ADVANCED DESIGN
SPRING 2023
JOSHUA TREE, CA
with Fernando Flores
The design process for this desert museum began with puzzles, with the concept for the puzzle based on an output from Midjourney, an image-producing AI chatbot. The commands varied, but common themes were Hanayma puzzles with different materiality combinations and creating interesting voids. A final image was chosen to progress into a physical puzzle, noted for its interlocking exterior, connecting rods and mechanical nature. Moving into the building, the puzzle was unrolled across the Joshua Tree site relative to the site boundary. The existing puzzle piece forms were extracted, copied, relocated, and reused in different ways on the site to create inhabitable areas, all of which revolved around the main central structure. The spatial result of this process is that circulation guides visitors along the curvature of the edges and guides them into the sunken central atrium. These peripheral spaces are linked via the main stairs cutting through the atrium space which follow the two "key" puzzle piece forms.
