2nd Year Spring 19
Kent State University | College of Architecture and Environmental Design
ARCH 20102: second year design studio II—Spring 2019
Urban Fit[ness]: sports | wellness | play
‘People respond viscerally to atmospheres. Increasingly they respond to institutions with ennui. We are becoming ever more a species that thrives on immediate, palpable stimulation on material fact. It is not what it is so much as how it feels. One of the things we feel most potently in buildings is their atmosphere. Maintaining and even extending the public role of buildings demands they produce a saturated experience that almost clings to the skin of the people moving through them.’
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This exercise explores the role of an urban wellness and holistic living within the city. Themes of health, fitness and repair were targeted to study new formal and spatial strategies for a wellness/fitness center that supports a lifestyle of healthy living, collective play and rejuvenation. Students were asked to consider concepts of well being as both an individual and collective experience, and how forms and spaces for human rejuvenation catalyze the urban milieu.
Concepts of atmosphere and fitness were emphasized as they relate to the experience and performance of space. Special consideration was given to material effects and their impact upon physical and cognitive restoration, revitalization and healing.
How might the experience of a built environment serve as an agent of wellness? Who are the various users, and what are the physical and social expressions of the spaces they inhabit? How might spatial sequencing and program assemblies support an urban neighborhood? What roles might context play in the cultivation of new forms and structures of urban fitness?
