Symbiotic City
The Symbiotic City was my Studio 4 final project. In this studio, we conducted research on not only the history of Denver, but also on the unhoused population within the city. The specific population I chose to focus on for my project were the unhoused women of Denver. Through research and personal interviews with women in shelters that I conducted, I learned that the majority of these women have endured abuse not only once becoming unhoused but almost always before they were forced to leave their homes. This was a very important project because it allowed me to combine my background in psychology as well as architecture, to have an intersection that I believe can be impactful when working on projects for populations that have experienced trauma and hardships. I was able to win the Studio Excellence Award for this project and our class work was shown in London the following summer at the Livable Cities Conference.
Design Process
First, we had to choose an existing building in Denver to design around and use. I chose the Denver Energy Center buildings shown below which are two octagon shaped towers.
I started with a grid to impact my design moves, and was curious what my interior and exterior walls could become by manipulating the grid. Through many iterations, I landed on the last and final plan above.
I then took the massing from the floor plan I had designed, and rotated it four times. With each rotation, I took the remaining mass that was left from using the existing towers as constants. This is what created the variation in each level.
