Adrian Contreras Architecture Portfolio
Chelsea Community Center Urban Block | Manhattan, NY | Adrian Contreras + Dylan Scallan
169 Delancey Street Tower | Manhattan, NY | Adrian Contreras + Kevin Mojica + Dylan Scallan
Located at the foot of Williamsburg Bridge, 169 Delancey stands as a cultural beacon within the Lower East Side of Manhattan. Resonating with the area’s cultural past deeply rooted in the arts, this project is designed to preserve and promote artistic expression through education, presentation, and transimission.
Black Box Theater Institue of Dance | Charleston, SC | Adrian Contreras
Culture Centers
Performace Space Dance Institue
Green Space
Urban Edges and Gathering
College Destinations
Site Plane
The Black Box Theater is a space that is dark and mysterious. It converges the performers and the audience to a close and seducive experience for dance performances. Light shines through the facade to create a rhythmic pulse that the inhabitants can admire. The metal panels blocks most of the exterior to create an a space that is a mixture of light and dark.
Florida Landscape
Gainesville, FL | Gainesville, FL | Adrian Contreras
The University of Florida’s Natural Area Teaching Laboratory, also known as NATL, is a dynamic environment where interactions between nature and human start to shape the space of the architectural structures. How a person dwells inside a building compared to inhabiting nature begins to drive a structure to be designed within a harmonious concept with nature. Light, rain, and other phemomena contribute to keeping a building from being just a structure but transcends it to be architecture.
As a structure begins to inhabit in its site, a mark is left onto the environment. Minimizing the effect of this mark to the delicate nature begins the concept of a harmonic design. Light from the sun provides structure with new ways to set up the mood of certain spaces. Nature itself leaves a mark into architecture, and how we decide to use it allows architects to take control of how we shape the moods. Architecture is an iterative process where structures and nature always bounce off each other. To be concerned of the enviroment of the building is a step closer to integrating architecture and nature.
While trying to integrate both architecture and nature, a designer must begin at trying to understand what is nature. Building a miniature structure with an intention to collect information from the site was the beginning of the design concept.
Constructing my structure into the NATL site, one piece of information that struck me was how impactful were the marks that man-made objects left on nature. As we continue to build and place structures in the environment, we end up controlling the environment. The fire phenomena marks the wood from nature, displaying the influence people have on the environment.