The question of collaboration between architectural elements and everyday objects occupying these spaces have been prominent in the architectural discourse. The research project titled ‘Scales of Design’ the role of industrial design was examined across various scales, from large-scale labor spaces to domestic, to the scale of an object. The design field has been intertwined and developed alongside architecture shaping spacial experiences. Design grounds the space, brings back the attention to the user to create close contact, when architecture has the ability to go as high or as wide as possible and influence vectors of expression of composition, construction, materiality, and relationship to surroundings. The balance creates a composure of movement, experiences, and scale.
Haven is a place of safety or refuge, synonymic to a harbor, a space for temporary docking, safety, and rest. The project is situated in the center of Lausanne as a space for temporary settlement for Ukrainians in the light of current events. The project hosts a diversity of spaces that expand or compress in height based on intimacy. The proposed programs accommodate showcasing and concocting of artistry and craft stacked in a vertically arranged in a tower-like structure. Architecture is reduced from unnecessary elements and diluted to a vacant floor with a disconnected technical core and circulation, a frame, and an envelope: a plan that could work under any terms, any content, as a reinterpretation of a typical plan.
The project is composed from the three main elements: a steel frame, a technical core, and post-occupational elements. The envelope is repeated among six floors, hosting programs that span from the most public to the most private, the arrangement of the programs also creates tensions and differences that are experienced through expansion or compression of the interior spaces. The range of programs offered in the building spans from public to private spaces, from a café, exhibition area, lecture space, workshop, and housing. Though the same plan repeated and when in collaboration with the changes in interior elevation, the physical transformations appear in atmospheric differences yet through the same space. The difference in elevation is based on desired intimacy and closeness between architecture and the user. The varying heights of the spaces prompt an exploration of how spatial proportions impact and shape interactions within the building. The building is an expression of a typical plan stacked and repeated along the vertical axis, with a singular exception with an expansion in plan, which is in the heart of the building, an exhibit space, which grows and engages with the street.
The typology channels the world within itself, becoming a latticework organized by a collection of ideas and actions, which are planted within the typical plan. The necessary flexibility and openness of the plan, which allowed for customization and modularity of spaces that served as a theatrical backdrop to the activities happening inside. Plans – were scripts designed to engender new forms-of-life, a series of frames capable of being used, varied, intensified. A plan that could work for any tenant and host whatever content. Architecture sufficiently determinates to accommodate endless variation, a building able to program instability and organize flexibility by means of architectonic eloquence. All permitting space, empty, large, incomplete, until occupied with objets and people. This approach opens up towards a large repertoire of spatial configurations; the programmatic flexibility provided increases the potential of unexpected variations of atmospheres. The project explores a series of relationships between interior spatial organization and exterior form, between structure and space, vectors of expression, alongside composition, construction, materiality, the relationship to the territory, among other elements.