Download - Jonathon Meier
Jonathon MeierYale School of ArchitectureSpring 2013
Multicultural Center.........................................................................Architectural Traineeship................................................................Municipal Courthouse.....................................................................Yale Natural History Museum Extension........................................Dance Studios at Queensboro Bridge............................................Compression Test: Cohabitation Exercise......................................Live/Work for Entrepreneurs...........................................................Center for Advancement of Science in Space................................
p. 5p.13p.17p.27p.31p.35p.39p.43
Projects presented chronologically
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perspective view from the southwest street corner
Ball State UniversityCritic: Ana DeBrea
Spring 2009Muncie, IN
*Honorable Mention Prize, BSU Gresham Smith Competition
This project for a new Multicultural Center on Ball State University’s campus, designed in partnership with Jessie Rabideau, was an exploration of form based on the disruption of preconception. Continuous surfaces change roles and create varying functions by folding, intersecting, and merging.
The design process began non-contextually by exploring how a single plane was capable of changing direction–how a single surface was capable of taking on multiple roles. The same thought process was applied to the site, where pieces of the ground begin to rise up and intertwine with one another to define space.
The fenestration fits between the planes, but folds and angles within itself much like the concrete and grass planes. The angled glass is supported by vertical structural glass fins. Where the angled glass planes meet, they bring together reflections from disjointed locations. One might see oneself in a reflection next to a stranger from the other side of the building, or one might find the grass in a reflection directly adjacent to the sky (see page 11).
Multicultural Center
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Left: ground floor and lower levelRight: site plan
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1. entry and reception area2. resources3. library4. meeting spaces with moveable partitions5. theater6. cafe and kitchen7. mechanical8. general storage9. theater storage10. administration with sliding wall system11. lounge with flexible gallery space12. below ground exhibition space13. outdoor seating14. outdoor covered performance area15. ticket booth16. control room
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Top right: mezzanine levelBottom right: 2nd level
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10’-0” 30’-0” 70’-0”0’1. entry and reception area2. resources3. library4. meeting spaces with moveable partitions5. theater6. cafe and kitchen7. mechanical8. general storage9. theater storage10. administration with sliding wall system11. lounge with flexible gallery space12. below ground exhibition space13. outdoor seating14. outdoor covered performance area15. ticket booth16. control room
Top left: section A-ABottom left: section B-BRight: perspective from library
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1. parapet2. concrete roofing tiles3. concrete over metal decking4. hvac5. steel structural system6. 1/8” suspended hardi board panels7. structural glass fins8. glass window frame9. living wall10. green roof 11. soil over fiber mat and drainage layer12. interior concrete bearing walls
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Top left: green roof detailTop right: structural detailBottom left: space frameRight: perspective from the southeast corner
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view of the Maitland City Bowls sectional model pulled apart
Architectural Traineeship
These next pages are dedicated to the work completed during a summer architectural traineeship with Austrailian-based architecture firm Terroir. While in the office, I was exposed to foreign approaches to architectural thought, design, and practice. My work in the firm included model building, architectural drawing, graphic design, and exhibition organizing.
The Maitland City Bowls Club is in a small town north of Sydney, and it is a five-phase project for Terroir. The second stage involved designing a new entry way for the outdated club and a sleek new roof to unify the previously disjointed building. As the approach to the building is from atop a hill, the roof design was to be very exposed. To help the firm and the clients visualize the design’s complex geometries, I created a detachable, nearly 1.5 meter-long model. After being used in the office, the model was placed on display at the club.
The Sydney Laneways competition sought innovative ideas to spark interest and draw attention to Sydney’s unused laneways. I worked with the director of Terroir, Gerard Reinmuth, and photographer Brett Boardman to create a visual package for Terroir’s project entry. After being explained Terroir’s programmatic ideas for each laneway, I designed an image to graphically communicate each idea, and then combined the images into a comprehensive visual package. The project entry was short-listed and presented to the City Council of Sydney.
Terroir Architects
Summer 2009Sydney, Australia
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Top: Model made for Maitland City Bowls projectLeft: finished project (photo by Chris Rogers)Right: Sydney Laneways competition entry
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perspective view from the northwest street corner
This project for a new Municipal Courthouse in Washington, D.C. was designed in partnership with Jessie Rabideau. In viewing the courthouse as a place of transformation (inherent in the courthouse’s function of determining individuals’ futures), the design intent was to embody, through form and function, the courthouse’s role as a transformative yet authoritative and stable place. While maintaining the respected civic ideals of authority, stability, and integrity, the new courthouse exemplifies transformation in form, skin, security, and experience.
The idea of a twisting object developed as a visualization of “transformation”. The object, initially itself, twists and becomes something different on the other side. The twist remaining in the center of the object is left as the “moment” of transformation. The user would experience this moment of transformation when walking between the vertical and horizontal parts of the building. The skin, enveloping the building, sweeps over, down, and around just before sweeping upward from the opposite side.
The skin wraps around the building as a controlled system of fabric membrane louvers. Each horizontal piece of fabric membrane is independently hinged at its ends, which allows it to twist at any given point across the piece. It transforms spaces by adjusting daylight, visual exposure, and solar gain as the twist moves or is eliminated altogether. It was developed parametrically using solar altitude angles.
The skin uses solar sensors to make the louvers become immediately more vertical in overcast conditions (permitting daylight) and more horizontal in sunny conditions (blocking solar radiation). The passersby can see the kinetic skin transforming in real time as the clouds pass over and the skin adjusts to the needs of the building and its users.
Municipal Courthouse
Ball State UniversityCritic: Andrea Swartz
Fall 2010Washington, D.C.
*Honorable Mention Prize,American Institue for Architecture Students
National Competition
*Project Published,AIAS Crit Magazine
*Honorable Mention Prize, BSU Cripe Competition
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Top: site context, Washington, D.C.Right: model photo, south façade
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north south
1.5’ 3’
360 variance
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kawneer 1600 ss and sloped glazing curtain wall system
concrete structural grid
skin shading/privacy control device
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Left: building assembly diagramRight: louver variation diagram
Top: dynamic façade moving in real time as a reaction to solar sensorsLeft: single component of skinRight: close-up view of skin-to-frame connection
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1. meeting hall2. outdoor deck3. retention pond4. lobby5. bicycle parking
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solar sensor
fiberglassmembrane
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suspendedramp
aluminum armature
structural steel member
retention wall
pond
Left: ground floor planMiddle Top: section A-AMiddle Bottom: section B-BRight: wall section through skin
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Left: security diagram of public (blue) vs. private (orange)Top: perspectives of circulation sequence (from public to privtate)Right: perspective from courtroom
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perspective view of undulating floor plates merging with the hill’s topography
This project was for the extension of an invertebrate exhibit at the Yale Peabody Museum of Natural History. The site is situated at the top of a hill on Yale’s campus set next to the Klein Biology Tower and its colonnade designed by Philip Johnson.
Displaying invertebrates in their preserved states completely removes the specimen from their natural context, allowing the specimen to be seen as free-standing objects of sculpture. This project seeks to further remove the objects from their contexts by rescaling the traditional vessel (jar) to become long, glass cylinders which stretch up and through the building—dually serving as display case and light well.
The horizontal planes flow between the extents of the cylinders to shape circulation paths and create an unbroken topographic experience with Science Hill. By day, the backdrop of the planes creates an intensely graphic display. By night, the tubes illuminate the specimen and expose them as free-floating objects in space.
Yale Peabody Natural History Museum Extension
Yale School of ArchitectureCritic: Joyce Hsiang
Fall 2011New Haven, CT
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Left: unfolded section cut lineBottom:unfolded section through circulation pathRight: standard section
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perspective showing volume collisions and piercings
This project translates the intense noise, both audio and visual, of the program and site into interactive volumes. The volumes, each representative of a dance studio, collide with one another to define new spaces and create internal visual connections (i.e. studio-to-studio, studio-to-café).
When the volumes collide to the point of piercing, the mesh skin is broken and transparent glass is exposed, and a connection is made to the exterior (i.e. main entrance). The spatial resultant of all the collisions is the performance hall, where the angles of the collided volumes form the necessary acoustical and line-of-sight angles for the theater.
Dance Studios and Performance Hall at Queensboro Bridge
Yale School of ArchitectureCritic: Joyce Hsiang
Fall 2011New Haven, CT
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section showing the visual connections formed between the collided volumes
rotation around the physical model
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view from the top looking down into the dark core and bright living units
This project was an exercise in understanding how to balance the most fundamental living needs within an unusually small space. The site was an abstract 3-meter cube raised 10 feet above ground. It was understood that the unit would be repeatable in a field on all sides. The program had to fit 2 separate living units for 2 unrelated individuals.
The design focused on how form could be used to increase the perception of space without increasing the physical space. The concrete core twists up through and beyond the extents of the cube. Its base is very wide and becomes increasingly pinched as it moves upward. This created a very dark and dramatic space on the interior of the core and very bright and open spaces on its exterior.
The stairs–twisting up the core–begin on its interior, puncture it at the living units’ points of entry, and continue up on the core’s exterior. Three key elements increase the perception of space in the project: the continuous motion of the twisting form, the physical constriction of the stairs inside the core compared to the openness outside of it, and the dark interior of the core juxtaposed with the bright living unit.
Compression Test: Cohabitation Exercise
Yale School of ArchitectureCritic: Peter De Bretteville
Spring 2012Abstract Site
*Selected to be published,Yale Retrospecta
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section cut through both units and the concrete core
close-up view of the faceted, twisting concrete core
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view of the “void” cutting through the building from the courtyard on the other side
This project investigates how form can simultaneously address tight site constraints, environmental needs, programmatic innovation, and experiential affect. The program houses work space and private living quarters for 8 entrepreneurs on a site only 17 feet wide and open to a large courtyard on one side. The courtyard is considered a means of advertisement to the public for the entrepreneurs and their ideas; therefore the public is pulled into the building by a voided exhibition space on the second level.
The void scoops up into the building as a social space and forms the exhibition hall, creates a 2-story social work space (where entrepreneurs can discuss ideas with one another), pierces the other side, and then twists back around to form a shared roof-top terrace. The piercing draws in day light to both the live and work units—where the site would not otherwise have air rights--and pulls it through the voided space and glass floors to the exterior ground floor of the site. The light exposure on the ground floor (to what would otherwise be a dark space) allows the void to materialize and test the boundary between solid and void.
Live/Work for Entrepreneurs
Yale School of ArchitectureCritic: Peter De Bretteville
Spring 2012New Haven, CT
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section cut showing the void moving from the courtyard, up and through the building, and re-emerging on the rooftop
plans showing the void moving from the courtyard, up and through the building, and re-emerging on the rooftop
top: light causing the void to materializebottom: structural model
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the underside of the building as the primary facade
The new CASIS building was designed to be a new genre of exhibition space–both in how one experiences and inhabits it, and in how the exhibition space affects its surrounding spaces. The exhibition space was thought of as a field of objects suspended between two lattices that moves up, through, in, and out of the rest of the building. By lifting the field of objects above ground and exposing it with the porous lattice, the underside of the building is established as CASIS’s primary facade.
One flows through the field of objects on a walkway that is suspended between a porous “floor” and “ceiling”. This creates a feeling of being neither “here” nor “there”, but rather existing somewhere inbetween the ground below the floor lattice and the sky above the ceiling lattice. The exhibition space also interacts with the street and the interior classrooms and offices beneath it by exposing its contents as silhouetted objects. The upper lattice holds a thick space frame for structural support, allowing the lower lattice to be delicate and hang from above.
Center for the Advancement of Science in Space (CASIS)
Yale School of ArchitectureCritic: Mark Foster Gage
Fall 2012New York, NY
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left: site plan showing the building as a terminus to the allé that connects to the waterfronttop and right: plans showing the lattice moving through the building
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left: view from the exterior, beneath the lattice, where the building mass begins to disappear as the sky appears through the lattices; objects appear as silhouetted massesbottom: section cut showing the relationship between the field of objects and the office spaces, and the field with the exterior of the buildingright: suspension between ground and sky while moving through the field of objects
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