Congruency Through Overlap
- Discipline
- Architecture
- Semester
- Autumn 2014
- Course
- Architectural Design V
- Work Type
- 3D Models
- designer
- Voghel, Justin
- faculty
- Lewis, Karen
- Location
- University of Chicago, Cook, Illinois, United States, NA
- Description
- Segregation has an overwhelming presence in the city of Chicago. Thus, the extreme distinction between the University of Chicago's campus and the surrounding site context is no surprise. It seemed necessary to make the addition to the northern dorms a threshold into the campus that provided and easier Segway for both the general public and the students. In order to connect these incongruent infrastructures, a further analysis of the main artery, 55th Street, revealed that the strong vehicular traffic flow is coming from West 55th because of its connection to the airport. East 55th draws in more from the Hyde Park region and those students living in off-campus housing. The building is rotated on a diagonal axis, breaking the grid of Chicago, to establish its presence as a gateway and to provide larger scale access points from the west and shorter access points from the east, directly correlating to the traffic flow. The program is composed of a series of overlapping campus and public_access elements. This theme extends to the dormitories nested on top of the more public program. A series of communal spaces are set up in the dormitory areas. The double-height hub is a public gathering space for the entire house, the terraces connected to clusters of dorm rooms within each house, and, of course, the singular dorm rooms. Though each floor has its own unique layout, sectionally, they are linked via a rail/mullion system that crawls the facades of dormitory spaces and creates a modular structural system that unifies the entire project.