This studio course began with an examination of traditional Japanese joinery and the spatial consequences of subtractive carving into a mass. Ultimately, the term project was a gym, with several key components including a diving pool and climbing wall. Kris’ proposal features rooms and circulation embedded into adjacent buildings (invited by the project prompt), joined by bridges to the freestanding new building. The project is designed to allow both the public passersby and the private gym members to move through it, complemented by a porous façade of vertical insulated strips between ribbons of insulated glazing.

To tackle the program of the project, rooms were treated as discrete units with particular characteristics. They were clustered according to the desired visibility out of and into each room. They were then stacked vertically and aggregated according to the method illustrated here.

The program of the project is divided into two zones to accommodate the environmental comfort of the occupants: the conditioned and non-conditioned, both of which span the full height of the building (thereby eschewing any height-based physical hierarchy). As a result, many of the amenities of the project are outside of the building’s thermal envelope and available to both public and private users (including the 4 climbing wall, basketball court, several lobby- like gathering spaces, and the roof garden). The climbing wall and circulation canyon separate the indoor conditioned pool and the adjacent building, while the basketball court sits atop 2 the pool and can be reached via the canyon. 1 All users can access the stairwells and bridges of the circulation canyon. Only the most agile climber will reach the roof garden. 

To further desegregate the users, the two zones strategically interact to provide key experiential connections. The indoor diving platform runs alongside an outdoor bridge across the canyon, separated by a thin fully glazed façade. When atop the diving platform, the diver faces one of the gathering spaces, a sizable entry lobby off of Summer St. This lobby is the only non- conditioned space that encroaches on the indoor pool room. The climbing wall occasionally punches through the central monolith to peek into the pool and basketball court. These two zones are logistically connected by the elevator, which has two sets of doors on each level (one opening on conditioned spaces and the other open to visitors in the circulation canyon).