Role: Harvard GSD Studio Project
Location: Harvard GSD
Status:
Fall 2012 (Graduate student work)
Award: Selected and featured in the annual Harvard publication & exhibition
Ornament today has ubiquitously been relegated to the surface through different perceptions and methods of patterning. The project rather proposes ornament through architectonic space; a series of similar forms in space are generated in a system of aggregation with a subsequent reverse manipulation of the system – conscious dispersion and clearing to produce inhabitable cavernous living voids. The accumulation of components is a speculation towards the departure from the formal structural frame to an informal freer infinite system without clearly defined boundaries. The ornamental begins to border on the excessive through the repetition of the tetrahedral form.
A series of spatial studies rely on the repetition of 10 different sized tetrahedrons that point downwards. The aggregation is a result of a scripted algorithm with specified degrees of overlap. While the voids between the tetrahedrons are projected for habitation the interior of the tetrahedrons may be used as service spaces. The ten chosen sizes of tetrahedrons function in scale from furniture and stairs to larger scale spatial dividing blocks.
Sectional variation is generated through this form of aggregation.
Carving out voids for habitation results purely through people’s
desires for space. The potential of this conceptual and formal design process in the definition of a most common program, an apartment building, plays on the extreme of getting rid of the repetitive slab system that defines most buildings. The experimental definition of the ornamental space lies in the different spatial conditions created through repetition.