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URBAN GRID REDUX
Integrated Design Schematic is the first semester of a two-semester comprehensive design sequence with a focus on the comprehensive development of an institutional building, public in nature, with sophisticated programmatic demands, urban contextual conditions, and environmental parameters. Projects are developed to address concepts of structural form, material order, spatial organization, and aesthetics while responding to the interrelated pressures of the public, the institution, and the city, leading to the emergence of formal typologies and architectural concepts. For the Spring 2015 design studio, the site was located in
Galveston, Texas, along the coast of the Gulf of Mexico. Galveston’s historic grid, populated by an eclectic mix of building scales from bungalows to multistory buildings, forms an analytic field for consideration and architectural development. The program, a museum of natural
history, challenges students to develop a variety of theses and strategies that weave together the disparate elements of the urban context found in Galveston’s conventional American city block grid as counterpoint
to the museum program, resulting in an emerging argument between architecture’s competing tendencies toward autonomy and contingency.
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