Class: ARC361
Instructor: Anne-Marie Armstrong
Project: Casa Gaspar
Architect: Alberto Campo Baeza
Fall 2020
This project was about studying Casa Gaspar as a contained entity. After researching the home for a period of time I arrived upon the conclusion that the home in no way attempts to integrate itself within the surrounding landscape. Instead, the design focuses its attention on the creation of an internal atmosphere. While the decision to dismiss the natural world in a design is one that a despise, I found Baeza's decision to do this intriguing; as it resulted in the home-sharing commonalities with a reproducible object of mass production. This is what then sparked the inspiration for the above video.
The idea of mass production led me to create a proportioning system that would allow me to break apart Casa Gaspar into a series of blocks that could then be reassembled to create new designs. It was critical for me to design these new blocks in a way that would not only respect the ratios and dimensions of the original home but also respect the character of Baeza’s design. In total, I created 60 individual blocks, each designed as a play on a certain condition found within Casa Gaspar. Some blocks were designed to provide opportunities for interaction with the surrounding landscape, some were designed as playful iterations of what already existed, and some were more radical extrapolations that were about pushing the limitations of the proportioning system I created.