Hortus

For me, this process started with twenty different topics, each discarded as easily as the drawings I made for them. In the end, I realized that as someone pursuing degrees in both landscape and architecture, I was extremely interested in the dive between disciplines, something that I would later come back to again when I did my actual thesis a few years later.

In the end, I chose to address three issues, Green Roofs, and to an extent greenwashing, and green architecture. I had spent a lot of time researching green roofs, and it seemed like for many, just having a garden on top of the building was enough effort to make the building green, and consider it completely integrated with the landscape. As someone who sat in classes for both disciplines, the disconnect between the two seemed large but not impossible. It seemed that many buildings sacrificed experience for green or green for experience. So, I wanted to design a building that was both green, able to be deployed in multiple locations, and be able to provide an experience. For my design, I realized that a central element had to be the green roof. I wanted to illustrate that it could be used to create green architecture but needed to be developed further. Elevating the original intention, while achieving a memorable user experience.  

To do that, I designed a water filtration system that is the architecture. First I started with  dividing the building up by program. The most basic building shape is a rectangle or a square, so I took a rectangle and divided it up by usage. Blocking out how much of the building would need to be devoted to the filtration system, how much to parking and service spaces including back of house, and finally how much I was planning on giving for usage, as I was intending this building to be a community center, or have a public function of some type, with high traffic and high usage. I then played around with how it was arranged in the building. An additional challenge I quickly realized when making my long building, was the amount of natural light being let into the space. To help combat this challenge, without removing all the internal walls, I decided to incorporate voids or cores into the building. In my Design Process diagram, you can see my Lego blocks as I affectionately called them. In this, the voids or cores I drilled out of the building are the three vertical smaller blocks on top of the others. Essentially creating light wells or courtyards inside the building, where additional social spaces and green roofs could be.

With all this established, I started to design my building. My green roofs would double as a water collection system. In addition to recycling some of the water used in the building, rainwater and the water used for plants would also be collected. However, unlike other buildings, where the water would cycle through pipes in the internal walls’ unseen, my water filtration was actually in the walls of the exterior of the building. Water would be constantly cycling through, creating a weeping or waterfall walls effect, safely inside enclosed walls. All of this would go to the reservoir and wells below the building, which had several different filtration methods and used a combination of overflow drains and backup systems to control the movement of the water.

I have included several of my drawings at several stages throughout the process, once again, utilizing a mixture of sculptural elements, studies of the building envelope, and several of the green research I conducted.   

One of the most challenging aspects was how to reorganize the space so that areas of the building wouldn’t be blocked off, as well as how to handle the weight of the water. This was all solved thanks to the ‘Lego blocks’. I was able to break the problem down into the fundamental blocks, then slowly build it back up into an actual building. 

One of my breakthrough moments in the project was actually due to one of the harshest critics of my work. They challenged me, that the experience would be nothing more than sitting in a house listening to rain fall on the glass. At the time, my water was limited to only collecting rainfall, and wasn’t tied into the rest of the building. But after this conversation, I expanded the scope of the project.

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I spent a lot of time considering how to assemble all of the pieces, what I could use and not, and how to use sculptural elements as additional filtration or interactive water systems scatter through the building. 

One of the last challenges was how to implement the design in several different cities, I selected New Orleans and Rio de Janerio as my two location. And then I chose two different sites within each. One in the city limits, and one outside. 

As a last consideration, I studied and crafted two landscape designs, one I called an Introverted Landscape, and one an Extraverted. Each was equally important and worked equally well. However, the extraverted landscape was open to the exterior, and spreading out across a significant space, while the introverted was enclosed and full of hidden gems within a confined space.  Both worked within the design of the building, and were a part of the green system. The names came solely from the degree to which they impacted and worked with their surroundings.  

This was some of my earliest attempts to work through a section. Another big challenge was that people could picture the building more easily in the heart of the jungle but couldn’t imagine it sitting in the middle of Times Square. It took a lot of trial and error to land on a design that could be implemented across several sites, without being too disconnected.