Franco Chen, Haley Galian, Naomi Herring, Carmen Ng, Patricia Reyes, Megan Symm, Lusine Yeghiazaryan
103
Spring 2013

The last project of first year studio asked of students to design a bike shelter with a group of seven. Upon completion, the bike shelter must be able to comfortably seat three, and must be able to safely accommodate ten bikes. Along with the capacity requirement is the requirement that recycled materials must account for the majority of the construction.

“Linear Wrap Bike Shelter” is based on the notion of how we define spaces. “Space,” as we defined it was contained within a rectangular prism the size of a standardized parking spot with seven feet of vertical clearance. On the surfaces of this rectangle, one continuous line was drawn, only differing in the angles of protrusion onto adjacent planes. This line was imagined as a cut across the surfaces of our rectangular prism. A last step was taken where we took the negative of this model and propagated this new form as the container of the space, so rather the cut being transparent and permeable, it has now become opaque and the solid.

Subsequently, enough opaqueness still remained to successfully define the space as an indoor space, but by taking the negative of this model, the nature of the space changed along with it. Questions raised in this exercise include: what does it take to perceive a space, and to what extent can we push this perception, while maintaining its illusion?