NO-MIDDLE MID-RISE, 2018Commissioned for the Adjacencies Exhibition at Yale University School of Architecture.
The year is 2030. Transportation modes have expanded from ground-based vehicles to include air-born personal flight crafts. Air space is valuable, perhaps even more than leasable square footage. This new need for vertical real estate resurrects the mid-rise from its demise in 2018. A decade later the No-Middle Mid-Rise challenges one of the most standard building types, the office building. Today, the office building is being rethought from every angle; from how we work, why we work, and where we work. The implications on how we arrive, how long we stay, move through and depart buildings are examined as we reimagine the thresholds between exterior and interior. Transition volumes such as the porte-cochère, lobby, and circulation cores are now distributed throughout the building offering vertical ports of entry embedded at all levels rather than limited to the ground floor. Facades are animated by the constant hum of arrivals and departures. Flight paths participate in the frontal elevations as if hotwired to electrify the void between the building masses.
No-Middle Mid-Rise is made up of three types of parts: The Skirt (a plinth-like mass that anchors the now liberated ground plane), The Drums (two volumetric vessels that house office and public space) and The Legs (vertical circulation cores that unite the scattered ports to the city). Transforming the conventional three-parts of buildings the project lifts the bottom and stretches the top downward effectively rendering the middle, and the uninterrupted center of the mid-rise, obsolete. The relationship between these new and seemingly disparate parts are choregraphed to allow one to experience the building from under, between and in the round.
Designers: Kelly Bair, Kristy Balliet
Project Team: Akhil Mathew / Curated by: Nate Hume
