Design IV
Fall 2022
ARCH 141A
Professors Brad Samuels, Gauri Bahuguna
Court House in the Hague, Netherlands
From the recently established fields of Visual Investigations and Open Source Intelligence, models for evidence collection and analysis have changed dramatically. Yet, the program of the courthouse remains largely unchanged.
The project seeks to expand spaces of accountability through new typologies that align with contemporary models of evidence collection, narrative-building and distributed citizen participation to re-figure our notions of justice.
The first act draws and notates rituals. It investigates the relationship between rituals and the architecture types, both in confluence and dissonance.
Three transformed types are designed to accommodate three projected rituals onto three historically religious types.
The Basilica of Sant’Andrea was built to accommodate the pilgrims who flocked to the Mantua in the 15th century; the prayer wheel procession takes place at the Yarchen Gar, a monastery complex in southwestern China. The curve in the apse of the basilica provides an opportunity to make a turn, where a linear procession is placed to further reconfigure the original type.
The Tempietto is a small circular chapel located in the courtyard of San Pietro. Superimposing the crowd gathered at Emma Goldman’s speech on the circular chapel disrupt the perception of the building as a neutral circular space and creates a new problem of two overlapping spaces.
Xiahe County, Tibet
Chelsea, NYC
The second act tries to use structural montage to give tectonic resolution to the dissonance between the ingredients of first exercise.
The organizing systems of the original building will be drawn in dialogue with forces of transformation; the critical fragments transfer the load through seams, interrogating structural continuity along the exposed edges of the collage exercise.
“Montage is the determination of the whole […]
by means of continuities, cutting and false continuities”
- Gilles Deleuze
At the end it reaches the assembly of the three different transformed types through a careful exquisite corpse compilation.
The three designed parts are combined into one whole as a multi-faith center in Alphabet City. The center has a critical position where the relationship between the exterior street environment, an interior courtyard, and row-houses on the edge of the block is mediated.