Monday and Thursday are studio days. On these days in particular, the third floor undergraduate studio is filled with a frenetic energy of design, research, and exploration. Students can usually be found talking excitedly with design professors and classmates in a habitat saturated with trace sketches, study models, and empty coffee cups. Every week we’ll share a completed project, churned out from this energetic studio environment.
2A DESIGN STUDIO FALL 2013: Cambridge Common: a space of action and distraction
Faculty: Michael Bartosik, Adrian Blackwell (Coordinator), Marie-Paule Macdonald, Delnaz Yekrangian, Clara Romero, Ryszard Sliwka, Scott Sørli
Teaching Assistants: Matthew Hartney, Leanna Lalonde, Mark Tam
“The final project of the term asks you to materialize your project, in models and drawings that describe not just the organization and relationships between uses, but also the structural and material composition of the building and public spaces. In this part of the project you will consider how the interaction between human and non-human actors can help to draw out and reinforce the contradictory spatial relations on which your
project is based.”
CATALYST by Emmeily Zhang
Project Description:
Cambridge Common – The studio was asked to design and program a public building and outdoor public space. It is a community centre with a complex program, providing some sort of common to Cambridge. The studio was asked to explore relationships in their potential to construct a new world within and in relation to the one that exists in Galt right now. The building is to have a gross area of no more that 4,500 square metres and has a specifically curated program. The program considers what is necessary for the city at this moment.
CATALYST : Manifesto
n. [kat-l-ist] : one that precipitates a process or event, especially without being involved in or changed by the consequences; an agent that provokes or speeds change or action.
Catalyst is a community center made of a public surface and a scattering of programs, fragmented on the ground floor and unified on the second, and, finally, put all under the same roof that stretches over the whole site. Catalyst is developed based on the idea and belief that divides in social classes may be lessened if the people are put in proximity to one another. The paths that are taken across Catalyst’s site are maintained by the permeability of its ground floor. A path and an outdoor space cannot be owned by a certain group of people if it is essential and used by all people. A path from home to work, a path from the bus stop to the store — they all travel through Catalyst.
The accessibility of Catalyst is in its programs. They are all art-based programs, as art is a mutual interest of all different types of social groups and people. The roof of Catalyst serves as a light filter that can create areas of intensity on the public surface, which invoke people to gather with the changes in elevation. All this draws people into Catalyst and unifies the users of the building with those walking through it. Eventually, Catalyst may be able to engage those who travel through it so much that they may start to incite activity with each other — like a true catalyst.
I am a graduate student at the University of Waterloo School of Architecture, currently completing my MArch thesis on the design and collective memory of Indian residential schools in Canada.
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