VICTOR BAHNA
Big Red Art Shed
Terminal Studio project: Winter-Spring 2024
Location: Astoria, Oregon
Professor: Nancy Cheng
Process
As the Lyceum Competition was the basis for our designs, this project was focused on the ways that building materials could be salvaged from demolition sites and reused in new buildings or in new materials. As a result, the start of the design was involved around studying reuse of building materials and concepts such as biophilic design and adaptive reuse. I ultimately decided that, given my desire to work in the locality of Astoria, Oregon, I would focus on the concept of turning seafood waste into ceramics.
We were allowed to choose our own sites for this project. Due to interest in adaptively reusing buildings and working in Astoria, I chose a ruined cannery net loft in the depressed and hardly walkable neighborhood of Uppertown, with the hopes that a project like this could lead to an improvement in the quality of life for the residents. Siting a building over the water proved to be a major challenge, especially when considering things such as constructability and egress.
Given the excitement of working within a ruin, I tried my best to honor the history of the building while simultaneously doing something new and inventive with it; in my case, the carving out of the center allowed the building to have a central courtyard with lightly planted green space. Where the historic building's original façade fell away over time, I decided to put a new, terra-cotta façade that both distinguishes new from old and references the rushing waters of the mighty Columbia River.
Final Result
