URBAN ROOMS strives to create a residential community that is responsive to urban influences on the the dwelling. The design interrogates the procession that occurs as someone travels from the hyper-active urban landscape to the hypo-active environment of the dwelling. The procession is enacted by an architecture that is modeled after the concept of the porch and the characteristics of urban rooms.
The porch acts as the dwelling's physical connection between interior space and the city. It is an interstitial space defined by a number of physical and phenomenological conditions that exist within a part urban, part private realm.
As a critique of the current structure of urban living, URBAN ROOMS identifies a growing trend towards an over saturation of programmatic redundancies in the home. There has been a recession into the dwelling. Advances in social networking, attainability of information, and our thirst for instant interactions has deteriorated our connection to true urban living by a marginalization of the porch.
At the site level along Mission Street, the building reads at first as a continuous representation of the urban scale that begins to erode, revealing punctures and articulations that pull the city into the site. At each level of the project there is a layering of spaces that speak to the procession of urban living.
At the builing level, the open spaces are organized in two ways - a loud, active swath with live/work workshops, bikeshare, cafes, and a public lobby for access - and a quiet, calm swath with meditation halls, reading areas and a winter garden. The spaces are framed by bars of units that are oriented in accordance to their programmatic adjacencies.
To gain access to the rooms, one would circulate through a series of open cores, getting glimpses of the larger swaths of space until you arrive at the entry way of the individual units. Each unit has the ability to open up the kitchen/living space to a porch space that over looks more communal areas. Overall, the projects' intention is to capitalize on the rich and vibrant spatial experiences that can take place when a series of dwelling units are designed based on the influence of the porch and urban rooms.
CREDITS
Garrett Ryan Miller
M.ARCH Studio 3_falliers/fields
California College of the Arts_Fall 2011