TSA Book

TSA

THURLOW SMALL

401/316.5708

info@thurlowsmall.com

10 Exchange Court Studio 406 Pawtucket Rhode Island 02860

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INT O LAND URBAN

Working Planet Interior + Renovation Providence, RI 2008

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Yeosu Pavilion Proposal Yeosu, Korea 2009

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Bridge Park City of Pawtucket, RI 2010 - 2011

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Pawtucket Downtown Design Plan City of Pawtucket, RI 2010 - 2011

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Nail Advertising Agency Office Interior Providence, RI 2008

Sukkah NYC Proposal New York, NY 2010

Yinzhou Central Park in Yinzhou Master Plan Ningbo, China 2008 - 2009

Pawtucket Comprehensive Plan Maps City of Pawtucket, RI 2010 - 2011

Sorbus Clothing Store Interior Providence, RI 2007

ARCHIVE Online Exhibit 2010 - 2011

Gabion Field Finalist entry National AIDS Memorial San Francisco, CA 2005

Metro Transit Study Media City of Providence, RI 2009

Panelite Office + Showroom Interior New York NY 2005

Hadspen Garden Competition Entry London, UK 2007

Keepspace Project Urban Design Study Central Falls, RI 2009

Downtown Market Interior Renovation Providence, RI 2007

McCarthy Teahouse Landscape Pavilion Conway, MA 2006

SlipStream Greenstop proposal Tulare County, CA 2006

BayCity Project Waterfront Urban Design City of Providence, RI 2007 - 2008

Works and Projects

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TERIORS OBJECTS SCAPES DESIGN gal

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Peerless Galleria Interior Renovation Providence, RI 2007

Terrain Exhibition + InteriorObvita Slide Drake University ArtCity 2005 Art Pavilion Des Moines, IA Calgary, CA 2005 2005

Rhino Manufactured Housing AIDS Mobile Clinic proposalHousing Proposal Africa Prototype 2005 - 2002 2003 - 2001, 1999, 1997

The Green Ray High Line Proposal New York, NY 2003

Westminster Street Environment Design Providence, RI 2007

NC Wallpaper Panel System Providence, RI 2007 - 2008

Donna Dinucci Designs Interior Panel System Pawtucket, RI 2007

Laminar Booth ArtCity 2002 Art Pavilion Calgary, CA 2003 - 2002

Lattice Terrain Beale Street Landing Memphis, TN 2003

Downtown District Plan 2 Plan group City of Pawtucket, RI 2006

Pawtucket / Central Falls 400,000 Houses Urban proposal Train Station Study Amposta, Spain Pawtucket, RI 2004 2006

Oak Ridge National Lab Vision Plan Oak Ridge, TN 2002 - 2001, 2000

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THURLOW SMALL ARCHITECTURE, INC. > Location Pawtucket, Rhode Island Date 2001 - 2011 Partners Andrew Thurlow, Maia Small Designers Nicholas Proto, Melissa Lockwood Interns Jaimie Abel, Kyle Bendle, Christopher Capozzi, Nate Del Vecchio, Christine Dennett, Alex Diez, Theodore Duboc, Jose Goncalves, Eliza Higgins, Snehal Intwala, Jarrod Martin, Brandon Massey, Dianna Pozdniakov, Evan Richards, Nathaniel Richards, Grant Robinson, Eric Scott, Amanda Shadowens, Phil Stott.

Works and Projects

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tsa Thurlow Small Architecture, Inc. is an architecture and urban design office begun in 2001 by Maia Small and Andrew Thurlow that operates in both the local networks of Rhode Island and the global discourse of architecture and landscape urbanism. TSA develops systems-based design that performs—encouraging evolving relationships between interior and exterior environments, public and private spaces, and people and programs. TSA projects are primarily at the very large or the very small scales, from transit oriented development urban design to office interiors for creative economy clients.

Rafael, the $40 M Renovation and Addition to the California Palace of the Legion of Honor and Master Planning for the De Young Museum. She has also taught architecture at the Harvard University Graduate School of Design, the Rhode Island School of Design, and the Massachusetts Institute of Technology.

Maia Small, AIA, a Partner in TSA, is a licensed architect in the State of Rhode Island and is certified by the National Council of Architectural Registration Board. Along with her professional work, she currently serves on the board of the Pawtucket Citizens Development Corporation, the City of Pawtucket Riverfront Commission, and the steering committee of the Pawtucket Alliance for Downtown Success.

His previous professional work in Philadelphia at the office of Venturi, Scott Brown and Associates includes as a designer on the Trenton Firehouse and the Irvine Auditorium at the University of Pennsylvania. At Ballinger, he was a designer on Headend and Hub Facilities Prototypes for Comcast Communications Company, the Cabrini College, Sports Recreation Center in Radnor, Pennsylvania and Henry M. Rowan Hall, School of Engineering at Rowan University in Glassboro, New Jersey. For Rowan, Ballinger received a 1999 Highest Honor Award and a 1996 Design Excellence Honor Award from the American Institute of Architects, Philadelphia Chapter.

Prior to TSA, her previous experience was in the New York office of Bernard Tschumi Architects as the lead designer on the Downsview Park finalist proposal for a $145 national park in Toronto, Canada and in the San Francisco office of Mark Cavagnero Associates, where she assisted with the design and documents for the $20 M Renovation and Addition to the Rafael Film Center in San

Andrew Thurlow is a Partner in Thurlow Small Architecture and a tenured Associate Professor in Architecture at Roger Williams University where he founded and runs the School of Art, Architecture and Preservation Digital Manufacturing Laboratory.

He has also taught architecture at Columbia University Graduate School of Architecture, Planning & Preservation and the University of Tennessee College of Architecture & Design.

WORKING PLANET > Location Providence, RI Date 2007- 2008 Design Team Maia Small, Andrew Thurlow, Nick Proto, Kyle Bendle, Phil Stott Status Construction completed Client Working Planet Marketing Group Size 3,000 s.f.

Cost $47 / s.f.

wor Our clients came to us with two contradictory desires: they wanted an open space that had different rooms. We saw this as an intriguing challenge and began by asking two questions: how to do we work in an office? What would make it beautiful?

Working means going to your desk everyday, performing certain tasks, being distracted, moving through space, talking to other people, eating, getting information, listening in groups, being quiet, joining unexpected conversations-the same processes every day in new ways. We find beauty in that process too-- ways to see things we understand and find familiar, yet evolve and become something unexpected. Always interested in systems, we looked to a material and spatial process that would grow this experience.

In lieu of walls, we developed a mobile tube wall system that formed a variable and permeable way to designate space. The system, made of stacked and packed circular cardboard tubes, becomes a interior wrapper that indicates zones for activities, without limiting or dividing them.

Formally, the tube system defines a workspace with four desk clusters of four desks, a conference room, a separate space for account managers, the entry and a kitchen.

Informally, it dips and rises where visual contact is needed or restricted; it opens and closes, where physical contact or outlets are desired or rejected; it both continuously leads you through the space and encloses areas of extra infrastructure. Special circle packing areas create specific and exaggerated views in and out of the conference area. One area of glass was also added to provide the office partners simultaneously shared and separate office spaces.

The mobile tube walls are the repetition of a common material: four inch diameter by nine inch long mailing tubes made of recycled cardboard glued together and protected with a non-toxic and non-VOC fire retardant. The system was panelized and clipped together for easy installation, replacement, cleaning, growth and adaptability. This system has become more than an architectural solution, it has become a company brand.

The tube system fits into a larger construction project that involved the demolition of a warren of deteriorating and existing walls, flooring and asbestos-containing ceiling systems. The shell was then left open and relined with new flooring, paint, mechanical, data and electrical systems as necessary.

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View from workspace | Axonometric

Works and Projects

View from AD Zone | Rendering from entry

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View from conference room | Circle packing diagrams

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Existing Plan

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New Plan View towards entry | Existing plan to New plan

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Transparency effects | 3D printed model

Works and Projects

Lighting effects

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Glass wall

Works and Projects

Circle packed aperture

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Corner wraps | Cardboard tubes

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Corner digital model | Shop drawings of tube panel system

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NAIL ADVERTISING AGENCY > Location Providence, RI Date 2008 - 2009 Design Team Maia Small, Andrew Thurlow, Nick Proto, Kyle Bendle, Phil Stott Status Option 3 selected / Basic whitebox construction finished Spring 2009 Client Nail Size 5,000 s.f.

Cost $90 / s.f.

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1,2 & 3

Each proposal for the Nail Advertising Agency office interior offered ceiling, space, and wall systems to create both an experience and atmosphere: The Nail office interior Option 1 offers three systems: the floor as islands & coves, the ceiling as a surface flows and walls as perforated light panels.

The Nail office interior Option 2 offers three systems: the floor as path, the ceiling as vernooi packed spaces and walls as facetted panels.

And the one selected by the clients, the Nail office interior Option 3 offers three systems: the floor as central park, the ceiling as a set of sprite clouds and walls as movable display. The intention

of the office was to provide an variable experience that allowed for work space, presentations, creative thinking, hanging out and overall inspiration for the active endeavor of the agency.

The spatial floor system offers a set of highs and lows that define space without impeding visual connection. The sprite ceiling system intends to hide the existing mechanical systems in the depth of a dynamic thick material while still allowing sprinkler coverage and HVAC distribution. The movable panels would allow for private or interactive meetings within the office and at the same time, surfaces that could contain ideas, drawings, and project display.

The site is 5,000 s.f. in an existing space in the historic Peerless building in downtown Providence.

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Exterior view of Peerless building | Spatial relationships diagram

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Interior view of Peerless space | Daylighting diagram

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Logics for three ideas for three systems

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Images for three affects for three systems

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Vie from entry | Option 1 affects

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Plan | Option 1 logics

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View towards brainstorming room

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View of brainstorming room

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Axonometric

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View from Peerless atrium entry | View from copy room

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View of brainstorming room | Option 2 affects

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Plan | Option 2 logics

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View from entry

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View towards brainstorming room

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Axonometric

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View towards the entry | View from copy room

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View of brainstorming room | Option 3 affects

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Plan | Option 3 logics

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View towards the brainstorming room

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View from conference room

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Axonometric

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View of panel displays | View from copy room

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SORBUS CLOTHING STORE > Location Providence, RI Date 2007 Design Team Maia Small, Andrew Thurlow, Nick Proto Lighting Design Julie Rose Status Construction Documents / Unbuilt due to landlord & tenant dispute Client Sorbus Size 1,400 s.f.

Budget $75 / s.f.

sor The Interior for Sorbus, a highend clothing store, is designed to highlight its interior to its very prominent exterior site in downtown Providence’s burgeoning Westminster shopping district.

Our interest in the interior was to design a flexible wrapping system that would draw in shoppers from street to create a merchandise experience.

We imagined an eddy-like spatial configuration, where a changing surface would form pockets and swirls enticing shoppers to hang out and feel a part of the store itself. As the store might expand or grow, they could add onto the system providing new enticements

and color to a growing urban spot.

The components of the wrapper are also targeted for a variety of heights in proportion to the human body, as to allow for a variety of views and goods depending on whether someone is inside or outside, standing or seated.

The undulating wrapper, made from 3Form eco-resin and Maplex, allows for special lighting and display zones as well as set of an entry cashwrap zone. The reminder of the space includes Fleetwood fixtures and window box areas that allow for display of the merchandise. TSA also designed and fabricated a temporary signage wrap for the windows prior to construction.

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An eddy | On Eddy Street (and Westminster) | Wallpaper on site | Plan

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View from entry | Wallpaper wrapper

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View from cashwrap | Interior wrapper elevation

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Translucent wrapper

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PANELITE OFFICE & SHOWROOM > Location New York, NY Date 2005 Design Team Maia Small, Andrew Thurlow Status Construction completed Client Panelite LLC NY Size 1,400 s.f.

Budget $25 / s.f.

pnl Panelite, a NY-based manufacturer of translucent panels, came to us and asked for two things in their new Manhattan space: they needed a beautiful showroom to show off their products and a office that worked for their salespeople and support staff.

The concept for the Panelite Office & Showroom is to use both fixed and loose systems as layers, to create a set of spaces between enveloping sheer walls.

The design consists of four major components: the Work Zone, the Core, the Client Zone and the Conference Area.

The Work Zone is mostly fixed and shows off a long wall of flat panel assembly systems. The Core is the heart of the layered condition and is made up of two thicker,

fixed curved panels assemblies and four tracks with moveable panels; it is intended for meetings and should be though of as flexible so that it could open for a larger event (through sliding flat panels in the curved panel assemblies).

The Client Zone exists between the Core and the Conference Area for clients to wait, or spend time looking at a digital database. The Conference Area would be a place for salespeople to meet with clients or for the staff to meet as needed.

The goal for all of the components is to show off the translucency and variability of the panel products. During the fabrication and installation phase, due to the availability of certain geometry formwork, the geometry of the Core changed from the initial design.

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Views of conference zone | Original design layout in axonometric

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Views from and of entry | Panel layers | Existing space

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View of reception | Revised concept digital views

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Office views | Plan

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PROVIDENCE MARKET > Location Providence, RI Date 2007 Design Team Maia Small, Andrew Thurlow, Nick Proto Status Initial Design completed; Construction completed under separate architect Client Cornish Associates Size 2,000 s.f.

Cost $75 / s.f.

deli With the development of new housing and social life in downtown Providence, Cornish proposed a new deli/grocery that fulfills the needs of both daytime and nighttime activity, beyond the franchise and packaged food available.

The Providence market becomes a critical element in supporting the network structure of the city-- allowing people a place to cross over and more reasons to walk through the Westminster neighborhood.

The design of the market has been to project a sense of environment and action-- a sensibility-- that can entice a new tenant into the space.

The idea is to use the notion of the multiple-- the repetition and variation inherent in a market to project through itself out into the urban atmosphere. The color and changing displays become an evolving street transformation.

More literal connections between inside and outside is made by opening up seating to the outside through the storefront with tables and benches.

TSA completed the initial design that allowed the project partners to come together, including the architect who had a historic preservation background and completed the project, Durkee, Brown, Viveiros & Werenfels Architects.

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Shelving

Service Counter Flowers

Deli Cases

Coolers

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Groceries

Seating

Shelving

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Exterior view | Interior stocked shelves

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View of counter | Grocery types and products

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View of produce area | Environment types

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PEERLESS GALLERIA > Location Providence, RI Date 2007 Design Team Maia Small, Andrew Thurlow, Nick Proto, Kyle Bendle Status Conceptual design completed Client Cornish Associates Size 5,000 s.f.

Cost $45 / s.f.

gal The Peerless Office Galleria combines the historic logic of the shopping galleria and the new logic of the incubator office space into a new center for design and business in downtown Providence.

The Peerless building was recently renovated and offers 7,600 s.f. of raw space to be further built into a

series of very small open spaces for offices and studios. Because these are for small or developing businesses, there are communal facilities that can provide meetings areas, lounge space for informal events, and kitchen facilities since each unit has little space and amenities.

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Plan options: Wall, Lobbies, and Loop

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Overview | Hallway view | Lobby view

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TERRAIN EXHIBITION, DRAKE UNIVERSITY > Location Des Moines, IA Date 2005 Design Team Maia Small, Andrew Thurlow, Dianna Pozdniakov Status Painting & Exhibit completed Client Anderson Gallery, Harmon Arts Center, Drake University Size 260 linear wall footage

dra Terrain features work from the architecture and design firms Studio Luz, Thurlow Small Architecture and MOD-ECO Architecture. Studio Luz’s project, Vulnerable Architecture - HFC: Hope for the Children of Haiti involves the design of a new orphanage, educational facility, spiritual center, and medical clinic in the Bon Repos quarter of Portau-Prince, Haiti.

Thurlow Small Architecture (TSA) exhibits Gabion Fields: National AIDS Memorial Finalist Entry

and Rhino: HIV/AIDS Mobile Clinic Proposal. The intent is to illuminate how necessity, cultural impetus and desire intersect, through ornament and form, with manufacturing and production processes. In partnership with the Ghana Education Project, MOD-ECO Architecture is including Mobile Health Clinic in Ghana.

In each of these projects, the firms demonstrate strategies and opportunities for design to have significant positive impact for those in need.

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Paint elevation | Exhibition poster

Works and Projects

TSA exhibition wall | Paint system

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ARTCITY ART PAVILION > Location Calgary, Ontario, Canada Date 2005 Design Team Maia Small, Andrew Thurlow, Snehal Intwala Status Competition entry on display Client ArtCity 2005 Size 1,000 s.f.

Budget $10,000 CAN

art Obvita Slide. Our proposed art pavilion avoids the enclosed and separate nature of “pavilion,� and instead creates pavilion-less-ness: an open, permeable framework.

contains several individual panels that are formed over unique CNC foam molds and micro-patterned with machined toolpath profiles, as new-ornament. This micro-ribbed effect is pronounced where there The slide is a performative is no art displayed and becomes envelope that offers three grottoflatter towards display areas.

The art shown here are stills like territories for grouping and viewing art within the existing from director Michel Gondry’s 15+ walkway; each space is videos presented on the surface discreet in scale, delicate, textural themselves; art could also be hung in place of the panels or from and organized nodally along the aluminum extrusions. Viewers the sinuous, continuous surface structure. The slide encourages can experience the artwork both from inside and out-- or through the adventure of new movement the slide display surfaces. While patterns and circulation while broadcasting art by nesting into the slide expands to move through an existing and familiar space, as the space of the 15+ walkway a symbiotic organism folds into its and elongates into a larger space pair: the walkway provides security than the given envelope, it is lightweight and easily demountable and protection, while the slide activates its interior. and, when stacked, comfortably fits into such a space for storage.

The slide is constructed as a The panels are simply fastened 38 zone, large fiberglass shell to the aluminum tubes which are mounted to a framework of themselves slotted to fit together braided ogive-shaped, or lenticular much like tent poles. aluminum extrusions. Each zone

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Art surface double height view

Works and Projects

Upper level art surface | Bridge and open space relationship

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Atrium view | Plan

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Taxonomy of pieces

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Affect images | Ribbon | Circulation, objects and wrapper diagrams

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Continuity, structure, tubes and surface diagrams

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YEOSU PAVILION > Location Yeosu, Korea Date 2009 Design Team Maia Small, Andrew Thurlow, Carlos Endriga Competition Sponsor Organizing Committee of the Expo 2012 Yeosu

yeo Pools are a spatial net.

The geometry of the pools comes from a set of spatial relationships derived from the program brief.

We first began by describing a network of open centers between the two main galleries and support spaces, then we experimented with proximities and adjacencies to test out the potential effects. We sought the best option to highlight porosity, overflow potential, and density to contrast the narrow walls with the openness of the pools.

People move like water.

This pavilion is a place to learn about and inhabit the experience of all of the forms of water as life, action, value and meaning through a set of interior and exterior pools.

Some pools are literal and some are figural; pools contain water, wildlife, people, experience, and texture. Each one is named as shown here, to express the variety of types, uses, perceptions and interactions between water, land, people and the earth. While the wall geometry is complex, the spaces are simple to allow for the exhibits.

Responsive Wall system.

Parametric modeling (RhinoScript / Grasshopper) was used to both create and control a system of structure and panelization for the networked wall system, dubbed “butterfly clip.� The integrative

workflow model incorporates design criteria, programmatic & site analysis (both internal and external constraints), as well as fabrication requirements as generative devices for the creation of the self-similar wall system as architectural prototype.

Walls like water.

Moving through pools of program is more than going between rooms. The walls themselves are delicate structures of bent aluminum, a cage of circulation that varies in density and porosity.

Thus one falls from one pool to the next, swirling through the basins, from interior to exterior.

The paperclip walls are translucent and open slightly differently for everyone such that movement is unpredictable and dynamic. The waterfall walls, on the inside, would have a variety of panel enclosures to allow for or restrict movement and, on the outside, to create a solid barrier as necessary for the roof and exterior edges.

Network site.

Moving to and from the Thematic Pavilion requires navigating a set of docks and negotiating the water itself. Here the pavilion is a heightened experience of a larger system spread across the water surface. It is anchored in the harbor, but tethered to the land, the rest of the expo, and the city.

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Exterior views

Works and Projects

Night view | Plan organization

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Wirewalls

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Interior view | Wire frames | Longitudinal Section

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SUKKAH SILL > Location Prototype Date 2006 Design Team Andrew Thurlow, Jarrod Martin, Christopher Capozzi, Anthony Aversa, Adam Cuomo Competition Sponsor Sukkah City NYC 2010

suk Like a sukkah, a sill is less a thing in itself and more a means of support for something else- a space for something to be, a frame for time. In this contradiction of temporary universality rooted in perennial context, the sukkahsill offers a ledge, formed by the accordioning of the enclosure, upon which the exterior environment shows its ‘harvest’ and the interior offers a mid-day stop, a simple universal place to rest and breathe in the middle of a complex city and a nighttime cocoon for an intimate conversation. Here, for just a moment, there is a protected space and encapsulated view to the sky, above the pressures of the horizon, where we can set down our things, collect ourselves and look up.

The sukkahsill is a lattice made of slats of wood, each

with a thin, rectangular profile, connected along their length and at intersections. The two-way gridded roof is woven together like a basket, easily formed by wetting and bending the slats into position using a 1:1 template and pegboard system with removable dowels, similar to how ancient ship builders made wooden ship hulls. The folding structure creates a system of stretched polyamide tully fabric panels that either cover the trusses or provide reveals for views back out onto the city and for glimpses of those inside. The structure creates two and half walls, holds up the permeable roof, and provides an exterior under shelf rack system from which local products, such as potted plants, can be temporarily hung. The interior ledges are just wide enough for a drink, a small package or a short lean. Then, soon, you move on.

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Exterior view | Interior view

Works and Projects

Exterior view | Interior view of structure

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Roof plan view | Frame layers | Exterior view

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Structure | Bands | Wire effects

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ARCHIVE > Location Online Date 2010 -2011 Design Team Maia Small, curator & creator Client Association of Collegiate Schools of Architecture

100 ARCHIVE is a digital platform that will host faculty and student projects and stories so that people outside the architecture community can experience the energy of architecture schools. Guest curators will review the submitted work for special recognition, participants can show their work as an online portfolio, and people outside of architecture can discover the relevance, diversity, and breadth of architecture as a discipline and culture. Currently the project exists as the ARCHIVE DROPBOX a growing database of student and faculty work that will eventually include browse, search and discussion capability to offer an online space to the existing community of students, faculty and

administrators.

In is final exhibition version, ARCHIVE will be intended for three specific audiences: individuals, particularly those in under-represented groups, who might achieve their fullest potential by attending architecture school; members of the public who are interested in learning more about what architecture schools and graduates have to offer; and current members of the architecture community, including students, academics, and professionals.

We are working to build ACSA’s ARCHIVE to show how architecture schools are doing things that matter.

Visit and sign in at: www.archive100.org.

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Poster | Logo configurations | Logo types

Works and Projects

Online community website : ARCHIVE DROPBOX

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Y - WING HOUSING > Location Prototype Date 2006 Design Team Maia Small, Andrew Thurlow, Brandon Massey Status Selected for publication as Feidad 2006 semi-finalist

ywi Due to global patterns of life, contemporary culture fosters new “families� that are not longer defined only by strict racial, typological or economic categories, but cross and flex as subsequent generations increasingly embrace interracial marriage, unmarried or nonreproductive couples, divorce, secularism, single parent households, roommates, cohabitating multi-generational families, adoption, etc. This multiplicity has the potential to create rich iterations and personal identity within common experience that requires a more variable relationship between time and space; thus, ownership, interior and exterior relationships, and living boundaries must become more flexible.

Y-Wing Housing The Y-Wing is less a specific architecture and more a system of spatial territories. The variability of the system works at two scales: the system components that allow for an infinitely expandable spatial envelop (it can infinitely extend by adding new wing that adapt to landscape: embed, rise, or fall; curl, hook or elongate) and the wall-less permeable skin system that allows for a gradation of interior and exterior: audial, visual, illumination, and air flow. The skin is not an enclosure system, it is a delineated spine of infrastructure from which water, energy, and materials flow.

Expandable System The Y-wing does not preference a specific form, technology, or material, but instead suggests a variable individual unit that connects with other around it to create either larger units for expanding families or extended spaces for necessary use. The system itself also extends arms into the landscape that ride along side or conflate to create courtyard spaces and appropriate the landscape into the system of the house.

Through stacking and conjoined configurations, it can figure into single-family housing, apartments, or row houses.

Permeable System The structural and programmatic lines, defined dimensionally by the modular, designate the elevation, infrastructure, variable program, and the changing relationship between inside and outside. Program is enhanced by specific spatial relationships and infrastructure availability, not defined by the architect. Openings allow for connection physically back into the landscape as well as views-- the elongated linearity drawing the inhabitant out into the landscape-- the new fenĂŞtre longeur. Here we are allowed to enter the exterior and interior at will, not as a transition, but as seamless neutral passage.

Space is also captured in between the volumes that is covered but not interior, cultivated but not controlled.

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Works and Projects

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Rooftop view | Sections

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Porch view | Plan options

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Exterior view | Exploded axonometric

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Exterior elevational view | Affect images

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Porch view | Interior stair view

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Interior living space | Roof view

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TEA HOUSE > Location Conway, MA Date 2006 Design Team Andrew Thurlow, Maia Small, Nate Del Vecchio, Brandon Massey Status Design completed 2006 Client Thomas & Susan McCarthy

tea The TEA house is at once, a site specific project for clients in western Massachusetts and a prototype for a landscape pavilion, appropriated for production on a larger scale. Intended as a glowing lantern and object in a larger natural landscape, the pavilion becomes a place of retreat, a switch to a different place and time accessible by each person in their own way. The clients are not only keepers of the surrounding landscape, but participants in the changing experience, where the existing environment is, at once, both absorbed and mirrored in the multiply refractive and reflective, semi-translucent exterior cladding system units. Programming ranges from tea ceremonies to garden storage shed-- or from painting studio to open-air sleeping pavilion for two. There is a tatami mattas-modular organization, and the pavilion is 9’ x 18’ in dimension.

The monolithic enclosure system for the TEA house uses a series of recycled, thermoplastic polymer tiles as an exterior cladding system. The individual, overlapping tiles also borrow from similar clay roof tiles only instead of opaque, they are semi-translucent. Tile interlock is achieved through profile curvature and each tile is designed to snap together with its neighboring tiles. There are 745 individual tiles, per pavilion - these consist of 598 flat, 23 ridge, 46 ridge eave, 4 ridge end, 2 end cap, 20 side course, 28 corner and 24 cut tiles, each manufactured using 8 CNC-milled formworks.

The drape-forming over the milled formwork uses (20%) recyclable, epoxy molds to create the (745) 1/8” thick, (100%) recycled P.E.T.G. with UV inhibitor tiles.

The semi-translucent tile material is intended to simultaneously reflect the immediate exterior environment and veil the backer panels, located directly behind the tile wall. Each of these layered, screened systems are set within a lightweight, structural aluminum frame comprised of “off-the-shelf” rectangular, extruded sections. The structural cage is affixed directly to a light-weight concrete slab with a corrugated underside profile and interlocking footings. Ramp access can also be attached to the concrete slab, while the current backer panel print options consist of an ‘Arita porcelain’ panel set, a (1858 Hiroshige) ‘36 views of Mt. Fuji’ panel set, or pink & blue singular-color panels, each screened for privacy and additional light control.

As a pavilion, the TEA house becomes a glassy shed, a primitive veiled hut, its interior contents revealed through semitranslucency, with an interplay of exterior, surrounding landscape textures, forms and shadows on the interior. The overall form is generic, like that of a traditional Tea house, and the on-site assembly easy. It is a surface landscape of luminescence formed into a distinct object, embedded within a landscape - the pavilion projects an aura, a presence of the surrounding landscape, as affect.

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Urban view | Material affect images

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Mobile pavilion view | Portable unit

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Materials list

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Exploded axonometric

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HIV/AIDS MOBILE CLINIC PROPOSAL > Location Subsaharan Africa Date 2002 - 2003 Design Team Andrew Thurlow, Maia Small; Eliza Higgins, Dianna Pozdniakov Fabrication Team Nathaniel Richards, Evan Richards Fabrication Assistance Joseph Lombari, Display World, Inc., Dani Lett, Z Corporation Status Design completed 2003, Chosen for traveling exhibition Competition Sponsor Architecture for Humanity

aid Rhino. HIV in Africa is not only a crisis beyond words, but beyond images. The calamitous epidemic, caused by an unseen microscopic force, becomes apparent through absence-- it is the loss of community, parentage, future that unfolds through a slow disappearance of life. And it is memory that remains, our own images of connectivity and potential, of faces and cities.

second is through one side that opens up allowing for easy access to HIV testing and minor medical assistance. The third is the clinic side, that limits access to patients in need of greater care, pregnant women needing exams or longer term help. It can become a center for multiple levels of activity, to engage anyone affected by HIV, to form new memories and spread information.

The RHINO project seeks to negotiate between the desire to give the reality of HIV a presence through image-- a mobile architectural icon-- and let the mobile object be a smooth and familiar part of the communities it serves. Thus, this is done through space and time. When arriving to a site, the unit is a distinct object, noticeable in its material difference and shape. It then begins a transformation which allows it to open up to the community, to take shape and connect to existing familiar networks and pathways.

It unpacks and reveals three areas of engagement: space for education, testing and treatment.

The first opening is at the front end, [where it detaches from a heavy duty truck], which can serve as a place to get information. The

The mobile unit consists of a double-sided spatial configuration that pushes out into its site. The interior is defined by the activities within; specific profiles allow for storage, counter space, seating and bed surfaces to be pushed or pulled from the structural liners.

In between the liners lies all of the infrastructure necessary for a medical unit including: water stored in tanks, medical supplies, miscellaneous storage, staff space, rigid structure and electrical systems. These are combined into a central spine in order to increase the area for circulation.

The intent is to provide smooth access to internal spaces in order to maximize the number of contact hours between clinic staff and people.

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Open Configuration

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Mobile unit overview | Open and closed states

Closed Configuration

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Plan | Neighborhood view | Environment views

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Interior view | Interior elevations

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Exterior view

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interior vacuum formed panel system for pushout including beds, exterior vacuum formed panel system for pushout modulated in

interior vacuum formed panel for core including protected storage structural system: struts, duocoque frame and roof panels / skylights underside decking leaf spring assembly and wheels

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Exploded axonometric | X-ray axonometric

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3D print | Interior surfaces

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MANUFACTURED HOUSING > Location Prototype Date 2001 - 2006 Design Team Andrew Thurlow, Irina Verona, Maia Small, Jaimie Abel, Amanda Shadowens Technical consultant Dr. Spivey Douglass (UT); Protomet Corporation

man Industrialization techniques in architecture since WWII, including prefabrication and mass production, have been predicated on the standardization of building systems. This methodology of the mass production of materials has been through the use of a uniquely designed and built prototype; while overall configuration could change, tectonics and standardized components were understood to be inflexible. This project no longer views form generation as fixed and ideal, but instead as supple and transformable. Through the use of Computer Numerically Controlled production processes, new methods of fabrication arise and ultimately allow for differentiation in mass production.

The introduction of specific computational design software has enables the development of a non-standardized building system through material studies and serial logics. Thus a new paradigm emerges, where local variation formulates continuous, yet differentiated, global structure.

This project explores the development of tectonic systems composed of repeatable yet nonstandardized building components and seeks to capitalize on the change in mass production from the paradigm of the standard or rigid to the multiple or loose, by complexifying the relationship between prototypes and tectonic components.

The proposal also seeks to augment the current shift from the stereotypes of impoverished “trailers parks” of yesterday to enriched “land lease communities” of today by infusing low culture with high technology. Finally, the proposal seeks to offer a new view of manufactured housing that values strength, durability, affect and desire, borrowing strategies from the closely aligned automobile industry. The product it to sponsor an image of lifestyle, spatial effects, and aesthetics that provide more than comfort and stability, but a new type of living ‘performance.’

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Mobile transit view | Neighborhood options

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Community view | Prefab history

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Mobile unit views | Sales brochure

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Plan | Open configuration

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Foam CNC milled panels | MDF scaled panel molds | CNC path views | CNC process photo

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Aperture elevation | Foam panel elevation

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CNC paths | Material history

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Resin Panels

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Resin, metal and foam panels

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165 NC WALLPAPER > Location Prototype Date 2008 Design Team Andrew Thurlow, Maia Small, Nick Proto Fabrication Precision Laser

165 The 165 Panel Project is a customized perforated wall system designed to provide an inexpensive, variable open texture for any surface by offering a two-dimensional process with three-dimensional effects. The technique begins by transforming an image into a pattern of pixels through a simple Photoshop algorithm, choosing which version works best and then modifying it to accommodate structural and material requirements. This pattern is then laser cut into steel. Next, the steel is bent to structure the panel and provide attachment points, and, finally, powder-coated to create a consistent, high-end finish.

This project originated with the interior design of a 5000 s.f. advertising agency in downtown Providence. The panels would illuminated the brand of the company in an existing poorly lit space. We found the system had potential beyond the singular project and eventually applied a mock-up to our own office interior.

In the following images, a flower pattern was used as an example and tested in a variety of materials as mock-ups, including pink foam, wood and paper board before fabricating a set of four panels in steel. Since the system is structured to be variable, it is just as easy to produce one image as another-- any client could apply his/her own image to the process with ease.

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Cut foam wall | Panel taxonomy

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Cut foam wall | Laser cut panel model

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Lit up cut foam wall | Laser cut paper model

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Perforated panels rendering | CNC process

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Laser cut metal panel prototype | Laser cutter | Metal break | Scale photo

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DONNA DINUCCI DESIGNS SCREEN SYSTEM > Location Pawtucket, RI Date 2007 Design Team Andrew Thurlow, Alex Diez, Christine Dennett, Kyle Bendle Status Completed 2007 Client Donna Dinucci Size 9 l.f.

Cost $70 / l.f.

ddd the other, reflects her and her clothing’s animated sensibility and vibrancy. At the same time, the texture is meant to stimulate and enhance the detail scale in the openness of the studio, so that As both a changing space and it mediates between the whole spatial divider, it offers a textural surface in the midst of a large free and the piece. The screen was form space that she works and designed and CNC fabricated by shares with her clients. Donna TSA. After the completion of this has a vibrant personality and visual project, she has invited TSA to be the architects on her upcoming spirit and the pattern embedded in one side and drawn out on house renovation.

The screen is an architectural device design specifically to relate to the body and the space of Donna’s studio.

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CNC panel surface mockup

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Finished panels in Donna’s studio

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Finished panel | Scale diagram

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Finished panel system, | Patterning

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ARTCITY > Location Calgary, Canada Date 2002 - 2003 Design Team Andrew Thurlow, Maia Small Fabrication Consultant Method Designs, ZCorporation Status Collected entries exhibited in downtown Calgary Competition Sponsor ArtCity 2002, Peepshow Competition

art Our urban peep show begins with a strategy, not a structure. This strategy is to conflate a series of oppositions: icon and context, folly and landscape, and art and spectator through a reconfigurable assembly composed of eight connected components that can be located in three site types in Calgary. Like the peep show, where eroticism stems from the intimate relationship between the voyeur and the desired object, each booth profile stems from an organized physical relationship between the spectator and the work on display. Here the booths operate at a glance to entice various patrons-- passers-by, tourists, and urban opportunists.

Their specific profiles organize a relationship between an individual viewer and piece of art through a shared surface, a go-between, that fosters a quick peek or perhaps a lingering gaze. The viewer/art interface then affects the outer urban realm: the loungetype booth not only offers art, but a place to recline; the seat-type booth, a short rest; the bar-type booth, a place to write or set your coffee. On the outer side, ledges provide places to lean, set down packages, or sit down, perhaps doubling as a bus stop.

We propose not a single specific site, but a systematic response to shifting sites and dis/assembly.

The eight booths, as a taxonomy of art and viewer interfaces, would specifically be repositioned each year upon reassembly into one of three site types: the urban plaza, the sidewalk, and the plus-15 walkway. The first configuration, the Quad, is organized for an urban plaza site, where spectators can easily move around and into the display field. The Edge configuration would be placed in a sidewalk site to both define the linear boundary and create a double-sided programmatic wall.

And finally, the Aisle configuration is designed for siting in the plus15 walkway system, where linear progression creates positive and negative display spaces in series.

These configurations not only sequence display, but allow the desired object to attract, compel and surprise its viewer. Over time and successive installations, the materiality and geometries of the booths allow them to be iconic, alerting the memory to previous installations, yet their reconfigurability always allows them to respond to the specific conditions of current time and site. Thus they stake out urban space without discreet edges, allowing for them to both avoid the excesses of architectural folly and remain distinguishable from the surrounding landscape.

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Art Pavilion rendering | Human proportion diagram

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anodized aluminum facing aluminum honeycomb core mounted artwork in glass aluminum edging removable joining clip or locking clip inserted at edge removable artwork mounting clip inserted at edge lower finished panel

Material system exploded axonometric

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Pavilion rendering | Configuration diagrams: Edge, Aisle and Quad

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3D print

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Wood formwork | Environments

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Art prototypes in wood and metal | Elevation study | City | Expanded paper

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BRIDGE PARK > Project Partner L + A Landscape Architecture, Park co-designers Project Consultant Horsley Witten Group, site and hydrological engineers Location Pawtucket, RI Date 2010 - 2011 Design Team Maia Small, Andrew Thurlow Status Conceptual design complete; in development Size 1.4 acres

bri As part of the work being done for Bridge 550 by the Rhode Island Department of Transportation, our office, during the process of developing the Pawtucket Downtown Design Plan, identified the possibility of transforming the proposed storm water retention basin into a publicly accessible park that would connect the School Street neighborhood to the Blackstone River. The PDDP Team then collaborated on a conceptual design for the park itself, one that

would merge ecological logics and pedestrian access, looking at how lanes for people could cross with channels of water. The water basin would need to accommodate 70% of the 100 year flood stage as part of the variance obtained by RIDOT from CRMC, be safe for the public, and offer new ways to see and experience the new bridge and the river’s edge. This project is currently in process and in review at RIDOT.

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Park view | Park plantings

Works and Projects

Park view | Park plan

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Park North - South section

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Park East - West section

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YINZHOU CENTRAL PARK > Project Partner L + A Landscape Architecture, Park co-designers Project Partner Team Minus, Master Plan designers Location Ningbo, China Date 2008 - 2010 Design Team Maia Small, Andrew Thurlow with Zhang Rui, Sun Li Status First Place, Invited Competition; Anticipated completion May 2010 Size 78 hectares Budget $42 Million

yin Yinzhou Central Park is the 78 hectare centerpiece of a new master planned mixed-use development for 80,000 people in Ningbo, in Zhejing Province, China. The park design describes an artificial landscape that uses natural logics to allow for selforganized growth and ecological, social and economic sustainability.

The five blocks are organized through five types of water: the meaner, the canal, the lake, the convergence, and the fens. Water flow and access structures the

relationship of the park to the city, allowing a healthy aquatic life and close pedestrian relationships.

The geometry and program are defined by a set of circles that pull and extend the hard, soft and constructed water banks. These circles also function as pools of program, in some cases defined by textures of ground or water or by plantings. The vegetation is more a system than fixed planting-- it will evolve over time just as a forest or wetland would naturally.

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lenticular hills

lenticular fields

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Park plan | Park program

lenticular islands

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Lenticular island view | Topography

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Waterway view | Edge types: Soft, hard and constructed

Works and Projects

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50 year flood stage

hard / soft / constructed edges

second phase construction

50 year flood stage | Edges | Second phase construction diagrams

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Lenticular fields view | Program diagram

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Lighting plan | Connections diagram

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Foliage view

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Planting plan | Planting strategies

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Lenticular hills view

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Planting types | Section

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NATIONAL AIDS MEMORIAL > Location Golden Gate Park, San Francisco, CA Date 2005 Design Team Phase 1 Maia Small, Andrew Thurlow Design Team Phase 2 Jose Goncalves, Eric Scott, Theodore Duboc Consultants Mark Kelley, MACK5, Mark Cavagnero Associates Fabrication Support Snehal Intwala, 3D Systems, Inc. Status Selected as a Finalist; Published in Emergent Memory Size 1.7 hectares Budget $2 Million

nam Gabion Field. In an environment of a disease that captures and changes lives throughout the world, over time, incrementally, in hidden and overt ways, in all economic and social environments, through political passages: our design proposal is more a memorial landscape than monument. It is a loose and interactive system of distributed components, an open network of landscape organized by choreographed figures; it is not a fixed, pristine, idealized object intend to charm or abstract a complex experience.

The wire components are distributed into the surrounding forest and out into the meadow where they densify and help to form organized spaces. The wire is deformed to create benches, walls and portals. The wire lattice also creates an atmosphere of framework, without interfering with the lush surroundings nor treading heavily upon the ground.

The figures become more angelic, more spirits in the material world that guide the space of the memorial garden. The figures, as trunks, operate like columns of collected space, similar in scale and nature like surrounding trees.

The project deploys wire-meshThey would be both visual clues architecture in the existing of an(other) type of garden space landscape of the Memorial Grove in and space defining objects. The Golden Gate Park. These objects, wire-mesh-components shape as a landscape of spirit, elevate a space, they are meshes which series of layers of screening and consist of braids and linkages, a overlapping to express light weight form of architectural drapery, like organizations of air and space, webs floating in the air, “strong containers of program, eddies and yet delicate in appearance.� The swirls of density. They also house individual wires are joined together, remembrance by becoming a creating an airy and light structure framework for memento, such as that can be extended in multiple for red ribbons-- or the impromptu directions. self-organized memorials, such as in New York City after 9/11.

The spatial gabions are coated (Imagine the impossibility of a with bonded rilsan, specified with red ribbon appended on a wire either a shiny, highly reflective for every person who contracted white nylon coating, for maximum HIV...) The wire frameworks offer reflection as an enhancement a structure for layers of memory of the picturesque pointalism so that remembrance is not throughout the site, or with an abstract, but instead has texture, ultra-matt grey-white nylon, to individuality-- so that it remains absorb more light, for greying conscious and alive. effects to coincide with the fog and for enhanced atmospherics.

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Landscape view

Works and Projects

Plan | AIDS quilt, ribbon, and 9/11 memorial fence

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Wire gabion view | Landscape affect

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Material and landscape affects

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Interaction view | Etherial memorial images

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Gabion units

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Landscape atmosphere | Grouping sketch

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Forest view | Grouping sketch

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Lighting view | Human proportion diagram

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Fibre optic lighting view | Gabion duo

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HADSPEN > Location London, UK Date 2007 Design Team Andrew Thurlow, Nick Proto, Kyle Bendle Status Selected for second round

had In the shadow of the Hadspen wall, this project conflates the social and spatial traditions of the bastion and the parterre into a contemporary landscape experience.

The bastion system, like Lucca Italy’s now pedestriated ramparts, are more than a physical edifice, they sponsor a social eventstructure, the passeggiata, a viewing promenade in an elevated garden. As an archipelago, the bastions are a series of episodic, yet interconnected, terraces for viewing the subdivided ornamental arrangement of flowerbeds and the surrounding walls.

the parterres, highly controlled, floral field spaces composed of micro-gardens. The hedges are a series of permeable vegetative boundaries that organize the promenade, but allow for visual continuity. Finally, the fourth are parterre beds that project color and texture horizontally as a minifield quilt.

A series of registrations from the FOA design pulled across and expanded in section define the geometry of the garden. While the design is limited to the space of each bastion, the geometry links across, tying the lenticular components to a larger system Each bastion organizes a series that allows the viewer to reference of landscape systems: the first, and rereference the textures across the bastion edges, are socles that the garden as a whole. Here, replicate the lenticular pattern of the passage of the passeggiata the whole garden as a smallerinvolves an infinitely variable scale, textural, stone lattice. The experience of moving through the pattern modulates down its length primary and secondary systems of and forms diamond shaped the FOA paths and into these new planters as well as a system for paralleling tertiary and quaternary vertical garden walls. The second systems of rising and falling, are ramps that allow access on moving and resting, viewing and top of the bastions that literally and being viewed across a series of figuratively elevate the pedestrian berms and hedges, through fields to a performer in the promenade. of horizontal flowers and vertical The third are hedges that create stones.

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Garden overview | Pathway diagram

Works and Projects

Texture pathway | Path sectional perspective

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Bastion view

Works and Projects

Sections | Line and surface diagrams

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GREENSTOP > Location Tulare County, CA Date 2006 Design Team Maia Small, Andrew Thurlow Competition Sponsor Great Valley Center

hwy A dusty little town on the road to somewhere else. Sam Donaldson

demonstrate a beautiful example of sustainable architecture. The Slip Stream Stop not only provides I don’t remember ever feeling this a place to rest, but to refresh awake. Thelma & Louise and restore, to learn about local people, to support a more informal The California Highway system is economy and demonstrate the not merely a means of transport, processes of make agriculture it is a character in the American through both small productive story-- the love of the car, the fields and an informal market. The excitement of travel, the freedom stop is a zero-sum condition-- the and independence of the open water collected on site is used for road, has encouraged adventurers cultivation, the energy given by and those struggling to find a the sun produces both healthy better life. The rest stop, however, plants that then produce fruit, and unlike the drive-in, the interchange energy storage from photovoltaic and the car, has been a mostly panels. These products are then inert limb, defaulting to cost reinvested: the fruit is sold for and federal indifference. The local and stop revenue (for upkeep Central Valley, too, one of the and new crops) and the generated most productive regions in the power is used both for the stop’s world, has suffered from a lack daily equipment and for its nightly of definition since its consistent, lighting. Rest stops can often be horizontal scale landscape and threatening at night, when they mechanization have made it less are even more important, thus the accessible than its Yosemite design includes inviting lights, to and Death Valley cousins. The that both sides of the road appear intention of this stop is to make as nocturnal, glowing beacons. evident the local beauty by This rest stop is not a pass-thru, it expressing its cultural history is a destination. and legacy of the soil, as well as

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on their way to death valley for spring break, jeff, lucia and toby stop to open the top of the jeep-- and find a great place to horse-around...

the tulare rotary club wants to have a meeting-- and finds a social hour in the outdoors...

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Roadway view

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rachael stops to calm the baby-- and shows michael where oranges comes from...

christa stops to stretch-- and remembers picking strawberries with her mom...

during their car rally, georgia and her husband stop to clean the windshield-- and find a luscious picnic spot...

OVerview

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the local union members holds a meeting-- and finds a new public space near familiar fields...

on his way to toledo to deliver a truckload of sneakers, dan pulls over for a night’s rest-- and finds a beacon in the fields...

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Site view | Plan

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elena and her sisters bring their extra nectarines to sell in the rest stop market-and finds she sells more walnuts and pistachios...

antonio and his brother check the a healthy snack in the market...

tires-- and find

Market view | Energy diagram | Water diagram

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Exploded axonometric

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Plan

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sun-young and her parents hope they make it to fresno by dark-- but they find a rest stop worthy of family tourist shots...

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louella doesn’t have time to stop-- but enjoys the line of lights breaking the monotony of a highway in the dark...

Site section

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HIGH LINE PROPOSAL > Location New York, NY Date 2003 Design Team Maia Small, Andrew Thurlow Competition Sponsor Friends of the High Line Status Advisor Selection Citation, selected for Grand Central Exhibition + Press Publications Size 1 mile

hil Over the city’s history, New Yorkers have simultaneously reveled in dense urbanity and fought for breathing space. In times of abundance, cultivated natural environments have been places of luxury, leisure time and reflection; in times of hardship, open space has been a salvation, an escape from the odiferous miasma of industrialization and poverty to spiritual, cultural and physical purity. This false dichotomy between paradise and rehabilitation has denied the unique opportunities of blending environments— the opportunities of allowing the urban condition to in fact heighten the experience of cultivated vegetative landscape.

offer Babylon in the 21st century-real foliage in the concrete jungle: the decadent urges of the boom city have come to rest in the space above the street. Babylon is not longer a decadence of simple carnal desires, the pleasures of the 21st century city are indulgences in time and space: the time for the slow speed of plant cultivation, the time to meander, the time to literally stop and smell the roses-the space for non-profitable life, the space for collective behavior, the space of personal territory.

Social butterflies mix with real ones.

Rather than transgress the existing structure, we treated it as a linear container that could hold insertions In the 21st century, in a 19th that would foster both attachments century structure, we propose to the city and allow for vegetation a new pleasure ground: an to drip and permeate into the city. interior and exterior, public and Different profiles respond to various communally owned, elevated programs: communally owned greenhouse landscape that folds greenhouse gardens, personal together the presumed antagonists storage units as either cabanas of urban and natural life. It is not or mini-storage, farmer’s / open a natural environment as escape markets for produce and flowers from city life, but rather exalts it grown on the green ray, and by drawing it through the blocks escalator/elevator units to connect themselves in one of the most to the street. unique conditions of the city. The main feature of the system is a The space under the high line network of greenhouses that follow would be organized in support of the continuous surface of the these activities—special parking/ elevated plane; they are ephemeral loading zones for material for atmospheres of mist, luscious storage and goods for market, hothouses, translucent night extensions of the circulation beacons, community saturnalia, system to experience the vertical that foster private indulgence and transition through milky glass wicked collective cultivation. They escalator tubes.

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Highline gardening | Affect image

Works and Projects

Greenhouse view | Affect image

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Market greenhouse view

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Historical affect images

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Mini-storage greenhouse

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Axonometric view

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Market greenhouse

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Greenhouse types: mini-storage, market, and kiosk

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Linear configuration

Pleated configuration

Split configuration

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Configurations: linear, pleated, and split

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Dusk view | Affect image

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Urban view | Affect image

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Urban view | Affect image

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BEALE STREET LANDING PROPOSAL > Location Memphis, TN Date 2003 Design Team Maia Small, Andrew Thurlow Status Collected Entries exhibited, Memphis Convention Center Competition Sponsor City of Memphis

mem Lattice Terrain. The Mississippi is both an edge and a path to Memphis. It defines a variable boundary that adjusts the relationship between aquatic and inhabitable, city and natural landscapes. This park then is the space in between and has the potential to provide a loose network of connections, opportunities and transitions between these soft zones of urban and river life. This proposal suggests the use of a lattice structure to create a series of pedestrian pathways that move from multiple points within the city to and through the park. The spaces in between these conduits become textural networks of their own: lawn or landscape, the existing cobblestone, or programmed areas such as a marketplace, amphitheater, view seating, etc.

All of the networks eventually lead to the one intended affect of the landing: the panorama. Here the

architecture opens up to parallel the river and create a visceral experience of water edge and a much stronger global connection from a local stance.

The marketplace is a highly developed architectural component that could be adjustable to various vendors, events or public functions. It is partially embedded within the pier and extends into the landscape.

It is organized so that the view of the water is primary-- as both an urban experience and the natural shifting panorama. The moments of contact between the conduits define a series of cross axes that are extensions of the historical lot and street systems of the city.

These urban extensions provide direct visual and pedestrian access in two ways: in one location they are elevated to create a mound that becomes a high viewpoint to the extent of the river scene and the in the other direction a view of the city behind.

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Site plan | Site diagram mem

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mem Urban view | Bridge, historical, and expansion images

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amphitheater

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Exploded axonometric mem

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mem Urban view | Bridge, historical, and expansion images

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PAWTUCKET DOWNTOWN DESIGN PLAN > Location Pawtucket, RI Date 2010 - 2011 Design Team Maia Small, Andrew Thurlow, Chris Capozzi, Jarrod Martin Status Study to be completed 2011 Client City of Pawtucket Planning Department; Pawtucket Foundation

pddp Pawtucket, Rhode Island, is a city of roughly 73,000 situated just a few miles north of Providence on the Blackstone River. Like many small New England cities, Pawtucket has seen its fortunes ebb and flow with history. It expanded with the industrial revolution in the 1800s, suffered an outflow of manufacturing in the 1930s, lost residents and density to suburbanization and urban renewal in the 1950s and ’60s, and resurged with real estate growth in the early 2000s.

Many of these eras introduced plans to redesign Pawtucket’s physical environment, and the city today reflects these layered efforts.

Its unused train station deteriorates slowly above a closed rail stop.

Interstate 95 coarsely cuts off the downtown from its neighborhoods.

The core of the city, once a meeting point of historic routes, is now a confusing set of one-way streets and inescapable loops.

problems, we had to trace their roots. In 1790 Pawtucket presented a vision of America as an urban industrial nation to a receptive Alexander Hamilton, then Secretary of Treasury, as he crossed the Main Street Bridge.

The city soon emerged as a dense urban hub connected to commercial corridor spokes. That clear pattern, though still evident today, was later interrupted by major projects intended to benefit the city, like the interstate and the northeast rail corridor, as well as a succession of planning decisions that altered the function of short segments of roadway and intersections.

bus traffic, and pedestrians. The third is a parking system that will discourage the creation of new surface parking and decrease the city’s environmental impact. The fourth project develops a Riverway that supports public spaces along the mostly undeveloped river and connects them to local neighborhoods. The final project, Downtown Guidance, cleans up zoning and land use issues to encourage the pedestrian-oriented, mixed-use development the city wants and discourage the cardominated, low density it doesn’t.

So the PDDP is not really a single “plan” so much as a set of ongoing projects. These efforts may not fix downtown, but they will give the While likely made with good intentions, these choices inevitably city a solid infrastructural base that provides healthy and clear ways undid established connections. to get around by allowing the city The design team found that to leverage its many strengths. linking existing routes, instead of Pawtucket is what so many places reconfiguring them, could allow people to use their natural instincts are not— a small, walkable urban center filled with new and old to get around. All we had to do in a town developed during the textile buildings, neighborhoods of people from all over the world, hardy In 2010, the City of Pawtucket’s era was knit its original threads entrepreneurs and accessible Planning Department and the back together. city government. At just one Pawtucket Foundation initiated a project to fix the downtown.

The Pawtucket Downtown Design corner, Fountain and Exchange streets, you can find a world-class Called the Pawtucket Downtown Plan proposes five concepts theater, a silkscreen company, a Design Plan, the project’s goal is that look backward to move high school, a renovated mill full to improve the city’s infrastructure forward — not through nostalgia of design companies, a historic and, as a result, foster sustainable but common sense. The first armory, and, just across the economic and residential reconnects the historic turnpike adjacent river full of wildlife, you development. The city selected system, including the former reach City Hall, a post office, a Thurlow Small Architecture to Boston Post Road, so that public library, and a historic site lead a team of traffic engineers, travelers see clearly how to get to landscape architects, and and from Main Street. The second soon to be the center of a new National Park. What we learned regulatory consultants on a identifies Exchange Street as a 10-month project to study traffic, true place of “exchange” between from the downtown plan was that sometimes the best design is public space, and zoning. the highway, the river, the coming train station, and the delineated simply to make a place evident to Before we could solve Pawtucket’s systems for bicycles, local car and itself.

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Turnpike idea | Main Street plan

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Main Street view | Turnpike system | Signage

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PAWTUCKET COMPREHENSIVE PLAN MAPS > Location Pawtucket, RI Date 2010 Design Team Maia Small Status Maps completed 2011 Client City of Pawtucket, Planning Department

PAW2 The City of Pawtucket Planning Department hired Thurlow Small to develop a set of diagrams to assist in the development of their state mandated Comprehensive Plan revisions for 2010. These plans

illuminated changes to zoning, land use, riverfront and downtown development, cultural facility locations, natural resources and urban neighborhoods.

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Public transportation | Planning districts | Natural resources | Community services | Cultural Resources | Zoning | Open space | Major routes

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METRO TRANSIT STUDY MEDIA > Location Providence, RI Date 2009 Design Team Maia Small, Andrew Thurlow, Nick Proto Status Completed 2009 Clients Rhode Island Public Transit Authority, City of Providence

met Thurlow Small was hired by Schwadesign to create the language and copy for RIPTA’s Greater Metro Transit Study findings and publication materials

to help the projects move forward with political support and funding.

This material was presented to the press by Providence Mayor Cicillini in December of 2009.

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Materials that explain RIPTA initiatives

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Copy & Graphics paw2

KEEPSPACE PROJECT > Location Central Falls & Pawtucket, RI Date 2009 Design Team Maia Small, Andrew Thurlow, Katherine McPhillips Status Completed 2009 Clients Pawtucket Citizens Development Corporation, Rhode Island Housing

ksi This 62-page Local Knowledge Report documented informal neighborhood information to provide a greater understanding of the site complexity and qualities and to help identify the most productive opportunities for projects. The Report consists a set of 33 maps, supporting photos, and analysis that identifies: Circulation informal pedestrian movement, bicycle use and parking, public transit patterns and habits, areas of traffic and pedestrian problems, existing important neighborhood linkages.

concern, sites of most perceived blight, existing organized public events, community hangouts.

Recreation types and locations of organized sports, informal recreation habits, greenspace needs.

Community Resources unique regional or community facilities, important religious or service organizations, businesses that provide daily provisions.

Entrepreneurial Activities locations and types of unregistered economic activity, types of mobile Social Space areas of positive economic activities, locations of social activity, areas of public safety urban agriculture.

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Table of maps | Recommendations

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Riverfront map | Community institutions map

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In the mid twentieth century, when the American economy flourished and modernization took hold, the process of urban growth appeared simple: cities or developers hired designers who were governed by a particular set of rules; between them, they shaped the built environment.

Today, economic instability and resource depletion make the process less one of urban growth, and more one of transformation, requiring complex forms of engagement with an increasingly diverse group of players in a more fluid regulatory environment.

Among them are neighborhood and merchant associations, quasipublic agencies and community non-profits, groups that, in many cases, emerged in response to the failure of prior public projects. Not only do planners have to contend with increasingly challenging infrastructural conditions, but they are simultaneously hampered (as they engage in larger and more polarized political battles) by well-intended legislation intended to prevent corruption. Rules such as these, that define how planners operate, significantly limit negotiation tactics that could more easily diffuse crises and build sustainable partnerships; the only options remaining to planners are fighting often futile battles or capitulating via easily hijacked design charrettes. A secondary layer of constraints are rules that define what planners operate on (namely codes and zoning regulations) which have further reduced cities to regulatory agents intent on eliminating detrimental projects rather than developing incentives for beneficial ones. Perhaps this approach makes sense when there is growth to regulate, but regulating no growth means doing nothing. In an environment that increasingly requires adaptability, the one-size-fits-all mentality of codes is crippling; traditional zoning, based on Victorian values, generally only serves to protect us from the dangers of an

industrial economy that is barely evident in today’s cities. We are in times of economic decline and regressive design interests, where public budgets are small, private financing unpredictable, and where there is an increasingly dismal view of the new, mostly as a result of the failures of the old.

We believe that designers have a responsibility to not only reshape the physical world, but also to reconceive the process of growth as one of change by engaging the formation of projects themselves: the priorities, the principles, the players, and the possible.

Presented with the opportunity to engage this expanded set of conditions in the context of the

zones with access to the existing 40 ft deep waterway; and the City of Providence, determined to expand its tax base by increasing high density housing. The role of the Bay City Project has been to expand the conversation between the various constituents, to gain a global view of the potential to satisfy existing stakeholders, engage a broader public, and foster a new waterfront identity— to elevate the project from compromise to opportunity. The organizing strategy was thus to develop a systems-based urbanism that does not result in a singular, static vision or plan, but rather projects inherent variability.

Our strategy of “planlessness”

THE BAYCITY PROJECT > Project Partners Muchi-East Location Providence, RI Date 2007- 2008 Design Team Maia Small, Andrew Thurlow, Melissa Lockwood Status Study Phases I, II, & III complete Client City of Providence, Department of Planning Size 3 linear miles

Providence waterfront, our first design move was to design a process, not a master plan. The resulting BayCity Project entailed a public/private partnership between the City of Providence, two design firms, and the Rhode Island School of Design Center for Design and Business. Our decision to focus initially on the creation of a project, rather than identifying ourselves as project designers, intentionally shifted the emphasis from the production of solutions into an unfolding process of authorship and identity.

We immediately recognized that the future of the Providence Waterfront rests in a negotiation between three interests: a neighborhood organization focused on expanding recreational and public space; marine and public infrastructure industries fighting to preserve industrial

comprises four modes of operation: 1. networks – Common among urban projects, the Providence waterfront has a long and complex history of failure and reconstituted alignments between the political, economic, and institutional forces that shape the nature of the design question itself. Partnerships between interest groups have developed, and will continue to develop, out of identifiable and anticipated needs. As we map and construct the network of players, we also discover who is absent; these holes in the network reveal as much about where we aren’t as where we are.

2. expertise - Design is the arrangement of ideas and structures from information; expertise is key to ideas and structures that perform.

Planlessness requires local and

bay global study of existing human and natural systems: transportation, hydrologic, water infrastructure, energy, ecological, social, cultural, educational, environmental, media, economic, and financing.

Securing funding for this research is challenging. Missing expertise informs us about the priorities of partners.

3. scenarios - Systems-based urbanism lets existing motivations and rules cultivate desired incremental change, with multiple partners creating a diverse and stable result. Logics, not objects, apply. Our directive for the Providence waterfront offers three one-hundred-year urban systems scenarios, each of which highlights the values of the three primary interest groups taken to their extreme conclusions: > Berms: a system of water barriers and plateaus motivated by the desire for public space and a system of green links. > Havens: a system of water inlets and jetties that emphasize marine and industrial use. > Islands: a system of physically independent yet linked zones that create new land to support mixeduse development and increase tax revenue.

The three scenarios are diagrams of systems operating at the limit—a maximum condition never intended to be implemented.

Instead, partners and constituents are able to combine different

percentages of the three inputs to produce a set of blended outputs. The percentages can vary along the edge or change over time in response to evolving physical, social, or economic conditions. Here, adding together logics multiplies opportunity by three rather than distilling the needs of multiple users into an unsatisfactory compromise. When a pier is pulled up into a berm, perhaps public and industrial constituents discover compatibility through section? Then, through a further set of sectional microblends, a strategic series of formal moves adapts each site to promote new uses.

in the process remains. We do, however, fully understand that this is a long-term process and must unfold in its own way over time; “we” aren’t constructing a “vision.” Like a government and its constitution, individuals and decisions matter a great deal in the beginning; very quickly, they matter much less than principles; eventually, they ideally don’t matter at all.

We have also realized that these issues aren’t unique to Providence and, indeed, resonate in many other cities at this time of global economic, resource, and environmental change. This scale of civic dysfunctionality is terrifying.

We are however, optimistic about 4. structures - In planlessness, the potential of planlessness to policy shifts, development develop a larger system with the incentives, leverage, and capacity to inform projects in many negotiation become design tools. locations. While planlessness Priorities, such as density, growth shares certain affinities—in terms zones, and activity types, shape of community participation—with decisions; seemingly disparate not-for-profit groups such as the actions are mutually reinforcing, becoming synergistic and catalytic. Project for Public Spaces, the Urban Land Institute, and the While developments in the project Congress for New Urbanism, its benefits include a longer process have accelerated the urban and expanded partnerships; a experiment, our most profound conclusions in the political process greater complexity of design logics; and the inclusion and reward of have come through what is still local designer capability. missing and which we hope has still to evolve. The public is Planlessness suggests that concerned with zoning in five answers will not come from years; our concern is with urban international debate or conference systems of the next hundred. In presentations, nor from an our network of participants, there exclusive set of remote power are key omissions; crossovers players, but instead from between community leadership matching global expertise and and design are limited; public local knowledge through ongoing engagement is ineffectual; and, projects. while lessened, a lack of trust

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network system > PARTNERSHIPS public & private existing conditions research

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Network diagram | Form, zoning, and property value diagrams

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Site overview | Site views

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islands

Plans: Havens, islands, berms

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edge systems > HAVENS,

berms

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macroblends

Three types | Macroblends

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microblends

combo systems > BLENDING evolving environments

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Microblending diagrams

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Blending environments | Blending percentages

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WESTMINSTER STREET ENVIRONMENT > Location Providence, RI Date 2007 Design Team Maia Small, Andrew Thurlow, Nick Proto Status Study completed 2007 Client Cornish Associates Size 3,000 s.f.

Cost $47 / s.f.

wes Westminster Street is the center of a new inhabitation of Providence’s urban environment. Cornish Associates, the developer largely responsible for its rehabilitation, asked TSA to both help with design review of their tenants signage and street components, but also to look at the whole environment of the street to help encourage a vital atmospheric experience. The interior of the Peerless and Alice buildings was complete and new retailers have moved in, but the street itself needed a finer grain, a place to sit, enjoy, shading devices to protect

people outside and a texture of the vertical surfaces. The intention was to allow for a consistent quality or level of design, but at the same time offer complexity and variation in the area.

From this work, Cornish also asked TSA to complete architectural designs for projects associated with the Westminster Street area including: Sorbus, Nail, Heir, the Galleria, and the Providence Grocery (initial design), three of which have since finished construction.

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Westminster view | Plan

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Retail entry view

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Project diagram | Street section

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Tazza cafe entry

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CITY OF PAWTUCKET DOWNTOWN DISTRICT > Location Providence, RI Date 2006 - 2007 TSA Design Team Maia Small, Andrew Thurlow, Brandon Massey Client Pawtucket Foundation PA Subcommittee Maia Small, Joe Haskett, Matt Kierstead, Omay Elphick Status Study completed 2007 Organization Pawtucket Agenda / Plan to Plan

paw The Pawtucket Agenda process was initiated by the Pawtucket Foundation and organized by New Commons and eventually comprised over 35 local and regional decision-making bodies, citizen groups and individuals.

This group pledged commitment to the ongoing development and implementation of a revitalizing strategy, and action to set in motion immediate interventions to spark catalytic developments.

It represented both a public/ private network and a strategy committed to the revitalization of the Pawtucket downtown and its connection to Central Falls and their greater neighborhood draw areas.

Committed to the process, we helped to organize this conversation by analyzing the existing conditions and posing questions as shown below. As well, we proposed a Downtown District that would offer development guidance and incentives.

• Defining Downtown: Where, specifically is “downtown” and how can we understand the relationships between it and its very essential neighborhoods and our neighbor, Central Falls?

• Consider Diversity, diversity is a great strength of this city, how can we made sure we have different perspectives and voices from our city working together?

• What kinds of methods of planning, power or incentives do we have to help economic and social forces already at work?

• What is an identity in a future vision for the city?

• Pawtucket has historically been a place of tremendous innovation, how can we reinforce our past and look to the future—to be a vibrant, sustainable, contemporary city rooted in history?

• What can we learn from other places, especially in New England, to understand our options and strengths?

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Existing lack of center diagram | District and connections diagram | Historic views

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District diagram

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PAWTUCKET / CENTRAL FALLS TRAIN STATION STUDY > Location Pawtucket, RI Date 2006 - 2007 Design Team Maia Small, Andrew Thurlow Status Study completed 2007 Client Pawtucket Foundation

tra The historic Pawtucket / Central Falls Train Station has been a symbol of economic decline for more decades than it was open in the mid-20th century. The historic building, that straddle both a below grade rail line and two cities, is seen by most community leaders as a pivotal catalyst project for the revitalization efforts in the region.

Unfortunately, in private hands, the building itself is imperilled by poor development planning that has seen it only as a pad site for future franchise development.

In an effort to assist in the public

leadership against a generic suburban typology, the Pawtucket Foundation engaged TSA to develop a plan for the proposed tenant by the developer, CVS Pharmacy to reuse the existing build instead of demolishing it for a new building. The study found that a typical CVS could fit into the station in two ways-- in the primary space allowing for public access to trains via a side passage way, or by leaving the main hall for public access or smaller scale retail with the pharmacy inhabiting the ancillary portions of the building.

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Elevaition study | Site photos

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Spatial studies

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400,000 HOUSES > Location Amposta, Spain Date 2004 Design Team Andrew Thurlow, Maia Small, Grant Robinson Status Featured in Center Journal #14 article Competition Sponsor Quaderns

400 The Future is Open (Linux ad copy) dimensions of land-- and transform them into new widths based on In reaction to both the failures of the connection to the old ones, Modernism’s closed compositions then we are re-appropriating the and Post-Modernism’s praise landscape, re-dimensioning it in of non-designed street life, terms of the possible multiplicity of we propose an open-ended configuration. The connections, paragenetic system, a strategy of however, not only imply major restructuring and synchronizing axis or circulation routes, begin surrounding settlement patterns to also organize the systems to offer a new urban infrastructure of land: ownership, densities of with variable boundaries. Our inhabitation, commercial nodes, intention is to vary the housing public space, water infrastructure, types and ownerships in etc. order to seed the intentions of individual interconnected This project proposes an economic neighborhoods, dense nodes of and spatial organization that central activity, and civic space accounts for minimum and fostered by both economic and maximum conditions of spatial public endeavors. Paragenesis appropriation for housing, develops from a mapping of the commerce and public space. It existing long lot configurations seeks to avoid the recent divisions present already within the site that allow for both our desires of and surrounding landscape. The exclusivity and lifestyle as well as long lot configuration, more than foster haunted divisions of elitism, simply mute existing geometry, ghettoism and real estate fashion. speaks about the delineation Rather than “location, location, of land, land ownership and location” to describe a triple agricultural appropriation. They are intensity of site importance for one markers, references and historical site (site3), this term is redefined to descriptions of ownership, use imply that the variable boundaries and land pragmatics. Thus imply that there are actually three if we seek to transform the locations overlapped within one land striations-- taking familiar (site + site + site).

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greenbelts + nodes

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Mercado view

berms

housing

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infrastructural lines

canals

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circula-

Urban systems diagram

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Plan | Site sections

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Site lines

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Berm flooding diagram

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Urban housing | Density diagrams | Green strip diagrams

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mercado view | Drainage diagram | Site lines

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OAK RIDGE NATIONAL LABORATORY VISION PLAN > Location Oak Ridge, TN Date 2001 - 2002 Design Team Maia Small, Andrew Thurlow Status Featured in Center Journal #14

lab The American technological sublime X-10 site is comprised of topographic ridges with narrow linear valleys, that have, in the race to produce the first atomic bomb, acted as both camouflage and containment device. Today, they provide an armature for the layout and distribution of various infrastructures (automotive and material) and plant buildings (laboratory and production).

Currently, the confused lab mandate of mixed energy, nuclear, materials and medical research has resulted in an increasing obvious crisis, namely the lack of a clear physical identity for one of only eight National-level scientific research laboratories. This problem, stemming from the everchanging cultural and scientific research agendas, have affected the infrastructural and building spatial dispositions at the scale of the landscape; improper and non-existent planning has resulted in an accumulation of ad hoc adjustments to the original linear patterning.

This project began with design participation on the ORNL Master

Plan competed in 2000 (currently under construction). This proposal relied on conventional strategies of hierarchical organization and lead us to consider a separate Vision Plan from a much looser, more fluid perspective. The Vision Plan avoids the imposition of exterior geometry and instead draws out existing infrastructure, networks, places, nodes, interstices, grounds, circuits and marks. We explored the mobilities, dissolution, systems, superpositions and scalar changes of the site and how camouflage techniques and the mutable and changeable could flex and animate. We then could deduce growth scenarios and phasing issues from the artificial excavations and geometric transcriptions made at the scale of Bethel Valley Road.

Landscape generated crossgrained organizations at the scale of the site reinforce programmatic compositing techniques at the scale of the architecture. The future X-10 site, all 428 buildings, 89 trailers and 3.4 million gross square feet of enclosed space becomes a supple yet deterministic system.

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Oak Ridge National Lab aerial & history

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Maximum ORNL massing

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Massing surface | CNC pathways | Mapping

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Massing strategy | Mapping

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PARAGENESIS > Linux Ad copy The future is open.

As global landscapes grow into increasingly complex layered systems, composites of cultural, economic and temporal modalities, current public policy promotes a simultaneous construction of more and more definite boundaries.

To control these entropic environments, civic agencies and corporate institutions respond with new design types: gated communities, enclave business parks, privatized “public” parks, border quarantine and security checkpoints in an effort to exert control over our physical and cultural edges. We want free trade, as long as it isn’t free.

systems re-cadence. They link, but their inherent genealogies and protocols remain intact.

Our paragenetical operations consist of three components: 1. The formation of organizations that identify, reciprocate and synchronize with existing physical systems.

2. An interest in density over objectification and permeability over perimeter.

3. The generation of atmosphere and continuity, without uniformity.

The following describes the above three intentions through the development of three landscape urbanist projects: the first is for an urban development in Amposta, In reaction to this inherent Spain as part of the Quaderns contradiction, between the 400,000 houses competition formation of loose social networks where our proposal contained and the imposition of constricted layers of linked infrastructures spatial boundaries, where existing woven through a site of berms; the political and economic powers second describes a Beale Street incrementally appropriate and Landing proposal in Memphis, coordinate public territory, we Tennessee where we developed a propose design and visual systems loose pedestrian pathway system of variable boundary that reinforce to adjust to the soft edges of the both the natural organized city and the Mississippi River; blending and multiplicity of and the third is a proposal for culture and allow for a permeable the re-use and development of expansion of as-needed space. the High Line on the west side of Manhattan in New York City where To explain urban and architectural we proposed a new Babylon, or systems that allow for loose, Green Ray, a linear greenhouse but determinate formations, we modulated by the city. have designed and employed a series of paragenetic systems Latent Tendencies: through three design projects.

Synchronicity Paragenesis describes a process C.G. Jung described sychronicity of co-mineral formation in which as a phenomenon where two the lateral development of contemporaneous events are one coincides and affects the linked together in a meaningful development of another. It requires manner. These event structures simultaneous, synchronized require the observation of a growth of at least two networked discreet moment in both space layers; it is genesis through and time that could be reflected weighted symbiosis. Paragenesis in a related instant. Often the can also be understood in what first event is curious, or perhaps it is not: it is not indiscriminate unrecognized, until the second blending, where juxtapositions event triggers a memory and are forced into a smooth mix; it identification of the first. Both is not metamorphosis; it is not events could be external to about transformation. It is about the psyche (in the physical adjustment and realignment, where environment), then internalized,

or one could be internal and one, external. With respect to site, again, two instances must be recognized, but in lieu of individual psyche, here we acknowledge a communal experience or memory found as self-determinate geometry patterns, programmatic or inhabitation systems on the site. The events latent within the site become meaningful for what they hold as future potential and for how they relate to one another, not because they hold symbolic histories. This acknowledges that found dimensions and formal patterns are not coincidence, but express the nature and sensibility of the place itself and it is up to the designer to trigger a connection.

In the Amposta project, we considered the evident patterns of the site to be a rich lineage of collective geographic changes.

While post-colonial Americans identify land with individual ownership and use, as David Lowenthal in Understanding Ordinary Landscapes argues, contemporary Europeans identify land collectively, through a linked cultural heritage or as the “rightful realm of all.”1 This collective perception describes to an individual his or her culture through land by indicating both place in physical space, as well as in time.

Land apportionment in Europe grew through layers: historical tribal attachments, population shifts, resource use, and inevitably from changes in state. Thus, existing divisions are less a literal mapping not of regime dominance, but more of individual and popular will; they often reflect generations of heritage, fluctuations of wealth and even geological change. This sense of patronage lends itself to another quality, the value that landscape is not simply to be used, but can be “a receptacle to manifold other things,” a notion of compositing experiences and uses that broadens its relationship to culture.2 In many ways, land in Europe has been a much clearer, more dependable organizing force of culture than authoritative sovereignty; as a symbol of

national identity, land itself has been fixed, while borders and institutions have fluctuated.

drop); to the mercado that includes a multi-tiered, open air shopping zone, banks, public square, civic buildings, churches, and public In the Ebro River Delta, we were library. The mercado is not simply intrigued by the existing layers an exterior mall or shopping strip, of geometrical information in the but rather a pedestrian civic space farmland towards the river and the and transportation hub located expanding gridded landscape from on the opposite edge from the the city. The agricultural land is highway. It is intended to be a divided into unequal striated lots, distinctive civic space that also stretching towards the river and functions as a gateway between bending off to form incomplete the Amposta site and whatever rings around the city center; developments may occur along the the grid stretches from the city non-highway edge. The mercado core outwards, to form housing also extends into the depth of blocks towards the site. In this the site transitioning seamlessly context, two systems converged into housing. It is not intended to at the site, an historic agricultural separate use, but rather to facilitate landscape and a contemporary the blending of commerce, civic commercial one; our project would space and inhabitation and to link therefore be to paragenetically to a highly dense area of other grow the systems together and infrastructures. simultaneously allow the new system to be both flexible and The second system, canals, deterministic. Our task was to offers an alternative way to enter align one to the other, to identify the housing landscape: by boat. their structures and protocols and While roadways enter the site both allow them to occur simultaneously off of the highway and the local in space and time. First, we arteries, the delta waterways act interconnected lot lines beyond as reminders of the sea and the the site to allow a connective agricultural dependence on water, network between the urban grid offer the experience and program and existing agricultural landscape. of active waterways, and also work Where the lines crossed, denser as transportation. Their edges are nodes could develop, where not always fixed, but open up softly they separated, they become the to the landscape through the rising geometry of electrical, water and and falling of water level, creating waste infrastructures that organize changing borders between houses the residential neighborhoods. and a constant re-appropriation In the same way that patronage of exterior land. The canals also of land in Europe has yielded to open up into different conditions popular will, there is no need for of public engagement through idealized, fixed zoning. The original overlooks, sidewalk promenades, lines are intended to be starting boat launches, wetland, and map and not absolute. ramped “beaches,” for example.

Five systems cohabitate from this original mapping: nodes, canals, pedestrian pathways, greenbelts and housing. The first system, nodes, occurs where the original paragenetic lines overlap. The commercial nodes vary in scale from a “cross-road” configuration, where an intersection can foster a corner store or small-scale market; to a ìtowncenter,î which would offer a sampling of uses (restaurant, cafe, market, dry goods store, park, even a postal

While the nodes, canals, greenbelts and minor and major roadways layer across the site, the pedestrian pathways knit them all together. These bikeways, walkways and trails weave through the residential neighborhoods, as well as the public spaces. They also connect to public bus routes on the major roadways and bring people via foot to the mercado and urban center. Inevitably, they are the most important thread to lead people across and over the

par

waterscape into and through the variable topographic changes and create a diagonal network of experience on the site.

Similarly, in Memphis, we found two existing systems of interest, in this case, the unusual, evolved city grid stemming from original colonization and the imposing, reconfiguring river’s edge. When the late 18th century American government appropriated and gridded the land west of the colonies, they exempted only a few existing spatial organizations from redistribution; one of these came from the French colonization along the Mississippi, the long lot.

Taken from agricultural patterns used in Normandy, the long lot delineation was typically a one to 10 proportion of land with one edge at the river leading back towards the interior field that allowed for a diversity of resources, irrigation water, and soil types.

This lateral subdivision can still be found most famously in Green Bay, Wisconsin where the lots became an interruption to the Cartesian grid, allowing for a juxtaposition of less compatible systems; in Baton Rouge, Louisiana the lots organized thinner urban constructs, but avoided conflicting with the downtown grid; in Memphis, Tennessee, however, the long lots evolved into the urban grid itself, allowing long, sinuous urban fingers crossed by substrates.3 Drawn from the Mississippi edge, they worked into a developing urban context and offered an existing logic within which to form a new, loose edge to the variable height and width of the river.

The Mississippi is both an edge and a path to Memphis. It defines a variable boundary that adjusts the relationship between

aquatic and inhabitable, city and natural, landscapes. In our design proposal, we sought to paragenetically interleaf the logics of both the system of long lots that ran perpendicular to the Mississippi and the indeterminate boundary between the river and the water’s edge. We created a lattice that responds to both contexts and allows for the definition of space to come from the density and proximity of program, resources and people.

The long lot delineations, drawn from the city into the project site, determined the lattice convergences, thus meshing the logics and dimensions of one into the other. The lattice then fosters other systems to fit within the open webs: lawn, cobblestone, plazas and a public market.

Synchronicity in the High Line proposal is posed as a programmatic organization formed by the geometric structure of and the legacy of gardens in New York City. Over the past two hundred years, New Yorkers have simultaneously reveled in dense urbanity and fought for breathing space. In times of abundance, cultivated natural environments have been places of luxury, leisure time and reflection; in times of hardship, open space has been a salvation, an escape from the odiferous miasma of industrialization and poverty to spiritual, cultural and physical purity. This false dichotomy between paradise and rehabilitation has denied the unique opportunities of blending environments-- the opportunities of allowing the urban condition to, in fact, heighten the experience of cultivated vegetative landscape.

The High Line proposal paragenetically aligns the programming and geometry of a greenhouse system to the building, block and precinct scales of the city. It meanders through the blocks, starting and stopping in sequence with the types and structures that surround it and forms formal and programmatic

alignments; the start and stop patterns of use and inhabitation coincide with existing urban cadences. There are three typologies of greenhouse that form from unique conditions of the high line: the linear, the split and the pleated formations. The linear is an elongated, repeated structure that changes by either additive or subtractive ends; its rhythms of starts and stops respond to the surrounding buildings. Useful for larger or repetitive spaces, it not only includes communally owned greenhouse or exterior gardens, but rentable mini-storage space units (like garden-side cabanas) as well. The split condition is a reaction that occurs when the High Line encounters a foreign object or enters an existing building as it does many times, particularly towards the High Line’s southern end. The singular end of the greenhouse divides and forms independent extrusions that follow their own course and may either end in the city or rejoin. The split condition creates smaller linear spaces ideal for retail kiosks. The pleated condition occurs when the geometry of the high line flexes to create a significant bend or curvature, as it does when it crosses Tenth Avenue. Since it offers both small-scaled crenellations and an overall visible identity above the city, it would house a more centralized public marketplace with changing vendors to sell produce and flowers grown on the High Line. The space below the High Line would both be organized in support of these activities as special parking and loading zones for material for storage and goods for market and would adjust itself to existing public transit nodes offerings points of connectivity with surrounding networks. In the proposal, milky glass escalator tubes extend from the underground and surface circulation of the city to enhance the experience of the vertical transition into the air. The organization of the city flexes each component as necessary. The economic and social structures

of the High Line thus synchronize with the physical delineations of the New York City-- one event becomes meaningful because it happens at the same time as the other.

Don’t fence me in: A Preoccupation with Density Patterns of life that offer more global and less local pressures and the ease of international travel and temporary migration have caused global culture to define spatial boundary in terms of density, rather than perimeter. One example of this is how contemporary culture fosters new “families” that are not longer defined only by strict racial, typological or economic categories, but cross and flex as subsequent generations increasingly embrace interracial marriage, nonmarried or non-reproductive couples, varieties of sexual orientation, divorce, secularism, single parent households, roommates, co-habitating multigenerational families, adoption, etc. Interestingly, Americans tend to even describe their identities through density terminology, by stating the distribution of their ethnicity (i.e. “I am 1/4 Dutch, 1/8 Irish, 1/8 Native American, and 1/2 Puerto Rican...”) over indicating their home region. This multiplicity has the potential to create rich iterations and personal identity within common experience that requires a more variable relationship between time and space.

Paragenesis recognizes that structural formation is a process of gradation over time; that form comes through additive processes based on coincident logics, or gradated density and therefore is never complete or absolute.

When paragenetic layers come in contact with one another, each are always partially, but never fully, transgressed.

The Amposta project uses density to propose an economic and spatial organization that accounts for minimum and maximum conditions of territory for housing,

commerce and public space.

It seeks to avoid the recent divisions that pronounce desires of exclusivity and lifestyle, as well as foster haunted divisions of elitism, ghettoism and real estate fashion. In looking at the relationship between ownership and land value, rather than “location, location, location” to describe a triple intensity of site importance for one site (site3), this term is reconfigured to define three locations overlapped within one (site + site + site). Because the original linkages from one side of the site to the other are a loose system, the lines do not form strict divisions of zoning, but rather proximities of land use-- a gradated change in the programmatic density. When one type of land is desired, the use can shift by percentage as necessary to accommodate; e.g. when more housing is needed, commercial space densifies by adding housing units on the second and third levels.

Housing distribution stems from a series of chains that anchor in the dense edges of the site and make their way through the berm landscape towards more open centers. Rather than cluster towards the center and leaving the edges vacant and growing, the housing first defines various edges to secure the nodes a strong economic base. We suggest three densities of housing-- minimum, medium and maximum-- to take the Amposta site from a garden city to thick neighborhoods.

In Catalonia, while 72% of dwellings house between 2 to 4 people, the 17% of the population lives alone and 11% lives in groups of 5 or more-- the even distribution of types of family sizes implies that housing must be ready to accommodate various structures. Our housing strategy, the Y-Wing, is less a specific architecture and more a system of spatial organization so that the housing units themselves offer an “overflow” possibility to accommodate this distribution.

It does not preference a specific

form, technology, or material, but instead suggests a variable individual unit that connects with other around it to create either larger units for expanding families or extended spaces for necessary use. The extension of the two arms can create a courtyard space, when conjoined with another unit, or act as a house addition, to provide for changing family needs. This open core functions similarly to the housing blocks currently found in Amposta.

The Y-Wing also offers a system for creating four types of housing: the single-family house, conjoined units, row house, and apartments.

The key to allowing for minimum and maximum spatial boundaries is strategizing the economic system to allow for expandable and partial ownership. The Y-Wing configuration allows for the spatial expansion, but ownership models would need to follow this appropriation of neighboring territory. For example, a Tenantsin-Common agreement would allow for a series of structures to be owned together and distributed or redistributed among the various families. Co-operative housing structures would also allow for this variability.

In the images for this project, we wanted to use digital techniques to express the qualities and sensibilities of density. The first technique, called efflux, describes the process by which a solid mass distributes into a series of objects.

Painting effects tools in Alias Waveform Maya reconceptualize how traditional modeling software renders digital environments.

Instead of making a definitive form through building digital surfaces, the Paint Effects tool allows one to distribute complex, variable elements without having to model one and repeat it identically.

Rather than creating an object, it distributes fields of adjusted components, such as trees, grass, hair, rocks, etc. We sought to soften the edges of land by densifying the ground; each area of vegetation begins as a mass and

loosens into smaller scale pieces, much like the distribution of the housing chains.

Density in the Memphis project is found in the visual representation as well as through the distribution of the lawn, cobblestone, plaza and the extended public market networks. These programs are distributed based on their tendencies towards the existing systems from which they were derived. The cobblestone, referencing the existing finely grained texture of Memphis, is positioned towards the river’s edge both for practical necessity, to protect the erosion of the changing waterline, but also because it links to a larger geologic timeline of the Mississippi. The marketplace, a highly developed architectural component that could be adjustable to various vendors, events or public functions, is located and densified towards the city edge since the city contains more interior space. The plaza system allows for either formal, in an organized amphitheater, or informal outdoor seating for impromptu performance, public groups; it too leans towards the city. The lawn, also thought of as the Memphis welcome mat, shifts in density from the south end of the park to the north following its existing tendencies, as it if were drawn out and through the site.

To create the sensibility of changing density within the site images, we used another technique, saturation, by creating fog in the environment. Changing the saturation through fog does three things in the project’s representation: it focuses the viewer on our intervention on the site; it adds weight to the air, as if the river itself had seeped into the atmosphere and thus into the city; and it obscures the edges to thicken the zone between the observer and the landscape. This last characteristic allows the viewer to simultaneously perceive a vast horizontal distance and not lose a sense of three-dimensional space.

The High Line proposal shifts its density and boundaries by adjusting its greenhouse lengths, varying the size and width of its external spaces and loosing its extensions into the street level of Manhattan until they dissipate into existing pathways. We employed both efflux and saturation visual strategies to encourage a perception of changing density.

Efflux develops as vegetative patterns repeat through the greenhouse images, starting in scale as a mass of color and evolving towards the viewer as individual, repeated flowers or plants. Within the greenhouses, we created mists, vaporous and fog effects to obscure the depth of the interior space as well as mimic the milky familiarity of translucent greenhouse glass. Density, something that is both intellectual and perceptive, must operate at both levels-- we have tried to convey its rich possibilities in how it changes urban inhabitation, but also what it creates beyond functionality: a sensibility of variation and open boundaries.

A city runs through it: Continuity without Uniformity Our paragenetic model fosters a Leibnizian definition of continuity, that all change, sequence, or series in nature proceeds without interstice, and that nothing passes from one state to another per saltum.4 While this describes the relationship between elements, it does not assume the elements to be alike, nor internally uniform.

Layers forming paragenetically allow the complexities and logics of each system to adjust gradually to one another while still retaining their own internal logics. A contemporary example is the music D.J. technique of “pitch bending” where one song is sped up or slowed down to adapt to the song currently playing. It is an intuitive move to adjust pitch to flow between one and another without merging the two songs.

Their time structures align without changing the sensibility, identity or timbre of either song.

In landscape, continuity can be a series of surfaces, linked environments, or material effects.

Frederick Law Olmstead wrote that people did not cognitively perceive “natural” vistas, but instead viscerally reacted with pleasure though affect to nature and space, or “unconsciously recreated.” He believed the curative power of natural scenery was universal, that one did not require higher learning or cultural background: “to enjoy it intellectually, yes; to be affected by it, made healthier, better, happier by it, no.”5 He encouraged the distribution of opening and closing vistas, where “the eye could be constantly refreshed by new scenes.” and the use of familiar vegetation over the exotic; humble flowers to “highbred marvels”; trees with “plain green leaves” rather than ones that were “blotched, spotted and fretted.” 6 7 This familiarity is a form of contextualism, to cultivate a smooth transition from stress to recreation so that while spaces change (from urban to pastoral) new colors, textures and botany would not jar or disconnect the viewer. He avoids garish colors, garden toys and purely ornamental flora.

The most powerful continuity resident in the High Line Proposal is its sensibility, not its form. In the 21st century, in a 19th century structure, our project proposes a new pleasure ground: an interior and exterior, public and communally owned, elevated greenhouse landscape that folds together the presumed antagonists of urban and natural life. It is not a natural environment as escape from city life, but rather exalts it by drawing it through the blocks themselves in one of the most unique conditions of the city. The greenhouses follow the continuous surface of the elevated plane; they are ephemeral atmospheres of mist, luscious hothouses, translucent night beacons, community saturnalia that foster private indulgence and wicked collective cultivation. They offer Babylon in the 21st century-- real

foliage in the concrete jungle--as if the decadent urges of the boom city have come to rest in the space above the street. Babylon is not longer a decadence of simple carnal desires, the pleasures of the 21st century city are indulgences in time and space: the time for the slow speed of plant cultivation, the time to meander, the time to literally stop and smell the roses, the space for non-profitable life, collective behavior, and personal territory. Here, social butterflies mix with real ones.

To express the importance and affect of the historical changes in human cultivate of nature, we developed a continuous lineage of historical images. Here, like pitch bending, we sought alignments between found images and adjusted their intervals to allow one to blend to the next. The adjustments create continuity, but with each image still retaining its form, color and intent. The continuous image is not meant to teach the viewer about the history of the relationship between Man and Nature, but to evoke its atmosphere, a sense of pleasure and pattern from the color and texture of how people have depicted that relationship for centuries.

The Memphis project evokes continuity through both visual and formal strategies. Formally, the lattice structure creates a series of pedestrian pathways that move from multiple points within the city to and through the park in a continuous, but differentiated system. The lattice acts as a framework to create a loose, complex system of pedestrian pathways, exterior textures, cultivated vegetative landscapes and a linear pier that allows access to the water from the end of Beale Street. It provides a loose network of connections, opportunities and transitions between these soft zones of urban and river life.

Visually, to explore the horizontality of the river and the open adjustment between the city and

the waterway, we developed a panorama strategy. We created the panorama through perspective view angles and adjusting the depth of field and create a visceral experience of water edge and a much stronger global connection from a local stance. Here near space is clear and depth is obscured to give a greater sense of distance, an increase in the sense of vista and the perception of air thickness. The change in focus implies a greater distance or separation between viewer and landscape. The panorama accentuates the horizontality of the landscape indicating almost a stretch towards the view west.

clean and naturally sort delta and runoff water; and cultivated fields, for commercial agriculture, gardening, formal parks and sports areas. To demonstrate these gradated transitions, we feathered one zone to another through the use of a “ramp” shader that adjusted percentages of one territory and the next. The forest bends into the grassland, into the wetlands, etc. The visual sensibility of the ramps also came through the development of site images at the beginning of the project. We took Catalonian images and aligned them by color and lines to associate them and then blended them together; it was our first work on the project and The land formations and vegetative encouraged the development of all strategies in the Amposta project three paragenetic systems. define a continuous system of land territories that interact with the Using paragenesis requires an extended canal network. Within the assumption that dimensional residential areas, undulating berms and geometric structures are not redefine sites by allowing the merely mute artifacts of history, rising and falling level of the canal but meaningful palimpsests that overspill to create flexible edges map our cultural priorities and defined by permanent topographic values. It takes “meaning” from manipulation. Thus weather, the realm of metaphor into analogy, season, and agricultural need all the patterns of our inhabitation-participate in the actual square the distances between structures, area of owned land and allow a the legal definition of boundaries, gradation of responsibility to occur the distribution of programmatic between lots. In some cases, the on the land-- do not symbolize berms push into the ground rather us, they are us, in a new medium. than protrude and therefore buffer If we organize our logics upon the housing from the highway the systemic logics before and denser noise zones. Lots are us, if we subjectively read the more like territories that have a patterns inherent in the site and continuously updating boundary; extrapolate, but not mimic, then sites do have an edge, so each our project will be contextual at resident know what is his or a deep level that allows us to hers, and at the same time, the ignore the question of style or no boundaries fluctuate renegotiating style. What defines individualism, territory between neighbors. either as clients or designers, then, is the way in which we read The greenbelt system also existing structures and how we employs a continuous method prioritize some observations over of transition between different others. If Classicism was about zones. The greenbelts consist of a stylistic repetition of historical blended natural landscape that form as symbol and Modernism runs along many of the canals about the rejection of historical and are distributed throughout the models, perhaps we can move into site. They are a combination of methods of generating architecture four types of natural and artificial in landscape that embeds existing ecosystems: trees, limited since and individualistic sensibilities the soil cannot support extensive neither dwelling on, avoiding, nor forests; grasslands, for the health superficially attending, context. of the soil; wetlands, to collect,

Sensibility involves protocol, manner and system, but goes beyond the tangible because it straddles between cognition and emotional perception. Here, visual representation becomes critical in conveying the atmosphere of the sensibility generated so that the viewer understands the idea of what is being conveyed through an image, yet responds without cognitive orchestration.

Digital painting, environmental, and other density effects have the potential to engender and encourage this exploration and avoid the preconception of the digital surface. Rather than see each digital environment as smooth, it can have as much nap or tooth as we desire to give us new perceptions of depth, texture, motion, atmosphere, in the same inventive way that materials in the digital realm can exist with exaggerated qualities of reflectivity, weight, and transparency.

Inevitably, Paragenesis is a not a design process, it is a sensibility, and, like a system, it creates the set of rules for generating a series of outcomes; but it also lets us do more, it lets us pick the best ones.

Endnotes 1 David Lowenthal, “European Landscape Transformations” in Understanding Ordinary Landscapes. Paul Groth and Todd Bressi, ed., New Haven: Yale University Press, 1997. pg. 183.

2 ibid., pg. 184.

3 Cole Harris, “ French Landscapes in North America” in The Making of the American Landscape, Michael P. Conzen, ed., Boston: Unwin Hyman, 1990. pp. 73-75.

4 OED definition.

5 Witold Rybczynski, A Clearing in the Distance. New York: Scribner, 1999. pg. 363.

6 Julius Fabos, Gordon Milde and Michael Weinmayr, Frederick Law Olmstead Sr. Founder of Landscape Architecture in America. Amhearst: University of Massachusetts Press, 1968, pg.

18, 20.

7 ibid. pg. 62.

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act ANDREW THURLOW, PARTNER > education

1998 Columbia University, Graduate School of Architecture, Planning and Preservation, NY Masters of Science in Advanced Architectural Design Avery Library Archive, selected for permanent collection CAD Design Honor Award, awarded at graduation Full Teaching Assistant Award Scholarship 1995 Syracuse University, School of Architecture, NY Bachelor of Architecture

James Britton Memorial Award for Outstanding Thesis Super Jury, Thesis Invitation in final year AIA Academic Scholarship, New York Frederick W. Revels Traveling Scholarship Slivers Design Award 1990 Greenfield Community College, MA Associate in Science, Art professional experience

2001 - Thurlow Small Architecture, Inc. Pawtucket, RI Partner 2000 UT Battelle Group

Designer Oak Ridge National Laboratory Master Plan/Research Campus, DOE/UT-Battelle, Oak Ridge, TN. 1997 Venturi, Scott Brown and Associates, www.vsba.com Designer Trenton Firehouse Headquarters, Trenton, NJ & Perelman Quadrangle, Irvine Auditorium Renovation, Philadelphia, PA 1994 - 97 Ballinger, www.ballinger-ae.com Intern Architect Comcast Communications Company, Headend and Hub Facilities Prototypes Cabrini College, Sports Recreation Center, Radnor, PA Rowan University, School of Engineering, Glassboro, NJ

Highest Honor Award + Design Excellence, Philadelphia AIA

1994 Munley Brown Architects Intern Architect KOMA Competition, Los Angeles, CA. Honorable Mention

Andrew Thurlow is a Partner in TSA and a tenured Associate Professor in Architecture at Roger Williams University where he founded and runs the School of Art, Architecture and preservation Digital Manufacturing Laboratory.

His previous professional work in Philadelphia at the office of Venturi, Scott Brown and Associates includes as a designer on the Trenton Firehouse and the Irvine Auditorium at the University of Pennsylvania. At Ballinger, he was a designer on Headend and Hub Facilities Prototypes for Comcast Communications Company, the Cabrini College, Sports Recreation Center in Radnor, Pennsylvania and Henry M. Rowan Hall, School of Engineering at Rowan University in Glassboro, New Jersey. For Rowan, Ballinger received a 1999 Highest Honor Award and a 1996 Design Excellence Honor Award from the American Institute of Architects, Philadelphia Chapter.

In 2000, Andrew was one of four faculty at the University of Tennessee to develop a Master Plan for the Oak Ridge National Laboratory with Battelle under the leadership of Department of Energy Secretary Bill Richardson and ORNL Director Bill Medea.

He has also taught architecture at Columbia University, the Roger Williams University School of Art, Architecture and Historic Preservation and the University of Tennessee College of Architecture + Design.

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row Ballinger

HENRY M. ROWAN HALL > Location Glassboro, New Jersey Date 1994 - 1997 Ballinger Team Jeffrey French, Terry D Steelman, Mark Chadwick, David Lang with Margaret Grahame, Eric Keune, Todd Ray, Andrew Thurlow Local architect Radey and Fuller Client Rowan University, Henry M. Rowan

The Rowan College School of Engineering is concerned with the ongoing and future tasks of engineering as context, landscape, spatial and functional structures.

It simultaneously engages a body of water while creating a new quadrangle for the entire campus.

The definition of these exterior spaces are defined by the two distinct primary geometries of the building. The bar-forms are each comprised of laboratory and classroom programs, responding individually to both an idea of formal campus planning and that of object building. The formal and programmatic configurations are to be viewed as distinct pieces of function that relate to one another. A ‘tower’ acts as the central core for the building while the auditorium form relates to the newly created campus entrance.

Two L-walls clad in limestone wrap each laboratory bar, while a curved faculty office wing clad in metal panel is offset by the rectalinearity and materiality of the larger of the two L-walls. The faculty offices terminate in the atrium between the two laboratorybar geometries. As well, multiple circulatory devices activate the academic convergence and eventspace. The atrium space is both visually and physically connected to the primary exterior space of the building, the small lake, via the massive curtain wall and stair system that lead down to the water’s edge.

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per venturi, scott brown & Assoc

PERELMAN QUADRANGLE / IRVINE AUDITORIUM INTERIOR RENOVATION > Location Philadelphia, Pennsylvania Date 1995 - 2000 Client University of Pennsylvania Design office + Team Venturi, Scott Brown and Associates Robert Venturi, Denise Scott Brown, John Hunter, Susan Lockwood, Richard Stokes, Jon Wagner with Hideano Abe, Courtney Anspach, John Bastian, Stephanie Chistoff, Ronald Evitts, Elizabeth Hitchcock, Jake Hokanson, Kathleen Culpa, James Liebman, Jeffrey Lewis, Adam Meyers, Timothy Mock, Julie Munzner, Mindy No, Felisa Opper, Eric Oskey, Cynthia Padilla, Ahmed Patash, Matthew Seltzer, Andrew Thurlow, Howard Traub, Kenneth Wood, Jeffrey Wyant, Aaron Young

The great hall of Irvine Auditorium was adaptively restored as a multi-seat performance hall with variable capacities ranging from 400 to 1,200 seats. Renovations provided the auditorium with modern sight lines and acoustical, lighting, and environmental conditions for music, speech, and organ performances while retaining its chromatic architectural glory and its historic organ. Student practice rooms, a rehearsal hall, double-story side lobbies, and appropriate backstage spaces were also part of the restoration scheme. A new campus-side entry from the Commons to Irvine now facilitate day-to-day use and enhance, both symbolically and functionally, Irvine’s participation in the Perelman Quadrangle design—a campus center, not as a new palace, but as a new precinct.

(Robert Venturi)

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tre venturi, scott brown & Assoc

TRENTON FIREHOUSE HEADQUARTERS > Location Trenton, New Jersey Date 1996 - 2000 Client City of Trenton Design office Venturi, Scott Brown and Associates Design team Robert Venturi, Timothy Kearney, Brian Wurst, with Sara Loe, Daniel McCoubrey, Amy Noble, Nathalie Peters, Andrew Thurlow Local architect Vaughn Organization

The architectural design for the Trenton Fire Station Extension directly accommodates and frankly expresses on the outside a big garage with industrial-like auxiliary spaces; yet it independently fulfills the civic-aesthetic dimension via applied iconography. This iconography embraces graphic and symbol juxtaposed on form; it is independent of the form and integral to it at the same time.

As signage it identifies, informs, and ornaments all at once. The frieze across the front of the new wing, consisting of Roman lettering works to unify the irregular composition of the functional garage-like facade. At the new pedestrian entrance is architectural fanfare: a tradition statue of a fireman and a representation of a large-scale helmet are the central accent for the whole composition.

The entrance also purposely allows a view through the building, thereby spatially uniting the front and the back. (Robert Venturi)

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mts MAIA THURLOW SMALL, AIA PARTNER > education

1999 Columbia University, Graduate School of Architecture, Planning and Preservation, NY Master of Architecture American Institute of Architects Henry J. Adams Medal William H. Kinne Fellowship Award Skidmore, Owings and Merrill Traveling Fellowship,

Columbia University GSAPP Nominee Fred L. Liebmann Award, New York Society of Architects

Maia Small is a partner in Thurlow Small Architecture, an architecture and urban design office begun in 2001 that operates both in the small-scale networks of Rhode Island and the evolving global discourse of architecture and landscape urbanism.

1997 Archi-tectonics, New York Designer

Johns Residence, Millbrook, New York Maashaven Housing Study, Rotterdam, the Netherlands

Prior to her independent office, she worked at the New York office of Bernard Tschumi Architects as the lead designer on the Downsview Park finalist proposal for a $145 national park in Toronto, Canada and designer on the finalist proposal for a convention center in Lyon, France. She also worked at Gary E. Handel and Associates in New York, where she assisted in the interior planning and elevation studies of the $400 M Millennium Place Towers in Boston. Between 1994 and 1996, at the San Francisco office of Mark Cavagnero Associates, she assisted with the design and documents for the $20 M Renovation and Addition to the Rafael Film Center in San Rafael, the $40 M Renovation and Addition to the California Palace of the Legion of Honor and Master Planning for the De Young Museum.

1994 - 96 Mark Cavagnero Associates, San Francisco Intern Architect

Legion of Honor Museum, San Francisco: Addition Rafael Film Center, Addition and Renovation San Francisco Civic Center Courthouse DeYoung Museum Master Plan, San Francisco

She has also taught architecture at the Harvard University Graduate School of Design, the Rhode Island School of Design, and the University of Tennessee.

1994 University of California, Berkeley, College of Environmental Design Bachelor of Arts in Architecture with Highest Honors Professional Promise Award, awarded at graduation Undergraduate Thesis Selected for Permanent Collection,

University of California Library Student Lounge Competition, Honorable Mention professional experience

2001 - Thurlow Small Architecture, Inc. Pawtucket, RI Partner

1999 - 00 Bernard Tschumi Architects, New York Lead Designer Parc Downsview Park, Invited Competition, Finalist Congress Centre, Lyon, France: Invited Competition WIPO Headquarters, Invited Competition, Third Place 1998 Gary Edward Handel and Associates, New York Designer

Millennium Place, Boston, Massachusetts

1993 - 94 David Baker + Associates, San Francisco /

Baker + Vilar Architects, Oakland Intern Architect

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gary e. handel & assoc

MILLENNIUM TOWERS > Location Boston, Massachusetts Date 1997 - 2001 Client Millennium Partners Design office + Team Gary E. Handel and Associates Gary E. Handel, D. Blake Middleton, Frank Fusaro, Richard Lee, John, Banks, Bo Lee, Annmarie Lewis, Maia Small, Sylvia Won Consultants Childs Bertman Tseckares Inc. (Architecture), DeSimone Consulting Engineers, P.L.L.C. (Structural Engineers), Enclos Corporation (Facade), Cosentini Associates (Mechanical), Haley & Aldrich (Geotechnical)

Located at the southern corner of Boston Commons, Millennium Place is a two building mixeduse project that significantly contributes to the revitalization of the historical theater district of downtown Boston. Two towers, located on an irregular perimeter along Boylston, Washington and Avery streets, define the corner of the common and identify a gateway between the park and neighborhoods beyond. The podium of each tower is massed to clearly demarcate the thresholds of each of the surrounding neighborhoods, with a vertical “oculous� that marks the corner at Washington and Avery Street, providing an urban counterpoint to the Old South Meeting House to the north. The program consists of retail, an 18-screen cinema, restaurant, hotel, fitness club, and condominiums. Both building are clad in gray granite, glass and metal panel. I was involved with massing and elevation studies, as well as interior residential plan configurations.

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mark cavagnero assoc

CALIFORNIA PALACE OF THE LEGION OF HONOR RENOVATION & ADDITION > Location San Francisco, CA Date 1990 - 1996 Client Fine Arts Museum of San Francisco Design office + Team Mark Cavagnero Associates with Edward Larrabee Barnes MCA Design team 1994 - 1996 Mark Cavagerno, John Barnes, Karen Gibb, Bradley Davidson, Roslyn Cole, Maia Small Consultants GFDS Engineers, (Structural), Auerbach + Associates (Lighting)

The California Palace of the Legion of Honor was a $40 million renovation and addition project undertaken by MCA in association with Edward Larrabee Barnes. The original building, constructed in 1927 as a one and a quarter-sized replica of the Legion in Paris, houses the $2 billion collection of the Fine Arts Museum of San Francisco. The addition created a series of new modern galleries in the excavated courtyard of the historic building, new curatorial spaces, restaurant, museum store, storage facilities, and lobby desks. The building also underwent a seismic upgrade, ADA compliance, and significant historical restoration.

This project was published in both Architecture (December 1995) and Architectural Record (April 1997).

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mark cavagnero assoc

RAFAEL FILM CENTER > Location San Rafael, CA Date 1994 - 1997 Client California Film Institute Design office Mark Cavagnero Associates Design team 1994 - 1996 Mark Cavagerno, (Principal), Karen Gibb (Project Architect), Roslyn Cole, Maia Small Consultants Steven Tipping + Associates, (Structural), J S Engineers (Mechanical), Auerbach + Associates (Lighting)

The architectural design for the Trenton Fire Station Extension directly accommodates and frankly expresses on the outside a big garage with industrial-like auxiliary spaces; yet it independently fulfills the civic-aesthetic dimension via applied iconography. This iconography embraces graphic and symbol juxtaposed on form; it is independent of the form and integral to it at the same time.

As signage it identifies, informs, and ornaments all at once. The frieze across the front of the new wing, consisting of Roman lettering works to unify the irregular composition of the functional garage-like facade. At the new pedestrian entrance is architectural fanfare: a tradition statue of a fireman and a representation of a large-scale helmet are the central accent for the whole composition.

The entrance also purposely allows a view through the building, thereby spatially uniting the front and the back. (Robert Venturi)

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Praxis

Indian Architect & Builder

feidad

Indian Architect & Builder

Indian Architect & Builder

Center Journal

ACSA

Era 21

Archithese

Emergent Memory

Des Moines Register

Architectural Discourse 2007

#10 Urban Matters 2008

TSA: Art city Project 2004

International Conference 2003

TSA: MANufactured Housing Project 2004

Ekologie, Realizace, Architektura 2003

National AIDS Memorial Competition 2005

Architects design for reality of world problems 2005

Designing Digital Architecture 2007

On Landscape Urbanism 2007

Manufactured Housing 2003

ACSA

Annual Conference 2002

PUBLIC

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Manufactured Housing 2005

Metro Profile: Print Preview 2004

Metropolis

Daimler-Chrysler

Providence Business News

ACSA

ACSA

PreFab

www.thurlowsmall.com

ACADIA

Bauen mit System

Arch+

Portable Architecture

TSA 2007

Adaptable, Modular, Dismountable, Light, Mobile Architecture 2003

Architektur mit Fertigteilen 2002

Annual Conference 2006

Website 2006

Wohnmobile 2001

Design Navigator Print Houses 2004

Surfacing Urbanisms 2006

Fabrication 2005

ACSA

D’Arcy Thompson 2001

CATIONS