view.
GROUP MEMBERS:
Ross Amato (B. Arch '15), Rachael Tseng (B. Arch '15)
The Shear Town Hall is a group project for a new town hall in Downtown Owego, NY. The town hall is foremost a beacon, an iconic image of a city and a landmark to visitors. The modern town hall of Owego is not just a center for business and politics, but for the community at large. It is the focal point of its landscape, thus its pointed form represents the integration of the traditional town hall tower typology and modernity.
The building contains three essential spacial voids: tunnel, cave, and the atrium. The tunnel provides a direct passage between the street and the riverwalk behind the building, while the atrium penetrates the overall form, carrying light into the heart of the site, and dividing up the buildings programs. The many spaces of the town hall behave similar to caves, funneling individuals from low-ceilinged areas to larger monumental spaces.
The repetition of the townhouses on street side is incorporated into the project by expressing the concrete form with vertical strips, whereas the range of materials express on the other side of the building mimic the collage of balconies and materials on the riverwalk side of the townhouses. In order to maintain the controlled, open atmosphere of the building’s spaces, the structure consists of closely spaced longitudinal beams.
Group Member:
Ross Amato (Cornell B.arch '15)
- WATCH WITH SOUND -
Perceptual Patterns is a project for a sound and imaging course taught by Andrew Lucia and Taylan Cihan. It addresses the perception of patterns in image and sound. Over a period of time a series of images and sounds are played together at 1 and 2 minute intervals. The sounds were created using common objects such as pasta and cans while the image component focuses on various actions of human hands. Each segment begins with a repeated pattern of an image/sound. By overlapping and phasing these patterns (as well as altering some of the images) the audience tries to identify the pattern that was present without knowing for certain whether the pattern they perceive is the initial pattern or a phased/overlaid one. When enough images/sounds occur at once there is a moment of noise where the audience seeks to find a discernable pattern. The goal is not to identify the pattern throughout the segment for the audience, but for each audience member to develop their own perceptual patterns throughout the exhibition. The video editing was done by me whereas the audio component was done by my partner.
GROUP MEMBERS:
Rachael Tseng (Cornell B.Arch '15)
The project consisted of recreating a scaled version of a building’s structural system. My partner and I selected Moshe Safdie’s ArtScience Museum in Singapore. We selected this building for the unique structural system that it utilized, a combination of a tension ring, compression ring, and diagrid that supported the cantilevering petal. Using a combination of drawing provided by the architect and construction photos we were able to discern how the structural system was built. Constructed in only a week, we utilized several techniques in creating the model including laser-cutting, milling, and casting and designed jigs for the various structural elements to ensure they would line up to one another although they were built separately.
Group Members:
Ryan Carrington (Cornell B.Arch'15)
Homeostatic Horticulture is a group project that explores kinetic facade systems. Using thermal sensors the system would respond to fluctuations in heat by opening or closing. When opened flat the system provides a light filtration system as well as a screen to sunlight when it is not necessary for plant growth. In its closed, bent state the system allows wind to pass through the facade, creating an effective, responsive cooling source. The combination of the two states creates a system that behaves like a skin as opposed to a wall. The system relies on a simple pull mechanism where strings pull the outside corners of each component inward, the components bend in a perpendicular direction thanks to a hinge on their bottom corner.
