The Piles: Where They Fall Is Where We Stand
Type: Architecture
Medium: Rhino + Grasshopper + Blender + Photoshop + Illustrator
Year: 2022
Medium: Rhino + Grasshopper + Blender + Photoshop + Illustrator
Year: 2022
Beginning
with the idea of the piles, the project uses the political nature of
piles as a new tool, a paradigmatic shift, and a new punk rock
attitude that fosters architecture’s ability to be critical towards
the city. Inefficiencies produced by the pile allows for an
in-betweenness or heterogeneity that is productive for humanist
design. It produces a disruption within systems of asymmetric power,
dismantling the notions of mass production and of the ready-made
efficient box.
The pile, an alternative method of composition, creates a distance from the city’s capital-driven desires for efficiency and the icon and creates inaccessibility towards the object by developing a type of non-composition. There is no regard to the transition, the edge, or the threshold. The only law is gravity. Compositional physics forms a provocative figure without authoring usable space. Playing with slight deformations of the forms, physics simulations, materials, and spaces of soft and hard continue to reinforce the idea of looseness.
The project uses piles as social housing to contradict the efficient residential tower. On the inside, the moments of intersection and overlap of hard body and soft body create unique spatial qualities and lets users experience architecture outside of the efficient box. Looseness and indeterminacy give breathing room to interpret and inhabit spaces however users please. By using the attitude and methodology of the pile to create social housing in the core of downtown Calgary, the architecture is simultaneously reclaiming space for citizens and confronting the segregating practices of the city.
The pile, an alternative method of composition, creates a distance from the city’s capital-driven desires for efficiency and the icon and creates inaccessibility towards the object by developing a type of non-composition. There is no regard to the transition, the edge, or the threshold. The only law is gravity. Compositional physics forms a provocative figure without authoring usable space. Playing with slight deformations of the forms, physics simulations, materials, and spaces of soft and hard continue to reinforce the idea of looseness.
The project uses piles as social housing to contradict the efficient residential tower. On the inside, the moments of intersection and overlap of hard body and soft body create unique spatial qualities and lets users experience architecture outside of the efficient box. Looseness and indeterminacy give breathing room to interpret and inhabit spaces however users please. By using the attitude and methodology of the pile to create social housing in the core of downtown Calgary, the architecture is simultaneously reclaiming space for citizens and confronting the segregating practices of the city.
