MASS + AIR: CURTAIN WALLS

Spring 2024 | UC Berkeley CED
Final Project, Adaptive Reuse

The premise of this project is to renovate an existing garage, sitting off the north edge of Berkeley’s campus, into an interdisciplinary classroom. With a number of design restrictions on demolition, program allocation, and parking, the project is an exercise on reuse and formal play of major elements such as facade, auditorium, stair, roof, etc.

Sitting on an intense site with ~24ft of grade change, the garage is currently 4 levels of parking, each level having it’s own entrance. The unique character of the garage comes from its southern rounded corner profile which faces towards the major road intersection. Through play with elements, the interventions aim to challenge the garage’s heft and massiness, experimenting in the relationship of mass and air and its affect of lightness, particularly through the concept of the curtain wall.

Walls are placed around columns to detach them from structure, suspending them above the ground. Subtle details in edge conditions echo this suspension, retreating floorplates from their walls to create small voids underneath solid figures to float them above the ground.

Similar suspense is manifested in curtain partitions sprinkled throughout the building. While some puncture through the floorplates, others offer a variety of experiences: an entirely open space flanked by anchored program or ethereal spaces of diffuse light and loose program, extending the original idea of lightness to how we inhabit space and frame program as well.