The Civic Quarter

Architecture

Computation

ROLE

Architectural and Computational Designer

TIMELINE

15 weeks

TEAM

Claire Guo

TECH STACK

Rhino, Grasshopper, Python, SAP2000, Illustrator, Photoshop, V-Ray

CONTEXT

The East Adams neighborhood is undergoing a period of urban renewal shaped by new housing development, senior residential growth, and changing demands for community infrastructure. Within this context, the project site sits among existing and planned senior housing, future redevelopment phases, and neighborhood amenities that call for a building capable of supporting health, comfort, food access, social connection, and economic opportunity. Instead of treating the building as a sealed interior environment, the brief frames architecture as an active environmental system that can respond to climate, occupants, material behavior, and future uncertainty.

GOALS

Develop a community center that promotes physical, psychological, social, and economic well-being through spaces for growing, learning, gathering, activity, production, and retail incubation;
Organize programs through a gradient-based approach that coordinates indoor, outdoor, and semi-indoor spaces with temperature, humidity, comfort needs, occupancy patterns, and metabolic activity;
Integrate passive and active environmental systems that harness ambient energy, reduce reliance on fossil fuels, and support year-round comfort through material, spatial, and thermal strategies.

OUTCOMES

Designed a community center with clear environmental and ambiance zoning for varying programs.
Carefully considered passive and active climate systems to control interior environments.
Utilized computational design to size structural members, develop seating bowl geometry, and understand environmental performance.
Won an honorable mention in the King+King Integrated Design Studio Prize.

CONCEPT

The Civic Quarter reimagines the traditional senior center as an interior urbanism composed of distinct social neighborhoods rather than a singular institutional hall. A long bar building becomes the shared framework within which neighborhood insertions operate as quarters: each defined by their own material language, constituency, and atmosphere.

The design is centered around an east-west bar, designed to maximize solar heat gain in Syracuse’s predominantly cold climate. Within this bar, the programmatic arrangement of each neighborhood follows a south-north gradient, where spaces on the southern side are more public and participatory, while programs on the northern side of the site are typically quieter and more private, given the isolation from the busy street.

The interstitial spaces in between neighborhoods are designed to be a flexible gradient from exterior to interior, accounting for a variety of programmatic adjacencies.

BUILDING DRAWINGS

Urbanistically, the design aims to become “a walk through the neighborhoods”, including both exterior and interior paths that run parallel to the design.

Ground Floor Plan Oblique

Jogged Longitudinal Section

HVAC DESIGN

Building Systems Isometric

Given the unique constituency, atmosphere, and ambiance of each segment of the building, varying systems were required to maintain comfort across the building for each program group. Heating and cooling was loads are generated from a geothermal array in combination with a heat pump, with parallel boiler and chiller systems for heavier loads.

The heat is distributed from the main MEP room to programmed areas through a water-glycol loop. Active systems of the program groups are as follows, from left to right:

MAKE: Geothermal Radiant Walls + Air Exhaust + Fresh Air Supply

REVITALIZE: Geothermal Radiant Floors + Fresh Air Supply + Air Return
GATHER: Displacement Ventilation + Air Return

EXERCISE: Dehumidification System + Fresh Air Supply + Air Return

General bar: Under-floor Air Distribution

THE QUARTERS

MAKE

REVITALIZE

GATHER

EXERCISE

Interior Perspective (rendered collaboratively with Claire Guo)

MAKE: A space for cooking, preparing, and feasting.

MAKE is designed with a primary material composition of brick with steel structure, projecting a contemporary industrial aesthetic into the interior. Conceived primarily as a kitchen, makerspace, and dining area, this space relies heavily on ventilation and exhaust to create comfort.

Sectional Perspective

The stack effect allows hot and humid air from cooking to rise, and several hanging ducts exhaust dirty kitchen air to the exterior, which is replenished by fresh air from the westward (and windward) side passively as well as an AHU. When people are gathered and cooking, the heat from the stove is enough to keep them comfortable. When the space is not being actively used for cooking, radiant heating powered by a ground-source heat pump in the periodically placed walls slowly diffuses warmth into the space, creating optimal thermal comfort.

Structural Isometric and Finite Element Analysis

Passive and Active Systems (drawn in collaboration with Claire Guo)

Foundation to Roof Detail (drawn by Claire Guo)

Building Detail (drawn by Claire Guo)

Physical chunk models, the Quarters

Ultimately, the Civic Quarter understands architecture as a series of spaces that are not meant to conform to a unified logic, but instead to express their unique identities through material, tectonics, and ambiance.

POSTSCRIPT

This project was my most rigorous architectural undertaking in an academic setting. Despite the studio requiring only a single 'building' with a single set of documentation, we chose to push the limits of our project's conceptual philosophy and create four unique quarters, each with their own set of architectural drawings, construction details, finite element analyses, and renderings.