Wurster Hall Bench
UC Berkeley, Wurster Hall
Team: Yes Duffy, Brian Gillett, Chris DeHenzel, Rockne Hanish, Jeremy Fisher, William Smith, Marisha Farnsworth, Molly Mehaffy, Henry Richardson, Chris Lesnett, Robert Glass, Alexis Steiner, Anuar Azahari, Alyssa Machle
ASLA student award 2011
AIA SF constructed realities award 2011
In the Spring of 2010 a team of Landscape Architecture and Architecture students led a design build seminar to rethink a little known courtyard on the northeast corner of their academic building. Prompted to build a bench, the student team challenged the ordinary definition of such an amenity. The result was an outdoor classroom, performance platform, and social space.
The project concept splits, folds, and stretches the conventional idea of a bench, to accommodate numerous activities, and formally responds to the variable positions in which one might sit. The structural profile corresponds to function, providing an outdoor classroom, performance platform and social space that responds to existing site conditions. The design/build project allowed students to develop a broad range of skills, and manifests a pedagogical shift towards collaboration between architecture and landscape architecture at the university.
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