The Occupied Edge & Thickened Threshold
Professor: Billie Tsien, Jennifer Dempsey
SITE: Brooklyn (Adjacent to Boys and Girls Club + Skatepark)
Program: Public Pool
For the first abstract assignment, which influences the concept of the pool, I made a model interpreting the act of two people playing with the paper plane.
The holes in moveable walls determine the trajectory of the plane. One person throws and the other person pulls the paper plane. The wall becomes activated through stillness and movement, similar to the concept that drives the indoor pool design.
The pool is situated in Brooklyn, between The Boys and Girls Club and a public skatepark.
It is organized in relation to a sculptural wall which shapes the building and has a program that can serve multiple purposes.
This concept was inspired by an existing condition at the site, where a wall served as a boundary for handball, players and surface for skateboarders. It is a thickened sculptural wall, a vertical extension of the skatepark, activated for circulation, play, and the shaping of light.
A skateboarder can perform tricks and interact with the facade. These physical collages portray how two sides of the building are unified by a sculpted, thickened wall with apertures. Two forms of play are connected, bringing people together by engaging all 5 senses. The ground also thickens with sculptural and natural landscape, where children can meander on skate ramps with seats under shade of trees.
Physical collages
The seats and ramps become topography. The sculpted thickened ground plays multiple roles, for skateboarding, relaxing. The landscape is a source of respite, as well as the garden attached to the pool and connected to the boys and girls club. The garden allows for students to farm food and learn how to cook them in the kitchens that they have that aren’t being used.
Architectural rendering of an inhabitable thickened and carved red wall integrated with a public swimming pool. The wall becomes a continuous occupied architecture with carved rooms, shaded seating alcoves, changing rooms, lookout terraces, diving platforms, and staircases embedded within its thickness. The carved façade doubles as a skateable landscape with quarter pipes, banks, transitions, ledges, wall rides, and carved bowls seamlessly integrated into the architecture. Skateboarders perform tricks across the sculpted red masonry while swimmers, families, and spectators occupy the pool and terraces. The pool edge merges into the wall through broad steps and sun decks. Warm rammed-earth or red concrete materiality, lush trees, soft afternoon light, highly detailed architectural visualization in the style of contemporary competition renderings, emphasizing the contrast between solid mass and deep carved voids.