In the previous project, students explored the potential of their original perceptual constructions to be developed into a three-dimensional, habitable space. Although the program was for an actual building, a pavilion, the programmatic requirements were rather limited. While the design of the space for viewing could be easily interpolated from the previous projects, other programmatic elements, such as restrooms and kitchenettes, required students to further develop your perceptual construction to accommodate these program elements or to devise spatial planning strategies which would minimize the impact of these elements upon the viewers experience.

A conference center was chosen since it involves a complex set of program requirements. The complexity of the design is based on the varied sizes of the program elements in both plan and section. Students were informed that the success of the design of their conference center would be judged on how well they were able to interpolate the ideas generated from the previous projects into the design of a complex building. Based on this, students were to view the detailed program requirements in the brief as only a general outline and were allowed to expand on these programmatic requirements when it made sense in the context of their individual designs.

Project 4 involved the design of a publicly accessible ‘Pavilion of Vision’ to be located at the edge of a man-made lake on the University’s North Campus. This pavilion would either replace or be immediately adjacent to an existing ‘folly.’ This ‘folly,’ which includes a concrete platform and the re-use of marble columns from an early twentieth century neo-classical bank, was chosen because its ‘picturesque’ composition prescribes a way of viewing the world, a topic central to discussions in the studio throughout the semester. The primary space of this pavilion was to present, through the experience of a physically constructed space, the visual/ spatial experience which each student had developed in the first two projects.

The pavilion was intended to be a permanent construction with an interior climate-controlled space which would meet all of the requirements of life safety, energy, and accessibility codes. The brief was based on the limited program elements which might be found in a non-denominational chapel, an intentionally simple program to organize, since pedagogical intent of this project was to extend the students ability to explore the potential of their visual/spatial constructions. The primary goal of the design of the ‘Pavilion of Vision’ was to explore how the perceptual experience developed in their first projects could be made manifest in a three-dimensional habitable space, albeit one with a rather limited program.

For the first project, students were asked to explore a specific ‘constructed intervention in space’ and the potential for this construction to mediate our perception of space. As background preparation for this project, students were presented a series of lectures on 20th century art, specifically those which attempted to undermine our perception of light and space. It was pointed out that these art works were not to be seen as ‘precedents’ in the architectural sense of the word. Since these art works rarely, if ever, had a specific use or function. And most of these works, whether installations or independently constructed spaces, operated through variations of disorientation, these works could be said to be against or counter to use.

The final site for the installation of this construction was the graduate studio space. The final solution was not to be a scale model, but a full scale construction which allowed a viewer to actually experience a particular spatial condition. The final construction would be judged by how successfully it presented a specific spatial perception for the viewer/participant @ 1:1 scale.