Hyperboloidal Motion
Instructor Cameron Wu
GSD — 2011

This proposal for a museum at the mouth of the Charles River in Boston resists stasis. The project brief calls for the building to kinetically transform with each passage of a boat through the adjacent lock. Rotational motion governed by the geometry of a hyperboloid of revolution displaces stairs both in plan and section, fundamentally reorganizing the building's circulation and recurating its exhibits in a highly controlled way.

The stair mechanism operates beyond the extent of its function, requiring large voids to be cut out of the building's fiber. The result is an inversion of the notion of program and circulation; galleries take the form of three independent and linear paths while the stairs' motion carves out the building's primary gathering spaces.