Architecture often treats the surface of the Earth, or the “ground,” as a liminal plane to be broken and excavated, cut and filled, and smoothed into a neutral line. But when architecture opens the ground, we encounter the messy substrates of the city: exposed geologies, urban infrastructures, soil ecosystems, and hydrological worlds. OPEN-GROUND seeks to reinhabit these strata, imagining how architecture can operate as both a climate infrastructure and new public space. Aboveground, the project consists of an open-ended, multiuse, and many-textured surface of hardscapes and exposed earth. The space frame roof is loosely filled with recycled or natural insulation material, functioning as a thermal barrier and filtering light throughout the day. Covered by the shade structure, the surface provides space for recreation (such as basketball courts) and gathering, offering public services such as WiFi, outlets, bathrooms, and tool storage. Belowground, an array of tubular chambers functions as a rainwater detention and harvesting system. Connecting the space frame of the roof and the underground reservoirs below, a series of cylindrical ventilation structures provides conduits for buoyant air. These thermal stacks create a microclimatic engine, using temperature, humidity, and pressure differentials to ventilate and cool the open-air space. Not only does this cooling center build up the capacity for on-site water detention; it also proposes how climate infrastructures can function beyond bare shelter. OPEN-GROUND offers the political position that the role of architecture in the Anthropocene is to hybridize the relationship between public life and terrestrial systems. The project’s underbelly of pipes and conduits, crisscrossing beams, and soil substrates imagines architecture as part of a planetary stack, mediating a site’s geologies, hydrologies, and atmospheres to offer a new space to gather under the sun.
Project Leads: Daniel Jacobs, Brittany Utting
Design Team: Nathan Ehrlich
Model Photographs: Sean Fleming / smfleming.com