Abhishek Thakkar- Selected Works 2022

[EDUCATION]

PRATT INSTITUTE BROOKLYN, NY, USA Bachelor of Architecture ‘21 Concentration in Morphology Award for Outstanding Merit

[SKILLS]

3D MODELING Rhino 3D Grasshopper Cinema 4D AutoCAD Revit Autodesk Maya Fusion 360

RENDERING V-Ray Enscape Octane Render Keyshot

3D Studio Max Maxwell Unity Unreal Engine

ADOBE Photoshop Illustrator InDesign Premiere AfterEffects

FABRICATION

3D Printing Laser Cutting Wood Working CNC Milling

RhinoCAM

[WORK EXPERIENCE]

ISOMETRIC STUDIO Architectural Designer

SU_21-CURRENT | BROOKLYN,NY, USA

Exhibition, Installation and Furniture design for The Museum of the City of New York, Poster House Princeton University, The National Black Theatre The Cornell Johnson Museum and Governer’s Island

CHADHA RANCH - Designer

SP_22 | BROOKLYN,NY, USA

Freelance Visualization and CGI for Calvin Klein, Lets Get Free and Mika Tajima

GRAFTWORKS LLC IDC Research Assistant

[AWARDS & ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS]

DEGREE PROJECT AWARDS REVIEW SP_21

Thesis project ‘We did it our way’ was selected to be presented at the Spring 2021 Awards Review. The project received an honorable mention.

PERSPECTA 53 FA_20 402 Studio work featured in Yale University’s School of Architecture Journal in Meredith Tenhoor’s article “Toxic Geographies”

INPROCESS 25 FA_20

302 Studio work and Generative VR Architecture Elective work and CES Research work published in Pratt School of Architecture yearly publication

ARCHIVED STUDIO PROJECTS FA_17-SU_20

Potemkin Theatre| Prof. Richard Sarrach & Eric Wong Boathouse w/ Peiye Yang| Prof. Leonard Leung Dormitory| Prof. Leonard Leung Kindergarten| Prof. Eva Perez de Vega

SP_20-SU_21 | BROOKLYN,NY, USA Research Assistant for ongoing research on Building integrated Solar technology for Lawrence Blough. Preparing multicolor 3D Prints of Urban Schemes. Creating studio-wide templates for documentation.

ADAM ELSTEIN STUDIO Visualization Intern

SP_20-SU_20 | BROOKLYN,NY, USA Intern and Teaching Assistant for the Advanced Architectural Imaging seminar at Pratt Institute Assisted students with their visualization projects Demonstrated workflows for students via Zoom. Curated 3D assets for CGI design.

GRAFTWORKS LLC IDC Research Assistant

FA_19-SP_20 | BROOKLYN,NY, USA Research Assistant for “Domestic Mutations in the Age of the Sharing Paradigm” for Lawrence Blough. Drawing perspective drawings of designed schemes. Printing and preparation of final drawings for exhibitions.

STUDIO MUMBAI ARCHITECTS- Architectural Intern

SU_17| MUMBAI,IN

Graphical editing for the 2017 Chicago Biennial Exhibit “Prima Materia”. Furniture making for collaborative piece with MANIERA.

[ACADEMIC AFFILIATION] [REFERENCES]

CENTER FOR EXPERIMENTAL STRUCTURES Research assistant for a Robotics project at CES for Haresh Lalvani and Che-Wei Wang. Designed and strength tested custom joinery.

BROOKLYN,NY, USA

ANDY CHEN, ISOMETRIC STUDIO Partner Isometric Studio andy@isometricstudio.com

PRATT INSTITUTE BROOKLYN,NY, USA Teaching Assistant for Adam Elstein’s Architectural Visualization Seminar.

PRATT INSTITUTE BROOKLYN,NY, USA Teaching Assistant for Leonard Leung’s 301 Comprehensive Design Studio

PI-FAB BROOKLYN,NY, USA Fabrication Technician at the Pratt School of Architecture shops (Laser/Wood)

WAQAS JAWAID, ISOMETRIC STUDIO Partner Isometric Studio waqas@isometricstudio.com

LAWRENCE BLOUGH, GRAFTWORKS LLC

Head of core design Pratt School of Architecture lblough@graftworks.net

CHRISTOPH KUMPUSCH, FORWARD-SLASH(/)ARCHITEKTUR

Director of the Extraction Laboratory Columbia GSAPP ck2540@columbia.edu

Detroit has too much land for too few people.

The project is a design mechanism that invigorates bottom-up urban development as a way to retool Detroit’s deteriorating urban fabric that uses the city’s overabundance of land and unclaimed material as a basis of expansion and new construction.

What we are proposing is a programme for community growth that corresponds to the desire of the individuals that compose it, and involves their own labor in order to push forth a generative economy.

Thus our proposal emerges from the voluntary investment of the community’s own labor and its enthusiasm and ambition to improve their urban conditions and lives.

This project was in collaboration with Aaron Miranda and was selected to be presented at the Spring 2021 Degree Project Awards Review where we received an Honorable Mention.

DEGREE PROJECT

critics ADAM ELSTEIN LORI GIBBS MICHELE GORMAN

site DETROIT MICHIGAN

OUR WAYWE DID IT OUR WAY OUR

The people of Detroit don’t have the economic means to invest in their own communities and homes. Economic activity and potential growth is stopped in its tracks by the lack of capital investment the average people of the city can provide. But the city can provide access to its vast collection of foreclosed parcels, homes, factories, and commercial spaces.

By transforming these assets from a collection of unused and deteriorating spaces hoarded by the municipal government into a set of public materials that can be commandeered by the citizens of the city, a new informal system of labor and exchange can emerge if this land can be distributed to individuals.

At the scale of the parcel, the project explores a series of possible scenarios with either abandoned or occupied homes as a starting point. These yielded a set of possibilities where individuals could grow, scrap, and subdivide their parcels based on their particular. With some homes of Detroit’s housing stock acting as material resources and

some being gifted back to qualified residents as a byproduct of their labor capital. These drawings speculate about how these two starting points are transformed by the residents in different ways, either extracting or adding equity through subtractive and additive processes.

Occupied Home Abandoned Lot

Scrap

Charles Atlas: The Mathematics of Consciousness centers on a newly commissioned multimedia installation that takes inspiration from the seminal film and video artist’s ongoing interests in science and math

A prominent component of the installation is a stage designed by artist Mika Tajima, who previously collaborated with Atlas at the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art (2009) and South London Gallery (2011), in collaboration with Chadha Ranch, which transforms industrial scaffolding into an armature for performances featuring ongoing and new collaborators, and discussions that consider the theoretical origins of consciousness and mathematical sequences. A direct response to Atlas’s video, Tajima’s sculptural environment makes a conceptual connection between black holes and the meridian system that maps and circulates energy within the human body.

THE MATHEMATICS OF CONSCIOUSNESS

ATLAS

CHADA RANCH for MIKA TAJIMA

“In an era of stress and anxiety, when the present seems unstable and the future unlikely, the natural response is to retreat and withdraw from reality, taking recourse either in fantasies of the future or in modified visions of a half-imagined past” -Alan Moore

The project aims to view the contemporary art museum as a space to display works of art that are specifically tied to the idea of mimesis, as such is the nature of the artwork made by the artists on permanent display. While doing so, the project foregrounds the use of tropes and motifs inspired by cinema and theatre to infill an experience that is centered around staged conditions and so, viewing the museum as a set stage, hence the title: Potemkin Theatre.

The project was Archived among other student projects by the School of Architecture.

MUSEUM

critics RICHARD SARRACH ERIC WONG

site GINZA TOKYO

ポチョムキン

POTEMKIN THEATRE アート

Idle Civillian, Embeded Citizen Condition n°2: Duality of Experienced Art

Agent

Citizen CivilianAgent

SpeakeasyBack of House Front of House

Speakeasy

Potemkin

In the State of Louisiana, the stretch of the Mississippi between Baton Rouge and New Orleans is known as Cancer Alley. Throughout Cancer Alley, residents within a one-mile radius of factories are subjected to severe air and water pollution. As a result of this, the industrial corridor of Louisiana has one of the highest cancer rates in the country and has impacted citizens over several years.

The Project as a whole responds to the unjust setting in which many small towns in Louisiana currently reside in. In this speculative future for a green new world, the project starts with a fictional class action lawsuit in which petrochemical corporations respond to ‘Cancer Alley’ by funding a program that facilitates social and environmental rehabilitation. This ultimately leads to the establishment of a company known as Pax Opus. Their main focus is to create company town models known as “Sectors”.

Images from the project were featured in an article by Meredith Tenhoor in Yale University’s School of Architecture journal: Perspecta 53

CREOLE FUTURISM

SPECULATIVE FICTION

critics JASON LEE MEREDITH TENHOOR

site CONVENT LOUISIANA

PAX OPUS

For more than ten years, New York City has promoted energy efficiency policies including PlaNYC and the Greener, Greater Buildings Plan that will radically reshape the education of architects toward energy performance in buildings, reduction of emissions,and the efficient use of resources.

By integrating and extending current solar technologies such as PV and solar thermal for the predominantly vertical infrastructure of the city, this research targets innovative building mass and surface strategies that are highly energy efficient, generate on-site renewable energy, and produce a new vocabulary for sustainable construction.

LAWRENCE

SIMONE

SOLAR THERMALSOLAR SCULPTING

Building Chunk

Domestic Mutations investigates the consequences of the “sharing paradigm” on architectural organization and expression. With the discipline slow to see the potential for rethinking domestic space as it relates to novel conceptions of private and public life, the project develops a series of innovative collective typologies to question the hegemony of the singlefamily house.

Current collaborative models are having a distinctive effect on the domestic realm including co-living, multi-generational homes, food sharing and coworking. Design processes have yet to substantively interrogate the typology of the detached dwelling affected by these sharing programs, contesting the accepted delineations between permanent and transient residents, work and leisure, nuclear family and post-familial models.

RESEARCH ASSISTANTSHIP LAWRENCE BLOUGH

Amoeboid sphere is a CES project I am currently working on as a research assistant for Haresh Lalvani. Our goal is to build a series of actuated morphing structures based on non-periodic geometry.

Towards this end,we have tested software, hardware and electronics with simple such as 2D rings and tetrahedrons as the first phase of the project.

The current phase of the projects tests servo driven linear actuators and a custom screen-based control interface so users can manipulate the geometry in real-time.

SPHERE

RESEARCH ASSISTANTSHIP HARESH LALVANI CHE-WEI WANG

Amoeboid

Sphere Layer Morphology

Sphere Morphing

Joinery Closeup

The canon produced by architectural visualization methodologies has manifested itself into a mainstream culture.

Combined with the way architects use models as a way to explain a narrative, this “meta” introspective observes the way we use architectural photography as a precedent for realism.

VISUALIZATION