Sanctuary
A community sanctuary in Oakland, CA
with Jacqueline Lin / Prof. Dan Spiegel / UC Berkeley, Fall 2020
Digital Physical Model
Projected As-Built Elevations
Bathhouse Light Wells and Stack Ventilation
Original vs. Existing As-Built Elevation
This project challenges the conventional division of communities between those with and without shelter by providing spaces of refuge and safety from new environmental realities. The community sanctuary facilitates cleansing, sustenance and growth through a public bath, greenhouse and learning spaces. The banal becomes monumentalized not only through focus on mundane and ordinary programs, but also by inverting the importance of the train station and baggage hall as is suggested by their scale and grandeur.
The project raises questions of adaptive reuse through provocations of authorship and imitation. By architecturalizing the scale of an existing cornice, the project explores opportunities and conflicts of inhabiting ornamentation. By misusing and operationalizing ornament, a duality of scales is created, where perception slips between micro and macro readings of space. The poche created by the solidity of the cornice macrocosm takes on the bulk of the programmatic responsibility, giving freedom and flexibility to the void spaces it frames.
Blurriness becomes central to the project: blurriness and ambiguity of scale, class divisions, privacy and material. The dichotomy of solid and void, enclosure and exposure allows for strict control of program within the solid spaces and flexible, changing, operable spaces within the voids.