RENssELAER hALL: VERNACULAR PLAygROUND

Rensselaer Hall is a large but subdued Georgian Revival building on the North side of Cornell’s campus. Sand-colored bricks and simple windows stretch across its flat facade. However, in the center of this building, invariably distinct from its context, sits a vernacular amalgam. A neoclassical balcony and balustrade support two simplified Doric shafts. These terminate with Corinthian capitals. On top of these columns, sits a blank frieze, itself topped by a Baroque broken pediment. This stylistic blend of epochs and empires creates a powerful moment of architectural levity amid an otherwise categorical building.

Drawing from the broken pediment and those vernaculars that exist below it, this project imagines a fictional reality in which this central bay is redesigned in a new style: The Vestigial Baroque, or “Voque”. This style builds upon the design sensibilities of the classical Baroque era, then blends it with modern-day additive manufacturing and discrete object design. This fictional redesign is represented through a series of renders, models, and pseudo-historical taxonomies.

Corinthian Capital:

Atypically, atop the Doric shaft, sits a distinctly dis-ordered Corinthian capital with its recognizable, flowery protrusions and depth. This asserts the building’s noncommittal relationship to one style or order.

Column Shaft:

In keeping with Greek Neoclassical vernacular, this bay-window balcony employs a simplified Doric column shaft which acts as the vertical support element for its pediment above.

Baroque Broken Pediment:

At the apex of this central bay, sits a Baroque broken pediment. Curved striations of tapering depth vie towards the central, arch gap. The center is adorned with a rectangular Tympanum above a sinewy ornamental keystone.

Vestigial Baroque Column Shaft:

The Vestigial Baroque style is not tethered to the strictures of composition, symmetry, and proportion that its seminal inspirations were. Here, column shafts, pedestals, and capitols are subject to the non-euclidean strategies of their designers above any prescribed ruleset.

Conglonorament:

In our modern age, as we witness the rise of the Vestigial Baroque, a new trend has arisen: conglomerates of ornamentation from ancient and modern eras adorning architectural objects, insisting upon a new, temporally-apathetic sense of symbolic legibility.

Vestigial Baroque Broken Pediment:

At the apex of this central bay, sits a Vestigial-Baroque broken pediment. Curved striations of tapering depth vie towards an ambiguous center. The pediment’s wings are subject to the whims of spatial orientation, pulling and slipping away from each other, yet still evocative of their opposite.

Sculpted Urn:

Atop the balcony’s two undetailed pedestals sit two smooth-sculpted urns made of sandstone. These Greek and Macedonian inspired decorations create a visual extension of the smooth balusters below.

Porch Support Brackets:

Two brackets sit under and support the porch floor, adorned with their own unique ornament. These legs taper inwards towards Rensselaer Hall’s brick facade.

Balusters and Balustrade:

An array of curved, sculptural balusters wrap around the shallow balcony, supporting a volumetric top-rail and two urns. These Mediterranean-style balusters add to this central bay’s stylistic ambiguity.

Tilted Vestigial Baroque Urn:

In the works of Vestigial Baroque designers, decorative urns are sometimes used to connote axial direction shifts with a form; tilted and dislodged from their origins, pointing in the direction of the new movement.

Balusters and Balustrade:

An array of curved, sculptural balusters wrap around the shallow balcony, supporting a volumetric top-rail and two urns. The array, however, is lopped off in service of the now-dominant column shaft that erupts through the balcony’s underside.

Vestigial Baroque Window:

One of the common techniques among “voque” designs is the replacement of some or all “standard” windows on a building with “vestigially”-styled fenestrations. Often this involves the larger, ornamental form’s absorption of portions of glass, mullion, and frame.

Spring 2021

Competition: The Big Thing Competitions

Location: The Cosmos

ThE COsMOs: bEyOND ThE VEiL

For all the many joys and wonders that can be known during our time alive, there remains so much that lies beyond the veil of our understanding. At the instant of one’s final breath, the soul is shorn from its tethered form, and transported to the Hall of The Unknowable Truths; an impossible architectural monolith that waits beyond our realm of time and space.

MATTER AND ENERgy

Within the magnificent walls of this form, there are four apertures. It is through these four apertures that this new soul will have their last, greatest epiphany before stepping on to their final destination beyond the veil. Matter, Space, Energy, Time; one for each window. These four incorporeal concepts are embodied with form and with spirit. The Four Entities of All Reality. The final blessing bestowed upon humanity is access to these unknowable incarnations. Thousands upon thousands of souls walk this hall every hour, and thousands of souls are deposited at the shimmering feet of the veil at the end of their walk. But each soul experiences the hall as an isolated experience, unaware of the thousands of others around them. The epiphanic nature of The Four Entities of All Reality is felt individually by each soul and intimately ties to their own personal human story.

None can know what lies beyond the veil, what destination the soul will ultimately reach at the end of the Hall of The Unknowable Truths. But in this moment, it matters not. In this moment all that is, is the knowing, and the enlightenment that accompanies the knowledge. What better way to move forward into the infinite tomorrow than to finally, truly understand one’s yesterday?