SITE:
A block of stores and restaurants, down the street from the campus proper. The existent landscape design brings two lines of trees down the length of the sidewalk; the design emulates the tree-lined walks of the campus, which also contains pockets of miniature woodlands, miniature forests.

PROGRAM:
The space between the storefronts and the street is intended as a plaza for graduate students. But the proposed plaza is too long to be a plaza – too long to be a square, too long to be a traditional college quadrangle. Rather than a gathering-place, it’s a passage-way. This circulation-route should be turned into a mode, with flexible uses.

PROJECT:
Parallel to the existent city-block – buildings of brick and stone – there’s a city-block of landscape – buildings made of greenery.

The green that was originally proposed for the plaza, two lines of twenty-two trees, is replaced here with green that’s inhabitable: rooms of green, houses of green, buildings of green.

The buildings here are based on the growth-principle of climbing plants: they start small and get large – they start from a point and spread out, like a tree, as they grow upward. The building-structure here is the arch: a column that as it rises spreads out to form a wall, that curves in to form a roof. These ached structures mark out the boundaries of rooms, but they don’t close in rooms, they don’t close up rooms. Because of the curve of the arch, sunlight comes through into each room, between rooms.
This is the beginning of a city; the buildings are huts, they have the look of a so-called ‘primitive’ village, with its connotationsof the hand-made. this plaza is for people, to the side of the commercial, down the street from the institution. The village literally grows: climbing plants grow up each column and fan out over a meshed dome of a roof. The arches are asymmetrical, and pointed at the top; the buildings grow like plants, reaching up for light in all directions -- they shield from the light from all directions.

The buildings, the rooms within the plaza, are different sizes: twelve-foot square, eighteen-foot square, twenty-four-foot square. Each kind has three heights: a twelve-foot room can reach a height of twelve feet, eighteen feet, twenty-four feet; an eighteen-foot room can reach a height of eighteen feet, twenty-seven feet, thirty-six feet; a twenty-four-foot room can reach a height of twenty-four feet, thirty-six feet, forty-eight feet. The different sizes are appropriate for different kinds of gatherings: small huts for intimate meetings, mid-size huts for social groupings, large huts for community meetings.

The rooms are joined together; at least one column of each room doubles as the column of another room. The rooms together, across the plaza, form an aggregate of bumps; you walk from a private space, as a roof hovers a few feet above you, to a public space, as the roof sweeps up far over your head. It’s as if you’ve walked from the closed vestibule of a church into the open space of the dome.

Under the roofs, the pavement is raised to make seats; the seats outline the triangular plan of the buildings. Like the climbing plants, light comes from below, from under the benches; light shines up through the network of plants.