Velodrome

Abstract

The premise of this thesis is to use a large volume in order to create a public space, a new city scape in a city park. The focus of the thesis proposal is on the ability of an urban site project to resonate beyond the imposed limits of a park (the "Esplanade") caught in between the Charles River and the busy express way of Storrow Drive in Boston. The aim is to integrate the large-scale sports complex into a cityscape which can thus evolve positively whilst respecting the skyline of Boston and the surrounding city. The study attempts to design an Olympic Velodrome (indoor cycling arena that will be one of the vendors or the bidding of the Boston Olympics in the year 2008), in an urban setting park on the Charles River edge(meeting point of the Atlantic Ocean) without destroying the life of the town, its physical presence should accompany it. The urban question posed by the velodrome facility project involves presence and absence. The Velodrome's juxtaposition with the public space reexamines the space of transition, which is caught in between the public (spectators) and private (athletes) realms. Using the Velodrome as a point of departure, the proposal seeks to develop an architecture that functions simultaneously as both an urban connector for public (runners, rollerbladers, cyclers, etc) and a localizing element that enables the re-definition of the movement in free-form landscape. This proposal operates at urban, architectural, and bodily scales to provide a forum of exploration. Formally, the architectural configuration seeks to come bet-ween the meta-morphosis of the surrounding landscape topography, suggesting an alternative contextualism that maintains a specific relationship to the water-front and the city, while emerging as a unique and discrete relationship of speed, time, and precision driven Velodrome. The goal of the design will be to resolve the large scale standard dimensions of the velodrome and how the architecture can negotiate between the private (velodrome) and public recreational activities generated by the speed driven program.