Vernon’s Vectors: Designing a New City ~ Civil engineering

Vernon’s Vectors: Designing a New City

It is understood that cities and buildings are largely shaped by a dynamic flow of interrelated cultural, social, political and economic forces – the nature of possible interfaces between architecture and its various settings within the contemporary city. Rather, Vernon’s Vectors is a re-interpretation conceived by Daniel Cheng Lee and Jae Hwan Lee of how a building may deal with architecture on an urban scale. Rather than relying on the surrounding context of the city to begin addressing the project’s behavior, a singular yet versatile design system is implemented to influence the surrounding context to create an iconic image for the city – an inside out approach to urban systems.

From an initial urban analysis of Vernon, California, the notion of the curve is extracted, abstracted, and injected back onto the city as a generative component. The spline is then exploited to create a tower and museum with intelligence gained from the high-rise and medium building studies. Specifically, The programmatic spaces found within the tower and museum are parametrically generated by means of controlled rotational repulsion that are extruded in the Z axis to create three dimensional space. The tower vertically tackles issues of the blend between interior space vs. exterior envelope, structural feasibility, figure-ground relationship and scale through coalescence and dispersion. The museum, on the other hand, uses the curve to address atmospheric effect and scale via a fiber optic lighting system in which the shapes of the extruded profile faces are determined by gallery spaces and circulation. These processes are threaded together in hopes of creating an iconic figure for the city of Vernon.