pavilion

External Provocation:
Mountains are full of wonder. They are primordial symbols of time, glacial time, but also a record of the subtle fluctuations in seasons, changes in the weather and sky. They are natural, wild, stochastic, and unpredictable. They have no discipline. They have no referent. Each mountain’s identity is itself. It does not make sense to speak of errors when one speaks of mountains because they have no formal norm against which to stray. Buildings, on the other hand, are rarely wonderful. They are mostly a mundane composition of parts; floors, walls, columns, etc... They are artificial, willful, sited and structured. Necessarily positioned at some distance against nature, buildings are regulated through architecture’s conventions. With this in mind, we will start by juxtaposing an existing mountain (working top-down) and an existing building (working bottom-up) with the goal of using both to design an outdoor ‘party pavilion’ on the UC Berkeley Campus.

Internal Objectives:
Site: Study site through the quantities and qualities of an existing building and its surroundings.
Structure: Use structure to understand, order, and combine differences.
Materiality: Use material qualities to reflect existing site conditions as well as project new building identities.
Program: Consider how external “ideas” influence architectural problems and functions and vice versa.
Learn to think of program as something more than a list of functions.

(Brief given by professor Andrew Atwood)