Saving Main Street HDR Architecture
Circular Building Materials Depot
ARC 503 - Integrated Building Studio
Higgins Hall Facade Redesign ARC 513 - Contemporary Facade Design
Community Center ARC 504 - Core Studio
Pino Pascali Exhibition 2x4 Internship
HDR Architecture
Design Team: Tom Trenolone, Cole Wycoff, Tim Williams, Adrian Silva 2020
This design investigation sought out new ways of thinking about building typologies, their related programmatic elements, and their adjacency to one another. We knew we needed to challenge conventional concepts in order to create a thought-provoking prototype concept that could transform this community - and that could be applied to other rural communities as well.
Our solution: a mixed-use destination with health and wellness as the foundation that serves to generate the population density needed to create an enlivened town center. This town center, in turn, is the key to fostering economic and social well-being.
We envision reusing and re-purposing existing main street structures, and adding new spaces within the footprint to further activate the space and attract residents and visitors. All medical/clinical services are consolidated, and skilled (long-term care) nursing elements added by moving the retirement facility currently on the town’s outskirts back to the town proper. New elements (an auditorium/ meeting/theater space, community hall, swimming pool and basketball courts) are introduced to encourage increased traffic and engagement, which in turn provides incentive for traditional services such as pharmacy and café/dining to return to the town’s main artery.
Princeton
Professor: Paul Lewis, Guy Nordenson
This studio explored the implications of circular building materials from a series of overlapped trajectories. The program of the project is a prototype for a circular building material warehouse, showroom, and testing facility. The proposal is focused on using biogenic materials to produce a material depot. Circular economies foreground certain types of materials and objects over others, and reveal unintended consequences of conventional joints (the problem with adhesives) and typical construction. The building is seen as a material bank, and explores the role of design for disassembly, the importance of using biogenic and earthen materials to minimize or sequester carbon, decrease toxicity and advance generative cycles through building.
Two different material assemblies are the focus of the building: 3D printing of loam-based material and wood stick framing. One is heavy and must be extruded incrementally layer by layer, while the other tends toward light filigree assemblies. Where the technology behind 3D printing 1:1 is still emerging, stick framing has centuries of precedents. The structure is a dialogue between what is 3D printed from the ground up and the longer span wood roof structures. These two materials, one harvested locally from the ground, and the other acquired from re-purposed lumber will be augmented by other circular building material ready-mades, as well as other plant-based materials. The roof can accomodate different truss systems. This roof twists in different directions, responding to sunlight on the site, and to interior conditions. The roof is treated as part of the landscape, and the walls embrace the site, while offering flexibility between inteiror and exterior spaces.
The project addresses a selected community we worked with, and how we define the needs of that community. Community research and engagement was central in this project, where the main goal was to answer questions like: How can you address a community with a building? What agency does architecture have? What makes an inclusive architecture? The services I included were a health center, large communal meeting space, private small scale community meeting rooms, community pin-up board, a kitchen, restrooms, garden, etc. The site is Parking Lot 9, Princeton NJ, 08540.
Curated by Mark Godfrey, this exhibit unfolds across four distinct sections, each framing Italian artist Pino Pascali’s artistic journey. Spanning different buildings within the Prada Foundation, the Podium, the North gallery, and the South gallery—the exhibition, showcases forty-nine works by Pino Pascali. Pascali’s works are accompanied by nine pieces of post-World War II artists, along with a curated selection of photographs, videos, and materials capturing the artist in dialogue with his creations.
