lift tower

For this project, students were tasked with designing a San Francisco multi-use high rise building. I initially began the project by examining the notion of the building as floating masses, ultimately the final design put more emphasis on a different set of diagrammatic operations: Beginning with the notion of the “standard” extruded rectangular building, the project’s form arises from tearing the entire building mass from its site. This in turn created four distinct regions throughout the project: an entry retail level within the excavated site, an office level within the “torn” site mass, a daycare which would take advantage of the floating plaza, and live-work condominiums on the building’s uppermost levels.

In my creation of the building skin, I attempted to further reinforce the operation of tearing through the creation of 3 distinct layers of skin: An opaque layer, a transparent one, and a green layer.