This student project by Joshua Barnes, Laura Meade, Jiajun Ren was produced Winter 2012 in Ann Pendleton-Jullian's ARCH 442 class. Obtaining freshwater was the most important priority for this project. This became the motivation for the siting of the facility- a cleft in the hillside where passive water collection could be maximized. Then, we used the water's passage through our intervention as the design's story. As it flowed through the different scales of our architecture, the building was articulated in different ways. The fractal pound sign was adopted and used as our spatial strategy: at the smallest scale, a portion of the symbol was used as a DNA piece that created the dense, intimate spaces of the housing. At the largest scale, the recognizable pound sign became symbolic of our laboratories- a sort of '# marks the spot.' --Joshua Barnes, Laura Meade, Jiajun Ren
