The SuperNODE project, designed by myself and my classmate Tyler Hopf as a project for the Design Development Comprehensive Studio for fourth year students at RPI, was featured this week in eVolo.
SuperNODE brings landscape up and into the building, intersecting with the extension of the urban environment.
Existing as a positive cultural icon, safe haven and playground, SuperNODE stimulates cultural vitality in post-Katrina New Orleans. This media-tech acts as a node of culture in the city, harboring communication and exchange through media and public assembly.
The sectional “string” warps and deforms as a reaction to the program of the building. This allows the structure to perform in a multi-scalar way, creating opportunities for concerts and rallies with thousands of people, performances in the auditorium for hundreds, and smaller gatherings in lecture halls, classrooms, and private reading spaces enabling information exchange at every scale.
Three urban conditions are established in the site and buildings: the public plaza, the public park, and the sidewalk. The plaza as an open space for gathering is established at the west side, continuing into the building’s interior. The public park continues up into the building on the east side creating a continuous flow with the context as well as smaller scale elevated terracing. The sidewalk condition is created on the mezzanine levels as an overflow space of program on the main floors and as a consistent connector flying through the shifting sections.
Program is defines in two axes, vertically through cultural character (perform, project, converge, commerce, exchange) and horizontally through the action within (observe, catalog, assemble, create, individualize).
The two sides of the “string” enhance the differentiation in program and multi-scalar functionality of the building by creating alternation pockets of space and distinguishing between two orientations of the building.
Project Team: Alex Dorn + Tyler Hopf at RPI
Project based off of the exhibition “Newer Orleans” displaying designs for safe-havens in post-Katrina New Orleans.
Cape Cod Community College’s Frank and Maureen Wilkens Science and Engineering Center is a net-positive energy building designed to transform the heart of campus.
The project approaches sustainability through a holistic and global approach, implementing a range of moves including passive solar shading overhangs, air-source heat pumps, high performance materials with low embodied carbon and the expansion of the range of thermal comfort and lighting power density. Combined with on-site photovoltaics, the project achieves net-positive energy use.
The project’s thermally modified wood rainscreen façade is a study of the modern expression of vernacular Cape Cod architecture while reducing embodied carbon. Early lifecycle assessments identified the immense carbon savings of wood over fiber cement. The design team did not stop there, furthering reductions by peeling back unnecessary finishes like carpet and ceilings. Together, these decisions enabled a 19% reduction in embodied carbon.
#earthweek #designalways #buildingscience #performalism #netpositive #capecodmodernism #capecod #newengland
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