autumn 2014- University of Illinois at Chicago

The project explores historic disciplinary material to extract operative diagrams of the creation of voids; then design the protocols for the assemblage of second-order systems, and then the experiment of carving the existing Merchandise Mart in order to introduce new notions of urban interiority. The notion of urban interior will be approached as an alternative to collage cities and the accumulation of programs by designing voids that exhaust the differentiation of specific categories laid out by the proposed diagrams.

The Victorian Animal is taken as the diagram to combine two different systems. The operations of dome proliferation developed parametrically, but implemented manually, are combined with one another to stablish a strategy for the growth of the dome field applied to the existing structure of the Merchandise Mart.

The 18th Century library is studied as the program to drive the system. The Merchandise Mart is taken as a shell. The Dome proliferation produces nested interior urban spaces than then produce floor plates from their intersections The main domes are generated from the existing corridors and entrances of the Merchandise Mart. The proliferation of these geometries study the interior nesting conditions generated by the system.