Student Project: Marc Syp and Zhishan Wang
Advanced architecture often turns a cold shoulder to green technologies, considering their application as belonging to the realm of engineering rather than formal or conceptual problems. Our challenge is to pursue a radical green agenda without sacrificing formal clarity. Rather than subsume green systems as much as possible into the material of the architecture, as is possible with today?s technologies, we chose to push the diagram of green to its limits, allowing the formal characteristics of the project to be driven by the supply and demand of a zero net system. The result is an urban power plant, a public and private construction that exists simultaneously as a billboard for new technologies and as a reclaimed relic of urban infrastructure. The PV cell becomes more than a bank of electronics, it is a skin with multivalent transparencies; water systems are as much about mood as they are about conservation; and the machinic and organic intertwine relentlessly in spaces that are both private and public, a discrimination that is eroded in favor of generating a new urban ecosystem.
- Instructor
- Michael B. Cadwell, AIA
- Course
- Architecture 842: Advanced Architectural Design II
- Quarter
- ?????7