communal learning on a hill

Hybrid University and community center project.

The clients provided a set of goals more than a program:  the project, sited next to High Tech High Chula Vista, needs to serve as a gateway and catalyst to a larger campus based on the idea of collaborative, project-based learning.  It also needs to create a community identity for Chula Vista, stimulate local entrepreneurship , encourage innovation, and develop life-long learning.  The project needs to create a place.

I interpreted this into a few spatial ideas: permeability from the road, from the high school, to the larger campus, and within the massing; active interstitial space to encourage community and collaboration; visibility across the site and both between and within programs to strengthen that community; a range of spatial scales for a range of students and project types, which the students can feel a sense of ownership over.

A massing developed to meet these ideas as well as fit with the topography of the site well and provide daylighting.  The project contains six learning communities with a variety of spaces.  They are conceptualized as open collaborative spaces with more fixed learning areas existing within them.

Critical to this massing are glass circulation voids that cut vertically through the project.  Each creates a core for a learning community to exist around.  Their transparency gives visibility between communities and programs.  They become circulatory links between programs.  Each has a direct relationship with the main courtyard, the idea being that one can enter the project and pass directly to the core of each program.  At the current stage of development, the cores themselves are very inactive.  The stairs they contain are no more that glorified egress stairs.  If the voids start to take on program and work areas, then they can really start to become a part of the active interstitial space and the learning communities.

In terms of moving forward with this project I would like to:

.have the voids become active and programmatic

.develop the ground plane to dissolve into landscape and really become a part of both the site and the project

.develop further the learning communities

.further define the relationships between programs and incorporate the more minor, but essential, programs

.develop a tectonic structural and façade system that helps to define relationships

This post has 1 Comment

  1. cabrinharch on March 27, 2017 at 10:43 am Reply

    The format of the portfolio does really well to connect your opening guiding principle with your 4 concept diagrams. I definitely appreciate your first go at getting into the micro-communities, and your critical reflection on the current state of the cores. As you move into spring, I ask you to consider the scale of the program and if things in your scheme are a little too neat and tidy: incubator while similar in form to the micro-community is separate from them, the maker space while front and center on the main plaza is really removed from the micro-communities, and the public conference center can work as an isolated entity (which has some positive attributes, but does not do much to integrate public into the school and visa versa). In other words, I see why you have done what you have done and it makes good organizational sense, but I don’t think it would create the vibrant active interstitial zone you are after. How much is just enough order, and how much interaction and exchange can you encourage through spatial overlaps and connections between dissimilar program?

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