The name of ‘Bolt’ describes the detail, stance, and connectedness of a park chair. The Bolt chair pairs economic and ecological sensibilities in an elegant, durable package. The body is first milled from flat metal sheet stock with all parts contiguous to the sheet. Traditionally assembled chair elements of legs, seat rails, and vertical stiles are rethought as a sequence of structural creases, turns, and overlaps that minimize mechanical connections and eliminate the challenge of an otherwise welded assembly. Rounded or ‘eased’ corners offer a softer appeal, structural integrity, and tactile comfort.

Why Stop Competition

The competition invited ideas for a single family house prototype to be built within 99K construction budget employing local sustainable and replication strategies for Houston’s Fifth Ward. The Fifth Ward has seen recent decay and foreclosures in the housing market, the aim is to revitalize the area by bringing families back to the neighborhood.

Given budget constraints, a prefab industrial Quonset construction system, abundantly available on the outskirts of Houston, was selected because it can minimize erection time, cause efficiencies in the ability to act as both roof and wall and accommodate a wide range of labor capabilities. It utilizes crimped steel ribs to create self structuring spans of varying lengths that have the benefit of being energy efficient through the recycled nature of the steel and its high reflectivity.

Long term sustainable strategies include constructing a ‘double shell’ concept that serves as an insulating air barrier and creates cavities that are programmed with services, such as ducts and conduits. High to low volume collective spaces are created to allow for stack ventilation while the foundation system yields little impervious cover, a result from the application of the Quonset system.

The system is manipulated to be site specific, hinting at iterations that allow subsequent variety. The shift in the east west axis zones the site into public private exterior spaces, responds to solar orientation and layers the house visually to create “curb appeal” compatible with immediate context.

Project Designer
Powers Brown Architecture

Credits:
Jeffrey Brown
Harvey Builders - Pricing

 

America’s symbols of governance, such as the ubiquitous state capitols and state capitol malls, are classically inspired European architecture and planning of reason and nature, adopted in America by Jefferson in 18th century as symbols of democratic institutions. These symbols are in contradiction to our evolving dialogue with democracy that are subject to laws of ‘proper’ use and extreme security. The National Mall as a symbol of democratic values, has been reduced to a synthetic image of stability built upon a preserved image that masks the underlying issues of a compromised territory of, unstable boundaries governed by ad-hoc laws, and privatized overtones that distort the otherwise democratic message embodied by these symbols of governance. Throughout American cities these same conditions are stifling otherwise democratic public spaces.

This thesis articulates the representation of the last democratic space in America, post 9-11, as a critique based proposal that challenges our current and future negotiations with power in the built environment. Recognizing the challenge of a formal intervention upon a contradictory site, the National Mall will serve as the stage for testing a democratic space that communicates the asymmetrical relationships of public’s dialogue with governance in ‘public’ spaces.

While the Mall cannot be upheld as an egalitarian field, objects however can substantiate or infuse a democratic field within. This thesis justifies a form necessary to represent such a space, investigating compromised symbols that can be appropriated and redefined to provide functions and representation of conditions the National Mall distorts. The proposal infuses within the program responses to all major impositions of public spaces as a method of exposing the unstable conditions of democratic values residing on comprised fields. The purpose is not to render an ideal democratic space, but an independently operating machinelike space that highlights the context’s incongruous relationships.