Joseph P. Donaher DESIGN
THE STREET & THE TOWER
TYPE:Undergraduate Thesis
YEAR: 2024-2025
ADVISOR:Ben Pennell
In an era which will be defined by the rise of artificial intelligence, the question of how and where we live takes on renewed urgency. As global systems become less stable and traditional forms of work, movement, and economy dissolve, the importance of the physical locale and its aesthetics as the fabric of our visual reality will begin to take precedence. Architecture must once again become the carrier of meaning, rooted in place, rich in expression, and capable of grounding us in a rapidly changing world. When capital is unbound by labor, the last domain in which human beings will retain sovereign primacy is the domain of meaning: the realm of the built environment, the aesthetic, the spiritual, and the symbolic. In short, the realm of architecture. This thesis imagines a future of human settlement in which the choreography of the physical world becomes the primary locus of cultural life.The thesis therefore manifests as a collection of buildings focused on exteriors and facades composed theatrically into a masterplanned neighborhood. Aesthetic coherence, variety in unity, formal symbolism, and human joy acted as the primary design focuses. The ambition was simple: to create a place that humans would love. A place that people would spend their vacations on visiting. The thesis points out that a city is made not by the interiors of its buildings, but by the spaces in between, and the walls that line them. This project is an homage to the urban wall, its role in the character of the built environment, and a call for contemporary architecture to re-embrace its vital role in creating these purely human aesthetic ambitions in a future context where they are granted greater time and societal value..
THE TOWER
The main tower reclaims the skyscraper as a civic ornament and a celebration of the human need for aesthetic exaltation. Rejecting the anonymous glass curtain wall, its facades are sculpted with dancing figural silhouettes, ribbed cylindrical volumes, crenellated edges, and exuberant piping in the neighborhood’s own ornamental language.
The north, market square facing facade erupts with repetitive semiotic forms adorned with the hand-drawn, mural style seen elsewhere in the project. This gives rise to a suggestively linear mid-section which finally blossoms into the modern belfry, resembling an anthropomorphic “head” of the tower, adorned with abstract sculpture and figural articulations, ultimately capped with a composition of cylindrical towers, a motif seen throughout the project.
The south facade represents a more contemporary inclination toward translucency and lightness,exposing the structural theatre within, though these aspirations ultimately bow to the decorative language and figural sensibilities of the architectural language of the project. The south facade is capped with a double curved surface in lieu of a typical classical order or gothic arches, and the same composition of cylindrical towers.
The tower engages with the decorative excess of old bell towers while critiquing the mute gigantism of contemporary towers, adopting the extremes of both — scale and ornament — not to resolve them, but to stage our architectural, and frankly, human, impulses at full volume.The Tower is a public work that belongs to the residents of the community and is a physical manifestation of their devotion to the place they live and the neighbors who share it with them.