Courthouses are typically realized as buildings inserted in some figural relationship with a site. Here this typology is is reconfigured as a assemplage of spaces undeground, above and in-between the plateau of the site. The ground / plinth becomes a contemporary athenian agora and the courtrooms are growing above; the topology of the ground is distorted, stretched and bent and it a relentless sculptural ribbon unfolds to express the interface between state and citizens.

Roe vs Wade. Marbury vs Madison. Plessy vs Ferguson... Law is built on this janus interface. The Courthouse celebrates this polarity and it is organized by a public ramp that interweaves the cross section of the building and allused to a cross section of justice. The front skin of the building becomes an area for the public to occupy, an interstitial zone in-between the interior space of the courthouse and the outside city celebrating the public as the joint between the two spaces.

This paper briefly traces the history and logic of the abstracted formal vocabulary of the early white Meier houses and focuses on the Smith House as the generator of the language. The
formal theory for the generative specification of the language of the house is based on group theory. All plans and key sections are analyzed in terms of their group structure and all parts of the design are assembled in partial order lattices based on the dihedral group of order 4.

Courthouses are institutional buildings that are heavily depended on explicit
sets of functional requirements. A constructive program for a generative description of US
Courthouses is briefly outlined.

A programmatic sequence of a spatial montage in one serial sequence. The design spatializes the structural relationships observed or found in the evolutionary trees and the life spans of the designs produced so far by all the participant designers within the course "Introduction to Design Computing", Georgia Tech, Spring 2003.

Atlanta has become an urban fabric of parking lots, skywalks, and privatized parks. At the same time Atlanta is completely void of any central core: its center, once full of transfer stations for the trains, has become a void, an empty space with no function, no identity. The project proposes a vast injection into downtown Atlanta that possesses a potent mixture of architectural vigor, organizational fantasy and iconographic markings. The site is the Gulch and the program is connected to the systems and stations of the Multi-Modal Passenger Terminal.

Decades of American culture ignoring the pedestrian have left Atlanta wanton for streetscapes that embrace the city dweller on a human scale. Through a process of analysis of existing streetscaping, rulemaking for all types of streetscaping, and design proposals, interventions can be made at the small incidental scale of the street that can activate the street sphere of the city locally for the pedestrian. The combined effect of many of these small projects can culminate in an environment that continues to grow with the pedestrian life of the city.

A design proposal of a connection center across the street from MARTA’s Five Points hub station that will connect all intercity and commuter ground transportation modes as a “land” port for Georgia with convenient connectivity between 6 networks: a) Georgia intercity rail, b) Amtrak intercity rail, c) GRTA Commuter Rail, d) GRTA Express Bus, e) MARTA Rail, and f) MARTA Bus.

A project seeking to examine a common condition found in most North American cities: the division of previously knitted neighborhoods by some system of highways. The analysis seeks to tackle the possibilities of this edge condition found in the intersection of city fabric and highway lines and suggest ways in which the boundary between the vehicular nature and the speed and scale of the highway can be negotiated with the pedestrian nature and the speed and scale of the city.

A design proposal about an emergent pattern of urbanism: Urban space including housing, working, shopping, parking, entertaining and so on, should no longer be conceived as one static self-sustaining entity, but rather it should be conceived in terms of movement dynamics, directly engaging the human body, the effects of speed and motion in the technology and the politics of contemporary culture.

The inner-city freeway is commonly viewed as a necessary evil for all urban centers throughout the world. Although this project is specific to Atlanta, the issues faced are characteristic of many similar conditions in other urban centers in United States. The formal language of the system is informed by the two conditions it is trying to mediate: The fabric of the city and well as the dynamic nature of the car.

A desire to hold closer the future and a need to stick to some nostalgic fantasies of an idealized domestic past. The design is derived from the structure of the DNA, a main memory block of human life, to address the nostalgia of the past and the promise of the future. The overall shape of the building is that of chromosome, X-shape. Apartment units are derived from four basic units, symbolically derived from four protein bases, namely Adenine, Thymine, Guanine, and Gytosine.

Project [Space:Place] is a design proposal for an intersecting systemacy; social space: for consumer or inhabitant. static space or moving space. transversal or longitudinal: trans-space. pedestrian, social, but always moving. never static.

A study in formal composition for a house exhibiting all possible symmetries based on the structure of the prismatic group. The lattice of the rectangular prism has been chosen here for its great analytical and expressive power found within all or some of its partial symmetries. The language of the composition is kept to a strict rectangular prisms

A study in formal composition for a museum exhibiting all possible symmetries based on the structure on the C2C2C2 group structure. The formal language is purposefully aligned to dissonant shapes and spatial relationships to create an opposition to the high order of the underlying structure.

A design for hypothetical courtyard housing exhibiting all possible non-enantiomorphic variants based on the structure of the 2x3 cellular grid. A simple substitution rule suggests patterns of domesticity over patterns of mathematical thought.

A design proposal for the new Oslo opera House. The multiplicity of the building program covering an entire range of genres – from opera, ballet, musical theatre and dance productions to operettas, concerts and guest performances, is all veiled under a prominent urban skin, a landmark in the city of Oslo facing the harbor. The tall configuration of the urban curtain foregrounds even more its effect over skyline of the city.

A series of contrasted series of all possible configurations of non-entiamorphic planar arrangements of parametric cellular grids of 4x6 provide the underlying structure for the basic parti for the new opera of Oslo. The rhythmic juxtaposition of the walls of the structure addresses the musicality of the program it will house.

A series of formal experiments using pictorial information as a canvases of transformational operations. The main objective here is the computational representation of architecture objects next to water.

Differential Flow
John Weiler
ARCH 7011, Spring 1999

The first controlled, powered, heavier-than-air flight, is still a memory that heavily imbues the original site where the experiment took place. A design proposal for a  Meteorological Center and Field Station in the same site of the original flights suggests an architecture in a lighter-than-air flight frozen in time again.

Data Flow
Florent Nedelec
ARCH 7011, Spring 1999

A design proposal for a  Meteorological Center and Field Station as an interface-map of the weather conditions it registers. The major role of the center to collect real-time and historical weather data lends the project its main character as a hidden interface, buried under the ground, a silent map of the weather it surrounds it.

A design proposal for a Meteorological Center and Field Station on the grounds of the Wright Brothers National Memorial in Kill Devil Hills, located on North Carolina's Outer Banks. The intrinsic qualities of wood, its lightness and flexible strength, key elements in the design of the Wright Brothers' aircraft were elevated here as primary aspects of the grammar of the composition.

A software application for the implementation and use of properties of planar symmetry groups for graphic dsign. The project has both the pedagogical property of demonstrating the features of symmetry groups and it can be used as well as a useful generative tool for graphic designers and architects.

Flux Generator
Thomas Guillain | Julie Fernandez
ARCH 7011, Spring 1998

For the past century, New York's East River has been the City's back yard and bad conscience, a good place to shoot a movie but a bad place to go. Today, approaching the City's centennial, the East River and its waterfronts are on the verge of a new identity. This design proposal rethinks and redesigns the role of the East River in New York via a notational system of points and lines that develops a circulations systems, pedestrian and light rails, grafted upon the original one.

A massive beach on NY East River challenges the usual iconography related with NY's East river and at the same time suggests alternative modes of urbanism in some of the most filmed and still forgotten places of NY. A play of urban cards to suggest emergent programming techniques and a robust engineering plan to sustain the beach complete the urban proposal.

The redesign of the East River critical to the future of New York's public realm. This design proposal suggests a formal strategy for a morphing urban characteristics from both sides of the river and register them on the boundaries of the river upon temporary installations with re-programmable functions. The notation applied here is the Villa Lobos notation for his music composition based on NY.