Chelsea Loft

This is one of a series of residential projects which result from the study of urban domestic space. The loft as a spatial type for living can be seen as a freeing of the traditional programmatic organization of domesticity from a series of specified rooms based on a typical family structure to flexible open space.

These investigate organizations of conditional programmatic structure by incorporating a variety of transformative elements to negotiate degrees of privacy and programmatic specificity within open loft spaces.  In this loft we explored variations on themes familiar from the previous designs (this is the third project designed for the family) – the flexibility of the home to adjust to evolving lifestyles, the articulation of multiple domestic activities, and the unconventional use of conventional materials.  The loft is organized by a series of four sliding wood and glass panels and three pivoting doors dividing formal and informal spaces.

Location

New York, NY

Client

Private Client

Year

1994

Size

5,000 sqft

MFA Design Team

Scott Marble, Karen Fairbanks, Pete Cornell, Jay Berman

Structural Engineer

Office of Structural Design

General Contractor

Noah & David

Sliding Panel Fabricator

Sub-Studio (William Massie)

Recognition

Design Award, AIA New York

Photography

Paul Warchol; Eduard Hueber / Arch Photo, Inc.

Choreographer’s Loft

Using transparent, translucent and opaque materials, several types of interchangeable programmatic relationships and connections are possible within a tight space, allowing the choreographer to choreograph his domestic space for various events.

This loft is located on the ninth floor of an industrial building on lower Fifth Avenue, north facing with minimal natural light. The space is organized through a series of dynamic planes running longitudinally from the entry to the window wall. These planes range from glass rods and various types of plate glass to sliding fin-ply and glass panels that mediate the relationship of the program and space on either side.  For instance, the guest room is adjacent to the kitchen and can become a dining area by opening the sliding panels or can become privately linked to the bathroom by closing the panels. The materials of these primary organizing planes are used in other locations to establish associations between traditionally separated domestic programs, and these associations are further developed through the slate, cork and cherry flooring materials that extend under the planes connecting adjacent spaces.

Location

New York, NY

Client

Private Client

Year

1994

Size

1,700 sqft

MFA Design Team

Scott Marble, Karen Fairbanks, Jay Berma, Stacey Jacovini, Nicolas Kelemen, Kim Yao

Recognition

Design Citation Award, AIA New York

Metropolitan Home Design 100

Cardiff Bay Opera House

The opera house was located at the juncture of a major boulevard, a peripheral distribution road and the harbor, and was to serve as the core of a future urban development of the surrounding area.

Our design is organized by a mediating wall surface that spirals out from the stage proscenium to become the building envelope.  Urban scale windows on the exterior reiterate the wall surface as an interface between audience/performance.  Entry ramps extend the urban space of the adjacent piazza into the concourse, allowing events in these areas to occur independent of the Opera House proper.  Influenced by the importance that water has played in the identity of Cardiff, glass rain slots are placed on axis with the historic city docks allowing rain to fall through the building.

Location

Cardiff, Wales

Client

Cardiff Bay Opera House Competition

Project Type

Competition

Year

1994

MFA Design Team

Scott Marble, Karen Fairbanks, Jay Berman, Stacey Jacovini, Nicolas Kelemen, Kim Yao

Nara Convention Hall

This project exploits various aspects of theater to establish a condition for design. Both the physical structure and the activities are used to create a context for the site.

“In a theater, a thousand people cannot sit in the same seat and thus we cannot say that any two of them have seen the same play…The playwright has to take aim at his public by taking his shotgun and firing a thousand pellets at once, if he is to strike successfully a thousand views in a single blow. Film resolves this problem, since the spectator, no matter where he is in the theater, sees exactly what the camera saw. If Charlie Chaplin looks directly into the camera, his photogram will look directly at everyone in the audience, whether they are sitting to the right or the left…*

Marcel Pagnol, Confidences, as quoted in Paul Virilio, “Improbable Architecture” in Lost Dimension. Semiotext(e)

 

This project exploits various aspects of theater to establish a condition for design. Both the physical structure (stage, auditorium, foyer, backstage, etc.) and the activities (performance, rehearsal, spectate, etc.) are used to create a context for the site. The theater proscenium is interpreted as a compression of space into a picture plane between performance and audience. This compressed space is extracted from the theater to become a strip that runs the length of the site connecting the two main halls and organizing both the building and the plaza. This proscenium strip is treated as a vehicle for numerous and sometimes conflicting design interpretation. It operates both as a separator (in the case of the auditoriums) and as a connector (in the case of the entrance bridges). Within this strip are a series of electronic screens that establish a condition for considering the nature of the live theater by simulating the performance for the plaza. The entrance bridges feeding the convention hall are conceived as a system of urban movement. By extending beyond the site to make direct connections to the JR station plaza, the department store across the street, and the residential neighborhood, the bridges actively engage the surrounding context. To address the more intimate scale of the lower residential neighborhood west of the site, the middle part of the building is lifted to continue the space of the plaza through the site and allow direct pedestrian passage through the site.

Location

Nara, Japan

Client

Nara Convention Hall International Design Competition

Project

Competition

Year

1992

MFA Design Team

Scott Marble, Karen Fairbanks, Andrew Berman, Zachary Hinchliffe, Michael Kudler, Daniel Niggli, Christine Wentz, James Yoon

Consulting Engineers:

Arup (Guy Nordensen, Mahadev Raman, Paula Beever)

Landscape Architects:

Quennell Rothschild Associates (Nicholas Quennell, Andrew Moore)

Recognition

Competition Finalist, International Design Competition

Model

Sub-Studio (William Massie)

CAD Modeling

GIST, Inc. (Eden Muir)

Photography

Eduard Hueber / Arch Photo, Inc