Permanent Temporaries: Spring 2022
Columbia GSAPP
The Tesseract
The Tesseract proposes an alternative way of co-living - one that incorporates its surrounding environments, culture and ecology. An automobile engine research and development center, Tesseract takes cue from the dominant automobile influence and the West’s deep rooted and undying love for adventure sports and racing. It address the road trip culture and aims to bring in the technological zeitgeist being the electric engines to replace old rusty gasoline operated machines. Latching onto an existing excavated off roading race track, the project incorporates the racing spirit and serves as an extension to the track.
Understanding forces of nature and by running simulations on Blender, the project then took these learnings and incorporated them into an augmented reality setting. Using technology like The Oculus Headset, the design gave the ability to witness first hand the erosion of the building and hence the change in spaces over two hundred years, the project allowed viewers to experience the crux and scope of the project: not only as spaces and built architecture, but more importantly as a temporal spatial, emotional and environmental experience.
Tools: Rhino 3D, Blender, Quixel Mixer, TwinMotion, Adobe Creative Suite, Procreate, LiDar
The Proposal: A Zeitgiest
The F1 model aims at rethinking the tourism of racing that is heavily situated in the West, in order to create a platform that can offer itself as something more than just a research center which is exclusive to a certain audience and a certain function, or a race track which is typically only used once or twice a year - making it one of the most expensive sports. Through the process of finding a middle ground among the distinct contrasts of the sport of motor racing, namely their agencies as technological zeitgeists and their massive contribution to the carbon emissions owing to testing and tire usage, crew and freight transportation, their economic and power relations, political and touristic contributions and so on.
Upon studying various sports facilities, such as Olympic facilities, stadiums, race tracks and arenas, a major concern that surfaced was their permanence. And it is this permanence that brings with it a huge wave of change. While in some cases, this has led to a gentrification/ development of certain areas and the rise of their infrastructure and value, a lot of the others have been abandoned, broken down and left as empty boxes, while some have been beautified and romanticized as ruins or restored as objects or prized possessions, only to be viewed with no other form of interacting with them.
Through the process of accommodating the race track - encompassed by a system which is a result of a material matrix, the project questions this permanence.
Concept Cues: Landscapes, Textures and Forces
On the excursion venturing through lands of Las Vegas up to Los Angeles, there was a drastic shift in the landscapes, colors, textures, compositions - each with their own erosion, each one adapting in their own way. Be it Michael Heizer’s Double Negative, or the Grand Canyon. The boundaries between naturally formed landscapes dominating mankind and mankind cutting and carving through the naturescapes seemed to have disappeared.
Is this the cyborg Haraway talks about?
“Technology is not neutral. We’re inside of what we make, and it’s inside of us. We’re living in a world of connections - and it matters which ones get made and unmade.”
Donna Haraway
The Dilemma and potential Avenues
Does the facility have to have only one purpose that it is dedicated to fulfill?
If F1 has found ways to channel the hefty economic assets into creating alternative ways of engineering and manufacturing, why can’t the facilities that host these innovations be such zeitgeists themselves?
If the street races (which were first introduced almost a decade ago - 1929, Monaco) were able to make people rethink the permanence of its primary function, allowing it to have multiple personalities throughout the year, how can we redefine this function once again?
The fact that the first F1 circuit ever made - Silverstone itself was an adaptive reuse project, which rethought an old airport facility, can this project rethink the use of the SR 86?
How can reviving a stretch of a road strip lead to a revival of social ecosystems - whilst being mindful of the anthropocentric interventions to make sure history doesn’t repeat itself? How can architecture house this change?
Connecting Back to the Environment
Taking cues from existing ecosystems formed overtime as a result of the interaction of the external forces with the environment, it explores the possibility of facilitating and accelerating this process to give birth to an ecosystem of its own, which in turn would also alter its form and could accommodate a change in function.
Material is something that is ‘man’ually placed into a natural setting, even if the material itself is natural. The project takes up the idea of Materiality and the different skins of materials that were surfaced as part of the explorations as cues for spatial enclosures and a response to the nearby Mesquite quarry site.
Just like the program aims at replacing the decaying engine while keeping the outer body intact, the project too deals with the ideas of decay with respect to materiality, assembly and integration. The project’s form, facade and enclosures are interpretations of the concept of decay and erosion, with respect to different materials and their scales, their composition as well as their assembly. It takes this idea of scales and assembly further through an additive - subtractive process, taking cues from the surroundings - quarrying process of stone. Using methods of extraction, the masses are broken up into fragments which are then re purposed and repositioned to accommodate specific programmatic and structural functions.
A New Way of Building and Experiencing a Space
Re-imagining the old model/web of relationships that sports has to tourism, in terms of the event, its advertisement and its accommodation through the social, political, geographic and economic lenses, the project proposes a new model - a structure which toggles between its permanence and allows itself to dissolve and disintegrate overtime. Going from an iconic structure which attracts tourism and growth, to a model that inspires and poses as a new way of living.
The race track and facilities intend to be built using a material matrix using the nearby quarry stone in different ways, employing new modes of materiality, expression and climate resilience.
In terms of the program, each of these facilities aim to have two parts to them: a rather permanent research and innovation facility for engineering and construction - both of the cars, and of the podiums, and these plug in temporary podiums that would change every year, which each year’s design catering to different issues of climate and ecological crisis.
A synthesis of the tangible and intangible.
Investigating the composition of the stone as well as the influence of the external factors and the textures formed, the Tesseract experiments with blurring the boundaries between the natural and man-made, as well as the formal and the informal by appropriating the building language of the stone and the neighboring quarries to form cascading planes. Through the repositioning and repurposing of the massing The Tesseract activates spaces at the ground level as well as between built forms, forming a spatial network - of visual connect through openings and physical connect through the circulation.
Between natural and manmade: A Cyborg.
Investigating the composition of the stone as well as the influence of the external factors and the textures formed, the Tesseract experiments with blurring the boundaries between the natural and man-made, as well as the formal and the informal by appropriating the building language of the stone and the neighboring quarries to form cascading planes.
An Oasis In the Desert.
The Tesseract aims to be a ‘pit stop’ for tourists traveling on the 78, while also reinterpreting age and decay as positive factors activating spaces over the span of different time frames. Through its materiality, building language and the approach to the existing sand dunes as well as the resultant adventure sport off roading, the design attempts to tread with caution in order to navigate the fine lines between buildings as prescriptive and catalysts for change to being more of a ‘facilitator’ that speculates change, but doesn’t necessarily predict its exact movement or time of occurrence.
