RESIDUAL_FIELDS Fall 2021 | Senior Level Project Award
The project is located just north of the main Florida Atlantic University Campus. As a connection to the University and the FAU Research Park, the goal is to integrate the community at large to FAU.
The Boca Raton Air & Space Museum also lies directly adjacent to the Boca Raton Airport, serving as a satellite fixed base operations. The position of the project between the airport, FAU and the arterial I-95 highway makes it a prime spot for attracting users passing through Boca Raton.
The storied history of this site also makes it an interesting location for an air and space museum. Before development, this area was home to a variety of burrowing animal species. Today, a small portion of the site remains a preserve for burrowing owls, gopher tortoises, and others that live in symbiosis in the caverns they each create. As this area was developed, and the airport runways were constructed, it became a strategic military base location during WWII. The proximity to the coast allowed for an efficient base to be positioned here. Also, radar technology was first tested at this historic military site further cementing its importance. On the existing concrete pad, the remnants of one of the WWII hangars still exists as historical residue imbuing the physical site and with a sense of place rooted in history.
The rich history of this area and its connection to the preservation of natural habitats that thrive here were main drivers in the formation of the project. Investigating, extracting, and reforming these residues informed the making and meaning of the architecture.
Graphic Warfare
The project investigates how to use historical residue as a catalyst to drive the organization and experiential nature of future realit[ies]y. The project interrogates previous physical contexts and extracts relevant data in order to fabricate new organizational, geometric, and ecological frameworks within the existing context. The investigation stems from a process of examination, extraction, and subsequent reinterpretation of historical data to serve as a base for the construction of a proposed, future reality. The goal for the Boca Air & Space Museum is to create a beacon celebrating the innovation and technology of aircraft while respecting the important current conditions.
The process of abstraction and extraction stems from a graphic analysis of existing site conditions. By representing contextual conditions as flat, abstract fields, the underlying biases are avoided. This filtering process allows the project to grow organically from a set of graphic conditions limited to one mode of being. Each aspect of ‘site’ and place are flattened to one image, revealing a hierarchy in the result not the process. By allowing the documented conditions to contend with one another, an environment of contested architectonic forms is revealed.
These drawings serve as the basis of the investigation for this project. The production of graphics abstracting the physical reality of place allows for the orientation with the context of a project while also imbuing the process with the interests of the designer. The conditions the graphical fields represent directly impact the formation of the project’s conceptual and physical intentions.
Contextual Fields
The main goals of the project stem from the narrative-based graphic explorations. The resulting fields of contextual and tectonic information began to drive how the organization of the building and museum spaces interface with the idea of flight and nature. Within the project, there are three main layers of circulation; automobiles, aircraft, and pedestrians/users. The interaction of these layers and how certain moments are displayed or hidden became an important element of the project’s expression.
Flight
Sectionally, the experience of flight serves as an analogy to how people are brought up into the main spaces, reaching the ‘cruising altitude’. The ground level exists as the main aircraft space while the levels above allow the users to ‘fly’ above. Having the museum procession act not only on the floor level of the museum, but the mezzanine above. The mezzanine floats above certain interior volumes and begins to place people in new physical relationships to these aircraft.
Building Chunk
Through the sectional building chunk, the relationship of the three circulation layers can be seen. As automobiles are relegated to subsurface parking, the aircraft are celebrated on the ground level. Also, within the interior museum, the floor level and mezzanine level circulation are shown as constituent yet interconnected spaces that contribute to a holistic experience. The way in which static and moving aircraft are integrated as part of the main museum experience is also shown in the model.
Also, the way in which the perforated aluminum panels highlight the tectonic expression throughout the museum experience is shown. Choosing materials and having a strict tectonic language were both informed by the way the project frames the idea of aircraft and their nature as objects.
