A WALL BUILDING design

The wall, built as part of a graduate architecture thesis, demonstrates an experimental construction technique, within the materials and methods of conventional practice, through which a common building material is freed from its conventional construction.

$Inspired by a lecture on Wright's 'Textile Block' houses, the design began as an isometric drawing of a masonry facade whose constituent stacks each rotated a fraction of a degree relative to the adjacent stack$

Inspired by a lecture on Wright's 'Textile Block' houses, the design began as an isometric drawing of a masonry facade whose constituent stacks each rotated a fraction of a degree relative to the adjacent stack

Because the rotation results in dimensional contingencies due to the changing hypotenuses, the abstract rules developed to govern the stacks' rotations were rationalized into mathematical formulae so that meaningful design work could be carried out

The subtlety of the rotation coupled with the relentless organization of the horizontal and vertical lines asserted the visual potential of the design's construction technique

To test the viability of the construction technique, a mock-up section of wall was built at the Building Research and Demonstration Facility. This early design incorporated units turned on their side to allow a view through the wall, as well as slender concrete frames tied to the wall through metal struts that doubled as constructive aids, the frame providing the wall with lateral support.

The drawing and mock-up led to the development of the full-scale Wall Building. The 'window' units were abandoned to simplify the wall visually and, because the wall would be grouted solid, the concrete frames were not included.

Several wall start/end points, curve shapes, and focus locations were considered, respecting the existing Test Cell building and the Cube project under construction, and all having significant consequences on the wall's construction and final impression

Several technical drawings were required to realize the project, and although most processes resembled conventional construction, the requisite precision, planning, and discipline often exceeded it

While studying a wood model used to test various wall configurations, a photograph captured light streaming through the imperfect model's joints

The open vertical joints led to the adoption of an altogether mortarless construction, one that would demand even tighter tolerances during construction but would have the potential to yield a more refined result

The final design has one face of each stack oriented toward a common focal point, thus determining the rotation of every stack and replacing the abstract mathematical rule employed during the isometric drawing design

A WALL BUILDING design

A WALL BUILDING main