Brendan T. Westfall
Bloomfield Community Recreation Center​
Third Year Studio
2013 Hajjar Competition
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University of the Arts Student Center
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30,000 SF Structures | ADA/Code/Headaches | Hajjar Competition
Professor: Sandra Staub
Semester: Fall 2012
Site: Current Bloomfield Rec Center, Bloomfield, Pittsburgh, PA
The third year of Penn State's program broadens the scope of design considerations significantly in comparison to previous years. For our first semester-long project, we were to design a recreation complex which could be built in place of the recreation center that is currently located at our site in Bloomfield. The program requirements for this building were in excess of 20,000 square feet, which was the first building complex of such a size that I designed. The program called for a basketball gym, as well as an exercise equipment area, which I housed in one structure on the site. The Recreation Building, which was 50% underground for sustainability and scale concerns, featured a ground floor with a ramped compression ring. This compression ring served not only as a structural system , but also as a jogging track and exercise equipment space. This compression ring was also open to below, allowing patrons the opportunity to watch the basketball games occurring on the floor below. The site design I proposed featured two other buildings: a Community Education Complex and an indoor pool building. The Recreation Building and Community Education Complex helped frame an urban plaza, with green space and hardscape, which was central to the concept of my design. This focus on the framing of the site helps the Recreation Center to become inward-facing, which implies privacy for the users, which is a group technically limited to the residents of the Bloomfield community. The plaza also creates a border within the site of formal, regimented spaces and free-flowing, more natural spaces. On the natural space side of the site lies the Indoor and outdoor pools, as well as rolling green space for multiple uses.
Professor: None (Independent Project)
Semester: Spring 2013
Site: Corl Street Elementary School, State College, PA
To start the Spring 2013 semester, the third year class participated in a one-week charette-style competition. Located at Corl Street Elementary School in State College, the Student Recycling Workshop creates a space for teachers at the school to help their students learn the joys of upcycling through hands-on projects in a workshop environment. The idea behind my approach was to create a building nestled in the current topography, which would resemble a landfill. The kids entering the "landfill," then, would be superheroes, saving trash from mounding up in real landfills across the world.
Professor: Ute Poerschke
Semester: Spring 2013
Site: Avenue of the Arts, Philadelphia, PA
Much like Fall 2012, the Spring 2013 program for third year was a comprehensive building design located in an urban area, this time in downtown Philadelphia on Broad Street. We were to design a student union and activity center for the University of the Arts, which was also looking to increase its visibility in downtown Philadelphia. In developing a conceptual strategy, I was very interested in building connetions--not only between UArts and the city itself, but also between the various degree programs at UArts: dance, film, indutrial design, musical composition, etc. I began tinkering with the interplay of public and private space within a singular building, which was important for this project due to its urban site, and I ultimately settled on a building that reads as two seperate buildings. My design featured a glass curtain wall surrounding the bottom two floors, to allow the public to see into the gallery spaces located in the UArts Student Center, as well as the performance space which carves into the ground at the rear of the building. Upon this lightly articulated bottom portion of the building rests the more private study and work spaces specifically for UArts students, which reads as a more solid unit and is wrapped in anodized aluminum panels colored to express the presence of a spectacular new UArts building. Many of the student spaces are mixed-use, and each floor of the upper portion of the building are connected via an atrium space against the south façade. The fire stairs too work to tie the building together, as they are faced with fire-rated glass which allows students to peer into each floor as they rise through the building.