Digital Home-Office Building Complex

Project Overview

4th year studio,
Fall semester 2006,
professor Greg Andonian

Location

East side of Ottawa River bank, stretching from Major’s Hill Park to National Research Centre, Ottawa, Ontario

Objective / Outline

To design a new “home-office building” for Ottawa ART/ARCHITECTURE/HI-TECH community. The building complex will be a meeting place – a FORUM –for Ottawa’s permanent and transient citizens, including architects, urban planners, hi-tech specialists, politicians, technocrats and trans-nationals, to debate the future of the city development and hi-tech dwelling. It will set the stage to raise social/ethical/spiritual consciousness of the Canadian Capital Design Community pertaining to issues of:

1. Gentrification
2. Globalization
3. Urbanization

And promote peaceful coexistence of its multicultural membership. It will embody the societal aspirations to be in communion with each other to tackle the local challenges that residents face individually and collectively. The multi-ethnic community of Ottawa aspires to be in harmony with nature and with itself.

Proposal

1. a recreation park along Eastern bank of Ottawa River, between Major’s Hill Park and Rideau Falls
2. a building complex in the area surrounding MacDonald-Cartier Bridge (that ties the recreation park together in the area where the riverbank’s continuity is interrupted by the road).

The proposal establishes connection between two landmarks along the riverbank (the locks of Rideau Canal and Rideau Falls) and creates more nodal points along the shoreline in order to make this area a useful extension of scenic downtown area.

Concept

The building complex and the park are “PLAYGROUND”, a metaphor for diverse environment, comprised of unexpected spatial configurations meant to establish connections between people, their immediate neighbors and their immediate surroundings. The playground elements can be interpreted and used in various ways, in order to give people opportunity to create their own paths through the site and find their own favorite places that suit their personalities or perform certain function at a given point of time (recognizable environment).

Response to Globalization

Create environment, which strongly emphasizes locality and at the same time creates setting that is highly unusual, yet “friendly”. Reconnect people with nature (through manipulation of scale of the built form – creating sharper contrast between natural and human-made) and strengthen local sense of identity.

Response to Gentrification

Create permeable and transformable environment that constantly undergoes reinvention.

Response to Urbanization

Allow for possible further densification of the area (planned growth of the city). Avoid segregation through “opening” site.