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An Addition and partial Renovation to I.M. Pei’s tower on the MIT campus, Cambridge MA, USA.
The iconic Green Building’s contained simplicity and formal symmetry at first seem to resist alteration, especially by addition. Yet engaging these very qualities offers opportunities for intervention and interpretation, inspiring possibilities beyond the boundaries of this pivotal campus structure.
Building 55’s program calls for an interdisciplinary hub that showcases earth, environmental, and climate science education, attracting members of the MIT community and beyond. Its architectural strategy demonstrates resilience through sustainable design, and embodies a clear and compelling identity while also contributing to the identity of the campus as a whole.
The project establishes its own order, sitting in a lush green space that features a grove of trees to the north of the Green Building. Its wood- and glass-veiled main volume reflects the garden, extending it. As building users approach, they encounter an allee of trees, one side real and the other mirrored.
Inside, a newly enclosed ground floor is jointly programmed by the academic departments sharing the space, with glass walls maintaining visual connections to campus, the Charles River, and the City of Boston. Above, new classrooms and conference rooms give onto the first floor’s double height space, and lead to a newly renovated, fully accessible lecture hall. An essential project objective is achieving Zero Energy Certification from the International Living Future Institute (ILFI). Building 55 will demonstrate the University's goals for resilience and sustainability, engaging the MIT community around a dynamic expression of the earth, environmental, and climate sciences.
For more information please visit: https://www.aw-arch.com/mit-building-55
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An art installation in Amman, Jordan.
Civilizations have passed through Wadi Rum, a famed valley in Jordan steeped in history. Through the lens of this complex historical and geological site, the installation considers the idea of movement, weaving 3 kilometers of rope and 1.5 kilometers of steel to evoke the valley’s materials, colors, and exaggerated forms. Just as Wadi Rum influenced the existence and passage of nomadic civilizations, the project explores the transcendent space of threshold in shaping individual and shared experience.
Two contrasting materials, rope and steel, are brought together in this installation, contradicting assumptions about their texture, strength, and use. Malleable rope and stiff rebar are interwoven to create this place of shelter, its stability established not by the steel structure but by the rope’s tensile strength as it holds that structure together.
The form they create establishes a threshold, inviting entry and marking movement through the piece. Inflected at its midpoint, the structure offers a moment of individual repose and reflection to each visitor.
The materials’ color and weave establish a directionality that guides movement through the structure, serving as a conceptual bridge whose form may be symmetrical, but whose experience—constricted at entry, then expanded, uplifted, unbound—is not. Differences between rope and steel are blurred, their scale and grain intermingling to create a third building element completely its own: the weave. This abstraction suggests a monumentality that once again links personal and collective experience, encompassing the centuries of complex natural and human geography that is Wadi Rum.
Weave patterns and design intent were tested in multiple iterations on mockups, using scripting algorithms that included variables for local weaving practices, and providing opportunities to refine the design narrative in relationship to materiality and structure. Digital fabrication drawings produced in-house incorporated local construction methods and weaving techniques, facilitating on-site execution by a project team that grew to include local weavers. At conclusion of the exhibition, all materials were returned to the construction stream for use by local craftsmen and builders.
For more information please visit: https://www.aw-arch.com/amman-design-week
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A private residence in Needham, MA.
A search for simplicity drives this project to be both minimal and textural at the same time, punctuating a traditional suburban development with a palette of wood, concrete, and glass.
The lot is narrow and deep, and the house is placed back from the street and across its width, acting as a threshold between front and back. A new grove of mature trees creates a porous buffer from neighborhood activity, while at the rear, an expanded clearing defines a private enclave. The house, sited in between these two realms, is an assembly of raw materials, a charred-wood box perched on a structural pedestal of concrete and steel. The glassy and transparent living spaces are organized by the essential elements of oak millwork that hold high-function parts of the house such as stair, kitchen, bathroom, mudroom. Large panels of glass and rolling doors allow a landscape of sunlight and color to penetrate the calm quietude of this house which remains protected from the street but always a part of the terrace, the yard, and the woods beyond.
For more information please visit: https://www.aw-arch.com/needham-house
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A private vacation home in Nantucket, USA.
For more information please visit: https://www.aw-arch.com/boardwalk-house
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An office highrise in Ankara, Turkey.
The Ankara Office Tower is an integrated expression of building program and urban environment, serving high tech companies seeking academic/industry partnerships with leading academic institutions in Turkey’s capital city.
The project establishes cohesion at an ill-defined edge of a rapidly developing urban district, where unplanned commercial growth and infrastructure had eroded the structure of local neighborhoods. In response, the building is pulled back from the adjacent highway, making space for a bamboo grove that buffers a new urban garden and creates the only pedestrian connection to public transportation, knitting together individual and community experience.
The Tower is distinguished from its surroundings by clarity of expression - a geometric glass volume encasing a stack of large-scale wood louvers, set in a lush landscape. Over the course of the day, its design produces a transformative effect. Sculptural horizontals successively shift as they wrap the tower, creating different patterns depending on the sun’s position and the pedestrian’s perspective. As louvers open and close according to interior needs, the Tower itself appears either permeable or reflective, revealing patterns of use and activity within.
For more information please visit: https://www.aw-arch.com/ankara-office-tower
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A private observatory in NH, USA.
This private observatory is located at the end of a steep, half-mile gravel drive on a remote summit in central New Hampshire. The site is characterized by granite bedrock outcroppings and is situated at the center of a three-mile radius “dark” landscape with very little light pollution to obstruct astronomical viewing.
The observatory’s design rejects a traditional dome in favor of a synthesized architectural form expressed as an extension of the stark geologic context. An unconventional pattern of lock-seamed zinc cladding mediates between the irregular site topography and the building’s geometry. The choice of cladding—its dimension, color, and patina—engenders a material relationship to the gray granite outcroppings that characterize the summit.
As a counterpoint to the exterior and its context, the interior is lined with fir plywood, creating a haven of refuge and warmth from the harsh surroundings—a place for research, introspection, and even rest. A helical stair of plywood and steel pauses at a fissure in the cladding that opens onto an exterior observation deck. Continuing, the stair arrives at the observatory’s primary astronomical viewing platform inside a faceted turret. This platform is characterized by high ceilings and an oversized, sliding hatch that opens the telescope to the sky. A rift in the cladding creates an aperture at the corner of the turret, which frames Polaris when the turret is locked into the southern cardinal position.
For more information please visit: https://www.aw-arch.com/gemma-observatory