The historic Ursuline Campus of the
Southwest School of Art holds a special place not only within the hearts of the
students and faculty, but within San Antonio’s as well. When the SSA issued a
call for ideas to make it’s adjacent Navarro Campus “just as memorable” as the
Ursuline Campus, we developed a design that respects the architectural
significance of the historic campus while at the same time extending formal
characteristics to create a contemporary vision for the future of the school in
general and for the Navarro Campus in particular. A former car dealership, the
Navarro Campus is disconnected both spatially and physically from the historic
campus. Our design endeavors to strengthen their relationship by gesturing the
main mass of a new structure towards the historic campus.
Similar to the lines of the groin vaults in Gothic architecture, our design
creates a grid shell, or lattice structure, that envelops the existing
Navarro Campus building. The massing
of the new structure pays homage to the school’s historic chapel by playing off
the gabled geometry and extending it to address surrounding urban context. The
lattice's pattern references a woven textile or basket – the figurative and
literal creative fabric of the SSA.
Our proposal is not a static formal gesture. Rather, the lattice will be a
Living Icon which temporally engages the creative life of the school. Each open
cell of the lattice is filled in, over time, in one of three ways: 1)
permanently in which a graduate of the newly formed BFA and MFA classes creates
a panel; 2) temporarily as part of an installation or exhibition in which
artist(s) create works that engage the structure; and 3) through the creation
of donor panels. Some cells are left open. As the cells fill in, the lattice
will take shape fueled by the communal efforts of the SSA.