Gemini - America's Cup Pavilion
San Diego, CA
The America's Cup is the most prestigious regatta in the sport of sailing. With such prominence, this international competition draws throngs of hundred-member crews and fans wanting to partake in the spectacle of the race. Ergo, the America's Cup Pavilion functions as an epicenter for varied activities. Its function, being temporal and specific, conforms to two separate agendas: that of a landmark building with expansive and outwardly-focused race observation decks, and that of an entertainment center with internally-focused post and pre-race programs.
This project seeks to address the multifarious behavior of the America's Cup Pavilion through building disfigurement and uninterrupted entertainment. Unlike the landmark qualities of a shore lining lighthouse, my interests lie in designing a building that disfigures its distinguishable form through a mechanized skin. This skin utilizes mobile enclosure panels that shift space from conditioned to unconditioned, interior to exterior, dim to luminous, smooth to armored, in an effort to present various and unexpected spatial experiences to the user. Despite formal and spatial variation, uninterrupted surfacing engages race observers through a continuous experience of ground plane, elevated circulation, and observation decks.
My design preoccupations lie in the formal qualities of high-end sailing vessels. Specific formal and tectonic techniques used in the design of sailboats foreground the approach to designing the observation pavilion. Techniques of complex surfacing, feathering, aperture, shelling, and methods of attaching hardware used in boat design provide the formal language adopted for the design of the America's Cup Pavilion.
