LINDSEY FEOLA

Project: Olympic Stadium

Professor: Paul Preissner

Year: 2007

Team: Individual final project

In 2007, the architectural community in Chicago was completely preoccupied with the City's Olympic bid for the 2016 summer games.  Our studio, likewise, conjectured on how the Olympics could transform the City.  My project for the Olympic Stadium on the south side of Chicago sought to create a forum for the world's largest spectacle surrounding the achievements of the human body.  This project investigates how a building might capture movement. To create a stadium that warrants the title Olympic Stadium, it must be cinematic, mysterious and spectacular.  This project is grounded in momentum and movement, just like the athletes that give it purpose.  I began the process of designing this stadium, not unlike a designer who creates creatures for films.  To make something that is truly uncanny, familiar yet alien, and ultimately alluring, it must be grounded in biologically possible movement, color and structure.  I studied sea slugs for their elegant movement.  they are weightless but aerodynamic.  Their color modifies with their movement, mood and environment.  The stadium is an aggregate of a family of shapes derived from these studies.  They become circulation, canopy and shelter.  The rhythm of the shape generates a robust logic and structure born out of a module that is anything but structured. 

Project: Public Library

Professor: Doug Garofalo, Geoff Goldberg, Claire Lyster

Year: 2006

Team: Lindsey Feola & James Auler

This proposal sits at the corner of Jackson and the Kennedy Expressway in Chicago. Its proximity to the University of Illinois at Chicago demands that it serve a different function than a traditional academic library.

Pursuit of knowledge is not treated as an end in itself, but rather a means to an end. By engaging the books and digital information with circulation ramps and the building’s infrastructure, this notion is materi- alized. One veers off this path and encounters spaces that echo, in material character, the user’s own journey 

Project: Barcelona Housing

Professor: Xavier Vendrell, Pere Joan Ravetllat, Carme Ribas, Josep Fernando 

Year: 2006

Team: Lindsey Feola & Tracey Macmurchy

The experience of walking through Barcelona’s narrow, winding streets and encountering a small plaza is characteristic of this Mediterranean city.  Locals spend much of the year outdoors in these plazas, indeed appropriating the public space as their own.  Placa Gardunya, the site of this project was once one such plaza.

The site sits between the Mercat Boqueria, one of Spain’s most visited markets, and the National Library of Catalunya.  The Library is installed in a cloister-like building, a quiet enclosure that offers reprieve from the loud streets outside. The Market offers a cacophony of colors, smells and sounds and is active all year and during most of the day.  

Placa Gardunya offers an opportunity to provide a buffer zone between these two, very different experiences and connect to an existing network of successful public spaces. We sought to create a variety of public spaces with two new housing buildings and a new facility for the Massana School of Art in Barcelona.  These plazas create spaces for the public, tourists, students and residents to interact.

The site sits between the Mercat Boqueria, one of Spain’s most visited markets, and the National Library of Catalunya.  The Library is installed in a cloister-like building, a quiet enclosure that offers reprieve from the loud streets outside. The Market offers a cacophony of colors, smells and sounds.

Placa Gardunya offers an opportunity to provide a buffer zone between these two, very different experiences and connect to an existing network of successful public spaces. We sought to create a variety of public spaces with two new housing buildings and a new facility for the Massana School of Art in Barcelona.  These plazas create spaces for the public, tourists, students and residents to interact.

Project: Chicago Housing

Professor: Peter Landon, Roberta Feldman, David Brown

Year: 2005

Team: Lindsey Feola & Travis Howe

This project for housing focuses on the site of the new Chicago Housing Authority West Haven project, the site of the old CHA Henry Horner Homes. The 9 acre site is situated near the United Center, is bordered by the elevated train and is a part of a vast neighborhood reconstruction project including market rate as well as affordable and subsidized homes.

Typical housing provides a static and inflexible model for a diverse group of people. This model does not reflect nor respond to the changing nature of the lives of the dwellers. Many new housing options in Chicago seek to create urban utopias based on the suburban model. Instead of rejecting the urban condition of constant change and activity, we propose to reinforce and expose this condition.  

We contend that the human condition is one of constant change.  Individuals who make up the city and the city itself are most successful when they are neither nostalgic nor amnesiac they are neither independent entities nor consist of contrived holistic communities.  The city,  and the neighborhoods and individuals of which it consists cannot be reified.  The city, like its constituent parts is in FLUX.  

We propose a mechanism for growth and adaptation that strips away the elements that conceal the life within the units and provides a visibly flexible system of change and variation.