INSTRUCTOR: JOSEPH KING, MARCIAL CHAO, GREG MORROW
COOPERATED WITH: HO MING CHAU(MARCH), CAROLINE CHEN(MARCH), OLIVER KATZ(MRED+D), JENNY LIN(MRED+D)
The site sits in the block that is next to Coliseum Bart Station, which in an underserved community of 6,000 residents. It is stricken by high poverty rates, and lacks healthy food options, community space, and healthcare facilities. Therefore, our overall proposal creates a vibrant mixed-use community addressing those needs, including market rate and affordable housing, an extended stay hotel, co-working and creative office space and a vocational trade school.
We mainly design the co-working and creative office space and a vocational school. The building began with the dichotomy of two programs, a blue-collar vocational school and a white-collar office. The programs are poised to leverage each other both financially and with regards to public amenities through the connection of a shared podium. The atrium, positioned at the infrastructural corner, acts as a hinge between the two buildings. The intersecting axis that penetrates above the lobby creates a sequence of landscape through an elevated walkway towards the air train, dilating into a roofscape on the atrium, and a grand stair that spills into the landscape.
The form of the buildings was then articulated through additional extrusions to create a distinction between the two faces towards the BART and towards the public landscape as the unassuming and the expressed. The unassuming face, acts as a flat face to advertise the building towards the transit infrastructure. The expressed face orients towards the community both visually and through community-oriented functions. The exposed circulation acted as a further articulation of the form, which we consider to be amongst the shared and expressed experience of the building and the public. This is why we named the building ‘The Switchback’.
For the office we took the position that informal amenity space and more typical floor plates are becoming more blurred as amenity space increases. The vocational school, a lower density bar, features industrial workspaces at the ground floor which open up to BART station.
