— A Wall That Isn’t One
Spring 2021, Harvard GSD, Instructor: Sharon Johnston
“A Wall that Isn’t One,” positions the
wall, and the punctures within it, as a critical architectural tool for framing
civic space that can be restorative, inviting, and exploratory. The wall is
opened by three window types: a brise-soleil, borrowed from Le Corbusier’s
Carpenter Center, a vertical window, and a horizontal window. The building mass
is punctured by three anomalous courtyards of various proportions and uses. Axial
entries connect visually and spatially between the courtyards, Lynwood Park, Martin
Luther King Jr. Boulevard. At the civic scale, the wall varies along the site
as a mediator between the threshold of city and park, as each facade offers a
different response to its civic adjacencies. Along Martin Luther King Jr. Boulevard,
the building is low, long, and mostly opaque. A long ramp breaks the figure of
the wall along this city edge, revealing its civic nature. This ramp connects
to the roofscape of the building, a fully occupiable series of patios and
gardens that allow for looking out to the park, and looking within the
building, among the courtyard spaces below. Along the park side the building is
porous and transparent—the wall becomes a screen dissolving the boundaries
between interior and exterior. A generous building of discovery that provides a
second home for the Lynwood community, this project positions the body between
the grounding nature of its gardens and the framing of views, inwards,
outwards, and upwards, through its spatial qualities and displays of light.



























