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Six Silos
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A Renovation of An Old Silo Factory

 Fall 2018

Work With: Yuyi Zhou
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​The project is a renovation of the old silo factory located on an abandoned industrial area in Chicago. The silos have been abandoned since a 1977 explosion. Silos were traces of the industrial era. Through human development, more and more industrialized trails originally existed on the earth. How do we reuse them while highlighting their cultural value?
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​Silos always give people a feeling of mystery because of their opacity and height. People have no idea what is inside of them. We decided to take advantage of the mysterious feeling in addition to their structural thickness. We kept the original structure and added floors to the silos to create inhabitable space. First, we begin with the shape of the space as a circle which comes from the original shape of the silo. Then we break the circle to create the “wall”. We rotate the wall to create different feelings and different functions on each floor. The interesting thing is when we rotate the circular wall to create the inhabitable space, we create an interesting “Poche” space too. The Poche space could also be used as another room, furniture, or an armature. In this case we kept the old structure to represent the existing silo while creating new spaces. We played a lot with the light to keep the silo mysterious so each silo has a different atmosphere due to the light conditions.
 
​Due to the height of silos, the building actually has a beautiful view. In order to make the building more cultural and commercial, We decided to add a new structure on top of the old silos. The program of the new structure is a small theatre for 300 people. Our goal is to create different functions and feelings through the old part of the silos to the new part of the theatre. The philosophy of this project is to use the existing forms of the silos to create types of spaces with different feelings and experiences.
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Poche in Architecture
Poche space is interesting place in architecture design because it is not your intention to design such spaces but it is still important. In the ancient temple, such as Roman architecture, the Poche space usually hides the structure of the space. 
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Modern Poche
In modern architecture, Poche space usually contains hollow spaces for services such as plumbing and electrical wiring. However, at Le Corbusier’s Ronchamp Church, the thickness of the wall generated different lighting conditions, which makes us think differently on how we could use the Poche in our project.
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Poche Space in the Silo
​Take the original circular shape from the old silo, and think the circle as the main functional spaces when the circles tangent to each other, there is a negative space, just like the Poche spaces.
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Alternative Poche Spaces
Unlike the traditional Poche space, we think Poche space itself could become another program or an armature for the building.
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Facade System
We carve the facade of the old part of the building to create different lighting. The different angles of the curving facades create different angles of indirect lighting.
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Detail Section
The new parts of the silo are constructed in precast concrete; the curvilinear geometry for the roof makes the precast concrete strong enough to span the entire theater.
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