This project is about loose rooms nestled in a hillside that coalesce to create an alternative school for young carpenters and creators. I sought a gentle space of ambiguous boundaries, more about flowing space among elements than rigid volumes of walls and doors.
The project embodies an obsessive accumulation of many small moves, creating a loose spread of program, circulation, and boundaries.
Students enter from a road at the crown of the hill and circulate downwards, across a stepped topography of tables, chairs, trees and equipment.
Programs requiring assembly or security (auditoria, library) are focused in more specific carvings in the landscape, whereas more individual or dynamic programs (studio space, workshops, exhibition) are spread over the landscape.
Enclosure is formed by a continuous slumped glass roof wrapping the hillside.
The glass panels are supported by curved steel beams, which the glass appears to deform around.
The program brief was initially studied as individual pieces of furniture following the contours of the site, a hillside by a dam in suburban Connecticut.
