[ AGL ] Architecture Portfolio

ANA GABRIELA LOAYZA

aga.loayza@gmail.com

+1 (617) 642 6899

Ana is an architect exploring combinations of design, science, and technology for the built environment. Her perspective of architecture as inhabitable systems invites research in humanmachine interactions and engineering in crossscalar projects.

Driven professional with international experience in research and project development (6+ years), having practised at renowned architecture firms, such as Ateliers Jean Nouvel. Engaged in independent practice, she has worked in the design of residential, corporate, social, and installation projects.

She is part-time faculty at the Architecture Department of Rhode Island School of Design. She is also a thesis research faculty at Universidad Peruana de Ciencias Aplicadas.

AGL is recipient of different academic and professional awards.

She loves the ocean and surfing.

SELECTED PROJECTS

DWELLINGS, DIFFERENCES: DIVERSITY FOR SOCIAL HOUSING.

Residential Block. Option Studio with Farshid Moussavi. Harvard GSD.

MUSEUM OF THE IMAGE, NY

GREEN ACADEMY

Adaptive Re-use. Green start-ups hub.

CENTER - PERIPHERY: ENCODING NEW PROCESSES IN SHENZHEN’S BOUNDARIES.

Industrial Textile complex. Digital Design Prize 2021 awarded by Harvard GSD.

PROFESSIONAL WORK SAMPLES

COUNTRY CLUB VILLA

Recreational building. Lima, Peru.

Harvard GSD option studio with G. Legendre. Cultural Facility. RESET.01 | COGNITIVE PAVILION

AfrikaBurn grant awardee. Built and burned.

‘CUARTEL SAN MARTIN’ PROJECT. ATELIERS JEAN NOUVEL

Professional work. Drafting, modeling, visualization.

FEDEX CROSSBORDERS OFFICES

Professional work. Building renovation and interiors. Design and overhead.

SOL HOUSE

Single family countryside house.

agloayza.com

19-01

DWELLING COLLAGE

ON-THE-GRID DIVERSITIES FOR SOCIAL HOUSING

Harvard GSD - Fall 2019 Option Studio

‘Type vs. Difference: A 21st century Residential Block’

Instructor: Farshid Moussavi

Individual Project

The acknowledgement of co-isolations as a mode of inhabiting apartment blocks questions the standarized configurations of contemporary dwellings.

The analysis of brutalist and post-war precedents is the start for are referents for obtaining and articulated variety, more resonant to the customization needs of individuals and collectives.

The project relies in the use of modular grid. Different units -following the traces of the grid- are allocated on the site. Criteria as spatial needs, enclosure level, materials, and terraces respondo to the grid and the intimacy enclosure levels.

PARIS, FRANCE

21-01

URBAN MICRCOCOSM THE MUSEUM OF THE IMAGE

Harvard GSD - Spring 2021 Option Studio ‘Intuition and the Machine’ Instructor: George Legendre Team: A.G.Loayza, G. Guida.

From research on Manhattan’s urban configuration together with computational design processes, this project explores a Manhattan micro-geography, a reinterpretation of the city, to accommodate the Museum of the Image.

Our project pursues a microcosm of NY by reenacting the formal and experiential characteristics of Manhattan: creating a city within the city conformed by controlled art spaces and open urban ones.

Using the ‘Slat’, computational tool provided by the studio, combinations of linear spatial configurations in which the program can be inserted were tested. Bays and Interstitial spaces, major elements of the ‘slat’, are placed on site aligned to a set of parameters and including the project program.

From machinic to intuition, this project establishes a Manhattan micro-geography where each layer, bay and interstitial space frames a new dialogue with present day art, here framing a parting view of the East River.

EAST MID VILLAGE, NEW YORK

Entrance by 1st Ave. Extension of NY grid toward East River

This Euclidean reading of Manhattan recognizes the HORIZONTAL calling for homogeneity, and THE VERTICAL calling for the heterogeneous experience.

The design process relies on 4-steps that combines ‘intuition’ and ‘the machine’ to integrate these conceptual and programmatic intentions. The result is 5 profiles containing the program and behaving as an extension of NY.

OUTCOME DIAGRAM: ASSEMBLAGE OF BAYS AND INTERSTITIAL SPACES

The massing consists of 16 meters wide bays packed with the program in rooms and shaping a profile. In between, 4.5 meters wide interstitial spaces connect the bays. North-south walls are proposed to enclose this spatial logic and differentiate bays from interstitial spaces.

These spaces are functional connectors between each bay

BAYS: offerings N-S visuals or large exhibition rooms. From the bays it is possible to perceive other events behind the adjacent lateral spaces. Natural light and large size rooms are prioritized

INTERSTITIAL SPACE: Interstitial spaces are pauses between the solid nature of bays. They are of lighter and translucent materiality. The thinner proportion is suitable for light intrusion and linear circulation towards the upper or lower level.

L01 - GROUND PLAN In plan, the ground level reveals the linear organization of rooms, broken by the two public axis coming as an extension of the city grid. Visitors can access the multiplicity of rooms from the street level as the temporal exhibitions, media hall exhibits or the library.

The lower plan functions as a connection between the three plots of the museum. It contains immersive exhibitions in two bays in the blue here (point). It gathers public program as cafeteria, galleries, and workshops open to courtyard at the east. A connection to the park across FDR drive is also possible from here.

When stepping back, the entire massing reveals a landscape, offering new visual connections to NY, which vary in altitude and width.

Each bay creates angled views towards the river, and each interstitial space permits a direct line of site.

The height of every major room varies, and in some cases extends directly to the highest point generating a visual interplay between exhibition spaces and workshops on upper floors

2nd BAY PERSPECTIVAL SECTION

3rd BAY SECTION

BLOCK 1 - TRANSVERSAL SECTION

LOWER FLOOR EXHIBITION ROOM- INMERSIVE

16-02

GREEN ACADEMY GREEN BUSINESS HUB

Team: Ana Loayza, Rolf Soldtwedel

Contest: YAC Green Academy - 2016

Role: conceptual design, plans drafting, 3d modeling.

“Recently, from the Tate Modern to Prada Foundation, industrial architectures have become valuable opportunities for the urban regeneration of urban areas. They are transforming into modern centers able to meet the needs of a rapidly changing society. Industrial plants no longer in use are an extraordinary opportunity to relaunch culture, development, and innovation.

The project aims at reinforcing the ethical model of entrepreneurship, which is already strong in the area, in order to encourage the renewal of the city and the social fabrics.”1

The project should take an old paper factory located inside the industrial complex of Marzaboto, and transform it into a startup and green business incubator, where ideas, negotiations, and innovation take place.

1. Extract from the contest brief brochure (www.youngarchitectscompetitions.com)

BOLOGNA ITALY

[AI] : CENTER - PERIPHERY ENCODING NEW PROCESSES IN SHENZHEN’S BOUNDARIES

SHENZHEN, CHINA

Harvard GSD - Spring 2020 Option Studio ‘ Neuralisms Shenzhen: Fictions of Type and Territory’ Instructors: Andrew Witt, Robert Pietrusko. Individual Project. Harvard GSD ‘Digital Design Prize’ 2021 Award.

The studio explored imaginative and cross-scalar lifestyle futurisms for Shenzhen, China using tools as remote sensing, deep learning, neural networks, image processing and other leveraging technologies.

Shenzhen’s Urban Growth Boundaries, administrative limits to protect natural areas and touristic circuits have been vulnerable to arbitrary urban expansion in the last decades. Center-Periphery, reimagines these boundaries as sustainable manufacturing poles, responding to both, the need of responsible production chains for the textile industry, and the consolidation of the inner borders to protect natural areas.

Thorugh the use of Artificial Intelligence, a landscape generator assists the urban proposal acroSs selected territories in the city, encoding a new textile industry into the inner borders.

The study of the Urban Growth Boundaries reveals its irregular nature, zoning, and levels of built mass occupation along the Urban Growth Boundaries.

A scanning process supported by satellite imagery and AI image recognition helped to identify potential sites to allocate the facilities of the ‘new’ textile industry and where to bring back nature to the city.

CLUSTERS: CENTER PERIPHERY

The project relies in clusters to host the new production mode while emulating agricultural landscapes. The cluster’s centers were defined by structuring chains such as fiber processing or yarn portfolios, and the periphery was defined by complementary activities.

ANALYSIS: SCANING

TOOL: PIX2PIX TRAINING

Two neural networks training processes would assist the design process. The first part would use the center-periphery hierarchy to obtain new cluster combinations and later generate representational approximations to the new landscapes. The second part, consisted in training set to simulate a response of the stormwater collection system to rainwater levels along the year.

[LEFT] The textile production area is selected to further development as the congregation of different production lines: fiber processing, knitting areas, and yarn collection towers were articulated by roads and techno-agricultural fields.

[UP] In the architecture scale, the plan reflects the center – periphery layering of the production processes. The fiber containers perform as cores for the facility, while processing, design and administrative areas are layered around the cores.

The project merges plan and facades to create a productive landscape where crops are cultivated as raw material for organic clothing production, rainwater is collected and reused, and visitors can transit around these new cycles.

From a pedestrian perspective it is possible to perceive the inside to outside transition, opening the industry to ecotourism, and sealing the border with a symbiotic artificial-natural quality.

UNIVERSITY ISLAND ‘IN CONTRAST’

“Despite its area extent and beauty that marks the difference between Poveglia and the other lagoon islands, over the last years, this gemstone underwent a disastrous decline. Abandoned for almost 50 years, thick vegetation has grown affecting cultivation and architecture. Venice has never forgotten Poveglia, but it turned it into a natural setting for the grimmest tales and fantastic rumors.

University Island is a project to transform Poveglia into a dream university campus; a place of training, leisure and relax for the many students gathering in Venice. How to transform a desert island into a spearheading study and research center?” (1)

Poveglia will receive a new program where the existing architecture, nature, and new architectonic elements will convey. Guided by a conceptual approach around the morphology of Venice Lagoon’s islands, the proposal will explore the contrast between the old and the new, the historical architecture and new organic shapes derived from the interpretation of the island geographic formation.

1. Extract from the contest brief brochure (www.youngarchitectscompetitions.com)

POVEGLIA, VENICE, ITALY

A COLLECTION OF ROOMS A SCHOOL OF ARCHITECTURE AND REPRESENTATION

ALSTON, MASSACHUSSETS

Harvard GSD - Fall 2020 Option Studio

‘ Form as knowledge: What can a school of Architecture be? ’

Instructors: Eric Lapierre

The idea of Marvellous Architecture navigates the contradictions and agreements between reason and imagination. Rationalism suggest a careful and curated selection of an non-complex system that performs efficiently on the articulation of space. Imagination claims for the specificities of design to alter with grace the reason.

The studio addresses new ideas for a School of Archiecture as an addition to Harvard Campus. Concealing reason and imagination, ‘A Collection of rooms’ seeks for a system of connected rooms, of multiple proportions in coherence with the school‘s function and a new pedagogy.

From Zeno’s paradox, an abstract perception of space -as subject to infinite subdivisionsis taken as a departure point. A gradual grid serves to manage the assemblage of diverse rooms in accordance with an urban response, spatial needs, and structural exhibit. The grid conditions a formal and spatial composition of ad hoc proportions suggesting infinity.

URBAN PRECISION

In a urban level, the building is a key piece in the articulation of Harvard Alston campus. Externally, the effects of the variable grid are manifested in the building’s sloped height, room dimensions and size of fenestrations

Smaller fenestrations and smaller rooms are in tension with the windows and doors of surrounding edifications such as Genyzme, HBS or One western Av. The other extreme, with larger making spaces and bigger fenestrations are open to an adjacent park, liberating the flux of physical learning modes.

NO HIERARCHIES

From the entrance point, the grid proportions will increase in a Fibonacci sequence.

This modulation argues for a non-hierarchical distribution of space, where furniture, divisions and forum can be allocated according to the semester needs. In addition, it allows a equitative intrusion of green spaces within the boundaries of the school.

The external form of the building expresses the modulation of the grid through its fenestrations and structure. Interiors, instead, gather s the complexity of the school. From the outside the building is a simple cast of concrete. Fenestrations have the same height. A whole concrete texture covers the building.

Internally, the pedagogical system goes in a sequence from small rooms dedicated to individual and intelectual activities to large rooms dedicated to collaborative and making-based learning. In between, there is a variety of intermediate categories.

DEVICES

Fixed furiture, curtains and moving panells will be the main devices that will assist activities and reinforce privacy and character among rooms.

PHYSICAL DIFFERS FROM VISUAL

Physical paths happen through lateral fenestrations that depend on the size of the walls. While visual connections happen in perpendicular or diagonal axis to the rooms, not every case of visual continuity means transit. The continious repetition of frames suggests infinity.

Visual axis that are perpendicular offer a regular visual sequence of planes, sometimes disrupted by the presence of walls or gardens.

The only non-crossing walls are the ones of the diagonal axis from the entrance. This axis layers the same perspective along several rooms, suggesting infinity.

STRUCTURE

The structure is composed by walls and beams. The size of the beam proportionally increases to the size of the room considering the larger spam between wall to wall. In these sense the structure performs as an exhibition of an engineering coherence and economy of means.

Gamarra 3.0: Alternative mobility

The project images and alternative future for Gamarra, a commercial pole and textile production center in Peru. It departs from the material challenge of ‘weaving’ steel rods, as an attemp to obtain a meshed frame that doesn’t require joints. By using of robotic arms, weaving patterns are achieved to shape a furniture-transport prototype.

Urban design project. Architectural Association Visiting School Lima. Team with Diego Zambrano et al. 2017.-18

This same weaving system is later scaled up into a construction system for buildings and infrastructure as the project becomes an speculation of an integrated productive neighborhood.

The vertical pole is used as a base unit that in different configuratiosn can define different circulation paths, sense of enclosure, and visuals. For our study, it will be applied to the design of a bridge and assesed throught an structural and visual method of analysis previously tested in the industrial bridge, an aesthetic similar.

INITIAL DEFINITION - NUMBER AND POSITION OF POLES

BEAM OPTIMIZATION

INDUSTRIAL BRIDGE TAXONOMY & PRECEDENT-INSPIRED DESIGN

The new design is thought as a synthesis of the arch type of industrial structure and testing configurations vertical poles. The final design should achieve a path curated by the allocation of vertical studs, with the thinnest section possible, which should condition the connections with the arch at the same time

Light Enclosures

BEAM ANALYSIS

Thinner structures will not necessarily derive in higher values of deflection. Changes poles position and number might alter the result.

VISIBILITY ANALYSIS

The ideal bridge, considering visibility and structure, is option B, with poles of 13mm diameter, allowing a visibility level above the expected range in the pixel study.

Relaying on industrial nostalgia, this project acknowledges the value of industrial bridges departing from the structural and visual assessment. The project develops a method of analysis in a structural and visual level.

Digital tools as rhino, grasshopper, c# component and millipede plugin will be used to assemble this procedure and drive decision making during the proposal of an observatory bridge

Inst: Sawako Kaijima. Team: A. Loayza, T.Kim. Harvard GSD

PROFESSIONAL WORK

(SAMPLES)

19-01

COUNTRY CLUB VILLA MIXED FUNCTION BUILDING

LIMA, PERU

Contest 2022

Mixed used: saunas, restroom, gym, restaurant. Team: Diego Zambrano, Axel Algarate, Bryan Gonzales

The new building works as an assemblage of correlated volumes hosting interiority experiences and visual connections to the landscape and the ocean. Being an extension project, ,this volumetric approach aimed to organize flows in the lower level, and integrate views in the upper one: volumes order programs along the assigned plot and act as a continuation of the existing buildings.

Three cubes conform the building lower level and serve as base for a large longitudinal volume on top. Each cube contains changing rooms, sauna and restaurant kitchen, acknowledging the circulation paths around and between the pool and tennis courts. The larger volume on top contains the gym and restaurant, prioritizing an interstitial corridor towards the pool and using the block’s ending as a food and gathering place.

Cuartel San Martin | Hybrid complex

Composed by housing, hotels, retail and offices, Cuartel San Martin was a large scale project with implications in the urban configuration of surrounding district. Facades and resulting volume had a role in connecting the proposal with recognizable visual patterns and permeability towards desired views. Form follows an indexical extension of the neighborhood, while inserting nature in terraces, paths and large surfaces.

Professional work at AJN. Drafting and 3d modeling for post-edition. Team work. 2012-2013

Reset.01: Cognitive Pavilion

The ephemeral context of AfrikaBurn and Tankwa’s environment set constraints and resources for a morphological re-interpretation of the desert. Reset.01 is an experimental pavilion that challenges the connection with our surroundings from the lenses of embodied cognition and through the disruption of automated corporal tasks. The artwork would be a physical channel to rethink our basic corporal movements in an unusual environment.

Independent Practice. Team: Nataljia Boljsakov, Diego Zambrano. Afrikaburn 2018. Grant winner and exhibition at festival.

The pavilion is the result of multiple operations over a plane, providing different slopes averaged in one surface, turning it in both a transitable playground and covered shelter. Interpretations of the form were many: climbing, modeling, kissing, playing, sitting, resting, hanging, stretching were some of the activities observed.

Digital fabrication with prefabricated parts, CNC cut, and standarization of joints helped to reduce construction times in the desert and simplify the operation. A system of variable horizontal layers and vertical studs would conform the topographic form. The pavilion could be built most of the time by two people.

The burn took place on the 6th day of the festival. Previous calculations on the pavilion orientation, shred placement, paraffin quantities had to

Country house in Lima, Peru. A second home for a family.

The project aims the minimum occupation of the field to allow a larger vegetation covered space. The terraces work as a intermediate space to blur divisions between indoors and outdoors. Material differentiation is used to stress on possibilities to read the house volumentric compounds and mimetize with the pastoral context.

Casa Sol

This request was a 24/7 house for innovation, where the team and entrepreneurs could work in the basis of flexibility of space and personal schedules. A ‘future primitive’ geometry was deployed as an continuation of the triangular index given by the existing steel trestle structures, helping to define fixed and mobile parts. The working, rest and mixed spaces, allowed moments of individuality, small groups and collective work.

Independent Practice. Built project. 2015-2016

Fedex Crossborders Offices (RENOVATION)