Section Box Perspective - Level 4
Site - Zooming In
The proposed site is a vacant lot in close proximity to downtown Jackson, Mississippi. The density of the urban fabric on the block is relatively low, even for Jackson, considering how central the location is relative to downtown.
The lot is standard to the urban conditions of a small US city. It is, however, constrained compared to the average conditions for a US high school. In choosing this site, this constraint on the building footprint provided many immediate questions and potential directions of pursuit for what it means to be an urban high school.
Site Plan
The starting point for the project became how to deal with this vertical layout. I decided to vertically distribute the school's gallery throughout. The gallery was selected as the central planning feature because of its flexibility in a program that is so demanding of space, daylighting, and visual access to the outside. Diffusing the gallery spaces in the central core of the building seemed compatible with the high-school hallway. The art gallery is a type of space that already prioritizes leisurely procession, and the hallway in a high school typically supports a primary social domain.
This role of the hallway came into immediate question when considering a vertical layout, and one that I deemed to be a priority in preserving.
Vertical Circulation + Distributed Gallery Space
By marrying these spaces in this way, the hall isolates the galleries and a distinction between the display space and the rest of the school is made. In theory, this layout also provides the opportunity to extend access to some of the infrastructure of the school, in this case, the exhibition spaces, to the community. The gallery spaces being isolated on distinct split levels enables the school to restrict access to specific parts of the school when needed for shows.
The main staircase begins within a constrained space, wrapping small display spaces. After reaching level 4, the stairway assumes a split-level pattern of one long stair, a gallery, and one short stair. This transition can be partially seen in the "section box perspective" drawing at the top of the page. The two instances labeled “Gallery” show the difference between the small display space and the split-level galleries.
East Elevation
Section 2
Section 1
South / Amite St. Elevation
North
Ground Floor
Level 5 - Library Floor
Level Type - Large Program Space
level 3 - administrative offices, level 5 - library, level 7 - cafeteria, level 9 - technical workshops
Level 6G - Core Gallery
Level Type - Display
level 5G, 6G, 8G, 9G - core galleries
Level 6 - Workroom, Classrooms, and Teacher Offices
Level Type - Instruction
level 2, level 4, level 6 - workroom, classrooms, and teacher offices
Roof Plan
Hallway (painting workroom and a classroom in view)
Digital Art Workroom
Art Workroom - Unfolded - Plan + Interior Elevations
The art workrooms are identical to each other, they are all stacked, expansive double-height volumes on the north end of the building. The volume of these spaces reveals the structure and the enclosure as uncompromising. There are large interior windows providing visual access to each workroom from the split levels that extend past each workroom.
This visual access is established to showcase the focus of the magnet school, displaying the primary artmaking spaces on every floor. This access also maintains some of the social potentials of the typical sprawling school layout, a potential that can be easily lost in this vertical layout. It also plays into the potential for student autonomy in these spaces.
Four workrooms for the school's four disciplines drawing, painting, sculpture, and digital art - are indeterminate, prioritizing flexibility over specialization. This seems most appropriate for the transitional nature of high school, and the breadth of methods to be explored by young art students in these spaces. Teachers, students, and the subjects/disciplines being taught can remain subject to change.
considering the potential impact of materiality or ornamentation in art-making spaces
physical model - worms eye view
window datum
isometric - showing window datum / slanted massing
white - protruding window frames
black - window frames in relief
Unused Facade Language Iterations
exploring ways to create different sized apertures.
Nearly all visual arts curricula consist of improving one's technique in a given medium. Arguably the most universal principle is honing one's perception. Therefore this became a driver in concept development. How can the building serve as a tool, that supports the process of students learning to see? The following provides examples where there were attempts at provoking mindfulness through phenomenological means.
Blue dominates the circulation. The commanding presence of this unusual amount of vibrancy is the first shift away from one's expectations. The second layer is that this blue has a gradient. The gradations in color are not adjacent and the gradient is obviously not experienced at once.
One motive for a regular window grid and standard window units for the envelope was to promote an experience from the interior. The variety in the volumes behind the rigid form might create some interplay that could provoke thoughts of one’s place inside the whole. For instance, in the double-height spaces, the workrooms, or the cafeteria, the two rows of windows give a frame of reference that emphasizes just how much bigger these volumes are than the single-height standard.
Circulation Color Gradient
Screen Pattern Example
The screens of each window unit as a metaphor. The screens experienced from the exterior, though separated by large margins, have a whole pattern that is still intelligible. From the inside, the screen is experienced most often as one segment at a time, again emphasizing this idea of one's place inside the whole.
These potential effects are only describing motives for the existence of a whole image or pattern that consists of the window screens, and they are, secondary to the motives for the existence of a screen element in the first place when the screens or their pattern is not the object of our perception. The screen element was initially of interest because I was exploring the idea of decontextualizing views. A screen in this case enables framing views with a small opening, while still maintaining a large opening area in the building envelope to provide adequate amounts of daylight and visual access to the outside.
considering the resolution of a facade graphic - viewing from various distances
Parti Model - 3/64" = 1'-0"
learning to see - before
learning to see - after
Conceptual Graphic - separating perception from distorting associations or allowing for new impressions, refreshing one’s perspective, and increasing the awareness of the potential for distortion.