The thesis seeks to redefine the relationship between death and city through designing an urban vertical cemetery located in Shinjuku, Tokyo.
The cemetery is an attempt to envision the interaction between mechanical world and the human world. It functions as a giant machine that process bodies from physical matter to technological artifacts(crystals) and displays them on a giant 130m ellipse wall facing outward toward the sky.
Sitting on a narrow footprint, the cemetery allow users and visitors experience sublime and machinery at the same time as one navigates through the space. On the south elevation, one would experience a giant 130 meter tall machine that comprises of multiple smaller machines that decomposes bodies into diamonds. The Cartesian grid becomes both the structural and organizing elements of the machine. On the other end, the north elevation, one would experience a completely different view as one look up on to the giant ellipse that is embedded with millions of diamond. This new approach of death processing system is more efficient and allows death to have a new identity. The diamonds on the elipse are being observed from both within the structure and from neighboring sites, especially through the passing trains.
The massing strategy derived from Boulee’s Cenotaph to Issac where a pure geometry is amplified to create a sublime, in this case, a sphere is stretched into an elipse that spans 20 floors.
The building also has divided circulation paths for visitors and the dead as dead are mostly handle by machines while humans become the observer. Most visitor would take the exterior core to access the observation deck from 4th floor on.
Unlike other heavy industrial space, the new contemporary machine seeks for light and transparency. Thus, many of the laboratory spaces are enclosed with glass. Different shades of black was used for different privacy needs.
After all, this thesis has developed a new typology of a contemporary urban cemetery. It emphasizes on creating a machine monument that exhibits duality of forms and different special experiences.
The studio will use the house type as its vehicle. To be clear, the studio is not concerned with inventing or advancing domestic concerns. The choice of this building type is for its size and formal versatility. It is small enough to demand a high degree of resolution and articulation and versatile enough for a wide range of formal strategies. The project will be located in Los Alamos county, home to the Los Alamos National Laboratory initiated by the Manhattan Project in 1943. In the introduction to Alien Phenomenology, Ian Bogost describes the landscape in this area as a site of a strange mixture of things, some immediately perceptible and others hidden: mountains, fruit, atmospheric effects, nuclear warheads, sandwiches, automobiles, historical events, relics, and... aliens. Understanding a site through the lens of an alien phenomenology is quite different than the genius loci phenomenology of Christian Norberg-Shulz, which is centered solely on the human experience of place. As a contribution to an object-oriented ontology, Bogost is questioning the long established privileging of things at the service of human productivity and consumption. In short he is questioning anthropocentrism:
“We’ve been living in a tiny prison of our own devising, one in which all that concerns us are the fleshy beings that are our kindred and the stuffs with which we stuff ourselves. Culture, cuisine, experience, expression, politics, polemic: all existence is drawn through the sieve of humanity, the rich world of things discarded like chaff so thoroughly, so immediately, so efficiently that we don’t even notice.”
The southwestern desert is hostile to human occupation on many fronts: nuclear remnants, military presence, extreme weather, extra-terrestrials, desolation, etc. In addition to undermining the outdated phenomenology of the genius loci, an alien phenomenology of landscape puts into question the very conventions and cliches associated with the concept of “nature”. Architecturally speaking a genius loci position classifies sites as places that neatly fit into either romantic, cosmic, or classical categories with the ground being understood as a “stable element”. These are meta categories that have two effects to be skeptical of. First, it keeps nature at a distance from man as something to emulate, ponder, behold, control, manipulate, revere, etc, solely for our purposes. Second, it lays a vague contextual premise alluding to the correlation that, for instance, a cosmic landscape should receive a cosmic architecture. Rather than start with some notion of site, an object will be produced independently from it and treated as a foreign entity that engages the site and mediates its relation to a hyper-functional interior.
4A Studio project at Southern California Institute of Architecture(Sci-Arc)
Instructor: Dwayne Oyler
Fall 2015
1. Initial geometry formation with 3 curves
2. Replicate geometry either 2d or 3d and rotate within the given container
3. Boolean intersection, boolean difference
Placement of the object within the rectilinear box through reflection, rotation
The placement of the original objects through rotation and scaling within a container has produced two main architecture features. One is the alternation of solid and void spaces resulted by the angle of placement of the objects and how it interacted with the container (Diagram 1). The container is divided into 3 sets of solid and void and some are revealed as direct object where others are revealed only through misfit element that produced seams and cracks. The second architecture feature is the continuous circulation created with respect to the normal /direction of the object. This is done through extract surface curves to use as ramps and stairs and careful analysis of the object for the location of floor plates (Diagram 2).
Program - Top --->Down
Master Bedroom - Living Room - Courtyard - Parking Garage
The volume is placed at a 45-degree angle on the site facing North. There are 2 ways of getting to the house. The driveway is sculpted by the extension of the object and slowly transitions to the open courtyard at the lower ground level. From this lower ground level, you could enter the house through the garage and wind your way up through sets of stairs to the main floor. The walkway directly takes the guests to the living room through a straight bridge (Main floor plan).
The project is located in Los Alamos county, home to the Los Alamos National Laboratory initiated by the Manhattan Project in 1943. In the introduction to Alien Phenomenology, Ian Bogost describes the landscape in this area as a site of a strange mixture of things, some immediately perceptible and others hidden: mountains, fruit, atmospheric effects, nuclear warheads, sandwiches, automobiles, historical events, relics, and... aliens.
Public Floor
Living Room (879 sq.ft) - Kitchen (709 sq.ft) - Dining Room (211 sq.ft)
The main floor consists of the living room, a look out area , kitchen and a dining room (main floor plan). From the main floor, homeowner could take ramp to top floor for master bedroom (main floor plan), or take stairs down to second level for a relaxing outdoor area where bbq and Jacuzzi tubs are(see section). Further down the floor is a guest / entertainment center and a garage (Ground floor plan).
Main Bedroom Floor
Master Bedroom (879 sq.ft) - M. Bathroom (107 sq.ft) - W.I.C (56 sq.ft) - Outdoor Terrace (482 sq,ft)
Unlike other houses, this house is designed to be entered in the middle instead of bottom-up. This is because of the nature of the house that it’s very thin and very long. By designing a circulation system that is private-public-private, the users each share their own spaces while unnecessary circulations are eliminated.
(left) Interior close-up showing bedroom view out
(right) Skin detail showing courtyard at Main Floor Level
There were two strategies implemented for surface articulations. To the solid faces, hidden lines of the object viewed from elevations, even plans are projected on top creating seams and bevels. To the glass faces, original curve lines were projected on top to produce nested lines that intersects with one another and were emphasized differently throughout the surfaces.
3D printed 1:50 model.
Light before
3D printed 1:50 model.
Light After
The entire house is designed with the intent of having at least one major light source into any given space. The additional objects (objects fall out of the original box) are the main light tunnels that allow light penetrates deeply into the space. Glass surfaces are assigned to less prominent walls to allow indirect light gently illuminate the space instead of direct expose to sunlight. This is also to ensure the monolithic reading of the volume as a whole.
3D printed 1:50 model.
Showing Back view
Part 1
Part 3
Project Overview
HL23, the first major freestanding building of acclaimed architect and theorist Neil Denari, principal of Neil M. Denari Architects (NMDA). The startlingly sculptural fourteen-story residential tower stands on a singularly challenging site on West 23rd Street half beneath the High Line elevated railway bed, one of the nation’s most lyrical urban parks. HL23 ’s reverse-tapering structure cantilevers gracefully over the park, creating a landmark while producing cinematic views and unrivaled intimacy with the High Line for residents inside. The singular form of HL23 was made possible by modifications to seven different zoning requirements, granted by the City of New York in support of the design’s contribution to the cityscape. Housing eleven homes, including nine full-floor residences, a duplex penthouse at the top of the building, and a maisonette with a private garden at the building’s base, HL23 is an elegant, partially dressed figure: by strategically draping and fitting the structure’s steel-framed forms with a glowing, patterned steel skin, Denari both opens remarkable vistas and conceals private life, all while suggesting dramatic new directions for public architecture that is as highly crafted as the art objects shown in neighboring Chelsea galleries.
HL23’s Interiors were designed by Thomas Juul-Hansen of Thomas Juul-Hansen LLC, New York.
Project Address
515 West 23rd Street
New York, NY 10011
Schedule
Construction Commenced: March 2008
Construction Complete: May 2011
Client/ Developer
23 High Line LLC, New York, NY
Co-Developers: Alf Naman and Garrett Heher,
Project Manager: Elizabeth Church
Environmental Study of a possible bridge connecting Sci-arc main campus with a new adjacent building
