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About
PROJECTS
Building China: Five Projects, Five Stories
2008
The Building China exhibition, shown at New York's Center for Architecture, featured five unique architectural projects conceived, designed, and recently completed by Chinese architects. Located throughout China, these projects, many being shown in the United States for the first time, offered nuanced insight into China's transforming landscapes.
The design for the show fuses an interpretation of a traditional Chinese folding screen with the need for a high level of flexibility. The screen system, made from wheatboard panels, allowed adjustment to situations ranging from storage room access to exhibition materials arriving at the last minute demanding changes in the plan. Additionally, the system threads together two disjointed gallery spaces into an organic whole, emphasizing the curatorial idea of the show as a series of stories. A 16' high section of the system extends up from the basement mezzanine location to engage the sidewalk, advertising the show with a neon sign.
Ankook Building, Seoul, Korea
2007
The only program requirement in the competition brief for a renovation and addition to the Ankook Building sounded simple: make the building 70% commercial and 30% cultural. With the distinction between what’s cultural and what’s commercial increasingly slippery these days, we took the approach of making many kinds of programmatic subdivision and mixture possible. At the same time, we accentuated contrast between the new and old as a way of suggesting unique cultural and commercial identities.
What we needed was a concept for how to relate the old volume below and a new volume above. The need to keep the old building’s existing parking tower led us to think of it as a big column supporting the new volume floating above. This led us to conceiving of the new addition as a giant squid: a series of articulate legs tactically woven into the existing volume of the old building below, as well as the project’s streetscape.
Each leg serves a different purpose, ranging from a big new elevator, better stairs, a light well joining all the floors old and new, to a miniature apartment tower for an artist-in-residence. In all cases the legs act as columns. Located so as to slip within the existing column grid of the old building, the addition takes a symbiotic rather than a parasitic approach to structure.
With the constrained floor-to-floor height of the old building, the new top volume naturally suggests itself as a cultural space, expanding into the full height of the site's zoning envelope. Top lit and with a view to the mountains north of the city, its design suggests various identities and uses while attempting to constrain none.
With Haewon Shin of Lokaldesign. Structural consulting by Brett Schneider.
Reena Spaulings Fine Art
2006
The design for RSFA's new home treats the generic "white cube" gallery as a set of rigid conditions collaged with maximum contrast into the decrepit interior of a former brothel. Serving as both studio and exhibition space, the design's length and height are generated by uncut 4'x10' modules of Sheetrock.
With Ron Eng of Formactiv.
The True Juche Tower: Ideological Adaptive Re-Use
2005
The Ryugyong Hotel in Pyongyang, North Korea has been abandoned in a state of incompletion since 1992. Domus magazine recently called for ideas on how this massive concrete pyramid, tall as one of the former World Trade Center towers, could be re-imagined for new uses. Domus has stated that all proposals will be handed over to the North Korean Embassy in Rome and the Architects’ Union in Pyongyang.
We took as our conceptual point of departure Kim Il Sung’s creation in 1955 of the national philosophy of Juche, Korean for self-reliance. The success of this philosophy is obviously contradicted by the country’s chronic electricity shortages and the famine that started in the early ‘90s due to the collapse of the Eastern Bloc. Our response to this situation is to transform the hotel into an electricity producing solar chimney that doubles as a greenhouse, turning the rotting pyramid into an infrastructural monument.
First the hotel’s center is hollowed out to make a 330-meter tall shaft. With the addition of a low glass roof over the hotel’s 700-meter diameter site and a turbine placed at the shaft’s base, the chimney is complete. Air heated by the sun below the glass roof can only escape up the shaft, thereby spinning the turbine, creating electricity. Water used as thermal mass below the roof is used to grow rice. Lastly, sun-exposed facade areas are covered with solar troughs for increased power production.
With these interventions, the hotel becomes a symbol of self-reliance that simultaneously produces it in the form of electricity and rice.
In collaboration with Lok Jansen/Imagineering. Korean translation by Charlie Kang.
The Open Tower
2005 - present
An investigation of mass customization and indeterminate architecture, the Open Tower proposes a radically flexible building formed out of a spiral. 10,000 feet long but only 20 feet deep, the spiral’s dimensions allow both the continuous floor area required by offices and the daylight needed for apartments, making the tower super adaptable over time.
A typical office building doesn’t have any interior subdivisions because the developer doesn’t know who’s going to occupy it and how much space they'll need. So why are developers sure people are going to be happy with their predetermined selection of units when they build an apartment building? They don’t know who’s going to be in it either.
Pie chart: frequency of change to systems in a US office building over an average lifespan of 35 years [figures from Stewart Brand, How Buildings Learn, pp12-13].
Why not build new housing with the flexibility of office space? Or design offices intentionally able to become housing? More people could get places more tailored to their needs and incomes. Such a building would easily alter over time, transforming with ease from commercial to residential or visa versa, or to a mixture of both. Or maybe to something else. It would be a building designed for the inevitability that most design resists: change. A building either accommodates change or is destroyed by it.
Diagram: different rates of change for building components logically suggests they be layered to assist change [from Stewart Brand, How Buildings Learn, p13].
Parachute Pavilion
2005
This competition sponsored by the Van Alen Institute sought proposals for the design of a small pavilion at the base of Coney Island’s historic Parachute Jump.
A main interest of the local community is to have Coney Island become an all-year attraction. Feeling that the competition's given programs of restaurant, event space, and store were not enough to make this happen, we added to the brief a traditional Russian bath house.
Part sand dune and part Voronoi diagram, the Pavilion’s roof is formed by six intersecting cones. These organize the programs and circulation, and form an irregular folded plate structure. The column supporting each cone doubles as a water drain.
Complete with a dry sauna, plunge pools, and massage rooms, the bath acts as the perfect activator for the pavilion through the winter and into the summer.
In collaboration with Ron Eng and Eugenie Huang of Formactiv. Structural consulting by Brett Schneider.
Belgian House
2004
This commission for an extension to an 18th Century farm house in the Belgian countryside has one big problem: the King of Belgium's hunting lodge is down the road.
This has led to the area's highly regulated picturesqueness, such as mandatory pitched roofs to be 30 degrees or steeper. Also the old house is very small - with the client's 200 meter square program and the pitched roof requirement, it's hard not to overwhelm it.
These problems resolved themselves by making the house into a roof. By pushing a pitched roof down over the volume of the house below, its programs pop out throught the roof's slope like large gables. This move makes the roof function as a continuation of the landscape, camouflaging the apparent size of the extension compared to its host.
Similar to the vernacular intelligence of the old house, the extension arranges its programs in a corridor-free manner, but now in a loop where the "public" living room, dining room, kitchen, swimming pool, and patio encircle a "private" core of bedrooms and bathroom. The core's opaque walls create separation between the programs, while from inside it reveals itself to be connected outdoors by a glass roof.
In collaboration with Florian Idenburg.
Strip Shelving
2004 - present
"The design world often seems split between two camps: the plastics-obsessed futurists and the earnest greens. Casey Mack bridges the wood-plastic gap."
- Metropolis Magazine
Strip’s made with a composite extrusion technology typically used for porch decking. It uses the inherent possibilities of the process to combine structure and connectors into a single unique profile that can be about any length you want. Perfect for residential or commercial use, Strip can be freely mounted on any structurally appropriate wall or partition. We're currently evaluating it for a loading of 25 lbs/ft pending wall type. Feel free to contact us with questions regarding availability, pricing, and order minimums.
Extruded recycled wood fiber and plastic composite.
11” W x 4” H x variable length
Patent Pending.
Working prototype mounted with standard wall cleats. Note prototype finish does not represent composite finish.
Strip's development has been supported in part by the New York State Council for the Arts through sponsorship by the Storefront for Art and Architecture.
Pilkington Glass House
2002
Sponsored by the glass manufacturer Pilkington, this competition sought proposals for a house showcasing the company's commitment to sustainability on a site at its R&D facility in Northern England .
Our scheme is generated by two importations. First, we thought it would be useful for Pilkington to get better introduced to itself by bringing techniques from its automotive glass division into its architectural division. As a result, all the glass units on the south and north facades are conoids, formed using the car glass process of sag bending. Second, we thought making a very vertical house would allow adopting a double-wall facade, taken from its usual location in a high-rise.
On the inside are stacked the standard suburban programs of garage, bedrooms, kitchen/dining, and living room, with the upper floors hanging over views of flat farmland.
Overlapping like big shingles, the conoids form vents that work with the verticality of the house to produce the double-wall system. Heating and cooling through passive solar energy, the house's 78 degree tilt maximizes winter solar gain.
In collaboration with Andre Schmidt.
SK T-Tower, Seoul, Korea
OMA Asia/RAD Ltd.
2004
This design for the new headquarters of SK Telecom, Korea’s largest mobile phone service provider, creates a distinct look for the company in a merger of programmatic analysis and special effects. Both fragmenting and multiplying its surroundings, the tower's curtain wall rejects the typically neutral corporate façade, making instead a dynamic skin engaging Seoul at many scales. In 2005, the project was awarded best foreign project by the Hong Kong Institute of Architecture.
Casey Mack was project architect for the tower, with key responsibility for the design of the curtain wall and public areas.
World Trade Center
OMA
2002
Part of a master plan envisioned by The New York Times as an alternative to Daniel Libeskind’s, this mixed-use tower proposal crosses the programmatic specificity of the Downtown Athletic Club with the generic commercial space of 1 World Financial Center.
Formally, the Athletic Club’s massing is turned upside down and multiplied to create a porous base promoting better connections between Battery Park City and the World Trade Center site. This move is combined with a Financial Center squeezed to a 65-foot depth, thereby supporting graceful conversion to apartments unlike most reuses of unneeded office space.
Brooklyn Academy of Music Master Plan
OMA
2002
Part of the Brooklyn Academy of Music’s cultural district master plan, this proposal dramaticly reworks the modernist tower-on-podium convention. The typical separation between these two parts is avoided in favor of a smooth transition between top and bottom, thereby creating within a greater diversity of spaces for a mixed-use program.
About
Casey Mack is the founder and director of Popular Architecture LLC, established in 2004.
After completing studies at Columbia University’s Graduate School of Architecture, Planning, and Preservation in 2000, Mack worked at the Hong Kong branch of Rem Koolhaas’ Office for Metropolitan Architecture (OMA). There he was project architect for the Seoul headquarters of SK Telecom, Korea's largest mobile phone service provider, awarded best foreign project in Asia in 2005 by the Hong Kong Institute of Architecture. Transferring to the New York branch of OMA in 2002, he acted as a lead designer of the mixed-use tower complex for the Brooklyn Academy of Music’s cultural district master plan, the competition-winning Vestbane master plan for Oslo, Norway, and a proposal for the World Trade Center sponsored by the New York Times.
Popular Architecture continues Mack's engagement with urbanity with a new focus on maximizing connections between sustainable design and pop culture. Currently he teaches in the community design and Summer in China studios at the New York Institute of Technology, and is an organizer with Florian Idenburg of New York's Pecha Kucha night.