Tony King

I was also mixing in my new bag of tricks - theory. You cannot escape theory in a Jesuit school. In the techno music scene there was this ability to break down the barriers that contain us, running on a separate trajectory from the mainstream music industry. Dj's were using crowd response at parties to judge their latest track as well as using that energy to go back in the studio and work on tracks. There was this reciprocal process that increased the potency of the music. I took this concept and applied it to this project. I had this idea that I could think about design while waiting for the bus or going downtown to a music festival. I was down at Hart Plaza for the Jazz Festival and it was raining so I went down to the underground stage. There was this sound of the rain falling outside and dripping down the walls and over the openings. The qualities of the rain interacting with this concrete shelter made this lasting impression on my designer mind.

So the theory at the core of the design of this pavilion was creating a dimension intrusion. Could the experience of daily life in the city really translate into or generate shapes and forms? What experiences could develop from shape and form? I took a gamble getting myself into unknown territory, but I thought that this was the kind of theory and practice that professors and upper level students were trying to promote in our school. Our class discussed the poetics and functions of a truss and the concept of shelter. Where projects were being replicating a truss in a linear trajectory I was rotating it. I wanted the structure to cast the illusion of rhythm and movement, so I worked on how the structure, form, and spaces would organize a sense of procession and hierarchy while simultaneously these cone forms and layers were peeling away or folding into one another. I wanted the people to have this experience of this place warping their sense of reality.

The interior space held many possibilities that began folding inward toward a center and outward toward the earth. The spaces within the shell, the structure, and the exterior form all held equal importance and had to interface with each other. I did not want any one feature to stand out or become all too definable, or to translate the complexity of theory into structural complexity. For me the modern way of designing was working hard to exploit the simplicity of form and reasoning of function. Sketching the forms out on paper was not getting me where I wanted to go so I started building a model which was how I always began creating form and structure. There is so much more potential when working in a real and physical way. I had spent a lot time working with my hands and developed the skill of craftsmanship in my father’s garage restoring cars. It was natural to work this way in my studio.

The model was in a constant state of refinement, building trusses and then hacking them apart until I could see that all of these theories and ideas appeared to work out in physical form. The truss was then placed on paper to be drafted out to make a template. I then rebuilt the base and placed each truss section in place much like a crane would on a project site. The section explains the collection and draining of water during a rainstorm. This concept of water falling represents the structure as an intrusion of different dimensions where the water during a rainstorm becomes a shell in a sense (a transparent shell) that changes the dimensional and spatial qualities. The moat and bridge separate/join two different spaces, depending on the weather. There would be a thin wall of water that would also have to be penetrated during a rainstorm, which is the point of an actual intrusion. This point would be the defining moment for the users of this structure... do I go for it?