SANDUSKY ohio
"Simulated Research Campus"
Designed in collaboration with Lucas Luo and Ashley Xu
Located on a current NASA testing base and former nuclear reactor site, this design for a research university in Sandusky Ohio experiments with simulations and fabricated environments. In this campus, the architecture's ability to perform simulations means that students are constantly moving between fabricated realities. Students of this university will be tested, experimented on, and surveiled in order to simulate the effects of space travel. Each building on campus is designed around a specific type of pre-space travel simulation that tests the students: including a zero gravity simulation pool, a centrifuge, and a martian surface simulator.
The Sandusky testing center is an example of these extensive pre-flight simulations that NASA conducts. The concept of simulation is not foreign to this site. This NASA base already contains multiple instances of simulation, including a massive vacuum chamber, a hypersonic wind tunnel, a vibration chamber, and a nuclear reactor.
After developing a master plan for the entire NASA campus, individual buildings needed to be established in detail. One of which was a neutral bouyancy pool, allowing astronauts to simulate space environments underwater. With a neutral buoyancy pool there are two primary facets: the first being the pool itself. The pool is sunk below grade, and is surrounded by a massive staging area for large scale objects. The second aspect of this simulation building is the vast network of support and preparation spaces required to get the astronauts into the pool. These spaces are expressed as chambers on the second level of this project, with each chamber featuring a different type of human scale preparation. This move creates a pile of connected objects, so students will move through a sequence of chambers before and after experiencing the pool. This pile of objects seems to hover over the simulation pool, expressing the building’s purpose of simulating weightlessness. Whenever a void space is created in this pile of objects, a pseudo exterior world is created which underscores the variety of realities present in this project.
