Social Network
Design Team: Michael Frederick | Advisors: Raffi Tommisian
Oxford, Ohio: 2005
Architecture at its best creates a shared space that is the extended interaction between our minds and the environment. We need this extension to reach beyond our own capacity to learn and evolve. A series of program diagrams generated from mandatory adjacency and privacy requirements, developed into a continuous ribbon of circulation. The layering of spaces around a continual loop of circulation transforms the building into a viaduct for ideas and desires. The central atrium is panoptical; visitors are given visual access to the main programmatic components, which facilitates wayfinding, but more importantly, encourages exploration and discovery. The visual porosity informs users by connecting them to the larger human collective. The public space becomes a dynamic flow of people, information, and ideas. It is a smooth space that provides a place for students to exchange their ideas. Spatially, the union functions as versioning construct for worldviews. By interrelating student’s thoughts in this open, layered system new connections are made, thoughts are reformulated and new ideas are born.
