Instructor: Prof. Louden

Project Introduction:

2006-2007 Student Design Competition Preservation as Provocation: 

Re-designing Saarinen’s Cranbrook Academy of Art.

Semester focus:

Adaptive Use and Historic Preservation issues for existing buildings

New Design in Historic Context

Structure issues

1st half of the semester – light-wood framing, load bearing walls, masonry and concrete

2nd half of the semester – open span systems, steel and heavy timber

Project #1 premise:

Introductory project – Low income housing proposals for South Plains Community Action Agency (SPCAA).   1000 sq.ft. residence with sustainability in mind and that can be built for $50,000 and sold to low income families for the cost of construction.  Duration - Three weeks.  Presentations to SPCAA

Project #2 premise:

INTRODUCTION: In 1942, Eliel Saarinen, the renowned Finnish-American Modern Architect, designed the Library and Museum of the Cranbrook Academy of Art to be the centerpiece of the campus, which is now a National Historic Landmark. Considered to be one of the most technologically advanced and aesthetically daring Modernist building complexes at the time of its completion, its expanding collections and growing numbers of visitors now require a major transformation of the original. This competition, the first to address the emerging field of preservation design, invites architecture students to imagine this transformation. The challenge is not to adapt the buildings to fit current trends in library and museum design. Rather more ambitiously, it is to discover how the preservation of these extraordinary buildings can provoke a profound rethinking of our current conventions about design. The aim is to envision a new type of library and museum that would be unimaginable without the existing structures.

https://www.acsa-arch.org/competitions/historicalpreservation.aspx