The driving force behind this project was to immerse the user under the waters of the east river in order to provide for a more engaging and environmentally conscious interaction between NYC residents and the public transportation system of the ferries.
The goal was to create a temporary architectural intervention that takes into account the social context of the site as well as the recreational uses of the park by the surrounding communities. An analysis on the site showed a considerable variation in both pedestrian and vehicular traffic on the vicinity of the park (red indicating heavy traffic and yellow moderate traffic); as such, the intent of the project was to bridge these conditions towards the use of the park’s facilities as provided by the architectural intervention.
The project called to establish an entirely new design for the existing Barnard library on the campus at Columbia University, with the consideration of a singular ‘master program‘ as an integral part of the programmatic design of the structure. The design concept was based on the moments of concealment and reveal experienced in the desert cave systems as means of intriguing the student population into the interior spaces of the library and therefore activating these spatial conditions which had only function at a bare minimum in the current library.
Variation of light studies addressing concepts of materiality and shadow incidence.
