Final Wall Project

I was inspired initially by James Sterling’s Andrew Melville Hall. It was interesting to me how the hall’s sharp angles created such compelling negative spaces. I decided to play with the idea of a puzzle because a community center is a place where the disparate parts of the community come together as one. The puzzle imagery also lends itself to dramatic negative space and interlocking systems.

Because of their height, I wanted to make the walls on the thinner side to bring them to a human level and to make them less daunting masses. I also wanted to keep the feeling like the walls were perforated. I didn’t bring them all the way to the top in order to keep the sense that they were modules (pieces of a puzzle).

The puzzle sheets are orderly and imposing. I brought chaos into the system by punching pieces of the puzzle out of the wall. This adds movement to a static system. The piece gets smaller and rotates across wall; when you walk in, you realize it has been
punched into the room. There is also chaos in the fact that entryway isn’t completely clear…you have to wind your way around in order to find it (in keeping with the puzzle imagery).


The piece rotates and gets smaller and closer to the wall by a 3rd every time to mimic the
fact that the façade of the system is divided into thirds as well. There is a glass casement between the pieces and the wall to play with the light as it bounces into room.

As you walk in, the square materializes into sitting blocks that form a lobby/seating area.
The first block is only half materialized to indicate an evolving mass. The final block you realize is the complete 3D form of the original “flat” puzzle piece.

Forming the 3rd wall of the sitting area is a piece of the puzzle that juts through the wall
and into the space as if the pattern was repeating itself outside the community center.
The sitting cube has a private zen view; in order to appreciate the zen view you must be sitting on the block. There is a screen to semi-block off the sitting room from the rest of the community center.

I incorporated skeletal vs mass by punching the pieces out of the wall. The vertical mullions are reminiscent of when you pull off the outer paper of a puzzle piece
and see the threads that ultimately make the shape.