A hair salon renovation in Connecticut.
Commercial
Our plan for a new shopping center bridges across two often conflicting approaches: connecting to the urban context and creating an immersive experience for visitors. It is important to connect to the city in multiple ways, across multiple scales. We start by filling the block, as in a typical, dense urban neighborhood. We cut paths through the site. The block offers routes, to pass through the site in different ways with different experiences. This is a familiar urban approach. To enable an experience of discovery a degree of fantasy we want the new development to generate excitement and energy of its own, too. On the scale of the block, we create the sense of a micro city. Within this block there is variation, a unique way to circulate and expose oneself to activities. We take the symbol for infinity, never ending, always more. This symbol implies a movement that never ends and which crosses its path,making a connection, as it moves. We overlay this form as circulation on our urban block. It offers unexpected connections, discoveries, social interaction, and events. The new circulation path is a looping ramp that connects all of the resulting buildings, at different floors. It is not just a path, however. It is populated with small, unique stores that draw people’s attention as they pass through, exposing them to interesting shops, refreshments, etc. The ramp shapes the buildings around it, retaining the building density, opening up landscaped courtyards in each loop. We have a novel configuration of a large block, and it is specifically designed to offer maximum urban experience.
Presso Coffee is a Queens, New York cafe that prides itself on its exceptional coffee products, pastries, sandwiches and gelato. To complement their extraordinary product, special attention was paid to providing an ambiance conducive to cafe culture throughout the design process. The space aims to not only provide great coffee, but also to serve as an impromptu cultural center, art gallery, and exhibition space for book readings and charities. Open, clean design and a fluid circulation of space allow this coffee shop to best serve its customers and community as a meeting area, a work space and an extended living room to its occupants.
MESH conceived the design of the Media Center with a spirit of optimism. Optimism about both the creative potential of new media and the growth of the media arts in our city. The 20,000sf Center was funded by New York City and is run by IFP (the Independent Filmmaker Project). This new center will expand IFP’s offerings and allow them to provide support for content production across the new entertainment and technology sectors. Multiple levels allow for interesting connections between public and private spaces. The center supports interaction and cross pollination among user groups. The range of spaces reflect the new way we work today, in village-like community-oriented spaces. The surfaces of these spaces are activated with a variety of video, printing, chalkboard, and even old media – books – to inspire our creative energy. The large communal tables provide basic work space, but a range of supporting spaces enable working in different ways — quiet or social, sitting or standing. None of the meeting rooms have typical rectangular tables — some have MESH-designed egg-shaped tables for presentations and others more casual soft seating. The library provides a quiet area to think or read. The cafe is a social center as well as a place to eat. Three classrooms help to support turning filmmakers into multimedia artists. The centerpiece is a high-tech screening room, which appears as an island in the main space. Its rounded outer walls are contiguously mapped with video projection that continuously shows creative work.
An Internet venture fund wants to transform a tight, low-slung slice of midtown space into a suitable environment for high-tech finance. Three loosely affiliated companies share the space. The problem was to transform a conventional office layout into a layered, luminous space with a sense of infinite depth. MESH divided the private offices with glowing Lumasite (fiberglass-reinforced acrylic) clad walls packed out with data, power, and television cable. The walls provide both physical storage and electr(on)ic connectivity. They continue into the corridor as ambient light boxes. Phase two calls for the installation of flat-panel displays into the walls, to continually track the firm’s investments in Web space.Perpendicular to these, the walls dividing the offices and corridor are of structural glass/honeycomb-core composite panels (an experimental material – this is the first-ever installation). The panels provide a degree of transparency that shifts in relation to viewing angle and distance.
Our architect-developer team won a competition to build an exclusive resort park located in Gangneung, on the east coast of Korea. The project is a nuanced composition of natural and man-made spaces consisting of, (1) A 21 story hotel with 250 vacation units, (2) 2 condominium towers, 9 and 13 stories in height situated within a coastal pine forest. Designed as a four-season resort balancing indoor and outdoor recreation within facilities of water park, game park, indoor beach event plaza, fishing deck, floating green space, and hammock park, the project nestles itself in the pine forest. Utilizing the rich natural site, the resort weaves into the landscape and structures outdoor space in order to balance interior and exterior activities to create the resort experience. Analogous to the coral reef, the structure provides a natural recreational ecology, and a minimal disruption to the natural site. Each building is used to structure the varying programmatic elements, dispersed throughout the site. Introducing forest to water to building, as well as bringing land to the ocean, the coral resort project is where natural elements and the built environment merge. Each unit in the complex has a view and a relation to the sea, reinforcing the harmony created in a sustainable and natural approach to living and playing by the sea.
MESH designed two new workspaces for Grind in New York and Chicago. These 8000 square foot members-only workspaces allow a community of change makers to congregate and work in a new way. The high tech, low-stress environment allows you to work how you want, when you want. Profiles can be made public upon check in allowing for on the spot networking and bartering. The design is centered around customized elements that allow the company to maintain a “just add water” growth strategy, creating new friction-less environments around the country.
The Multi Contents Center is an office building for a consortium of media companies in Seoul’s Digital Media City (DMC), a visionary, high-concept office park. MESH’s winning competition entry, designed in collaboration with Gansam Partners, takes on two challenges: (1) programmatic demands for a publicly programmed podium and a private, set-back office tower and (2) staging a large-scale interaction with digital media in and around the podium. The podium and tower have conflicting agendas, as the tower is optimized for office layout and light while the podium must engage the street and house large-scale public programs. We present the podium as a light, media element and float it off the ground. It is dense with display and interaction with media of the tenant companies. Folding this media space upon itself defines a Media Terrace, an immersive space. We render digital media as physical space and physical events as media display.
Our architect-developer team won a competition to build this 10-story office building in a new, high-tech business district in Seoul, Korea. The site is a newly planned area, so the future context is unknown. The design is the result of a strict zoning mass, where the articulation of the envelope generates the building’s expression. The east facade adjoins a public promenade. An urban amphitheater draws the public into the building, which is inflected to create the amphitheater space. This east facade becomes a sleek, seamless glass curtain wall, a display with embedded LED video display oriented toward this public side, as if a virtual space were opened in the facade. By contrast the north and south facades express the actual, inhabited space inside. This space is bounded by construction technology that has not changed much in 80 years, concrete floor slabs. Here the articulation is in the modulation of the depth of the facade glazing, the location of the panels in space. Balconies, formed where the glass is recessed, bring building inhabitants to the facade. Here the building displays its occupation while the occupants may experience fresh air and views.
Writing is the organizing force of civilization. The world’s first writers stamped and scratched simple marks into malleable surfaces. Scripts have evolved over millennia as we retrace their forms onto new materials. The National Museum of World Writing engages this history by writing a glyph, an elemental character, into the landscape of Songdo Central Park. Its form is a trefoil, a continuous mark representing the overlap of 3 programs: public, curatorial, and archival. This sinuous concrete foundation structures all museum functions – rising, falling and breaking apart according to program. Old materials and new media interweave throughout the museum to reflect the history of writing in the structure itself.