THE MADE & THE MAKER:
FABRICATION LAB & STUDENT HOUSING
Bloomfield Hills, MI
Instructor: Bob Burnham
Autumn 2012
This studio focused on the Cranbrook Academy of Art campus and a proposal for a fabrication lab intermingled with student housing. The ingrained history of the campus integrated in design and architecture is openly apparent in the thoughtfully designed campus and surrounding landscape. The site of the new intervention sits on a current parking lot that is surrounded by forest edge to the north and east, the Cranbrook Art Museum by SmithGroup JJR to the west, and the New Studios building by Rafael Moneo to the south.
This intervention was inspired by the relationship between the made and the maker within the fabrication process. The main body of the intervention integrates both making and living, while the gallery cube becomes the subtraction of the body and an inverse of material representation. The heavy reshaping of the landscape was integral to the program and the contextual relationships at hand. The landscape was zoned properly to the given program and allowance of both truck transportation and semi-truck loading and unloading from the fabrication lab. The landscape allows zones of relief spaces for the students and active interaction with both the fabrication lab and the gallery cube. This intervention aims to sit respectfully among its neighbors, while amplifying the theme of courtyard spaces central to many of the buildings on campus.
The key element within the design was not the figure, but the ground elements of the courtyard space that became so crucial towards connecting to the rest of the campus. By mirroring the existing formal “L” shape on the site, this immediately creates a functional landscape zone that inverts the original use of asphalt parking into a hugging landscaped courtyard. Then, by pulling registration lines from the given campus, this created automatic zones that allowed the building to rest comfortably and logically within the site, while still providing a recombinated image of existing campus design languages.
Further, the concept of “the made and the maker” was taken to greater lengths by subtracting a literal mass out of the fabrication “L” form, and placing the mass onto it’s own respective footprint. This addition becomes the “Art Cube”, which fulfills the program requirement, but also creates a secondary courtyard space for the Moneo Studio students. This public art gallery and exhibition space provides a space to showcase large fabrication mock-ups, and also opens up to the surrounding landscape and further celebrates the creative process so prevalent within the Cranbrook spirit.
The main building reaches out to the forest edge providing a natural backdrop for the studio and living spaces. The main circulation is loaded toward the inner “L” facing the courtyard, and break-out spaces push out toward the courtyard. The campus registration lines from the grand allee, north campus, moneo studios, and art museum, all create specific zones that allow the building to sit comfortably within the site while still respecting its neighbors. The pixelated landscape zone is both hard and soft surface that allows a semi-truck to access both the art museum loading dock and also the new fabrication lab loading dock. The Art Cube placement allows a degree of freedom and excitement within this new courtyard space by providing a large exhibition space that can open up to the landscape and also be understood as an extension of the original art museum.
