A predatory insertion and new entryway into the Capitoline museums of Rome. Contra posta is heavily employed to introduce a new addition -part building, part landscape into one of the historically most densely layered sites in Rome, Italy.
Lester S. Yu B. Arch ‘09
Spring 2008, Fourth Year Rome Design Studio
Critics: Francesco Garofalo & Lily Chi
The studio imagined Fiber Placement Technology as an alternative future of building production and methodology. The placement of each composite fiber is computationally controlled to optimize structural and programmatic requirements throughout the material of the pavilion. Therefore the architectural effect is an elegant hybrid of spatial performance.
Marc Mintsioulis, M.Arch. I
panel 1
panel 2
panel 2
fiber pattern by processing
studio with fiber composite material.
Cemetery Towers located on E. Houston between Bowery and 1st Ave. There is an amazing ramen place nearby.
Credit : Kevin Lim, Wendy Tsai, Gary He
Critics : Inaki Abalos, Urtzi Grau
AAP NYC Spring 08
Tanker Settlement, 2067
A screaming came across the sky…..
In the post- apocalyptic scenario the carcass of a beached oil supertanker becomes the basis for a complex human ecology. The structure is communally re- appropriated, erected vertically and embedded in the shore of a former metropolitan port. The former boat serves the dual purpose of shelter and elevated protection. An aggregate develops as the boat is mined for parts in some places and fortified in others. As the system evolves, the structural integrity of the vessel remains in a fragile balance with the forces of reassembly, rust and human relations.
Studio Fall 2007
Ksenia Chumakova
A sampling of the final presentation drawings.
First Place in NOMA National Student Design Competition
NOMA Cornell Team 2008
Senior Design Team: Justin Hui, Julio Torres, Marco Andrade, Lester Yu
Design Project Team: Clayton Henry, Andrew Nahmias, Hoang Viet Ngyuen, Wajeha Qureshi, Mauricio Vieto, Stephen Whitaker, Charles Williams, Joy Lee
Faculty Advisor: Vince Mulcahy and Alex Mergold
Staff Advisor: Leon Lawrence
3rd year
This was a fun one.
Thanks Aaron, its a good format.
This project aims to transform the derelict industrial zone of the Italgas complex in the Ostiense neighborhood outside the walls of Rome by revitalizing it into a thriving public park and recreational complex. The site situates itself along the Tiber River, surrounded by new efforts to create a successful university setting and facilities. This fitness center and park become a significant component in the ongoing efforts to regenerate and reoccupy the area.
Taking cues from the imposing grid shifts that occur around the site, as well as the local mechanical and industrial archaeology, the project positions constructed fragments that cut through the landscape and sandwich existing relics. This design strategy creates a friction as the figures, old and new, slip and slide towards the Tiber River and back into the urban fabric. This is seen as a way to help mediate between the university development on both sides of the Italgas complex and to create a significant linkage between them.
The primary building, a long tube-like structure, becomes a threshold as one moves along the circulatory wall, penetrates the tube into the fitness center, and exits back out onto the existing relic to view the soccer field. By moving linearly towards the river along the wall and then cutting laterally back across the site, one is reminded of the tracking movements characteristic of the assembly line and industrial processes that occurred on the site not so long ago.
The building is clad in materials native to the site– rusted beams, corrugated metal, and stained concrete. This is an interpretation and extrapolation of the site’s current situation as seen in the image to the right, where industrial detritus has become engulfed in a young canvas of vegetation. By harvesting the surviving structures while promoting this new idea growth and regeneration, a significant dichotomy arises between the innocence of nature and the harshness of rust and metal; clean and dirty, old and new.
