This community center is intended to evoke a home - not four walls where a nuclear family convenes, but a multi-generational amalgam in which we share resources, take productive action, and collectively rest. Here, four walls are insufficient. Shifting levels and splintered spaces inspire dynamic, everyday use. Non-precious spaces are accessible to those passing through, waiting around, or meeting up. Within the greater volumes of enclosure, there is an additional layer of interiority of spaces nested within the system of frames facilitating gradients of views and privacy. Movement through thresholds, boundaries, and walls remains fluid throughout, while nested volumes are more specifically programmed.

Community Nest is laid out a 4’ grid. Set against the existing station building are administration and meeting spaces, connecting to the print shop in the baggage wing. The frames here, create a covered terrace surrounded by large sliding doors at the ground level. Moving toward the street, a single floor senior center contains a single nested space that utilizes an offset skylight. With this offset, the nested space is open to above, and part of the larger space, with walls acting as visual barriers, but losing their ability to provide acoustic enclosure. The senior centers gestures across the central axis through large sliding doors to the youth center.

Narrative callouts combining structure with program and adapation are key to the representational presentation of the project. Providing multiple modes of drawing for individual excerpts gives context and emotion to these moments, shown often simultaneously in plan, section, and collage.

Structural frames extend beyond the boundaries of the walls they support, implying connections and programmatic adjacencies between the inside and outside, and sometimes back inside. Frames cue a greater connectivity in what appears to be a series of pavilions. These conditions are facilitated by the structural system of enlarged and frequent frames, rhythmically woven throughout the larger site. Four heights of frames overlap and extend over one another, beyond the boundaries of walls, creating a variety of vertical spaces. Offset height datum from 14-30 feet creates various heights of spaces. The cladding of the building is a rain-screen of narrow fir panels, backed by a secondary structural system, bolted to but separate from the glulam frames, here shown crossing at 14 and 26 feet.

This project refuses binary thresholds; spaces belong to multiple territories and programs are delineated by nested walls or exterior passages, if at all, within a fractured hierarchy of frames. What constitutes a home are the structures we belong to, which are rarely either or. Here we frame interactions and use through diffusion of space, and leaky light, with parts belonging to many things at once.