In Between

Abstract

This thesis is about openness in the architecture.

After traveling and experiencing many different cities in Europe, I was intrigued with open spaces in cities, which offer a stage for different public interactions. I discovered that all these public spaces are formed by the surrounding architecture. This made me wonder about how architecture, as it becomes more independent today, could express and embody this openness within itself.

I picked up my site at the end of the King Street in Old Town, Alexandria, Virginia, which is currently unappealing to the public. I decided to create a urban plaza for the waterfront in an architectural way by generating a pavilion, which will provide various kinds of information and satisfy needs to the visitors and public.

The pavilion has several different services and lies in an area with flood issues. In response to these conditions, I made all the projects suspended between columns and assigned them different heights according to the context of the site and their own functions. The different levels of the projects generate vertical open spaces in order to let the surrounding environment flow seamlessly into the pavilion.

The entire project has been organized under a glass structured roof with a central staircase that ascends from King Street to the Potomac River, which has all the accesses to each level. There is a designed channel in the middle bay, placed within the girder to direct rain back into the river.