Daniel Dickson Portfolio 2023

CONTENTS

REFRAME

Literapolis

The Post-Internet

Textual City (Thesis)

duration : 06 . 21 – 05 . 22

location : San Francisco

advisor : J. Voordouw

production : ArcGIS, Grasshopper, Fine Letterpress, Lasercutting, Rhino, Enscape, Photoshop, Illustrator

outcome : researched and employed a new design approach publication : in talks with publishers to expand as a book

award : RAIC Student Medal for outstanding thesis

‘Literapolis’ reconceives the post-Internet city towards advocating the textual production of its citizens. It reacts to the precarious agency, accessibility, and heterogeneity caused by disenfranchising screen environments. In response, the thesis frames the city as a ‘born-digital living literary,’ whose spaces of writing-reading, though obfuscated, are tied to place.

The thesis unrolls over five scrolls. The first examines primary terms. The second organises five spatio-textual research scales: code, page, codex, archive, and city. The third develops a methodology of vectors, points, and fields to apply the scales to a post-Internet case study: San Francisco. The fourth posits Literapolis citizen narrative virtualities to re-enfranchise a vital living literary. The fifth reflects on the Literapolis as a language and ethic for reading the city, specifies how research might expand beyond Silicon Valley, and enacts a spatio-text.

Pedagogical Reflection

I learned a lesson in each scroll. Through the scales, I learned how to deprivilege traditional architectural modes like the typology, the massing, and the plan towards an interdisciplinary, perspectival, plural knowing of space. Through the case study, I learned how challenging and rewarding it could be to move theory towards praxis. Through the narratives, I learned how to centre community and stakeholder identity as a pre-political act in the design process. Throughout, I have developed a democratic position towards drawing, language, and institutions.

Writing Reflection

Amidst the scrolls, I created an ethical vocabulary to advocate for the sociocultural health of cities. Often,

I have intentionally treated nouns as adjectives or verbs, multiplying and opening each for citizen textual activation and agency. I continuously updated this glossary to reflect research discovery until necessarily halted to submit the document proof. This practice harmonised with my moral aims: I did not preconceive my terms top-down but uncovered and nuanced them iteratively per the discursive voices I encountered.

Illustration Reflection

As an architect, it is both my onus to elucidate in drawing. Meanwhile, translating abstract arguments and mass data into discrete pixels is contestable: it is too easy to sanction surficial treatment or personal bias while pursuing aesthetic cohesion and marketability. Against this, I employed definite and ambiguous communicative approaches to ensure the drawings progressed rather than delimited the writing. I enfranchised citizen decoders’ literary and spatial agency by allowing the images themselves to act as agents.

Presentation Reflection

In developing the thesis, I fought against inadequate forms of research dissemination. I knew that a standard presentation design – explication of slides with drawings – would be inadequate to translate my writing and illustrations. To this, I staged a born-digital performance to unite form with content: I scrolled the scrolls. By performing to a concerned audience, though my text did not discuss orality, I began to balance tensions between voiced and unvoiced engagement.

opposite : agency vector provocation

above : access point provocation opposite : page as substrate, city as superstructure, and literapolis scales

above : heterogeneous fields [1:50,000]

opposite : access points [1:250,000]

left : readymade architect narrative scroll opposite : guerrila researcher and chinatown child narrative scrolls

CULTIVATE

Stoic, Ephemeral Institute for the Urban

Forest

duration : 09 . 20 – 12 . 20

instructor : J. Hacker, M. Denegri

location : Hull, Quebec

outcome : detailed construction set

production : AutoCAD, Rhino, Enscape, Photoshop, Illustrator

competitions : AIA COTE top ten for students and STANTEC prize publication : Building 22 ed. 21

Our biosphere’s health depends on forests. Meanwhile, the tendency to privilege ‘natural’ stands displaces the impact and importance of urban trees. The brief proposes a solution, envisioning an Urban Forestry Greenhouse and Workshop Institute. Here, 68,900 sf interior program is to be centred by four 6,000 sf industrial greenhouses, each with adjoining laboratories and offices adaptable to specific research (invasive species and diseases, hardiness, agriculture). The whole is a living museum.

Contested Site

Along a prominent cultural promenade in the urban core, the site is at the literal and figurative heart of political debate in Canada. A traditional portage point for the Algonquin peoples near the sacred site Akikodjiwan, it sits opposite par liament on a narrow tract of land with a sectional change upwards of 25ft. The site is a remnant striving to reaffirm itself in the urban landscape.

Green-house Branches

How can a greenhouse be maintained in a climate (hot summers, cold winters) increasingly prone to cold snaps and heat waves in a fragile riparian landscape? The project sought to departs from a take-makeuse-throw-away method towards a circular economy by way of DFDA, re-purposing, and suspending the construction investment in a loop.

Studying the site sun and topography informed an approach founded in passive strategies. Foremost, thermal-mass Trombe walls are deployed to stabilise temperatures, resulting in long greenhouse band masses. These designed-for-demolition spaces adapt to season and use, in time returning to parkland.

Program Trunk

A pavilion integrates the greenhouses with a central ramp; visitors from the urban street descend through the building to the river unimpeded. Here, perennial program is housed, informed by a poetics of the forest.

Structural density and scale create compact stands and airy glades, while ceilings canopy in crests, troughs, opaque covering and glimpses of sky.

The site strategy meanwhile expands to the Capital context, whose urban forest pattern languages are adapted in miniature as deciduous and coniferous growing areas and renaturalised stands. At the scales of tree, building, and landscape, the project seeks a celebrated, viable narrative for the urban forest.

Resource Intensive

An early decision was made to limit concrete and steel, constructing instead with mass and light timber. 5,350,000 lbs of CO2e are sequestered therein, covering the 5,180,000 lbs required for construction. Costs are mitigated at the level of detailing, where resources chosen and spaces enclosed are ‘built for change’, with modularity, durability and adaptability in mind.

Further, the building strives to be energy positive through heat generation and recirculation from the greenhouses, storage and heat release via integral Trombe walls, and stack-effect natural ventilation. An integrated photovoltaic array supplies 93,500kWh/year, powering artificial lighting throughout.

opposite top : Indigenous words and settler law in the new land treaty opposite below : conflating the main pavilion’s spaces with the urban forest

1 main entrance, reception

2 permanent display

3 labs (invasive species, agriculture)

4 perennial greenhouse (office, lab)

5 annual greenhouse (deconstructible)

6 sheltered bicycle racks

7 meeting space

8 indigenous woodworking

canopy roof in one-way structural dowel-laminated timber panels and etfe cushion glazing

glulam post-and-beams branches/ trunks hold the canopy to earth

exposed clt structural walls and above-grade floors

above : main pavilion details

opp top : timber structure

opp bottom : materials spec’ed

top : pavilion circulation perspective

bottom : pavilion passive solutions

opp top : entrance from street

opp bottom : seasonal and life cycles

ENGAGE

Imagining Care For/With the Hough Community

duration : 01 . 21 – 02 . 21

location : Cleveland, Ohio

instructor : J. Blumberg, C. Hackett

production : AutoCAD, Photoshop, Illustrator, Rhino, Figma, Zoom

outcome : mappings and community engagement game ‘played’ with stakeholders

From the 1930s, the holc created redlining maps detailing which Americans should receive investment. If redlined, the de facto measure of social security, housing, was devalued. This practice disproportionately affected bipoc communities.

Mapping Inequality

Near a century later, redlining continues to particularly define Cleveland, Ohio’s politics of space. In afflicted neighbourhoods, housing is less valuable, access to quality greenspace is scarce, fresh produce is available only at the periphery, and public transit is limited. Most tellingly, access to health care facilities and quality broadband internet – a contemporary indicator of socioeconomic health – bypass these areas entirely. Exposed is a systematic inequity in the urban landscape, delineating who has the right to the city’s infrastructures, which neighbourhoods are valuable, where lives matter.

Deprivileging of Plans

‘Constructing’ a field of reparative care in Hough through architectural thinking was both challenge and opportunity. Typical park and pavilions interventions were proposed, but these did not address the problematic: top-down masterplan designs, like redlining, dispossess communities and disassociate history.

A paged was turned, asking, what might care be to Hough? What types of interactions do (and might) local people maintain with the neighbourhood that can be co-opted, reimagined, intensified?

People Over Proposals

Site use is understood as non-linear; the people, not the city dictate journeys. The breaking down of ‘nature’ (the park) and ‘city’ (the neighbour-

hood) meanwhile offers a cathartic activity, releasing stress and emotion. The proposal as such is grounded in an analysis use, of how the site is naturally engaged. Movements through the field inform the interventions, and in turn, field interventions augment preexisting movements. Classified are typologies of Pace (linear or meandering?), Porosity (what is the ground?) Visibility (value being seen or privacy?) and Quantity (how large is the group?) Urban furniture, sculptural objects, and landscaping is suggested responding to these conditions, integrated along both constructed and instinctively formed desired lines of travel.

Collective Journeys

The project is resolved in a co-operative game that offers the opportunity to take on multiple points of view, familiar and unfamiliar, which may be experienced in the lives of the people of Hough. It takes both a literal idea of movement (on a plan, physical) and an experiential approach (through collaged vignettes) to generate a multiplicity of poetic journeys. As such, In its attention to not impose outside notions of ‘what is needed’, the project asks Hough individuals and collectives to imagine and affirm their physiological wellbeing while engaging as custodians of the neighbourhood environment; it is a grounds for care.

opposite : digital (bandwidth) redlining in greater Cleveland; the less dense, the poorer the connection.

opposite : Black Citizens supplanting Cleveland’s red and yellow-lining

above : infrastructural mapping for Hough, Fairfax, and Glenville

people of hough

opposite top : full community led design boardgame

opposite bott : gameboard detail

top : example site sequence

bottom : some imagined activations

6111 Belvidere

6008 Quimby

6304 Quimby

1650 E 65th

CARRERDELULL

CARRERD’ÀVILA

RESPOND

Urban Living Rooms Migrant Community Centre and Housing

duration : 1 . 20 – 4 . 20

location : Barcelona, Spain

instructor : Z. Colbert, S. Kowal production : site photography, lasercut and handmade models, Rhino, Illustrator, Photoshop

outcome : viable infill construction responding to migrant/refugee needs publication : Building 22 ed.20

Can a building be a tool to navigate dispossession and trauma? How can it offer respite but not invisibility? Old typologies can be mined for a response.

One approach is to respond to that most pervasive of public spaces: the street. The Migrant Community Centre then offers a specialized, intensified version of the public realm in a building organized by a highly permeable ‘street’. In its daily use, local and urban communities meet. The final model demonstrates the framing of the site, circulation up and over the stepped building, and the highly specific manipulation of daylight. Unlike the street’s flux, housing requires stability, rest. It must be a place to live. Through in-person site analysis another answer resolved: to reexamine the living room.

Urban Living Rooms

Over two infill plots, shading spans of housing enclose and maximize exterior public space such that those who enter from the ‘street’, who descend from the housing, and who pass by from the wider city are encouraged to stay in the blocks’ urbanscaled living rooms.

The Southern site, with an open face maintains a purpose-designed market that can expand into the adjacent square.The surrounding housing caters to new migrants seeking immediate lodging; here they have the chance to forge connections in a lively environment from the start.

The Northern site meanwhile, more closed to the street, is a quieter environment for more established migrants, with room for a kindergarten and active recreation.

Private Living Rooms

The ideas of the Urban Living Room were applied on a reduced scale

to the arrangement of apartment units. Groups of apartments are provided, via localized exterior stairs, with rooftop Living Rooms to share as they see fit (barbecues, laundry, play space). The formation of micro-communities or large families is further promoted in these Rooms by a diversity and flexibility of unit typologies: accessible bachelors can be appended to larger units as home for an elderly parent or injured relative; a two-storey, three-bedrooms maisonnette can be split into a one-bedroom and a dorm-style double-twin for students or roommates; and taking this double-twin, a two-bedroom can become a four-bedroom over a single floor.

Integral, Distinct

Across the sites, apartments are unified by a system of horizontal louvers, while the complexity and circumstances of the housing and individuals within remains evident through the turning, jutting, shifting articulation of the masses. Housing begins a floor above grade, with courtyard lobbies reached via gardened ramps. Common facilities below are accessible from the street. Higher-level circulation is exteriorised such that all private living rooms open onto the public Living Rooms.

Interconnected over the Migrant Centre and emphasised on the street through sidewalk cantilevers, the Urban Living Rooms are continuous, highly-imageable urban spaces. They move to offer a displaced community the tools needed to reroot, heal, and affirm its right to the city.

opposite : view of housing blocks (yellow) and Migrant Centre (grey)

opposite top : community centre model opposite bott : centre iterations

above : housing massing, circulation, and integrated systems models

CARRER D’ÀVILA

CARRER

opposite : ground floor plan.

above : typical unit plan for grouping living typologies

1 sub-stair with roof access

2 one-bedroom (young couple)

3 accessible apartment (aging relative)

4 one-bedroom / maisonette first floor

5 two-bedroom (family with children)

6 student dorm / maisonette second floor

above : Carrer de Lull elevation, urban living room perspective opposite : market site section, private living room perspective

PROSPECT

Water Supply

Tall Building

Waste and Energy Technologies

duration : 06 . 20 – 11 . 21

location : Halifax, Nova Scotia

group : H. Jiang, M. Mun / Carleton

Climate Futures Design Lab

production : Revit, Lumion, VRay, Rhino, Photoshop, Illustrator

outcome : prospective solutions

competition : CTBUH Tall Buildings presentation/pub. : AIA/ACSA Conference, Fall 2021

Water: without it, we are incomplete. Yet, by concealing our daily interactions with it, we have come to accept water’s over and under-use. These two interrelated projects, Towers for an Aqua Culture and Reimagining the Energy Grid seek to reinstate a dialogue with water and prospect our urban interaction with our most precious resource.

Towers for an Aqua Culture

A building is both membrane and vessel, a space for learning and didactic in itself. Across two towers, a switchback façade of biofilter tanks clean polluted harbour and building wastewater simultaneously; bathrooms and ‘wet walls’ are placed at the fore, becoming the new window typology of the building; pipe networks are exposed and highlighted.

At the ground, bioswales manage stormwater runoff from the city; rain and fog collectors gather local weather for freshwater; and tidal generators take advantage of the coast to supplement energy requirements. The project offers tangible connections towards implicating actions from daily routine with their respective water supplies.

Water, Well Supplied

Dorm Lobbies, raised a level above grade, are protected from the elements, offering residents a reprieve to survey the complexity of the water system. Each dorm on the floors above maintains a tank. Pipes and aqua-culture are exposed, asking daily “How do we use water?”

Amidst the dormitories, interstitial study floors allow light to penetrate the dense core. Filtered tank water from above is collected and siphoned. Capping the buildings, fog catchers and green roofs collect and pre-filter water for building use.

Reimagining the Energy Grid

I worked alongside young architects, engineers, and public policy researchers at the Carleton Climate Futures Design Lab to simultaneously research the development of novel energy solutions,and approaches to transdisciplinary design practice. This work was a naturally progression from my competition entry.

Two separate systems were proposed for integration to tall public housing. First, an interior gravity turbine system captures potential energy from waste-water stacks and rooftop rainwater. Second, an exterior array of gravity columns with large hydraulic pistons store potential energy during off-peak hours to be released as needed. Used alone or in combination, the systems allow a building to act as a massive battery, offsetting peak-hour energy demands on the grid and re-siting urban energy.

Water, Well Used

After a series of interviews with building residents, a series of six fully-detailed BIM models were built in Revit to visualise possible integrations of novel energy solutions as applied to the existing housing stock. The reconstruction process referenced archival CD sets and site photography to create highly accurate, scaled models as aid for stakeholder discussion, a tool to imagine potential integrations of novel energy solutions for Ottawa and Vancouver’s housing stock.

opposite : dormitory towers as envisioned for Halifax, Nova Scotia

fresh water inlet

fresh water pre-filter

combined tanks

salt water inlet

treated water exit + distribution

Ribbed Mussels filter water. After death, they can be used as fertilizer. Seaweeds produce oxygen, absorb nitrogen, and biodeposit pollutants.

top : building water systems

Sea Urchins controlling the population within the tanks.

bottom : organisms for waste water treatment in tanks

opposite : proposed tank and washroom integration detail

each tank is used by two stacked bathrooms or kitchens after use, water is mechanically pre-treated

mep in

‘wet walls’ encased in glass offer daylight

mep out

the filtered water is released in a public pool.

floor 1b : community cafe-bar

floor 1a : community reception

floor 2 : dormitory lobby

floor 23 : green roof, fog catcher

floor 9, 16 : recreation space

typ. floor : dormitory rooms

top : cross section of site with lido bottom : view along boardwalk, and looking out kitchen tank window opposite : isometric floor plans

left : exposed gravity turbine and energy storage column systems opposite : grid of Revit modelled buildings and systems

extant interior system (gravity turbine)

exterior system (storage column)

combined systems

REPRESENT

We’re Remembering The Bookspaces of Fahrenheit 451

duration : 02 . 21 – 04 . 21

instructor : N. Spiller

production : Rhino, Enscape, Figma

outcome : exploratory drawings

publication : Building 22 ed. 21

awarded 2021 Architizer One Drawing

Challenge : Most Original Elevation

I am the illustrator of these images, and should you ask me what I am doing, I would wish to say, “I am remembering.” But do we remember? Do we take the time to learn from and to dissolve into words, into our most critical reservoir of knowledge, and prospective framing for the future: that is, the book? Surrounded by the din of globalised new media – of parlour wall streaming video, viral pictural puns, virtual bedroom conferencing – we are due a rereading of Ray Bradbury’s Fahrenheit 451.

The following drawings use the novel-as-site, liberally spatialising events while investigating the temporalities transfused via the medium of the book, asking: how can we represent the trajectory of our collective narrative?

The first triptych acts as preface to the pieces to come. The drawings develop key motifs which return throughout. The following two drawings focus on the Book People: their escape into virtuality, encoding and decoding of book data, dispersion in space, and rerealisation of knowledge. In the final drawing, the stacks reëmerge as a new typology of bookspace.

I. The Collection The dissociated legs of the Book People, the stewards and vessels of knowledge, rush through a fabric of transnational stacks. Portals open onto these spaces; the Firemen’s flames enter.

II. Burned to Memory The space of the book is Borgesian, a library of Babel crumbling under the weight of its own society. The custodians escape, their minds now repositories housing prose and verse.

III. Fallen Leaves The Firemen stoke the embers of a final hidden back-

room of shelves. A material culture rooted in paper and reflection is lost, at least for a time.

IV. Despatialisation Here, the diffusion of the people-as-knowledge is complete. The real spaces of reading – the library, the bedside table, the bench – dislocated by the firemen, now travel in the Books’ minds as fractured memorials. Planes of morse-codified poetry pass, and the vector of time continues onwards.

V. Respatialisation External bedlam subsiding – an imaginary of final wars, ends of prejudice, of tyranny – the Book People halt their flight and begin to restore the place of the book. Shelves materialize from the ether, alight with tomes. The human is delineated from a cascade of data.

VI. Stories Persist

A narrative of regrowth, the stacks reëmerge as a new typology of bookspace, integrating the transient Book People’s forests with the mass replicated suburban street once an abettor to literature’s disenfranchisement. In this utopic vision is a hope for a culture that universally prises its writing, knowing the guidance and wonder there bound.

Postscipt

The space of literature displaces the ego. So disrupted, we absorb words to become Book People examining tragedy – pandemics, holocausts, intolerances – and our capacity to learn – through compromise, empathy, rebuilding. After all, the stories we tell are the legs for the stories we create. opposite : Despatialisation

above : Despatialisation trials opp top : The Collection, Burned to Memory, and Fallen Leaves

above : Respatialisation

This drawing received ‘Special Mention (Most Original Elevation)’ for the Architizer ‘One Drawing Challenge 2021’