Design Strategy Statement for Wang Center

by Mach, Scogin Merrill Elam Architects

 

Our strategy for designing the campus center includes the following:

  1. -   The building's relation to the land is affirming but complex.
  2. -   It accedes to historically established principles wherever possible.
  3. -   It emphasizes and dramatizes the natural topography.
  4. -   The building rejects transcendental paradigms.
  5. -   It embraces local and existing conditions as sources of richness and beauty.
  6. -   It celebrates the variety and roughness of topography.
  7. -   The building is a beacon.  It is open and light.
  8. -   It grants vistas to other campus "centers".
  9. -   It provides framed views of itself from waypoints in the terrain.
  10. -   Experiences of the building emulate those of the landscape.
  11. -   The building reveals and conceals and promotes discovery and exploration.
  12. -   It safeguards individual experience while celebrating community.
  13. -   It architecturalizes kettles, eskers, kames and drumlins.
  14. -   A campus center avoids a single outward or inward focus.
  15. -   It meanders and rambles.
  16. -   It looks through and back upon itself.
  17. -   The campus center is a place of potential and fullness.  It asks questions.
  18. -   Unfolding encounters and the building's organizing principle.
  19. -   The building is made of "un-owned" spaces.
  20. -   The building is made of spaces open to ownership by all.
  21. -   Programmatic distribution should be as much about experimental, spatial and processional variety as functional adjacency.
  22. -   Sponsors the uncompromised coexistence of the individual and the collective.