Museum project with Prof. Michael Young
YSOA // Fall 2011
The organisational and formal idea behind the project derives from a desire to orchestrate the movements of various users through the project’s highly restricted site that is accessible from land only on one edge while it is surrounded by water on all other three.
Building mass positioned at the neck of the site depresses and lifts up the ground plane in order to separate the gallery visitors from the artists and from the commuters through the site. These circulatory movements are then further calibrated according to their various user speeds ranging from slow straight long ramps to fast spiralling vertical stairs.
The Navy Yards site is a flat plane populated with object like buildings without necessary urban elements to be cohesively connected in a field condition with its surrounding. Therefore, formally the project takes on other industrial objects such as cars and boats as precedent and attempts to investigate their tectonics as and alternative to architecture.
The circulation starting as one approaches the site spirals up inside the building. Upon entry the main stairs pull the visitor up towards the level of the galleries as natural light coming through the patterned openings further heightens and guides the user into the galleries.
The galleries are the destination points in where one can slow back down from circulation in order to experience the art work presented. The design challenges the typical procession at similar institutions.
As a part of the fundamental idea of flow and movement through the site the thresholds leading up to the galleries that typically help frame and distinguish the art inside from outside are minimised Internal spaces are created as a result of the auxiliary circulation around them folding in on themselves.