Katherine Weaver, RA

Kid, You'll Move Mountains

An existing gabled roof building houses administrative offices for the fundraising arm of the school and for Wawa House, an early intervention infant-toddler testing program. A new addition accommodates a series of building blocks containing a gymnasium and seven highly specialized classrooms, as well as life skills setups—-a house, an office, and a store--providing students with safe opportunities to integrate into the fabric of the village. This collection of building blocks is linked by a porch-—a corridor that creates the opportunity for social interaction while in transit from one area of the building to another. The single-loaded porch offers views of nature throughout and forms a protective courtyard for the outdoor areas.

Throughout the design, materials were chosen to appeal to the autism spectrum thought process and to create an atmosphere of peace and calm—color palettes are neutral and muted, strong considerations for natural light, basic rhythmic patterning of materials, and a program layout that is simple to navigate.

A Catalyst for Change

Located in the University Heights district of Newark, NJ, University Heights Charter School is seeking to expand its facilities to grow through grade 8. Now educating students in grades K-5, University Heights Charter School teamed up with the Canyon-Agassi Charter School Facilities Fund to find the right space to create a home for their second school facility.

After evaluating a variety of spaces in Newark, University Heights chose a unique location. A three-story brick industrial building, previously used for fashion manufacturing, is being repurposed with the combination of two new additions—a two-story 10,000 SF classroom addition and a 5,000 SF gymnasium addition. The design balances the preservation of historic elements of the building to retain its unique character, with modernizing and upgrading the facility to enable University Heights Charter School to develop in each student the character, scholarship and leadership to succeed in life, college and the community.

The classroom addition mimics the existing building's brick in a modern way. The gymnasium addition uses a Kalwall system to create a floating light box perched above metal panels painted with super-graphics to welcome students and project the school's identity.

One World For Everyone

Our office designed this campus from masterplanning through occupancy. My role was to lead masterplanning and site design, programming, and building massing. This project was enjoyable to work on. We had a great client and just as important, time to explore. One of the pieces I'm especially proud of is the site design--the siteplan was meticously cared for throughout concept diagrams all the way down to playground equipment.

Parametric Permutations

After conceptual ideations into basic theories and the meaning of architecture in undergraduate studies—and a liberating embrace of nihilism—the first semesters of graduate study were focused primarily on explorations of form. Evolutions of buildings forms have shifted from a Modernist clear delineation and simplification of rectilinear forms as expressed in Mies Van der Rohe's and Johnson's glass and steel shells to neoclassical revivals with contemporary materials. After a brief hiccup of Postmodern teals and mauves, architecture has entered into the age of computer generated forms. Deconstruction of hard edges and solitary geometric masses has resulted in a unifying form with ambiguous edges. Permutations of forms exploit the availability of rapid computational prototyping.

The following formal explorations focus on dynamic building forms. This doesn't imply that the architecture intends to use technology to literally make the building rotate or shift its physical global position. Instead, motion is inferred through inflecting repetitive elements. Through the establishment of formal structures, such as the floor plates in a high-rise, boundaries are parametrically altered to create subtle inflections between adjacent members. The following two studios explore these methods of movement in plan and section.

An Archive for the Multitude

What and how should information be preserved? What happens when the control of information shifts from formal institutions to the many? How will knowledge be formulated differently when the social institution of the library becomes extinct as search engines become the normalized interface for information.

Knowledge is being crowd-sourced and being created faster. Architecturally, computational time inspired me to create a physical manifestation of 'sensored' objects moving in space. Through the ingest of live-data, architecture can begin to act as a new kind of spatial mediation between people and their physical environment.

A reminder of my adventurous roots.

I keep this in my design portfolio as a personal souvenir.

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