Concept Stage:
College of Architecture and Landscape Architecture
University of Minnesota, Minneapolis, MN 2001-5

Study (Plan View): Inversion2: Dark Matter (Proterozoic/Holocene) I

Plan view of the site focusing on 3 existing geologic/architectural structures and a study for a proposed volcanic/biological environment for the CALA buildings composed of an encompassing lava landscape, geothermal heating, steam vents and naturally propagated moss and native species. Lava landscape could extend/flow beyond the road/walkway definition of the site forming a more natural perimeter and engaging with other landscape elements of the campus.

This concept for the proposed environment brings a simaculum of the Proterozoic rift system buried several km. below to the surface of the CALA site as an active geological-biological system, somewhat like a newly formed volcanic island off the coast of Iceland where life is brought in by wind and ocean currents, nurtured by moist steam vents from the slowly cooling lava.

Like Inversion2 II (video projection of geophysical data on the interior of the building), this proposal echo's and inverts Stephen Holl's design for the new addition to the CALA complex.

The use of dark volcanic matter from a deeply buried and invisible part of the site propagates Holl's inversion of the interior facing structure of the existing Architecture/Landscape Architecture building into an outward reaching and light filled appendage-like form of the new addition into an inversion of the site meta-chronologically (Proterozoic/Holocene) and structurally (surficial glacial till-soil/deeply buried volcanics).

This inversion is further amplified by the relationship of Holl's interest in the physics of light as a luminous phenomena and the use of geo-physical data in the form of aeromagnetic anomaly measurements that constitute the primary visualization method for the buried Proterozoic Rift system composed of extremely dense ultra-mafic rocks.

Upper Left Image: Study - subterranean geothermal system for heating of surface lava mass by penetration into the Paleozoic - Proterozoic Sthermal gradient below the site and existing steam lines from the UMN heating system.

 

Research 1; Research 2; Research 3; Conceptual 1; Conceptual 2; Design 1; Design 2, Quarry 1; Quarry 2