Joshua Tio

Room after Room | ARCH 100A | Adam Miller Studio | Fall 2025

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This project is tasked to create an 8000 square foot detached addition to Bauer Wurster Hall on the south side. The program encompasses an entrance on the East and West side, a public lobby, an auditorium, pin-up/review spaces, an office, and a public staircase and public ramp. Overall, the goal of this project is to create a complex structure made by simple decisions wrapped by a rectangular box. Within each floor, rooms are designed as a sequence to one another, limiting the use of a hallway. This encourages a continuous flow all throughout the building as encouraged by the project's title "Room after Room".

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In plans, the project encapsulated an evolution of the first floor plan. The first floor plan is an abstract representation of the overall site of the project encompassing the relational differences between the surrounding Anthropology Building, Bauer Wurster Hall, and UC Berkeley School of Law. This is visible through the vertical bar on the left, connected to the horizontal bar at the top, and the rectangular volume at the bottom right with a curve (this curve demonstrates the Law building's curved patio).

 

On each subsequent floor, one of these three aspects are exemplified to take over the entire floor. This is seen on the second floor emphasizing the curve into a full semi-circle for the auditorium. The third floor replicates the horizontal bar to form office spaces. Finally, the fourth floor uses the vertical bar to create the pin-up zones. 

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To interconnect the varying floors, this project uses volumetric curves in plan and section as demonstrated by the curved public stairway that wraps around the first to third floors, curved ceilings in the circulations and auditorium, and curved balconies. 

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The project's envelope takes an opposite measure to the interior's interweaved complexity in the form of a modest box.  This box is decorated with a pattern of glazing formed by half solid wall to hint at the interior form, and a void for the windows. Such combination of solid and void creates an encapsulating facade despite the otherwise basic form.

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Awards & Nominations:

2025 Design Excellence Award Nomination