Rebecca Commissaris

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The culmination of my thesis research on architecture and its place in the wilderness is this proposal for a new shelter on the Routeburn Track Flats.

In the most rudimentary way, a shelter offers hikers protection from the elements. This shelter straddles a line between landscape and interiority. It shelters and encloses, but also contains and frames the outside world.

The pinnacle at which this is realized is the second-floor open-air courtyard. It is the valley itself at an intimate scale. Walls are formed from site lines of the surrounding mountains so that they bridge one peak to the next, forming one smooth line, heightening the perception of the valley and enclosure. One wall slips down to become a roof and slides into the landscape to the most distant point, the entrance of the valley. Standing at the centroid your periphery is completely surrounded except for this one distant view.

It is a space that holds you in the vastness of the landscape.

I studied the rough rock that becomes a smooth rock on its cycle back to a grain of sediment – looking for a gap where architecture might fit into the story of the wilderness. I smashed a piece of clay on a table and morphed a “rock” from rough to smooth. Mappings of these smashings revealed a core that remained untouched over time and a perimeter that is jagged, rough, undefined. This triggered an exploration of enclosure – architecture that straddles a line between landscape and interiority.

There is a magical place called the Routeburn Flats in the South Island of New Zealand. It is a vast yet contained valley that funnels water from the mountains to the Dart river, to lake Wakatipu. The flats are so horizontal they look like a lake and there is a mountain that rises so sharply from this lake that it floats.

“What for lesser mortals is called “detail” was for [Lewerentz] a means of heightening and transfiguring the mundane…”
Colin St John Wilson

With a language of dots, dashes and flaps, I re-draw Saint Mark’s church, telling the story of space without the geometry, but with the rhythm of the bricks and mortar.

This studio proposes a research institute for the scholarly study of Michelangelo’s work.

Located near two of the artist’s masterpieces: the Laurentian Library and the New Sacristy, the role of the institute is to rejoin the S. Lorenzo complex into urban Florence as it was initially intended.

In the 15th Century the Medici family commissioned many alterations of the S. Lorenzo complex, including the removal of the buildings on the north side in order to create a clear view of their “private” church from their palazzo across the piazza. The removal of these buildings meant a widening of the Via Dell Canto De Nelli into a now ill defined market / street / piazza.

This proposal reasserts S. Lorenzo as a civic complex, in harmony with it’s urban context, by drawing a hard line parallel to the buildings across the Via Dell Canto De Nelli. The line becomes a long tall bar building with similar dimensions as the street. Conceptually, the building is an interior street. To link this bar building with the S. Lorenzo complex, a low mass building oriented perpendicular to the church connects to the side of the bar – like a knot or joint. As a whole, the new building mediates the mis-alignment of height between S. Lorenzo and urban Florence to re-define a strong street and clear piazza.

Full scale membrane structures that explore and express the relationship between membranes and tensile rods.
Work completed in collaboration with Sukwon Park and Omar Soliman.