| CLUSTERING | SPONTANEITY | EQUALITY |
Contra Costa Community Commons
| Studio Project in El Cerrito in California |
UC Berkeley, Fall 2020
This project explores the language of clustering, in which the rooms group together by their program, and these groups are connected through the common ground plane. This approach would reveal the figure-ground relationships between the positive-program rooms and the negative-leftover space.
Each program is divided into a series of rooms, of which were rotated and arranged along a grid and at least one edge of each room adheres to a grid line. Here, the green represents the library programs, and the blue represents the community programs.
Additional patterning is embedded into the ground floors to mesh together the space between the rooms.
What was interesting about this development is how a strict set of rules was able to produce a spontaneous-looking form.
Without acknowledging the base grid, the physicality of each program seems distant or unrelated to one another, yet the overall composition communicates a sort of order.
This phenomenon is further explored through the gridding of exterior surfaces, in which windows and skylights are punctured through the grid modules. As shown with the rendered perspectives, the absence of these grids reveals instinctual randomness with each opening, yet all of these openings come together through this language.
From the creation of these forms, this play of cluster and rotation proves the equal necessities between positive and negative spaces. The negative-void spaces were opportunities for specific occurrences—there were voids that act as courtyards that connect the surrounding rooms together and provide a shared space. Examples of this are found in my second orthographic, where an exterior reading room is a void created by three library masses. In this case, this void is large enough to harness a program, but there are plenty of other spaces that are unoccupiable, yet they still serve a circulatory purpose—examples of this show in the voids created within the community service rooms.
In addition, there are negative spaces that may be seen as useless or redundant gaps, but these smaller spaces are just as important as the larger ones. Without them, there would be less focus on the programs and the form would lose its spontaneous qualities. The definition of these gaps is flexible, for we could identify these gaps upon the exterior of the building. It is moments like these that offer points of interest for the form, so if these areas were to be filled in, the massing approaches the look like a monolith rather than a cluster of rooms.
