Reflections on the Chapel

Prologue: The Process
From the first time I saw our site, I knew that I wanted to use a visual language that somehow related to the environment. One concept I explored early on was manipulation of slices and contours. After hearing Patti talk about the craggy rocks that she saw during her visit to the site, this exploration of contour-hugging slices culminated in the form of my final model.



The inclusion of the reflecting pool came out of conversations with Ben, Robert and Adam, who were exploring the interaction between light and water. Now that my rock was surrounded by water, it seemed the only logical thing to do was to add a lighthouse, which I did in the guise of a side chapel.

I struggled for a while with how to design the altar area and lobby in a way that would speak to the importance of these areas without feeling tacked on. This dilemma was finally resolved when I took a page out of the CEE130 playbook and thought of these areas as places of intersection and rotation.














The massing of the classroom, office and bathrooms came last. I had originally planned on making each of these rooms separate buildings so that some of them could be used to block the noise from the street, but after I decided on including a large reflecting pool, it made more sense to cluster these remaining spaces.

Part I: Form
The main driver behind my design decisions for the project was the site of the chapel. The teaching team really gave us a gift with the Land's End location. The scenery at the site is raw, powerful, and natural, yet taken together, provides a near spiritual experience. This bridging of the earthly and the divine was something I strove to address in the form of my chapel.

The Earthly
The main body of the chapel evokes the partially submerged rocks that litter the coastline at Land's End. The usage of reinforced concrete and the squat shape of the mass give it an overwhelming sense of earthliness and groundedness.












The Divine
The pure, prismatic solids that intersect and penetrate the main body of the chapel stand in stark contrast to the rugged environment that surrounds them. Their translucent nature lends them a weightlessness and ethereal quality that makes them seem like crystals fallen from the heavens.












Bridging the gap
The combination of earthly and heavenly forms helps visitors and passerbys understand the function of the chapel as a bridge between earth and heaven. In plan, the heavenly forms also correspond to more contemplative or spiritual areas of the chapel. These angled spaces include the altar area, the side chapel, and the sheltered vestibule.












Part II: The Approach
Land's End has such compelling and dramatic views, attempting to block or blunt them would only have been fighting a losing battle. At the same time, I did not want my congregants to be distracted by expansive views while trying to have an intimate spiritual experience inside the chapel. I resolved these conflicting desires by addressing each of them in separate portions of the procession. The expansive experience is given its place in the approach to the chapel, while the intimate experience dominates the interior.














Visitors enter the site and pass the office/classroom complex to their right. Continuing downhill towards the water, visitors are treated to an expansive view of the Pacific ocean merged with the reflecting pool. Ahead to the left are a pair of dark rocks (beloved detail/zen view), a stepping stone pathway leading to this place of meditation, and to the right is the massive chapel. The meandering pathway towards the chapel is meant to give visitors time to appreciate the inspiring view and the vastness of nature. By the time guests reach the funnel-shaped vestibule of the chapel, they have thoroughly absorbed the expansive view, and are ready to turn their attention inwards and heavenwards.












Part III: Interior
In the chapel, the overpowering direct light gives way to carefully controlled strips of light and indirect glow. The roar of cars and ocean has diminished to a faint hum. This is a place of meditation, rest, and repose.

The narrow bands of expressive light cast interesting patterns on the seats and congregants, growing in length as the sun sets. This is similar to a hallway and staircase by Ando I came across in a magazine.






























The soft glow spilling out from the side chapel and bathing the altar area lend these spaces a spiritual feel. This indirect lighting and light piping is much like Holl's use of reflected light in his Chapel of St. Ignatius.











































Part IV: Grouping
I spent probably close to 95% of my project time working on and thinking about the chapel/side-chapel complex. It was important to me to have these two spiritual areas adjacent to one another and for them to be visually strong, because they are the raison d'etre for the rest of the site. Because of this, I also did not want to muddle the impact of these spiritual areas with less lofty spaces like an office or classroom. This led me to create two clusters of buildings, one spiritual, the other sacred.












The spiritual area of the site occupies the bottom half of the site and includes the water and everything touching the water. The focus of this area is generally outwards, towards the limitless ocean and sky.












The secular area of the site occupies the space overlooking the reflecting pond and includes the bathrooms, office, classroom and a lobby space. The form of these buildings are significantly simpler than that of the spiritual complex, but still relate to the angular nature of the rest of the site. In general, the secular complex is more oriented towards the hill and cypress grove in the NW corner of the site. Only the lobby, which serves as the main hub for the complex, has a major western vista.












By using the buildings to create a sheltered space in the NW corner of the site, I gave the children an area to safely play without disturbing anyone that might be meditating in the spiritual complex.

Part V: Final Thoughts
Despite the toll it took on my sleep, I did enjoy working on this project a lot. Having to balance design criteria like expressive light and zen vista with programmatic requirements like square footage limits was both challenging and insightful. I've definitely gained an appreciation for the amount of work tha goes into creating a proposal for even a very limited program like this chapel, and enjoyed picking up some architectural vocabulary along the way.

My favorite part of the project was the fact that the AD community was so willing to help each other out. From fellow 130 students, to older students, to the teaching team, I found a wealth of insights (not to mention considerable technical help) whenever I talked to someone else about my project. It was nice to take ownership of such a complete project, and to have enough time to bring it to some level of realization. I'm personally proud that I was able to fight my way through some difficult design decisions late in the game, and produce a model I'm fairly satisfied with. I think the best test of a model's success is whether or not you'd want to experience it in full scale, and right about now, there's few places I'd rather be than in my chapel by the sea.












THANKS FOR A GREAT QUARTER EVERYONE!

Inspiration

I was browsing through Archdaily after Patti sent out the link, and came across this temporary chapel in France. It looks pretty similar to the rock-like concept I'm working with for my chapel. Interestingly, this chapel is made of timber panels, and meant to be just a temporary structure.

Here are a few pictures and the link to the architect's project page.

Wall Project - Jason

This first thing I did when approaching this project was to think about how I could reflect the function and values of the site's function as a community center in the structure I created. The theme I seized on and that inspired my wall was that of transparency and accessibility. To this end, I endeavored to create a wall structure that felt open and airy, and would facilitate a dialogue between what was going on inside and what was going on outside the building.

The primary I achieved this level of openness and transparency was by heavily using transparent and translucent materials and judiciously using solid masses.















I was also interested in using planes to define dimensional space. A wall, in its most basic form, is a plane, so I wanted to have some fun with that fact and use planes to create something that wasn't just a flat surface. I did this primarily by using horizontal planes as translucent fins, giving the wall thickness while allowing for the filtration of light without impeding the transparency of the wall. These fins also created an interesting skeletal/mass relationship by giving the wall a feeling of thickness while maintaining a strong sense of openness. I also placed the wall at an angle to the side walls to create more interest and to create a shaded alcove in which the entrance could be placed.

























Another theme I explored in my wall was that of penetration of mass. In it's most basic form (shown in the study model below) the wall is a skewed vertical plane pierced by two rectangular prisms. This penetration allows the two most important features of the wall, the entrance and balcony, to be highlighted while still being in dialog with the rest of the wall which are in turn penetrated by a series of horizontal fins.

































In designing these penetrating spaces (the balcony and entrance) I also thought about the hierarchy between vertical and horizontal. With the wall having a dominant horizontal axis defined by translucency and transparency, I decided to highlight the entry and balcony with vertical and opaque planes. I gave the balcony additional prominence by placing it directly in the line of sight from the main entrance to the complex.
























For my zen view, I was inspired by what A Pattern Language said about fleeting views. I incoporated a series of fleeting vistas into the ladder that accessed my balcony in order to draw attention to the idea of ascent. As visitors climb up towards the balcony, narrow horizontal windows will punctuate the wall in front of them, giving them glimpses of how their relationship with the surrounding site is changing. I don't think people would want to linger on a rung of a ladder too much, so they would appreciate these series of views only fleetingly. This is much like the view one gets from a glass elevator in a mall perhaps, except that I've added the component of sometimes denying the climber a view so that each time they reach a new window, their vista will have changed more dramatically.


















For the movable screen of my habitable space, I continued my theme of transparency and fusion of interior and exterior spaces. When closed, the screen turns the balcony into an inward facing space. When open, however, the balcony is transformed into a space that addresses both inside and outside and increases the space's connection with it's surrounding courtyard.

The pictures in order are of:

1. Metropolitan Correctional Center in Chicago
2. Museum of Furniture Design in Europe
3. Elevation of a primary school in London
4. Future Museum of African American History in Washington, D.C.
5. Building on new Novartis campus
6. Close up of Novartis building
   

The images in order are Aqua Tower in Chicago (Jean Gang), Brick Weave House in Chicago (Jean Gang), St. Ignatius Chapel in Seattle (Stephen Holl), and the proposed Port Authority Terminal in New York (Santiago Calatrava). In the case of Aqua and the terminal, I liked how the architects were able to combine sinuous curves and straight lines. The Brick Weave house seems like a great example of perforation and separation between structure and envelope. Stephen Holl's chapel is really cool for the way he uses reflected light (the pictures really don't do it justice).

Group 1- Roof Project Summary

This first project was a huge success for us. We were able to communicate our ideas effectively throughout the design process and build upon each other's critiques and opinions. One special tip we discovered was that in team projects, you should begin the brainstorming process without any team members having already thought about ideas. It's great to have everybody start from absolute scratch and then begin to think as a cohesive group, combining the creativity and insight of four members.

I will reiterate the design constraints, themes, and challenges that drove our project from start to finish.

1. Site context - Community Center + Classrooms

This important constraint led to a desire for a youthful, playful environment with an organic feel. However, we were restricted to flat, orthogonal materials, which made creating an organic space very challenging.

2. Roof vs. Ceiling

As a team we struggled with the issue of which is more important, the roof or the ceiling. Although in a model it is often the roof that is most prominent, ultimately it is the experience of a person inside the space which is most important, which led to us focusing mostly on the ceiling. This meant we had to work on a human scale, keeping our design integrated well within the existing walls.

Both roofs began from a simple grid placed upon the site plan, from which we created all of our proportions.

Our Fehn roof began as a honeycomb grid which then could be pulled in and out of its modules. We then moved to the idea of floating Fehn grids within the structure of a larger Fehn grid. We decided to make it irregular to heighten repetition with variation, and considered adding unique installations like the bench and tree piece. In class, we were introduced to the ideas of using different materials and possibly working with vertical aspects of the roof as well. However, we wished to keep with an open, youthful feel and simplified our design to purely horizontal, floating, homogeneous panels.

Our Pinos roof started with the one constraint that the space in front of the community hall's facade could not be tampered with. We wanted a roof which wrapped around this open space with the image of interlocking fingers. The first goal was to wrap around the existing trees and somehow creep into the entrance area. The second insight was to introduce different heights which paralleled the different heights of floating panels in the Fehn roof. At first some were to be placed on top of the existing roof, but in order to preserve the site's integrity we later pushed all roofs under the height of the flat roofs. The third insight was to push the Pinos roofs into the exit area, the outer classroom wall, and the entrance wall. The fourth decision was to introduce varying flap sizes, sometimes leaving open gaps for light to filter through. The final addition was a skeleton structure of floating beams which gave the impression of sweeping tunnels at the entrance and exit.

From a large scale, the Pinos roof is integrated well with the Fehn roof because its overall mass is placed in symmetry with the Fehn roof's diagonal axis. It also has a generally square placement, sometimes jutting right through the roofs. Although all the pieces are flat and jaggedy there is a very organic feel because of its humanistic scale, looking almost like rolling hills inside the courtyard.

This was a great project in terms of design insight and building process. Feel free to leave comments or questions!

Group One Project completed at 1:00 AM

More pictures to come after tomorrow's presentation

Panel Construction

Our group is exploring hanging panels from our Fehn-style roof. We have been trying out different materials to hang the panels with, and ultimately decided on thin, clear, acrylic rods. The first picture shows the evolution of our materials selection from thin wood beams to metal wires to acrylic rods.

In addition to varying the heights of these hanging panels, we are modulating light by using three different panel materials. The materials are solid wood, perforated wood, and translucent acrylic. The next two pictures show the different materials we're using.