NJIT Students of Architecture Won the First Place in 2022 Timber in the City Competition
The winning design, Pine Hill, was developed by the Hillier College of Architecture and Design students ZhongMing Peter Zhang and Peter Koczarski, under the mentorship of their studio instructor Caroline Grieco. The Timber in the City is an annual student competition organized by the Association of Collegiate Schools of Architecture (ACSA) and the Softwood Lumber Board (SLB).
The aim of the competition is to explore wood as an innovative building material using case studies of real sites. In this year’s contest, which is it’s fourth edition, students were asked to design the MARTA Station at the Arts Center in Atlanta, Georgia, while embracing the possibilities of wood and a variety of wood technologies.
“The timber expression of this project blended modern technology with traditional carpentry as discrete elements. The massing in our design is an extension of the existing site topography, developed into a simple structure connecting two major roadways, inspired by a habitable gable roof. The site is a transportation hub occupied by a complex mix of user groups, which we treated as an opportunity to connect the visitors with Atlanta's culture through daily activities and shared dining, cooking, and social spaces. We hope this project can serve as a portal for showcasing Atlanta’s culture at a site of historical and cultural significance, while extending its function as an urban transportation hub,” Peter Koczarski and Peter Zhang said.
The competition drew more than 600 architectural student entries, and it was judged by a panel that included The University of Michigan's Arash Adel; MATTAFORMA founder Lindsey Wikstrom; Washington State University professor Omar Al-Hassawi; University of Virginia professor and co-founder of After Architecture Katie MacDonald; and Georgia Tech's Master of Architecture Program Director Michael Gamble.
"Pine Hill is a top winner with the students’ innovative timber structure and beautifully detailed drawings, diagrams and sections. The overall building form brings a unique approach to investigative timber expression and an interesting approach to a massive building. The elegant design respects and elevates the benefits of timber construction," the jury comments read.
Zhang and Koczarski designed Pine Hill as part of the Advanced Architecture Studio I, which both of them took in their last semester before graduating and were thus incentivized to experiment. “A Bachelor party to design,” is how they described it.
Early in the semester the entire studio collaborated on a series of studies on the site topology. “Regarding the “view analysis” of the site, our conclusion after extended research was: what view? We are in the Atlanta equivalent of Times Square, so the only view one can have is the view of building facades. This realization influenced us to create new interactions with the site instead of relying on more natural conditions,” Koczarski and Zhang said.
Every culture has its own understanding of timber structure, and the Gable roof is something both Zhang and Koczarski were really interested in. “The humble gable roof is a universal "canvas" for carpenters. It is both an homage to traditional structures and a fitting base for innovation,” they explained. The Riken Yamamoto’s Taoyuan Museum of Art in Taiwan was the inspiration for the treatment of sloped space and the physical properties of materials in designing the structures. “We avoided glue in our physical models, using a friction fit, or copper pins to represent bolts. This carried on to our digital design process where we used physics simulation to emulate the elaborate cable-sandbag model constructed by architects like Frei Otto,” Koczarski and Zhang said.
The organic form created a series of challenges for them in realizing the scale and the sense of space. “We experimented with sketching in VR headsets on top of our digital massing to realize our structural layout and programs. Realizing spaces from a first-person perspective was a very engaging method that we carried throughout our design process. We enjoyed periodically walking through the design in VR, using our bodies to instinctively measure the space in a virtual environment,” they said.
Caroline Grieco, Adjunct Instructor at the Hillier College of Architecture and Design had set up a studio-wide Autodesk's BIM Collaborative system, which streamlined the student collaboration using Revit. “With encouragement from John Cays, Associate Dean for Academic Affairs, to take a futuristic approach through collaborative technology, the students utilized unique 21st century BIM tools to imagine innovative timber structures within the guidelines of the ACSA 2022 Timber Competition,” said Caroline Grieco. Michael Kehoe, the HCAD Manager of Emerging Technologies, assisted in implementing the BIM Collaborative tools granted to NJIT by Autodesk. Hosting the student's BIM models to the cloud was a tremendous improvement over past methods noted Grieco.
The studio encouraged students to experiment through 3D simulation to ultimately create 3D visual representations that expressed their objectives in response to the competition's requirements. “Collaborative technology expedited the development of the student's work in ways that traditional methods of design would hinder. The digital tools accelerated the generation of solutions that were then evaluated by the student teams in the collaborative,” said Grieco.
Early in their project, Zhang and Koczarski established a series of project standards determined by the structural spacing and ergonomic dimensions, which allowed them to work in parallel with minimal conflicts. Peter Zhang had built a custom pipeline using Rhino to connect their project in Rhino3D to Revit. “Geometries were refined into BIM elements and streamed directly to our Revit file where Peter (K) was working on more rigid elements. The system that was setup for the studio gave us a great deal of versatility in collaboration. For example, if a design update was inefficient to realize in Revit, I would mockup the design in Rhino as a guide for Peter K's work in Revit. This process also worked in reverse, so we were able to take advantage of each other's expertise,” Zhang said.
Koczarski and Zhang took liberty in interpreting some of the competition assignment requirements: the ‘short stay housing’ was a particularly challenging requirement for both. They took the inspiration from Japanese capsule hotels and new small form-factor hotels. “We approached the room design as a focused device of resting, while blending more active programs with public spaces, such as dining and recreation. This separated our design from the existing hotels to create something more fitting for the active function on the site. In the end, we were glad to see the jury being receptive of this deviation,” Zhang and Koczarski said.
“The ASCA Timber 2022 competition jury recognized Peter and Peter's combination of comprehensive architectural, environmental and social solutions for the project site in Atlanta, Georgia. We can all recognize the students' commitment and success in extraordinary visual production and dedication to technological innovation in architecture,” concluded Grieco.