Meeting House

Professor: Tomas DePaor

Harvard GSD Core 2, Semester 2

This project explores how a changing depth of facade can act as a mediator of varied interior environments.The window is our primary connection to the outside world when existing within buildings. This project experiments with what the window can come to represent and how it changes our engagement between internal and external space. This project is proposing a clubhouse for the Harvard campus, located adjacent to the Natural History Museum in the Law school campus. The building consists of three houses - a community house, guest house and graduate house. The three houses are intertwined to produce one place where each of the three groups across Harvard’s campus can connect. Colour has been a strong driving force in the project further exploring the idea of overlap.

The community house is orange, guest is pink and graduate is red. The project was thought through in terms of scale - small, medium and large rooms. Each scale contains a fragment of the concept that gets compounded when reading the building as a whole. The building is created by an enveloping thick facade that wraps around to create a void within. The facade is folded both in plan and section. By using this folded surface, light and air are maximized. Much like the layers of a window, there is interstitial space that contributes to how we perceive these two fundamental elements. This building aims to take the principle of layers within a window and apply them to the building, turning the whole facade into one cohesive window mechanism. Light and air travel through multiple layers before reaching the central spaces, controlled through glass that varies in depth and opacity. Supplementary program and circulation exist within the facade, leaving the center free to host the larger, more open functions. The plan’s geometry was generated to create the same facade module that can adapt to host small, single-person spaces to large multiple-group spaces. The program is arranged according to the scale of spaces held within the facade. Small spaces are held in shallow reveals, allowing for users to be as close to the periphery as possible, having a greater connection to the exterior. Medium spaces use both whilst becoming a buffer for the largest spaces within. In section, the facade alternates between deep and shallow reveal to respond to solar gains as well as program. Orientation of the building exposes East, South, and West façades. Reveals become increasingly more deep as you move from the East to the West, clockwise around the building. The repetition in the facade is mediated by this alternating depth, creating a different external and internal environment depending on the environment.

Plan

Small room

Medium room

Large room

Original window