2019-2020
In collaboration with the dance department from our campus at SOTA we started the Dance studio project in late 2019. For research gathering we accompanied the department to their dance studio room over in the mission district to observe them in their work which provided me with annotated drawings and key words after joining them into some warm up dancing routine. after the research point I continued with conceptual work involving the orientation, contortion as well as movement of the human body as it danced. The concept was concentrated in the movement of the bone and the muscles that followed along with the bodies movement. The next move was to find a site where the studio would be established in, the assigned location was Glen Canyon park, which was in front of SOTA. This location provided several trips to the park in order to gather research and get a feel of how the landscape as well as the terrain would be of fit to the studio design. in the process of the site analysis a study of the sun was conducted in order to know how and where to orientate the windows for convenient natural lighting. Later I moved onto the layout of the facility, utilizing the bubble diagram technique and making physical models of the main structure's orientation and form. After site and subject research, 2 layout ideas, 3 conceptual models, and a series of main design element, final design were made.
The Final dance studio resulted with a double door entrance leading to the waiting room, which is connected to the boys locker/bathroom and the girls locker/bathroom. Moving forward a stretched hallway intersects with a secondary hallway which provides access to the other spaces. down the horizontal hall it meets the doors to dance room A and B, the two biggest rooms in the studio. going back to the vertically orientated hallway it provides access to the storage room at one end and the department heads office towards the other extreme of the hallway. In the quarter circle space there is a secondary set of doors that provide easy access to the girl locker/bathroom. Within the second top horizontal hallway, the path leads to dance room A, as well as a double door entrance towards the balcony at the top end of the dance studio. in regards to natural lighting all hallways and related spaces share a extensive skylight through ought the studio as well as normal and large windows within the walls. For the waiting there is a pair of skylights that provide lighting trough the inclined roof. As for the storage room it shares a skylight with the hallway wile still having a trio of top to bottom obscure windows. Both girls and boys bathrooms have this type of obscure skylight window as well in the sink side while still having slits of obscure window within the walls of the sink portion of the bathroom. For the two main big rooms there is a oval shaped skylight which illuminates the entire room along with the 4 slim top to bottom windows along the vertical wall of room A, and horizontal wall of room B. For the beam supported balcony it contains a small elemental designed pavilion on the right side while the rest of the space is synthetic grass, enclosed by a steel balcony fence. And finally the office space, a single door spacious tall room walled by full body windows ideally with equivalent sized curtains to block off any undesired natural lighting.
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