Rutilus Vilis

Junior Year Studio Project:

In this project I designed, with a partner, which was an off campus international student housing complex. The site would have been right off campus at Texas A&M in a section of town known as North-gate.

What was different with this project was that there was a real client. Having a person with real demands and estimations of the project was very cool to work with for the first time. We had no budget and our project wasn't actually going to get built, but came to our school looking for ideas from fresh minds and so that's what the studio was all about.

This was the end result of the project. Its a multi-use structure that has a mini-mall at the bottom for retail and then 13 stories of residential housing. There is also 2 layers of parking underneath the structure. On top of the roofs are courtyards which help replace the land lost because of the buildings enormous size. There are 4 towers and each is at a different height in order to not over power the area and to give light to a central courtyard that's in the middle of the structure. This building was also designed to be built in "phases" meaning you can build one tower and then add on the rest as funds come around and in this case there was already buildings on the site the client wanted to keep until some parts of the structure were finished.

The Building itself is called Rutilus Vilis, which in Latin means the "Golden Mean". It was named this way because thats the base for our concept. We stared out using the Golden Section, the Fibonacci Sequence, and Pen-Rose tiling grids set in several pod like formations. Once we had the grid laid out featuring numerous "kite" and "Diamond" shapes we then extruded each tower to the tone of the Fibonacci sequence. There was a mini tower that started at 2, then 3, 5, 8, and finished at 13. From there we added the "program" of the building such as all the dorm/apartment style rooms, and other amenities.

The building would have made the College Station, TX building codes, and fire codes. It would also have been within LEED certification as it had many of the "checklist" features and most materials were from within 500 miles of the site. This is also built from mostly natural materials or local materials. So concrete is all local and with local limestone's. There is NO SHEETROCK in this building and instead made with local Cedar and Oak and the same goes with the furniture. The outside would have been a mix of local limestone/brick and other stones.

This model you are seeing was done entirely in Revit and wasn't too bad for my very first attempt with the program. I loved Revit and will continue to us it going forward. The only reason it looks so plain was the fact that I couldn't figure how to apply material settings on "extruded" walls >.<. Most frustrating experience EVER!

Aftermath:

The client was very satisfied with our project. He thought it was one of the best in our studio. It also would have been one of most expensive xD. The scale of the project was massive! However, this was exactly what we were able to get our client to think about when the real project would get under way. He was very narrow minded about the project and in the end our project made him think in a bigger scale. As for myself, its a very unfinished project that I wish would have had more time to work on. The modeling in this was insane and its still not finished >.> Might come back to it later, but this was probably my most rewarding project.