The Gatehouse
Personal Exploration
Collaborator: Jean Jaminet, Associate Professor
Summer 2020 - Fall 2023
// Conceived as a companion to the larger Spanish Revival courthouse project, The Gatehouse extends an investigation into the formal and material conventions of Spanish Colonial Revival architecture through a smaller, more concentrated architectural intervention. Positioned as an entrance to the courthouse complex, the project revisits the architectural vocabulary established in its predecessor, translating its characteristic thickened walls, molded forms, and interwoven tiled surfaces into a structure that mediates between the surrounding landscape and the larger institutional building.
The project continues to challenge conventional distinctions between wall, roof, and ground, treating the building as a continuous sculpted mass rather than an assembly of discrete architectural elements. Tiled surfaces migrate beyond their customary applications, penetrating and occasionally exposing the underlying material composition of the stucco exterior. Internally, spaces are carved from the apparent solidity of the mass, producing moments of compression and expansion that emphasize the thickness of the surrounding enclosure. Through this manipulation of material, form, and spatial sequence, The Gatehouse operates both as an architectural threshold and as a further exploration of the formal language developed in Spanish Revival.
