Fall 2015
Critic: Shiqiao Li
An initial study of Bruno Latour, Timothy Morton, and Jane Bennet, led to an interest in human and non-human, truth and untruth, and subject, object, and field relationships. In the “Indra’s Net” Installation, the “Perspective Machine” endeavored to explore these topics more thoroughly. Combined with anamorphic projection and the marvel of a camera and lens, the idea of Dürer’s perspective machine was appropriated in a way that began to question how humans perceive their environments. What is true and what is untrue? Does machinery deceive the way we see things, or are our own eyes biologically exploited in such a way as to obscure the truth?
Moving forward, the “Smithsonian Institute of the Modern Perspective” furthers these incipient notions of what it truly means to see and whether or not humans are “meant” to see anything at all. The installation took an approach of a privileged perspective, a single, hierarchically all powerful spot where a person was “supposed” to see something –the truth, or maybe not. This museum takes this approach of a modern and privileged perspective and emphasizes it to the point of satirization. Four privileged points offers view into four cardinal directions, where one can gaze upon four unique aspects ultimately acting as a review of the city. But what purpose do these viewpoints serve? Surely one can understand the urban fabric without these points of view. By drawing attention to these places, people begin to realize the folly of privilege and begin to develop and independence in how they perceive their environment, and ultimately the world around them.
Agency amongst the people plays a key role, as the rest of the museum is shaped based off of their own independence, ostensibly having each person curate their own views in a way that a homogeneous privileged perspective cannot. Using operable louvers to shade spaces or block out certain views creates hundreds of possibilities of what people see. Moving partitions within the museum allow curators and museum goers alike to define the light quality and viewing angles in a way that suits a personal need, while still serving the masses. Balconies along shifted volumes open up more panoramic views to the city in all four directions, breaking down the hierarchical structure of privilege established in the center of the building. Each aspect of what someone can see, from the monumentality of the capitol to the seemingly unimportant blade of grass, creates a new paradigm of perspectival understanding by reestablishing the guidelines of visual importance. The Smithsonian Institute of the Modern Perspective acts as a perspective machine, reviewing the city in four directions, but its true essence lies in the agency of the viewer, who unearths possible truths and untruths in his or her unique relationship with the visual environment.
Spring 2015
Critic: Charlie Menefee
Designed using the constraint of 98% concrete, this project explores light conditions at a detail oriented scale. Four different spaces offer four types of light: exterior exterior has direct light, exterior interior has dappled light, interior exterior has diffuse light, and interior interior has no natural light. With an emphasis on constructability, each aspect was detailed out, ADA guidelines were met, and egress code was followed.
Fall 2014
Critic: Ed Ford
Exoskeleton began with an intensive two month study of different joints and connections. Narrowing down to one type of joint set up the framework for the program, and environmental education center in Yosemite National Park. The final joints utilize tubular steel and seek to accomplish two tasks, a structurally expressive exterior skin, and a lightness and separation in appearance. The design centers around movement in a condensed area on site, minimizing environmental impact and using the joint to remove the built environment from the national park. Thus the steel is able to satisfy structural problems, as well as inform the nature of the design.
Spring 2014
Collaborators: Tom Bliska and Mohamed Ismail
Architect and Critic: John Quale
334 11th St. NW Charlottesville, VA 22903
Working with the Albermarle Housing Initiative Project, this design-build encompasses a deck addition to a house, as well as a series of sun shading devices. Clear and opaque polycarbonate responds to the sun conditions throughout the day, while a series of smaller wood fins provide both shading and a backrest. The client requested extra storage, so we designed and fabricated a bench that opens up into storage containers. The materials for this project utilize mostly reclaimed cedar and pressure treated wood, leftover from other housing projects.
Summer 2015
Vicenza, Italy
Critic: Charlie Menefee
Examining how one interprets what one sees, Drawing the Invisible focuses on both the technical aspects of drawing as well as the communicative ones. For five weeks in Vicenza, Italy and the surrounding Veneto region, sketches focused on understanding classical architecture and proportion as well as the discipline of using drawing as a tool to describe various aspects of space.
Spring 2015
Collaborator: Bahman Jamasbi
Critics: Manuel Bailo & Matthew Jull
Boardwalk Hall was once a thriving cultural center in Atlantic City, New Jersey, but casinos and gambling have caused the city to fall into disrepair. This renovation project aims at reinvigorating the arts and culture of Atlantic City, adapting the existing West Hall into a cultural hub. Taking the existing structure, the renovation nestles into the grid, yet takes key moments and disrupts the mater with structural interventions, shaped for the program of the given space. Through these disruptions, the dynamacism of the space reacts to the program. Additionally, the program feeds directly into the auditorium space of Boardwalk Hall
Spring 2014
Critic: Peter Waldman
Serving as an annex to the nearby Children’s Museum, the Boston Culinary Institute serves both adults and children. When drawing out the edges of the city context and reinterpreting them vertically, the user climbs his or her way up through the cooking spaces, up to the dining room and preparation rooms, and finally to the highest points of the building, offering a new perspective in four cardinal directions towards the harbor, the immediate surroundings, the industrial city, and back to the museum. Smells rise throughout the building during the day; the diurnal and nocturnal cycles drawing occupants vertically in an effort to experience the building and get a unique view of Boston.
Water+ Competition, University of Manitoba
Manitoba, Canada, Winter 2015-2016
Advisor: Jeana Ripple
Collaborator: Bahman Jamasbi
This project was accepted by the Water+ Competition and we were invited to present our research at the University of Manitoba in Canada.
Snow Sanctuary looks at an aggregative modular system that utilizes structural properties in conjunction with the properties of water. Snow is used to insulate the building, and as it melts, a central detachable pipe recirculates the water into the plumbing. The columns and roof fabric were designed using Karamba 3D, and are built to deflect, so as the snow load increases, the room becomes smaller and easier to heat.
Prism
Vortex Competition 2015
Award: Faculty Honorable Mention
As a one week design competition, prism looks at an ailing part of Charlottesville, VA and seeks to remedy the failing program. Using the space as a new residential college, students and teachers redefine education and interaction, all while gathered around a newly day-lit creek, pushing connections between zones. In order to encourage new interdisciplinary modes of thought, buildings integrate with each other, arching the central public space.
From the competition board:
"An academical precinct made up of several schools and overlapping zones, or prisms, where students and the community share space and exchange ideas. By horizontally linking each school with a wide path and vertically linking each floor with a prism, a strategic, holistic hierarchy emerges to provide a moral framework for living and an environment of respect and trust."
Collaborators:
Ben Burghart, Ethan Feldman, Hannah Heile, Lucy Mcfadden, Chad Miller, Kari Roynesdal, Grace Willis, Laura Willwerth
Fall 2013
Critic: Esther Lorenz
This one week precedent study of Giorla and Trautmann Architect's Crèche de la Europe provided a fundamental basis in understanding spatial and practical principles in design.
Fall 2015
Critic: Shiqiao Li
"“Everything that exists, or has ever existed, every idea that can be thought about, every datum that is true—every dharma, in the language of Indian philosophy—is a pearl in Indra's net. Not only is every pearl tied to every other pearl by virtue of the web on which they hang, but on the surface of every pearl is reflected every other jewel on the net. Everything that exists in Indra's web implies all else that exists.” -Timothy Brook "Vermeer's Hat"
Using the theories of Bruno Latour, this installation looks at the idea of the modern perspective. Durer, who devised a perspective machine to accurately draw in perspective, provided the basis for my adaptation, which takes the traditional machine and inverts it. Instead of a subject object relationship, this perspective machine investigates human perception through a subject field relationship. By anamorphically projected a 9x9 square grid, viewers see an oblique trapezoid with their human eyes, but see a perfectly square grid through a single lens camera. In this exploitation of biological optics, the lines between truth and untruth, human and non-human, and subject and object are questioned.
This is a continued study of the Smithsonian Institue of the Modern Perspective.
"Apropos of Axiality" critiques Adolf Loos' concept that a lavish exterior encourages an excess in production, therefore facades should be austere. Instead, this house posits that architecture should serve more as a Lefebvrian production of social spaces. In reviewing houses such as the Eames House and Maison Bordeaux, "Apropos of Axiality" re-appropriates structural expressionism to shape social space. Using the Eames House's rigid grid and tripartite division of interior space as well as OMA's balancing of a main mass through counterweights and moment frames, the house utilizes structure to inform the space. By slightly shifting the exterior truss structure, utilizing the angles of the interior mezzanine, angling the main curtain wall, and offsetting both the center of mass and the center of stiffness, the interior forms a richer space as a counterargument to Loos.
A multi-tiered series of levels, borrowed from Mies' Farsnsworth House, and the promenade and roof terrace from Le Corbusier's Villa Stein layers additional public and private spaces. Slight increases in elevation and a mezzanine level develop an intricacy of space, while still maintaining an openness. A large central shared space is made possible by open web joist framing, and the circulation and support spaces nest quietly in an off-axis stair core.
Ultimately, "Apropos of Axiality" offers and alternate solution to Loos' critique of ornamentation, by proposing a series of produced spaces informed by an expressed structure, layered with a careful selection of additional appropriated elements from other successful domestic spaces.
This project was a submission for the 2018 Rotch Traveling Fellowship.
The HUBWeek festival in Boston celebrates art, science, and innovation. This was the entryway for the 2017 HUBWeek festival.
Collaborators: Sarah Fox and Ivan O'Garro
Transformation:
From Boston’s dense and urban city fabric to the festivities of HubWeek within the confines of City Hall Plaza, “The Butterfly Effect” encapsulates the liminality of this dichotomy through transformations of space, place, material, functionality, vibrancy, and mindset. Imagined as a transition through space, the emblematic butterfly parallels this idea with its literal transformation in its life cycle. “The Butterfly Effect” emphasizes these ideas of transformation, allowing active and passive participants to internalize their impressions as individuals while simultaneously joining in the conversation of the collective consciousness of the swarm.
Materiality:
Through materiality, “The Butterfly Effect” makes literal the biomimetic cradle to cradle approach of upcycling by utilizing materials from the waste stream and giving them a second, and sometimes third, life. Offcuts of vinyl from billboards and non-recyclable paint-chips comprise the butterflies, removing them from a landfill and instead repurposing them as art. Secondarily, the material is transformed again through folding, using origami to give the material new life. As the swarm progresses through the space, the material transformation is made apparent as the vinyl slowly folds itself from its original waste into a swarm of butterflies. Leveraging technology, the final material transformation gives the butterflies life in a more literal sense, using Dynalloy wire to allow the butterflies to flap their wings.
Swarm:
What is the role of an individual in society? Where does he or she stand in the collectivism of the masses? How do individual and group actions shape the world around us? Does society descend into chaos if just one butterfly deviates from its pre-determined, non-linear path? Small causes can have large effects. The serial repetition of the butterflies not only draws a connection to this idea, but also pushes ideas of individualism and collectivism, allowing participants to engage more closely with societal roles. Question convention. Push boundaries. Design, innovate, and create. Merge art and technology. Fabricate paradigms. Leverage individual or collective skill-sets and ideas to design a better world.
Technology:
Fabricating forty feet of swarms and hundreds of butterflies is no small task. “The Butterfly Effect’s” design is created through parametric modeling, allowing for quick and rapid prototyping of form and constructability. By working out issues and quickly moving through iterations on the computer, the fabrication process was streamlined. Using Autodesk’s Buildspace, an incubator and maker space, each unique rib of the swarm was fabricated with a CNC router, feeding the machine code to precisely cut the plastic to size. Dynalloy, a manufacturer of memory wire, provided the moving butterflies, which use a small wire that expands and contracts with electricity. When the butterfly receives this electric current, the wire contracts and pulls the wings up, making it flap. When the power is removed, the butterfly relaxes its wings, with the help of a reverse bias saddle hinge to pull the wings back down.
Main Partners: EYP Architecture & Engineering, Autodesk, and Skanska
In the book Nightlands, Christian Norberg-Schulz states, “In the North we are bound to a world of forces, because we inhabit the realm of the night.” In Iceland, where the sun casts creeping shadows, the counter balances are the dancing lights of the Aurora Borealis. Solar winds electrify the night sky and put on an exhibit of light produced on a stage between earth and space. Hosted by the land of fire and ice, humans have been fascinated by the Northern Lights for millenia. A front row seat to a natural phenomenon is becoming an increasingly rare experience. This design proposes a theater for such a viewing -a campus comprised of communal and individual cabins providing the best views of this awe-striking performance. Architecture merely serves as an intermediary, a fading vessel to bridge the divide between solidity and space, physical and corporeal - between fire and ice.
Competition team: Eric Der, Del Hepler, Mohamed Ismail, and Phil Miller
