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PrintA living urban structure at Griffis Park
COOL STUFF
A hundred architecture students from the University at Buffalo built dreams out of plywood, lined them up, and climbed inside. The Living Wall, a strand of fourteen interconnected full-scale dwellings, rises from the ground at Griffis Sculpture Park like a monolithic alphabet. All angles and openings, it spells out a new definition of urban.
Department of Architecture faculty members Shadi Nazarian, Chris Romano, and Nick Bruscia gave a tough assignment: the students, all undergraduates, had to build dwellings by cutting and shifting sections of a 6-by-6-by-8-foot box, and were allowed only a few shifts. They couldn’t cheat by cutting holes for doors and windows. The structures were to sleep at least three, offer space to stand up in, stand on their own, and yet fit with their neighboring units. “We are trying to see how little we need, for space we could actually stay in,” says Xiaonuan Dai, a teammate for the pod called Sister. Emphasizing community, Sister has sleeping space that connects to the next pod. “Our void space allows us to communicate with each other,” Dai adds.
Another unit, Rick Roll, named partly in tribute to a popular online prank, offers a unique key to the inside. “Our entrance is on the ground, oriented horizontally instead of vertically, so we have to roll into the building,” says Joseph Swerdlin, who says that just one shift worked out to be enough for their model’s design. After entering, “if you keep rolling all the way to the back, you will be in the first bed.” The entrance to Fracture reminds Brittany Cohen, one of seven teammates, of a lightning bolt. “We fractured our building apart,” she says of how they made the entrance. The floor space stayed at 6 by 8 feet; the team shifted a section upwards.
The students started with drawings, Styrofoam, box cutters, glue, and cardboard, and worked their way up in scale to plywood and structural soundness. They tell of reassembling them, like puzzles, at the park. Pod by pod, the Living Wall builds a concept community, and the students talk of connections between dwellings, walls, and spaces. They speak, too, of the fun of walking the uneven rooftops, and of seeing children climb the structures. Mostly, though, they thrill at building full scale. “It was awesome,” says Swerdlin, “It definitely made us realize what a space is.” He says Rick Roll felt bigger inside than he and his teammates expected. Enthused, Swerdlin is making a chair for his sister’s birthday out of leftover Rick Roll plywood.
In early spring, Dai and Cohen were among those who braved the cold for the designated overnight. Along with a Fracture teammate, Cohen relished the experiment. “I wanted to sleep in my own building. It was cold and rainy, [but] besides that it wasn’t bad,” she says, appreciating the architectural pillows they had designed into two of the beds. And despite what everybody had predicted about Fracture, Cohen says lightly, it didn’t feel at all crowded like a coffin. Dai was disappointed it didn’t rain even harder that night. Sister’s team had designed the roof to create a cascading water effect over the entrance. “It didn’t work as well as I would have liked it to, but the rain was coming down slowly,” she says. As sleeping bag met plywood in the tiny dwelling, Dai thought about all the existing structures society has to offer, and wondered whether they are really all that necessary.
The Living Wall runs through October 23 at Griffis Sculpture Park.
Jennifer Wettlaufer is a frequent contributor to Buffalo Spree.
