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The past week I wracked up a total of 3 hours and 40 minutes of sleep per night for a grand total of 21.98 hours. That’s not great. Unfortunately, this is fairly common for architecture students during charette week, AKA the week leading up to a deadline. I’d like to say that it was worth it, but as per usual, I still didn’t have enough time to meet all of the requirements for my final project. However, the work that I did do seems to be the best to date which is something to be proud of. In the past week and all its hours, all I’ve done is eat, sleep (not really), and breathe architecture, and with all of these concepts still rattling around in my brain in anticipation for my presentation and critique on Wednesday, I thought it might be nice to share the ideas behind the work that I’m semi proud of and cost me the past week (and semester so far) of my life.

The project brief was a research center at the site of a cave in San Antonio that is rich in fossils.

My project was rooted in two driving factors: dealing with juxtapositional contrasts and environmental responses. These included, time, space, solar, wind, orientation, and materiality

The first contrast was that of time. The site presented a condition where in the middle of modern day Texas, there was a snapshot of the Pleistocene era frozen in the geological record. I wanted to expand on this temporal contrast between past and present. Thus, the first thing the a visitor to the site would experience was a meandering path that forced them to experience time in a certain way where the present slowly faded away behind them as they made their way into the past. 

The second contrast was spatial. From the start of the project I had been drawn to the experience of spending extended periods of time within the cave. This experience would provide an atmosphere that was very dark, required artificial lighting, and would feel claustrophobic and confining. What my design intent addressed was undoing the effects of prolonged exposure to this place. I wanted that which was above ground to counter that which was below. In this way I wanted the buildings to blur the boundary between interior and exterior and be incredibly open spaces with high ceilings and ample light. 

This then segued into my environmental responses. With the desire to be open to light, the buildings all had large open corners. The reasoning behind these openings found at the corners stemmed from a rotation of all buildings’ footprints. This rotation served to increase the surface area exposed to sunlight during the day, and also reflected the direction of the prevailing cooling south western summer wind. The orientation would also break the undesirable northern wind in the winter. Overall this allowed for both passive solar and ventilation systems.

The structure of the building also aided in cross ventilation systems. The primary structure was made up of parallel earthen bearing walls, concrete perimeter beams, and a steel deck roof. I chose rammed earth in relation to the spatial contrast. Underground, stone and earth walls were imposing and oppressive, but above ground I wanted them to be the method of liberation and openness of space. Additionally, as this area was on the edge of arid climate zones and humid ones, I wanted to utilize the thermal mass of earth for heating during the night and in winter, and also to use earth’s ability to moderate humidity. 

This is a snapshot of just some of the thought and effort that goes into architecture and the product of 7-8 weeks of labor.