BDES1020 Continuous City <Sastra, Widjaja>

Abstract

The city of New York seemed at first to be a great context in which to build. However, due to its historical nature it was very difficult to justify demolishing an existing building and starting anew. As opposed to a city such as Isfahan, where it is sometimes challenging to even research what type of building occupied the site, hence where the approach is to research Isfahan in general and learn about their culture. What’s left, therefore, is to build upon or within the existing buildings. And this was indeed very difficult programmatically as well as structurally since one has to consider the purpose of the building, its structure and its facade to maintain consistency. In a way, this approach frees the students from the somewhat mechanical formulation of such ideas and instead provides opportunity to develop other ideas more deeply. Perhaps the proposed building need not be an extension of the existing one; however, it was both fun and rewarding to think of another program that would be closely related or even completely opposing that of the existing one, provided adequate justification of course. New York City allows one to be a little bit less traditional and push the boundaries of architecture a little bit more. My design proposal of a music school was a natural extension to the existing building, i.e. Radio City Music Hall. The location of the new building was planned to be on the top of Radio City Music Hall. Building on top of an existing building was the simplest way to design, since it required few consideration of the existing structure. However the location of the new building is consistent New York City vertical tendencies, what with so many skyscrapers. The overall idea in the design was to metaphorically connect the way the music is created in an instrument, in my case a wind instrument, with the development of musicians. The shape of the design along with the existing building resembles that of a wind instrument, where air enters from the top to be transformed into music at the bottom. In a similar way, students of music start from the top to advance down to finally performing in the Radio City Music Hall.