KATHERINE YAOCHEN DU

GENERIC/SPECIFIC

Core 1 Studio

Harvard Graduate School of Design

Instructor: Andrew Holder

This project began with the analysis and extraction of a fragment from a Baroque precedent - the Church of the Gesù in Rome. This fragment, a portion of the church's pendentive, was then transformed, abstracted, and deployed on a nine square grid on a sloped site, in service of accommodating the given program of a cricket club. 

The studio was additionally charged with reproducing the chosen fragment on the hot wire cutter. With this error-prone, single-axis method of representation, the continuity of the pendentive, which accomplishes much of the work of reconciling the different scales, programs, and geometries of the church, can only be reproduced through a series of discretized, low-fidelity cuts in the shape of simple extrusions. A turn or twist in a vault implies an infinitesimally large number of miniscule changes of direction, but this was abstracted down to three intersecting cuts that collide with each other to produce unexpected formal and spatial qualities in the vaulting. This discovery is the crux of this project, where a series of stacked, snake-like forms imply a linear and logical circulation when read from above, but a disjunction and scattering of vaults and directionalities in reality.