Ann Pendleton-Jullian Ann Pendleton-Jullian practises from Cambridge, Massachusetts, where she also teaches at MIT. This combination of teaching and practice allows her to consider the vital exchange between ideas and architecture that is evident in both her commissioned work and her theoretical projects. Her work has been cited for the manner in which it poeticises the intersection between pragmatic concerns and the ‘ambitions of the imagination’.
Access Program Buildings, Asian University for Women, Chittagong, Bangladesh, 2006 This design, initially proposed for the Access Program Buildings for the planned Asian University for Women on a vulnerable hilly terrain in the second largest city of Bangladesh, takes into account both topographical and ecological factors, and also offers a new model for grouping buildings in an academic ‘village’. PendletonJullian suggests ‘garden’, ‘cloud’, and ‘inlay’ as the organisers for this building group for the new university. The garden is at the northwestern end of a long sinuous ridge, a terrace formed by cutting into the 67-metre (220-foot) contour line. The shape and articulation of its outline reveal the scale of the erosive forces operating on the soft geological material here. At the edge of the ridge, a building is formed by the placement of four pavilions – a classroom, IT centre, library and administration block – that cohere around a square courtyard, a place of stillness within the intense undulations of the landscape. This is what Pendleton-Jullian calls the ‘cloud’. All this rests on an ‘air plinth’, and is wrapped in a protective casing that responds algorithmically to the changing parameters of solar orientation, wind directions and views in or out, revealed or veiled. Finally, the housing is inlaid into the topography, hanging from the contour line. Organised as a chain, where the basic double dorm unit can be configured in various different ways to achieve increasing scales of interaction, the housing strands plait together to modulate the street and at the same time are themselves modulated by water courts fed from channels in the street.
Text © 2007 John Wiley & Sons Ltd. Images © Ann M Pendleton-Jullian
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