"What could a school of architecture be?"
What if an architecture school had as its reason for being an unwavering challenge to dogmatic ideology, arbitrary convention, and pervasive banality? What if a school openly encouraged, supported, and nurtured a commitment to innovation? Could that school become more than a refuge for creativity, but a spark to the larger academic community? What about the larger community and region? How sustainable could it be? Ultimately, could it inspire curiosity about the power of design?
Such a school would make space in the margins, where fertile ground for creative ideas often goes overlooked. It would make a virtue of connection, transparency, and openness. It would embrace diversity, recognizing authenticity in every individual person, every strand of thought, every contribution to knowledge of theory and practice. In addition to pedagogy, the products and processes of design thinking-in physical and representational objects-could be a source of delight and celebration. Such a school would find opportunity in the most unexpected places.
This proposal for the Northern Ontario School of Architecture creates such an opportunity. On a marginalized site within the downtown-at the intersection of Durham, Larch, and Elgin Streets-the building takes a shape that is fluid, malleable. It emerges from the primordial ooze of a creative search for integration, influenced as much by its contents as by its context.
Programmatically, the building is a learning tool for the whole community. The first-floor (manufacturing) shop reveals processes of making for ail to see. Second- and Third-floor Library is easily accessible as a community resource. Three distinct fourth-floor undergraduate studios, or "neighborhoods" representing each of the three dual-stream core courses, surround a student forum, overlooking an exterior public forum and cafe-a hang-out space that is also a place for public studio/ thesis reviews. The school is thus in constant dialogue with the public realm.
Pedestrian access connects the core of the building from park to rail lands, energizing the (exterior) public forum, and the (interior) student forum above. Transparency permeates the building inside and out.
The roof-wall enclosure forms a "solar blanket", shaped to accommodate flows of user activities. A fuselage-like technical strategy is used to integrate program, structure, and environmental systems into a unified whole. The blanket bends and twists to allow for movement through the building as well as interior and exterior shelter. Technologically, it is a flexible framework that can support panels of photovoltaic cells, high-performance vision glazing, and layers of woven wire and wood shading devices. The energy-absorbing potential of the blanket creates a natural stack effect throughout the building, allowing rising hot air to be captured (for heat) or ventilated (for cooling). It brings together in one unifying form three transparent pavilions, gathering together under one roof students, faculty, staff, and community.
The Northern Ontario School of Architecture could change the nature of this downtown district - energizing it, making it a center of creativity, and inspiring ail who call it home to care for its future.
(Competitor's text)
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