Consultants: David Kefferman, PE (Structural Engineering)

Method Design was commissioned to situate and design a new prayer chapel for the expanding garden and field areas of the Rain Forest International School near Yaounde, Cameroon.  In addition to fulfilling the program of a gathering and worship space for the community, the School’s leadership required full maintaining of views from school buildings into the chapel, as well as additional exterior amphitheater-style seating and gathering space.  The design team’s response was to utilize a single, shifting wall system of CMU fins oriented towards a central, internal point to negotiate a landscape that provided private, intimate worship space to the interior, and an exterior gathering and amphitheater space.  The mahogany and corrugated steel roof system–designed with David Kufferman, PE and the RFIS Team, provides for areas of shading and entry to the chapel.

Consultants:  Akustikmiljö

The D151ort Pavilion is an architectural device to transform our experience of sound and light.  It explores the potentials of parametric design, is informed by material logic, and is inspired by the urban experience.

The result of a transatlantic collaboration between architecture students from the Royal Danish Academy of Fine Arts School of Architecture in Copenhagen and Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute School of Architecture in New York produced an innovative sound installation for the most progressive international music festival located in Denmark: The Copenhagen Distortion Music Festival.

The D151ort Pavilion is the centerpiece of the festival, a digitally fabricated, reconfigurable, acoustic pavilion made up of 151 sound absorptive cones arranged in a hexagonal geometric configuration. The graphic quality of light projected from the triangular cones emphasizes the shape and structural character of the installation. The mobile installation visited four venues during the festival, taking center stage in an outdoor plaza, in a small nightclub, in a grand hall, and in a teeming lobby. The project would not have been possible without the expertise, knowledge, and generosity of Akustikmiljö of Sweden. Special thanks  for time and resources donated by the Royal Danish Academy of Fine Arts School of Architecture in Copenhagen, Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute School of Architecture, CITA, Method Design, Krydsrum Arkitekter, Statens Kunstfond, and of course the Copenhagen Distortion Music Festival.

Method Design Team: Reese Campbell, Demetrios Comodromos, Nick Axel

The Westbury Theater proposal projects the programmatic vitality of the newly renovated Westbury Theater to engage and re-vitalize the community, its identity, and the local street life.  This is accomplished through a primary strategy highlighting the programmatic difference in the project by articulating the main components of the complex: theater volume, studio spaces above, and commercial storefront at street level. This formal strategy of articulated difference is unified by the array of projecting window boxes that establish visual connections between users of the studio spaces and the residents of Westbury, while at the same time manifesting an architecture of cultural performance.

The overall building complex asserts itself as a unique and significant urban object through the extension of the two Marquees–one on Post Avenue, and one in the new addition on Winthrop Street.  These Marquees act as both light beacons within the community, and signage for the vibrant events inside.