Alexis Wolfe Coir Portfolio
alexis.coir@gmail.com +1 248-894-3935
Professional Work
Frederick Tang Architecture, NYC Adam Pendleton Studio. Brooklyn, NYC. Designer & Project Manager. New studio space for the artist Adam Pendleton. Complete renovation including new facade and structure. Ongoing. Greenlight Bookstore. Brooklyn, NYC. Designer & Project Manager. 1,400 sf commercial interior buildout focused around custom millwork. W. 110th Street Residence. Manhattan, NYC. Designer & Project Manager. Combination and renovation of two condo units into a single-family residence. East 72nd Street Residence. Manhattan, NYC. Designer & CA. Combination and gut renovation of sprawling 1970’s-era apartments into single-family home.
A+I (Architecture Plus Information), NYC Merchandise Mart. Chicago, IL. Designer & Assistant Project Manager. +100,000 sf of major renovations at the historic Merchandise Mart. Included master planning, wayfinding, rebranding, commercial workand public installation. Completed 2016. Merchandise Mart: Armature for Art. Chicago, IL. Designer & Assistant Project Manager. Public art installation on the Chicago Riverfront. On hold. 315 Park Avenue South. Manhattan, NYC. Designer & Assistant Project Manager. 17,000 sf interior commercial space including lobby / art gallery. Completed 2014.
Marble Fairbanks, NYC Glen Oaks Branch Library. Queens, NY. Junior Designer. 18,000 sf new branch library. Completed 2013.
PLY Architecture, Ann Arbor Park House / Ply Studio. Ann Arbor, MI. Junior Designer & Fabrication. Office/residential addition off of historic structure. Completed 2007.
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Mezzanine Level
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Frederick Tang Architecture | Adam Pendleton Studio New studio space for the artist Adam Pendleton. Complete renovation including new facade and structure. Ongoing.
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Frederick Tang Architecture | Adam Pendleton Studio
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Frederick Tang Architecture | Greenlight Bookstore 1,400 sf commercial interior buildout focused around custom millwork, playful ceiling lightwells and simple material palette.
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Frederick Tang Architecture | Greenlight Bookstore
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Frederick Tang Architecture | W 110th Street Residence Combination and renovation of two condo units into a single-family residence.
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Frederick Tang Architecture | W 110th Street Residence
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Frederick Tang Architecture | E 72nd Street Residence Combination and gut renovation of sprawling 1970’s-era apartments into single-family home. Public spaces organized along enfilade and private rooms pinwheeling off of a double-loaded corridor.
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Frederick Tang Architecture | E 72nd Street Residence
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A+I | Merchandise Mart: Master Plan +100,000 sf of major renovations at the historic Merchandise Mart. Included master planning, wayfinding, rebranding, commercial work and public installation. Completed 2016.
Main Lobby
Outdoor Public Space
Grand Stair
Work/Bar Lounge
CTA Stair
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A+I | Merchandise Mart: Grand Stair
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A+I | Merchandise Mart: Grand Stair
Details: typical tread; mezzanine cantilever
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NE Entrance > Food Hall
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A+I | Merchandise Mart: Food Hall
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A+I | Merchandise Mart: Armature for Art Expandable public intervention on the Chicago Riverfront. The armature provides individual and social experiences through recontextualizing the surrounding urban space. On hold.
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A+I | 315 Park Avenue South 17,000 sf interior commercial space including a lobby/art gallery reconnecting two previously separated entrances. Completed 2014.
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Marble Fairbanks | Glen Oaks Branch Library 18,000 sf new branch library providing civic identity and community hub to low-density Queens neighborhood. Completed 2013.
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Marble Fairbanks | Glen Oaks Branch Library
Cross Section
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PLY Architecture | Park House/Ply Studio Office addition off of historic structure in Ann Arbor neighborhood; convertible into residential unit. Completed 2007.
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Academic Studio Work
Harvard GSD Museum Spring 2012, instructor Scott Cohen City for Migrant Workers Fall 2011, instructor Chris M. Lee Thesis: Architecture’s Shadow 2013, thesis advisor Elizabeth Whittaker
University of Michigan Herbarium UG2 studio, instructor Jon Disbrow
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Museum
This studio operated as a kind of architectural game, scrutinizing the reciprocity between a building and its context. Students designed an American Beaux-Arts museum and then proposed a contemporary addition. Though the two buildings are in different styles by separate “authors,” their organization works in tandem. Each building is incomplete without the other; the architecture only critically engages the history of museum typology when it confronts its framework across time. The main logic of this reconcilation here is circulation, a key organizing force for the Beaux-Arts. A case-study of Peruzzi’s Palazzo Massimo in Rome reveals the possibilities of linking separate volumes via a single path that switches between corridor and enfilade organization. Working from this logic, the ‘new’ addition then inverts the organizing structure of the ‘original’ museum: the circulation opens the enfilade galleries out to the city, while an aggregation of volumetric ehibition spaces are caught in the core. Two different typologies of circulation and exhibition spaces emerge: the slow ramping of the promenade servicing peripheral galleries, contrasted by vertical interior stacking linking together more orthogonal rooms. Instructor Preston Scott Cohen Harvard GSD Option Studio
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Architectural hybridism and circulation; Morphological diagrams. 42
Harvard GSD | Museum, Option Studio
Circulation entraps galleries and inverts the enfilade 43
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Harvard GSD | Museum, Option Studio
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City for Migrant Workers
The city of Beijing has undergone radical transformation throughout the past fifty years, and a wave of recent building projects is transmuting the spatially paradigmatic nature of the city itself. New housing is especially needed as the capital modernizes, but market economics ignores the region’s historical richness and offer high-rise towers in place of the traditional Hutong neighborhoods. These massive new complexes are completely alien to the city’s organizational and symbolic principles and are rigid schemes that cannot support Beijing’s culture. A deficiency in adequate housing is synonymous with failure for the city itself, for as Aldo Rossi stated, “the residential district...is intimately bound up with the city’s evolution and nature, and is itself constituted of parts, which in turn summarize the city’s image.” Located at the terminus of the arterial north-south axis, this project proposes a return to the deep structure of Beijing as a methodology towards understanding the city’s morphology, and argues that the fundamental concept of the city can be defined in relating the private to the common. The solution lies in the courtyard-turned-mat typology, which absorbs the scale and urbanism of contemporary Beijing while providing a connection between the residential, political, commercial and civic lineage of the Hutong typology. Instructor Christopher C.M. Lee Harvard GSD Option Studio
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Signs of indvidual life in the dense courtyard neighborhoods (above) juxtaposed against the objectifying scale and surveillence of Tian’anmen Square.
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Beijing’s hierarchical axis with project at southern terminus.
Harvard GSD | City for Migrant Workers, Option Studio
Axonometric: relationship between dwellings, communal courtyards, public intersections and civic elements
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Architecture’s Shadow: Representation in the Digital Age Masters Thesis As a device that probes reality, representation is capable of constructing meaningful worlds that can reconcile our relationship to the unknowable. Such constructs involve conventions: culturally communicable frameworks whose limitations allow meaningful deformation. When engaging with such conventions, architecture becomes an ontological device for understanding the world. This conceptual space can in turn support multiple levels of inhabitation, giving society a means of representing itself.
Confrontation with representation (physical and mental) becomes architecture through the condensation of space, material and time. It emerges as the mechanism, the semi-structured matrix that allows us to confront the nature of certain realities. It is important that this matrix dwell partially in shadow, away from descriptive symbolism and flat patterning. With no apparent beginning or end, immediate purposefulness is suspended in favor of multivalency. Ubiquitous architectural moments quite familiar to us—the stair, the corridor, the room, the threshold—are each confirmed and reconstructed by their representation.
Marked by the advent of the digital, our own era is grappling with the inherently architectural issues of scale, memory, and confrontation. The platform upon which architecture is primarly created is characterized best by the zooming operation, which is amenable towards scalar incertitude and spatial ambiguity. This kind of ambiguity can create a powerfully seductive image, but it offers little non-formal (representational) criticality in the physical, real and symbolic sense. In the effort to be always “becoming” (as opposed to being), it must shed confrontational symbolic, political, and representational qualities.
This matrix has no true starting point. Like George Perec’s diagram for “Life: A Users Manual” it is rearranged by actors, who image the architecture through the movement, memory, semantic identity and cognitive experience of their individual sequences. The condensation of these traces within the actor constructs a re-representation simultaneously delirious, imprecise and whole. In short, it creates an architecture. Far from being a completely authored artifact, architecture is uniquely able to hold within itself contradictory worlds, and challenges the proposition of any singular social, physical, experiential or mental reality.
Advisor: Elizabeth Whittaker
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A possible narrative: Entry / Corridor The construction refigures an everyday classroom. The participant encounters two paths, one direct and the other a narrow passageway to the left. She turns to walk between the classroom’s wall and the structure. This is the CORRIDOR wall. Core After rounding the CORRIDOR wall she drifts inward. The four walls commune through sound, projection, reflection, shadow, models and drawings. This constantly shifting exchange embodies the multiple realities (or multiple aspects of a single reality) of architecture.
Stair / Threshold The participant slips through a tight corner opening, encountering objects of ambiguous scale along the way. She looks back to see a distorted reflection of herself standing in the classroom. This is the THRESHOLD wall; it protects the autonomy of the installation by disfiguring the image of all surrounding elements.
Room She walks into a secluded space oif the final wing. The wall in front of her is blank save for lit openings; the ROOM wall. Openings reveal distorted domestic vignettes occupying the interior structure of the partition.
Concept diagram of the non-linear experience (after Georges Perec)
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Harvard GSD | Masters Thesis
ROOM WALL 1:1 CAD drawing embedded room models THRESHOLD WALL projected video reflection & distortion
STAIR WALL sequence drawings sound installation scaled models
CORRIDOR WALL compression embedded model running length of partition
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Configuration studies
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Harvard GSD | Masters Thesis
ROOM models; 1:1 structure corner detail
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STAIR: drawing/model collapse
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Harvard GSD | Masters Thesis
STAIR vignettes
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Herbarium and Outdoor Classroom
This project provides a new herbarium complex for the University of Michigan’s collection of preserved botanical specimens. The proposed site is a wooded hill overlooking the Huron river in Ann Arbor’s Gallup Park. Small tangles of berry trees and switchgrass blanket the southern exposure. Knotted pine trees cling to the crest, while the northern base is clothed in a wood of deciduous trees. The architecture responds to the texture of the site: materials, the play of light, topography, wind, and seasonal precipitation are all important. Whereas the existing facility is an example of office park big-box anonymity, its replacement is a celebration of rich specifity and choreography. The massive collection is split into two monoliths that sit at the foot of the hill, sentries guarding entry to their dead specimens and the site beyond. The herbarium itself is a container of landscaped spaces and internal paths carrying researchers through key progammatic areas, a quick procession that is offset by the immense repositories. While the researcher works in the filtered light of the building, visitors walk a windswept path to the remote classroom nestled in the northern woods. Instructor: Jon Disbrow University of Michigan Studio, UG2
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University of Michigan | Herbarium, Undergraduate Studio
Site texture studies and model 75
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Parking Entry path Reception/lobby Classroom/ auditorium 7 Collection entry 8 Dark room 9 Laboratory 10 Collection 11 Open office 12 Private office 13 Faculty lounge 14 Library 15 Greenhouse 16 Outdoor Pavilion
University of Michigan | Herbarium, Undergraduate Studio
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Second Floor
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Other Work & Research
Destabilizing Everyday Space Harvard GSD, instructor Panagiotis Michalatos Collaborators: Sophia Chang & Alex Shelley Brief History of Type Harvard GSD, instructor Panagiotis Chris M. Lee Construction-Deconstruction-Reconstruction: The Digital Representation of Architectural Process at the Abbey of Notre-Dame d’Ourscamp Brown University Collaborators: Sheila Brown & Clark Maines A Line in the Andes Felipe Correa & Ramiro Almeida The Harvard University Graduate School of Design Sketches Personal
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Other Work | GSD, Performance Domains Two projected patterns, a vortex and expanding rectangle, respond to different stimuli of sound and movement through space. A familiar corridor at the GSD is transformed into a destabilizing space, perceptually altering an otherwise quotidian service route.
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NAME: GALLARATESE RESIDENTIAL UNIT ARCHITECT: ALDO ROSSI 1969-1970
The primary organizing elements of Rossi’s Gallaretese derive from the urban typology of a raised street and the traditional Lombardian tenement residence, where living is arranged along corridors. All units are kept to the upper floors and organized along a ballatoi, while the ground floor is an open public colonnade. Rossi absorbs the strict dimensional limitations of a standard affordable unit into the structure of his building. These dimensions extend outward and are expressly legible in the organization of all public areas of the building, including the facade, the circulation, and most notably the rhythmic colonnade of the portico below. A single moment of tension - a hard vertical divide that disrupts the building’s horizontal extension - defines the boundary where the portico level bifurcates in section. This space is the most urban in the scheme and is marked by unique and monumnetal infrastructural elements. In his Architecture of the City, Rossi writes that there “exists a specific aspect of the housing issue that is intimately bound up with the problem of the city, its way of life, its physical form and image--that is, with its structure.” The structure of the city provides a framework for living and social content, and the residential unit is an urban element that describes this phenomenon. Upon visiting the Gallaretese in 1974 Rossi said, “In the last few days I saw the first open windows, clothes hanging out to dry in the loggias--the first timid signs of the life it will assume when people move in. I am confident that the spaces reserved for this daily life, the ballatoi, will bring a sharp focus to the dense flow of the daily life and the deep popular roots of this residential architecture and of this ‘big house’ which would be at home anywhere along the Milanese waterway or any other Lombardian canal. Figure-Ground
Structure and Organization
Circulation
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Other Work | GSD, Brief History of Type
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Other Work | Ourscamp Abbey Construction Sequencing Research project hypothesizing how monks might convert a Romanesque church into a Gothic structure. Alongside archaeological field work and deep institutional knowledge, the digital reconstruction played a critical role in understanding how masons and carpenters may have dealt with more complex Gothic geometries and the sequencing of deconstruction and subsequent construction.
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Other Work | A Line in the Andes A Line in the Andes examines the transformative role of the first underground metro line currently being implemented in the city of Quito, Ecuador. Original drawings of the historic core provide a basis for understanding future urban morphologies.
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Other Work | Personal Sketches
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