Perkspace
Degree Project by Hazel Yimeng Sun & Ying Xiong
Instructors: Mike Szivos, Abigail Coover Hume, Ashley Simone
How can designed environments help us escape manipulation imposed by corporate culture?
We believe that office architecture needs distinctive boundaries between work and leisure in order to foster a healthy relationship between corporation and its employees. Instead of the superficial conflation of work and leisure in open plan offices, as exemplified and promoted by corporations like Google, we propose work and leisure space with distinct boundaries to provide employees a sense of clarity and control of their time and action. Boundaries characterized by contradictory form, structure, and material increase occupant’s awareness of their experience throughout a workday. By creating unlikely juxtaposition, we want to manifest the absurdity of modern corporate culture, and create a new office typology that imagines a reality where contradictions like corporate greed and genuine concern for employees, profit maximization and altruism, standardization and customization can coexist, and a type of architecture that benefits corporations, employees and the public simultaneously.
Instructors: Mike Szivos, Abigail Coover Hume, Ashley Simone
How can designed environments help us escape manipulation imposed by corporate culture?
We believe that office architecture needs distinctive boundaries between work and leisure in order to foster a healthy relationship between corporation and its employees. Instead of the superficial conflation of work and leisure in open plan offices, as exemplified and promoted by corporations like Google, we propose work and leisure space with distinct boundaries to provide employees a sense of clarity and control of their time and action. Boundaries characterized by contradictory form, structure, and material increase occupant’s awareness of their experience throughout a workday. By creating unlikely juxtaposition, we want to manifest the absurdity of modern corporate culture, and create a new office typology that imagines a reality where contradictions like corporate greed and genuine concern for employees, profit maximization and altruism, standardization and customization can coexist, and a type of architecture that benefits corporations, employees and the public simultaneously.
"Welcome to Perkspace"
https://youtu.be/EMKkjGsY99g
PROGRAM
Perkspace is an architectural infill project, sited inside the Ford Foundation. Perkspace imagines a new design-production ecosystem by putting design offices, prototyping space, and showrooms in the same building. Perkspace has two types of incongruous programs, one for the company and one for the public. The two types of program are arranged on opposite sides of geometric volumes. For example, one volume has the company design office inside the enclosure, while accommodating public sightseeing activities on its exterior. As a result, office workers and the public would oscillate between work and leisure programs as they go in and out of the geometric volumes. The notion of inside and outside would be destabilized as occupants enter the boundary of one volume and find themselves on the outside of another volume.
METHOD
We explored Venturi’s idea on “the Inside and the Outside†in Complexity and Contradiction to define juxtaposition. Our site, the Ford Foundation inspired us to advance the vision for humane architecture, which Kevin Roche established in the original design of the Ford Foundation. We also looked at works by Allan Wexler and Frank Kunert which induce a sense of absurdity through juxtaposition of unlikely typologies and materials, which helped us define absurdity as a design criteria.
CONTACT
yingx1995@gmail.com
hazelsun320@gmail.com
hazelsun320@gmail.com
Degree Project Booklet