Browsing by Author "Witte, Ron"
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Item Abounding Interiors(2014-04-24) Hergenroeder, Alicia; Wittenberg, Gordon; Witte, Ron; Colman, ScottWithin the history of the graphic plan, cell-based and wall-based plans comprise a dialectic of definition and openness. A new type of architectural project whose formal legibility operates predominantly in the plan has emerged and combines the logics of the cell and the wall. As a formal study, the abounding interior plan falls into this third category, leveraging the open-ended wall and the celebrated object-room. As a result, both implicit and literal forms define the abounding interior in which distinct formal configurations become legible depending on a perceptual bias. The design of the abounding interior posits that the plan drawing has value as a composition and as a generative, perceptual device. In fact, the graphic plan can exceed its two-dimensional capacity and create an architecture which upholds and elaborates that graphic character in a three-dimensional way.Item Definition: More or Less(2018-04-19) Jackson, Joseph Paul; Witte, RonSpatial definition within the workplace has historically been relegated to either the perimeter or the workstation. This typological tendency flatlines program, idealizing labor within a generic container. As a result, new forms of untethered work have become reliant on superficial difference to generate collaboration and serendipity. The exhaustive flexibilities of the generic office dismiss an architectural thumbprint capable of calibrating a social context conducive to contemporary work. In response, this thesis prompts a new workplace of definition: more or less. Sited in Houston, the project explores an organization of parts, each of partial definition, combining and disjoining readily. Three courtyards enable the nuanced assembly of contiguous space, driving a spectrum of spatial and interpersonal work relationships. Through orientation, an oscillating social figure allows leased and nonleased space to intermix. Rendering organizational structure less structural, the design strikes an advantageous balance between room and landscape, private and collective, focus and collaboration.Item Dynamic Densities(2017-04-21) Qi, Maria; Witte, RonThis thesis attempts at using DENSITY as a tool to add diversity to generic space. The method advocates for the collision among different layers of densities and celebrates the discontinuous, oscillating, unstable or even chaotic spatial experience that comes after.Item Indiscrete Adjacency(2011) Jefferis, David; Witte, RonThis thesis establishes indiscrete adjacency as an organization that can synthesize formerly discrete programs to produce integration and cross-fertilization across programmatic boundaries. Indiscrete space moves beyond cellular and continuous spatial models to produce fluctuating heirarchies of organization, program, circulation and form. The effect of these multiple heirarchies is a pervasive condition of simultaneously belonging to many spaces. The increasing number and complexity of activities, occupants, and group identities in an elementary school can no longer be organized by simple adjacency between discrete cells. Indiscrete adjacency is proposed as a model able to manage this complexity by producing spaces with allegiances to several programs at once.Item On The Bias(2013-09-16) Tehranian, Alexander; Colman, Scott; Witte, Ron; Wittenberg, GordonWithin the typical institution, social patterns are all but solidified: enter off the street, funnel through the grand multi-story lobby, take the elevator, and get to work. Everyone associates together in a single space, and everyone subsequently operates in isolation. By collapsing two-dimensional urbanism and the three-dimensional institution, the emerging articulated surface has the ability to tear down the boundary between architecture and city and integrate itself with the surroundings by leveraging the common space of interaction in the city—the street. The result is an interruption in the strict patterns of the city as street, side- walk, lot and building are disassembled, circulation is uncoupled, and the ground plane of the gridded city is reconstructed. Rather than constructing the institution around an all-encompassing connection between all of its publics in equal measure, this thesis sets out to tailor relationships between publics of the institution as well as with the segmented publics outside of it by leveraging a series of internal streets rather than a single, common one. In doing so, particular publics can be paired, specific spatial relationships can be constructed, and generative social relationships can be structured between publics. These streets will be tempered by their relationship to the ground plane and the exterior, the surrounding program, and types of connection. Relationships will not only be structured between urbanism and institution, but also within the imbedded layers of the institution, moving with and against the street. The institution that most easily encapsulates this condition is the Fashion Institute as it con- tains multiple user groups, or publics, that engage each other in multiple ways. Whether ver- bally, visually, or spatially from lectures to sketches to runways, the institutional discourse is easily penetrated by those publics that exist outside of the institution. Here, the street is brought into the school and the school is brought to the street.Item Sponge, Table, Pads: Exchange Space(2012-09-05) Ou Yang, Chun; Witte, Ron; Colman, Scott; Wittenberg, Gordon; Whiting, SarahThis thesis takes the typical one-to-one relationship between a tower and a lobby and asks what if a three-layer base that produces a higher density and a scale exceeding the physical boundary of a single office tower replaces the lobby. Combing retail, conference facilities and recreation the base at once consolidates the programmatic needs of office workers and thickens the singular exchange of lobby-office-lobby to one of recreation-lobby-retail-office-lobby. Spanning the length of a ten-acre site in London, the base establishes a large horizontal floor plate and introduces big-box retail and an economy privileging lower prices onto a site surrounded by boutiques and mom-and-pop stores. Instead of planar adjacencies, retail and towers overlay in section. Vertical, horizontal and transverse circulations intersect, turn and unite, forming new programmatic possibilities and proliferating the cultural, economic and social life of a tower onto the city.Item SURFcity(2013-09-16) Stitt, Alexander; Colman, Scott; Witte, Ron; Wittenberg, GordonSURFcity reorganizes, redistributes, and recentralizes the peripheral urban environment of diffuse and urbanized architectures into condensed architectural form. Through surface elaboration and densification techniques, it produces a new model for a contemporary city and community. Bringing together differences otherwise experienced at a regional scale to the human scale, it produces hybrid programs, new interior public space, and allows the surounding exterior area to return to nature.Item Terms of Lease(2019-04-15) Carr, James Lundy; Witte, Ron; Finley, DawnThis thesis investigates a new leasing model, through the reorganizing of planned office space. By displacing office amenity into a continuous network of shared program, a new interior context will be created, organizing large discontiguous populations of people into engaged neighborhoods, or zones of operation. Through the exposure of a heterogeneous organization, new program types will be pushed together, engaging serendipity and interaction among tenant employees, producing a collective culture within the context of the building. This new leasing model will provide an architectural response to the way the contemporary workforce works today - mobile, creative and remote.Item Void Off Center(2011) Chen, Zhan; Witte, RonThis thesis exploits the potentials of the off centered void . While geometric rigidity confines the conventional void , eccentric alignments in Void Off Center escape those defining boundaries. These eccentricities extend the influence of the void to open up new possibilities for both program and circulation. Void Off Center uses a system of axial voids and lobes. Like an engine's camshaft, this setup can be tuned to regulate the parts and movements of the larger whole. Embedded into the plate structure, this combination of voids and lobes catalyzes an agile spatial constellation . These potentials are tested in the design of a museum. Proposed as an expansion to Houston's Museum of Fine Arts, this project organizes each of the main museum functions (exhibition, public, service) around a particular void , giving each an identity. Program in Void Off Center resists conforming to spatial definition . Voids animate programmatic boundaries as walls, floor plates, and material surfaces intersect or lap each other, creating multiple interactions. Circulation in Void Off Center follows an open trajectory. It loops in and out of orbit around the voids, creating a movement that is both episodic and unified. Both Program and circulation are drawn together by the void at multiple scales and illuminated with an overall legibility.