VORTEX : ART + HOUSING

This proposal is based on art culture as foundation for a community’s renewal and social/economic regeneration, specifically the Mission District in San Francisco. The general purpose of this building is to attract life to the area and serve as a revival icon. The building is born out of the interest of renewing and reviving a street, a community, a generation. The vortex building serves as connection point between the different sectors, streets and intersections surrounding it. It attracts, draws, and invites different kinds of flows to this site, specifically to the center of the building. It resembles a big vortex due to its motion or convolution of flows, and circulation, it draws everything towards its center. The center becomes the most important or principal space. This great center is where people most likely would meet and everything will emerge to it and from it. For the programmatic distribution, in concept, everything is drawn from the outside to the inside, from the more public to the more private, to the sparse to the denser. The building has been designed to accommodate an array of artistic, educational and community projects, as well as exhibitions, displays, facilities, events and commercial activities. The building caters to various creative heads to explore their creativity. It’s intended to be a center that encourages people to take part in art projects, and also engaging in learning wide range of skills and subjects, with the special emphasis being public and urban art.

The concept of “art as a unifying force” comes to life with what I like to call the “dynamic mural”. It’s a mural runs and moves through the building so that art pieces could be exposed in a dynamic way; it’s a dynamic mural that is tangled and integrated to the program and housing units as well. It’s a giant transparent strip, double walled with a rail on the inside, where you attach art pieces or small installations for some time, and then they rotate and move like a monorail of art around the building. Across the building, themes of participation, inspiration, learning and celebration are threaded together to enable people to follow their interests but also to come across new things to appreciate.