Design III
Fall 2022
ARCH 131A
Ru Jia
Kaivana Patel
Razaq Alabdulmughni
Professors Elisa Iturbe, James Lowder, Daisy Ames
The project focuses on the close reading of architectural precedent through the execution of drawings and physical models. A triad of precedents is studied: the Mosque of Sultan Hassan, the Church of Santi Luca e Martina, and Texas House 1.
Plans and sections are understood horizontal and vertical cut at critical points of the architecture. Ideas such as axiality, part-to-whole, surface development, and bias of a singular view were the key aspects I explored in this study.
The four walls surrounding the central courtyard gives an ambiguous reading of the wall through a combination of different design elements.
The shallow relief etched on the wall creates a surface-like appearance; the apertures punching through the wall make it like thickened planes; the presence of iwans behind each wall make them read like solid masses extruding outwards.
The cruciform in the Mosque of Sultan Hassan is an elongated one, suggesting a favored directionality
pointing Mecca. Meanwhile, the street direction forces the entry to turn along another axis. This mismatch between the two orientations results in the creation of an interstitial poché, dense and figural, registering the tension exist on site.
The cruciform in the Church of Santi Luca e Martina is one continuous space defined by a encroaching wall. The wall in this case is a accumulation of mass on a datum surface, creating a fractal-like pattern that defines the boundaries of the cruciform.
