Research Studio – University of Illinois at Chicago – Spring 2015

The public plaza is undergoing an unprecedented transformation. Historically plazas and public squares have been defined by the building that surround them, and often design in tandem. The Mayan square and temple dace each other, as do the Italian piazza and the church. The French place is surrounded by uniform housing blocks. The corporate plaza is an extension of the lobby. The plaza currently has no firm relationship to buildings.

The project rewires the fundamentals of plaza design to combine flat and three dimensional platonic forms in multiple orientations simultaneously and integrally. The project takes The Alcoa Building in San Francisco by SOM as a case study to rethink the building plaza relationship. The stark difference between the levels of the street, plaza, and building are challenged by the creation of “pocket plazas” that carve spaces in the existing plinth , creating hybrid space between public and private.