B.03
AN OPEN WORK

Type:
MIT Option Studio

Professor:
Enrique Walker

Team:
Isadora Dannin, Emma Pfeiffer, Clarence Yi-Hsien Lee

Date:
Fall 2019


The ISI Building, designed in 1979 as a commercial office space by Robert Venturi, Denise Scott Brown and Steve Izenour, is an archetypal “decorated shed”. The architects focused their design work on the street-facing graphic facade of the building, while the building sides and interior were kept as ugly and ordinary as possible. Venturi and Scott Brown intended this approach to produce an architecture amenable to future change: the building could be called - after Umberto Eco’s 1962 essay of the same name - an ‘open work’.

Our design doubles the square footage of the original building in order to test the actual capacity of an ‘open work’ to change. This doubling is complicated by the fact that Drexel University renovated the building in 2010 to house their architecture and design school. We decided to take up this fortuitous challenge and keep the Architecture School as the program for our test.
The proposal sandwiches the original 4 story square building between a new monumental billboard and a new construction 7 story rectangular building. The architecture school is flowed through by a vast new civic program, including an elementary school, daycare, library, cultural hall, gallery, artist studios, food court, garden center, and auditorium. This civic program is accessed by a continuous 15’ wide ramp that circulates in front of the original ISI facade and around a vast internal void carved out of the back of the original ISI structure.

The architecture school is interspersed between civic activities, charged by the juxtaposition of old and new building fragments, and the inverted surfaces of the original ISI’s facades. The monumental new billboard frames the original graphic facade of the ISI with a radical wash of indeterminate color - proposing a civic surface that activates the building’s new take on openness.



01. Existing: The ISI Building


02. Model Genealogy (Detail)


03. A Model Genealogy



04. Proposal: Structural Model


05. Proposal: Structural Model


06. Structural Model Interior


07. A Collection of Surfaces


08. Surface Detail: Courtyards


09. Entrance Knuckle


10. Entrance Knuckle


11. Rear Facade Knuckle


12. Rear Facade Knuckle


13. Table Cloth


14. Presentation Case: Compound Strategies


15. Presentation Case: Views

16. Review Documentation
01. 3 Sites
02. Original ISI Plan

03. Drexel University Renovation
04. Proposed “Doubled” Plan


05. The Public Path

06. Architetecture School Directory