Jessica Marquardt

This housing project was a collaboration with Keyan Rahimzadeh.  This design-research project explores the familiar void spaces typically created by urban infrastructure, transforming previously uninhabited rifts in the urban fabric into opportunities for enhanced urban dwelling. Downtown Atlanta, Georgia exhibits such a condition: the interstate corridor cleaves the city into disparate compartments. We examine the implications of a building-as-bridge, formally and functionally, by designing a housing complex spanning across an interstate.

The unfavorable conditions above the vehicular artery motivate dramatic design decisions regarding protective boundary and the creation of a respiratory interior in couryards. The utility of generative geometric methods, shape grammars, enables rapid formal prototyping and testing of comprehensive building schema.

TECH ART Museum establishes a new context for the examination of artifacts.  Works displayed in this museum range from traditional art media to innovations in design and technology.  The question of how art and technology are in service to one another is relevant both in the performance of the building and in the potential for art to elevate and inspire a technology driven community.  

The museum is situated on the edge of an engineering university campus within the city of Atlanta.  The  site fronts a main street in midtown Atlanta and marks the opening of a prospective wooded park on campus.  The proposal plays with the distinction of natural and artifical in the co-presence of city : woods and art : nature.