A plan of a building is thought to belong only to that building, but a renewed interest in transforming existing context in contemporary architecture may insist on a different set of formal resolutions.  This thesis begins with a figure/ground map of a piece of St. Petersburg, and reinterprets this as both plan, elevation and section for a building.   By manipulating  multiple existing plans of city blocks and connecting them to one another, a series of labyrinth like structures create interesting intersecting spaces. The new geometry also punctuates the facade in a volumetric manner to house a Cultural Center for the city.

Working in this way, the existing formal and aesthetics circumstances in most Saint Petersburg architecture is retained - namely, the courtyard and the sculptural facade. St. Petersburg is known for extravagant buildings that act as typologies often contrasted by their ornament and color against the more normative and banal building structures of the city. The effects of color are studied in this thesis as ways of discerning surfaces and spaces, and color is used here as a technique to highlight the complexities that arise from working from plan to elevation.

This procedural thesis embraces the fundamentals of architecture - the site, the context, the plan,the elevation, the section, the color, the aperture, the space - but it does so by stressing continuity.  Each design decision affects the next - each aspect is contingent upon another.  In so doing, the project exemplifies a way of working in design that will provoke a similar seamless of experience for the viewer.