Portfolio Academic Professional
Adam John Williams
University of Texas at Austin 2017
2017
www.adam-john-williams.com
Redrawing Harlem
P5
Artist Housing
University of Texas at Austin | Spring 2017
Subterranea
P15
Longhorn Caverns Visitor’s Center
University of Texas at Austin | Spring 2015 Cavern Entry Stair
Studio Mexico
P27
University of Texas at Austin | Spring 2016
Fulcrum
P35
Clinic Master Plan and Nursing School
Canopy
University of Texas at Austin | Fall 2015 Leander City Hall
Prototype
P47
Digital to Physical Translation
P53
Texas Natural History Museum
University of Texas at Austin | Fall 2014
Modern Monumental University of Texas at Austin | Fall 2014
P67
UT Austin Reading Room
Drawings and Compositions Conceptual | Travel
P69
Resume 3
Redrawing Harlem Spring 2017 Partner: Ace Ren Instructor: Hillary Sample
Where people often live separate lives within the city, we want to re-examine the allocation of private and shared spaces in the urban block. Interpersonal relationships are vital within dense urban networks, so providing opportunity to foster these relationships should be prioritized. The project seeks to define the relationship between the public and the arts community through a series of transitions (sectional, material, spatial, etc). Ground and second floor program combines performance, work, courtyard and common spaces in a series of stepping terraces that connect the elevations of Hamilton Terrace to St. Nicholas Ave.
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Block of 123rd between Broadway and Amsterdam
St. Nicholas Ave. Outdoor/Green Space vs Residential Space
Rentable Space vs Residential Space
The inspiration for the project is the much maligned garden-tower block, whose original intention of fostering close internal communities, while providing ample green and public spaces, failed due to its isolation. We propose an urban re-contextualization of this typology, using communal residential spaces to connect rather than separate individuals from the urban environment.
Residential Space (Private)
Terrace Space (Mixed)
Performance Space (Public)
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Apartments look into the public courtyards, but sit at a level removed from activity. Within each unit, variations in plan and layout occur that cater to individual needs and personalities of the performers and artists. It is the relationship between the units, the tower, and the “garden� that mitigate the relationship between artist and audience.
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Each courtyard is programatically unique, giving a variety of conditions between the high elevation change.
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Spaces along the spine of the building are shared by the artist residents. Program includes co-working spaces, lounges, practice rooms, and workshops.
This spine is not a single homogeneous space, as each room has its own presence and character within its respective courtyard. Instead, each room is connected physically and visually by circulation spaces, hallways, and terraces.
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Subterranea
Spring 2015 Instructor: Murray Legge, FAIA The most critical aspect to understanding a site is context. The issue posed by a cavern system is how to reconcile two parallel landscapes, isolated from one another by mere feet of earth. This jarring disconnect is settled by a series of transitions, intimate and discreet gestures that preserve the grandiosity of the caverns while creating identity at the threshold of something profound.
Still from video exploration. Walking simultaneously above and below the site along the same path.
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Longhorn Caverns Visitor’s Center The building came about while looking at precedents that involve invisible landscape transitions, points where the landscape shifts from the profane to the sacred or unknown. The building provides a system of walkways surrounding the cavern openings, in an attempt to recreate the ritual and instinctual behavior found in this unique landscape typology.
There exists a rich, typological tradition of occupying these “invisible landscapes”. Dome of the Rock in Jerusalem provides gathering and ambulatory space for an inconspicuous yet significant monument.
Ice diving, as a more informal manifestation, shows the practical and instinctual rituals that form around mysterious vertical transitions.
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Like Dome of the Rock, the landscape transition becomes the focus of the building. An elevated series of platforms comprise the building, creating a strong, orthogonal exterior perimiter that mutates to the internal geometry of the site.
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Buildings and site furniture become elevated spaces of contemplation, both reverant and observant of the subterranean phenomena.
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Longhorn Caverns Entry Stair The threshold between above and below ground is the most ambiguous yet powerful moment of the site. The entry stair attempts to give physical and spatial presence to this moment through a suspended stair, transitioning geometries from the natural, irrational cave opening to the humanistic, rational circular staircase.
A
B
A
B
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The tensile stair physically engages the visitor to the space, recognizing the individual as they tenuously step onto terra firma.
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Photograph and Illustration by George Andrews, during one of many expeditions to Mayan architectural sites. Courtesy UTSOA Archives.
Studio Mexico
Spring 2016 In collaboration with Universidad Marista de MĂŠrida and Universidad de Veracruz Instructor: Juan Miro The studio consited of two components. The first was in researching the archives of George Andrews, an American architect who spent decades cataloging Mayan sites in the Yucatan. The second was in designing a master plan, and non-for-profit nursing school in Valladolid, Mexico, within a community with strong Catholic faith and traces of Mayan ancestry.
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Our research into George Andrew’s archives revealed the intricate ways in which Mayan public spaces were constructed, highlighted in his drawings using yellow tape. We constructed our master plan of the medical campus along similar lines, using a subtractive system of clearing away brush, and using path, openings, and buildings to guide users within a system of private thresholds and reveals.
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One of these main spatial sequences was that of the visitor, shown here through a series of vignettes. The building peeks out from massive walls at a distance, revealing lush gardens and plazas once past each threshold.
A. View from existing clinic
B. View from public courtyard 1
C. View of garden from public space
D. Path moving north towards nurse housing
Caravan Dispatch
Auditorium
Productive Grove
Existing Canopy Lounge
Central Plaza Medical Simulation Lab
Productive Garden Existing Warehouse
Library
Existing Limestone
D C Administration
Patient Recovery Rooms
B
Chapel Community Center
Existing Clinic
View from Central Plaza
A
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Buildings are inspired by Mayan spaces and symbolism. Ground floor spaces have thickness, walls read 3-dimensionally. Second-floor classrooms open up to the campus, announcing the presence and purpose of the building as might traditionally intricate Mayan carvings.
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Fulcrum
Fall 2015 Texas City Lab, in conjunction with City of Leander Partner: William McCommon Instructor: Matthew Fajkus Vehicular infrastructure has long been the defining characteristic of the American landscape. Supported financially and culturally after WWII, it is fast falling into disrepair and slowly out of favor. As our relationship to this landscape changes, how does our architecture?
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Overview
Currently, the City of Leander hosts one of the most problematic urban conditions found in US cities, a high speed, high traffic corridor dividing its heart in two. Leander is already host to multiple areas of burgeoning character, with the risk of each developing separately, unevenly and becoming isolated from one another. This current preference for a singular mode of transportation should be reversed, with multiple forms equitably woven together. By introducing civic program and pedestrian/vehicular infrastructure as a connection between east and west Leander, government and economic activity creates the fulcrum between old and new development.
Balancing Acts
Accessibility Accessibility
Transportation Transportation
W
E
Development Development
Toll Road
SITE
Gas Station
Historic Rail
Infrastructural Site Identity RANGE OF LANDSCAPE
[
DOMAIN OF BUILDING
[
RANGE OF LANDSCAPE
CONTINUUM OF TRANSIT CONNECTIONS
RANGE OF TRANSIT
[ [
DOMAIN OF BUILDING
SUPPORTING PROGRAM FULCRUM
[ [
RANGE OF TRANSIT CONNECTIONS
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DD DD
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Canopy system bridging highway/rail, signaling pedestrian crossing In bridging our transition from vehicular to alternate modes of transit, pedestrians requre a scale of support to compete against the scale of the highway. Elevating the pedestrian humanizes the once marginalized identity of the individual amongst an inhospitable landscape.
1:1 steel mockup of column and integrated lighting. Funded by UT Material Lab Grant.
Ca Ca D D
G G
m: Leander m: Leander City City Hall Hall d d Business Business Center Center
A modular steel structure provides shading, lighting, signage, shelter, etc. in a variety of configurations. These systems work together in creating a pedestrian surface across the highway and rail.
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University of University of Texas Texas at at Austin Austin School of School of Architecture Architecture Professor Matt Professor Matt Fajkus Fajkus Fall 2015 Fall 2015
Leander City Hall Our proposal is a two-part system. 1. A canopy/infrastructural element that includes pedestrians into Leander. 2. A mixed-use building of city hall, offices, and retail to grow and sustain an urban presence.
Built program at undefined site
In a city identified with and dominated by its infrastructure, engaging the rail and highway with public architecture is necessary in constructing a civic presence to the city. As a node between existing and new modes of transit, the city hall supports and incubates the life of the city in its new central role.
Shading/landscaping across existing highway and rail
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A terra-cotta rainscreen reinforces the length and movement of the building’s site, reflecting the activity of the offices and retail at ground level.
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City Hall Chamber
Internal Street
An internal, shaded corridor reflects the lost grid and alley system of Leander. Here it serves its original urban purpose as a place for interaction between program and people.
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Prototype
Fall 2014 Instructor: Igor Siddiqui A structural system was developed based on a digital parametric process, creating infinite variations, or prototypes, of an object. The object is one of many, created by a system of variable density that erodes and forms a rectangle based upon random point generation. The end product is a physical model of this system created using paper pulp, when once applied freezes the prototype in place.
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A digital scale of interconnection and density is established, allowing formal multiplication of the object. An infinite number of possibilities are available. The digital method is then translated directly into a physical process, using identical generative strategies.
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1
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The physical product uses a critical mass of inexpensive, biodegradable materials to create something greater than each individual part. Twine, ping pong balls, and recycled wood serve as the project’s armature. The configuration, once tensile, is frozen in place by a recycled paper pulp, provided by shredded secret documents. The nature of these documents creates an unpredictable and unique color for each product.
Final Product
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Modern Monumental Fall 2014 Instructor: David Heymann
Monumental architectures have largely fallen out of public favor in past decades, as shared opinion and culture become increasingly fractured. These projects are investigations of whether monumental, platonic forms may still hold meaning for an increasingly skeptical public. Starting from the rational, shapes are networked and mutated to recieve a diverse audience.
Etienne-Louis Boullee, Centograph for Sir Isaac Newton
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Texas National History Memorial Museum SITE 1 The natural history museum is an outdated typology, a relic of the 19th century. It needs to outgrow its function as a depository for artefacts in order to maintain interest and growth, and therefore the nature of its spaces must change. The building must be monumental, but it cannot remain stagnant.
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This addition responds to the solidity and rationality of the existing building, which it faces. Two solid cubes are established within the perimiter, while dialogue occurs regarding prescriptive space, and the contemporary role of the natural history museum.
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The interior, while acted on by multiple agents, reads as a unified whole.
Museum domain, past and present.
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University of Texas Reading Room SITE 2
The UT Austin campus fabric has remained immobile since its creation, a framework beholden to the past that denies students an individual campus identity. The University’s mission of individual greatness and aspiration is reinforced by subverting the surface narrative. The space is non-prescriptive and internal, a place of individual cultivation.
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The building consists of a matrix of underground chambers. Two monumental forms, the grid and the sphere, are pitted against one another, rational forms that must resist imperfection to retain their character. The project is meant to alter these two geometries to their last breaking point, beyond which they are no longer identifiably platonic.
New reading spaces sit beneath an existing monumental staircase, mutating the existing plaza above.
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These catacombs house the most private and intellectual activity of students, reading, by creating individual domed work spaces, altered by three display and common areas.
Section A 1/16”=1’-0”
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Drawing and Compositions Conceptual | Travel
Building Reinterpretation, based on City 7 from Italo Calvino’s “Invisible Cities”
Zaragoza, Spain
Einsteintaume, Potsdam, Germany
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www.adam-john-williams.com
EXPERIENCE
ADAM JOHN WILLIAMS
EDUCATION
Involved across multiple competitions and initial concept work throughout Europe. Collaborative design with landscape and interior architects, graphic design, engineers, clients on small-to-medium projects. Created 3D models using Rhino and Grasshopper, rendering using VRay and Adobe Suite.
Hunt Laudi Studio, Washington DC
University of Texas at Austin
May 2013 - Aug 2014, Junior Architect
Masters of Architecture I, May 2017 GPA: 3.85
Catholic U. of America
Main scope of work in revitalizing abandoned tunnels for Dupont Underground to create unique, innovative public space. Detailing design for landscaping in Memorial Park. Lead production of design and construction sets for small residential and commercial projects in DC and NY.
Spring 2012 Architectural studies Barcelona, Spain
Visual Communication III, UT Austin
Fall 2011 Socio-geographic studies Oxford University, England
Course topics involving parametric modeling in Revit and Grasshopper/Rhino, VRay rendering. Conducted class sessions, individual critique, grading.
Software
Architecture and Society, UT Austin
B.S.Arch, May 2013 Honors in Liberal Studies Magna Cum Laude
SKILLS
Snøhetta, Oslo, Norway
Aug 2016 – Jan 2017, Architect Intern
Aug 2015 - Dec 2015, Teaching Assistant
Jan 2017 - May 2017, Teaching Assistant
Microsoft Office | Adobe CS AutoCAD | Rhino | Grasshopper Revit | Archicad | Unity | VRay
Introductory architecture course covering issues of form, theory, and poetics of space. Responsible for conducting class sessions, grading, high levels of organization (accountable for 50 students).
Design Modeling | Hand drafting Graphic layout & design Photography | Woodworking
Fabrication 3-D printing | Laser cutting CNC routing | Basic coding
Languages French | Conversational Spanish | Basic Norwegian | Beginner
ACTIVITIES AWARDS
2016 Yvette Atkinson Scholarship 2015 UT Materials Lab Grant 2013 Solar Decathlon -Team Capitol DC Member of Tau Sigma Delta/AIAS Global Architecture Brigades National Building Museum design charrette invitation
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