Botanical Research Center

Princeton, NJ

Two-week Design Exercise

First Semester Core Studio
Michael Meredith
Princeton School of Architecture
Fall 2018

Typically, a botanical research center represents and reproduces an antithesis between nature and culture. Nature is the object of study; the researcher is the paragon of culture. Greenhouses simulate the wild; laboratories allow specimens to be examined from the safety of civilization. Yet the greenhouse is already technical and artificial, and the human, already as much ‘nature’ as ‘culture.’

This project for a botanical research center on Princeton’s campus stages a dialectical purification and re-ambiguation of the distinction between nature and culture, recursively erecting and deconstructing conventional oppositions through the building’s formal and material language.

Oppositions

Masonry versus glass; semicircle versus rectangle; front versus back; nature versus culture. The building is a didactic essay in the construction, deconstruction, and re-construction of seemingly foundational opposites.