Aretha Franklin School For the Arts (Triple Dichotomies)
- Discipline
- Architecture
- Semester
- Autumn 2018
- Course
- Architectural Design V
- Work Type
- 3D Models
- designer
- Iovino, Anthony
- faculty
- Jones, Kay Bea
- Locations
- Detroit, Wayne, Michigan, United States, NA
- Description
- This was a student project by Anthony Iovino for Kay Bea Jones course ARCH 4410 in Autumn 2018. My design for the Aretha Franklin School for the Arts explores dichotomies through program, form and spatial experiences. The architectural language emphasizes the program that defines the school itself, the performance spaces, the gallery spaces and the athletic facilities, while identifying and supporting these functions by providing dynamic spaces and expressive forms as venues used by the school, the public and those used by both. Three undulating ribbon surfaces create three organic forms that contain these pieces of program in fluid yet defined spaces. Through the exploration of materiality and color, these three massive, expressive objects explore dichotomies such as light and dark, inside and outside and front and back to create a spatial quality that at times can be confusing and ambiguous as it changes one’s perception and understanding of the spaces they occupy. The relationship between the creative programmatic spaces and the normative, systematic classroom bar of the high school creates a dichotomous relationship that explores program, inside and outside, variances in intersections and circulation and changing perceptions of vast, monumental spaces, and those that are small and confined. From the exterior, one would expect large vast spaces to fill the monumental undulating forms and the smaller, confined spaces to fill the human-scaled classroom bar. However, inversely, large, linear open circulation fills the classroom bar while narrow, confined curvilinear circulation fills the interstitial space between the ribbon surfaces of the monumental forms.