Flat Volumes

CASIS Headquarters & Museum, New York City
Critic: Prof. Mark Foster Gage (Yale University)
Year: 2012

This project creates a series of different volumes and environments for exhibition that are stacked, using a language of continuity linking them together, so that they’re neither separated or pixelated, neither uniform or enfilade. In other words, program weaves itself between exhibition spaces that spiral through a language of surfaces; while this language of continuity sustains the main exhibition areas, it bifurcates to become poche and to become program. The residual space from this bisection is similar to Kahn’s servant space, but rather than service between program, it is program between exhibition. For the users, to occupy programmed poche is to access correlated functions; for the visitors, it allows one to be simultaneously aware of both the exhibition space and the different programmatic adjacencies that support this building.

While the spaces are continuous, there is a hierarchy produced by layering that avoids an evenness of spatiality; space becomes both differentiated and connected. To further emphasize its relationship to the exhibition space, certain enclosed elements of program become voluminous or object-like, while the exhibition surface involutes to create an armature or casing for these volumes within the exhibition. This involution creates a phenomenal transparency between exhibition and either education, conference or research that suggests different environments from one exhibition space to another.

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Published in Retrospecta 2012-2013
Featured in Big Plans exhibition 2012 at Yale’s School of Architecture’s Gallery