ALEXANDER KERN
401.347.4937 akern@risd.edu
97 Irving Ave, Providence, 02906-RI
Skills
Education
Work Experience
Software Revit, SketchUp, Enscape, Adobe Creative Suite, AutoCAD, Rhino
Rhode Island School of Design Candidate for Bachelor of Architecture 2016 – 2021 3.9 GPA with Honors Curricular emphasis on design by analogy, physical making and the poetics of spaces and relations
Ruch & Partner Architekten Architectual Intern Summer 2020, Switzerland Design for residential project in complex regulatory framework
Fabrication Metal and Wood Manufacturing, Casting, Modelmaking, Drafting, Sketching, Illustration Languages German, Swiss-German, English, French, conv. Italian
Awards / Publications Winter 2020 Chosen for Oaxaca RISD Travel Course with Silvia Acosta and Joao Caeiro from RootStudio, workshop by UNESCO advisor Luis Fernando Guerrero Baca, restoration of archeological sites Spring and Fall 2019 Studio models chosen for archival by department 2018 Illustration for Jorge Paricio PhD - Hybrid Drawing Techniques 2017 RISD Literature Prize for The Architecture of Social Immobility in John Edgar Wideman’s Philadelphia Fire
Brown University Cross-enrolled in interdisciplinary and language courses Fall 2019 University of Southern California Summer Studio, School of Architecture June - August 2019 London School of Economics Culture and Globalisation Summer 2017
Spring Studios Intern Summer 2018, USA Project acquisition material: marketing campaigns, social media strategies, layouts and visual identities at New York’s leading 360 degree branding agency Enzo Enea Landscape Architecture Intern Summer 2016, Switzerland Project competition for a corporate client and design of a private garden
University of the Arts London Orientation to Art and Design Summer 2015
Chloé Assistant Designer Fall 2015, France Various projects ranging from research, design to production
Haileybury and Imperial Service College 2013 – 2015 International Baccalaureate (39), Higher Level History, Economics and German Literature, Rugby Team, Tennis and Investment Club Member
RISD Woodshop Monitor 2019 - Present Enforcing and maintaining safety standards, coordinating workshops for peers and faculty, responsible for shop upkeep and operation
This portfolio contains work done in the departments of Industrial Design and Architecture while at the Rhode Island School of Design, where I am graduating with a Bachelor of Architecture and a Bachelor of Fine Art in June 2021. It is a collection of projects I find reflect the interests and values I have developed at an art and design school celebrated for its tradition in making, process-driven design and interdisciplinary thinking. Each project has a few spreads devoted to imagery resulting from the design process and the final outcomes presented at each critique.
Cover: Providence Public Library, 1/8” Model
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Urban Hybrid Tower (Public)
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A Pavilion for the Farnsworth House (Cultural)
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Boathouse: Studies in Movement and Measure (Public)
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Providence Public Library (Cultural)
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Cascade House: A House for Two Families and a Spa (Residential)
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Facade Analysis: Leadenhall Tower (Technical)
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Integrated Building Systems: Shared Work Office (Technical)
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Essay: The Architecture of Social Immobility in J.E. Wideman’s Philadelphia Fire
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Charcoal Drawings: Observations from Life (Fine Art)
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LIGHT/WATER/FORM (Sculpture)
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Tulip Light (Furniture)
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Rocking Cow (Product)
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Architetural Analysis: Carpenter Center (Drawing)
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Birdwatcher Steel Structure (Public Installation)
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Landscape Architecture: Lot Park (Technical)
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Urban Hybrid Tower Fall 2019 Professor Cara Liberatore & Daniel Ibanez
The Urban Ecologies studio investigated the typology of the hybrid tower. Drawing from Koolhaas’ theories from Delirious New York, the studio was tasked with combining three programs in one structure. I began my exploration by overlapping three programmatic bodies where spaces become increasingly private towards the top. Freeing up the cores leads to a building that reads as four separate bodies from an urban perspective: depending on which floor one occupies, the room extends from one volume into another, creating the sense of both defined borders and continuous spaces, allowing for hybridity in a large tower. The housing floors feature kitchens with operable glass louvers that open up towards a shared space between two apartments, encouraging a neighborly experience even in a skyscraper. A scale model for the housing floor was made to verify how light enters the building and how the overall atmosphere feels. The facade elements are cast concrete from a silicone mold.
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Left: Hybrid Tower, Structural Model
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Right: Hybrid Tower, Programmatic Model
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Top: Hybrid Tower, Interior Model View
Right: Hybrid Tower, 10
Senior Housing Floorplan
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Left: Hybrid Tower, Interior Model View, Gallery Floor
Right: Hybrid Tower, 12
Mixed Housing Floorplan
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Left: Hybrid Tower, Interior Model View, Housing
Right: Hybrid Tower, 14
Gallery Floorplan
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Left: Hybrid Tower, Basswood and Taskboard Model
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The border is the true protagonist of space, just as the present, another border, is the true protagonist of time. Eduardo Chillida
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A Pavilion for the Farnsworth House Spring 2020 Professor Jeffrey Geisinger
This proposal sees a pavilion for recording podcasts added to the site to the north of the Farnsworth house. The structure is made of 2x4 studs and 8x4 ply, and wrapped in a double layer of thick felt curtain. Sound is prevented from traveling between double insulated floor plates, which are suspended from the radially structured frame. The idea of wrapping the pavilion came from the curtains in the Farnsworth house, as they act both as visual barriers for privacy but also add to an isolation of sound, preventing reverberation throughout the glass box. The podcasts may be recorded on the second floor of the added structure, after climbing up the ladder opposite the entry. The floor is covered with the same fabric as the curtain, the ceiling is hung from a resilient channel. Direct exposure to sunlight can be enjoyed one level above. This is a peaceful pavilion that offers those who search for it a moment of calm, ideal for recording podcasts contemplating the surrounding architecture.
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Left: Pavilion and Farnsworth House, Rhino & Photoshop Collage
Right: Pavilion and Farnsworth House, 20
Rooftop Plan
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Top: Pavilion and Farnsworth House, Rhino & Photoshop Collage
Right: Pavilion and Farnsworth House, Plan
Below: Pavilion and Farnsworth House, 22
Sections
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Boathouse: Studies in Movement and Measure Fall 2021 Professor Kyna Leski
A tree grows in response to the unique forces it is exposed to. Lateral winds, snow loads, the humidity of the air and earth surrounding it all impact its growth, shape and resistance to the passing of time. The body is strained similarly in the sport of rowing: both the tree and muscles build fiber in response to external stresses. This process-driven project explores the concept of built fiber as an architecture for a boathouse on the Pawtucket River in Providence, RI. A conceptual jump from the tension and release of a bow lead to the development of a drawing machine that generates forms found in the movements of rowing: a homeostasis of sorts with no datum. Further studies in the movement of the boats in and out of the boathouse confirmed the shape of inserts into a grid of rods that deflect and stabilise the floorplates—the architecture assembles itself in the process of building fiber, the process of building resistance to stress.
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Top: Movement and Measure, Bow Drawing Machine
Bottom: Movement and Measure, Boat Maneuvering
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Left: Movement and Measure, Static Model
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Right: Movement and Measure, Stressed and Static Model
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Top: Movement and Measure, Deflected Columns by Curved Insert
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Right: Movement and Measure, Expanded Model
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Top: Movement and Measure, Boathouse Model
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Right: Movement and Measure, Boathouse Model
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Top: Movement and Measure, Boathouse Plan
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Top: Movement and Measure, Boathouse Section
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Top: Movement and Measure, Boathouse Model
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Providence Public Library and Archives Spring 2019 Professor Jim Barnes
The allegory of an archaeological site was used to design the architecture for a public library in Providence. The challenge was housing both an antique collection of artefacts and a modern media lab. The realisation was that regardless of how old or new a medium is, the matter is still the same: knowledge. Like on an archeological site, knowledge is uncovered. The building reads like an archaic tomb, with winding corridors and rooms at uneven angles—this is an ancient place. The library constantly renegotiates its mass against the site, at times veering off of the boundary to remain in the past while welcoming the present. The border is the true protagonist of space, just as the present, another border, is the true protagonist of time, sculptor Eduardo Chillida said. The architecture then occupies a timeless space, fast and slow, present and past, in and out of order, where knowledge uncovered can give rise to future potentials.
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Top: Providence Public Library, Process Sketch
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Right: Providence Public Library, Process Sketches
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Top: Providence Public Library, Taskboard Model
Right: Providence Public Library, 50
4th, 3rd and 2nd Floor
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Left: Providence Public Library, Taskboard Model
Right: Providence Public Library, 1st Floor, Ground and Basement
Below: Providence Public Library, 52
Long and Short Sections
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Top: Providence Public Library, Taskboard 1/16 Model
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Right: Providence Public Library, Rhino & Photoshop Collage
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Cascade House: A Home for Two Families and a Spa Summer 2020 Ruch & Partner Architekten
The owner of the adjacent house uphill desired to build a house for his adult children and their families in the Engadine valley, Switzerland. After determining the maximal area for the proposed project, a massing model guided the design of the house, where the exterior cascading stair proportions the rather tall building in the slope to its surrounding. The spa is accessible by both the two apartments in the building and the owner’s house via an underground passage. It features a pool that pushes all the way to the interior boundaries and reinforces the idea of swimming in an alpine cave—windows frame the opposing Piz Uter peak amongst other fantastic views. The apartments share similar layouts with the private bedrooms occupying the North half of the house, while loggias pierce the West facade adding the Spa window into a large frame.
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Top: Cascade House, Site Plan
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Top: Cascade House, Site Model
Below: Cascade House, Plans and Sections
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Top: Cascade House, Elevations East and North
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Top: Cascade House, Elevations West and South
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Top: Cascade House, Plastecene 1:100 Model
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Right: Cascade House, Foamcore 1:50 Process Model
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Top: Cascade House, Foamcore 1:50 Process Model
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Right: Cascade House, Conceptual Sketch
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Leadenhall Building: Facade Analysis Fall 2020 Professor Penn Ruderman
As an introduction to Integrated Building Systems, I analyzed Rogers Stirk Harbour’s Leadenhall Tower in London. The south-facing façade of Leadenhall consists of a double-skinned, externally ventilated envelope. This design exploits passive solar heating as well as daylighting. The external glazing system incorporates air vents every seventh story. These cause cool air to be sucked up into the cavity and vented back outside in a slightly warmer state. This is due to the Venturi effect, and is exactly the same principle that allows a chimney to operate. The flow of air keeps the inner glazing cool, minimizing the need for artificial cooling. The cavity which separates the outer layer of glass from the inner layer of double-glazing also contains automated blinds that respond to the sun’s movement. This additional component helps keep the office space comfortably cool, while ensuring a glare-free environment. The interstitial gap between the external and internal glazing helps prevent not only radiation but also conduction of thermal energies. Additionally, hardpoints between the internal and external facades, the maintenance catwalks, and the steel frame are thermally interrupted by low-conductivity plastic dividers. Internal endplates are likewise insulated against thermal conduction from the external steel trusses by low conductive thermal breaks. The double skinned facade sandwiches and is supported by a massive steel megaframe. The external megaframe also avoids the need for a central structural core; therefore even the largest floors have no more than six internal columns creating multifunctional and flexible workspaces. Shear loads are transferred to a support core at the north end of the tower, which is organised as a series of K-braces, and acts as a giant column.
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Integrated Building Systems: Shared Work Office Fall 2020 Professor Penn Ruderman
The prompt for the Inegrated Building Systems class final called for a shared office building at a site in coastal Rhode Island. Given the building’s proximity to the ocean, marsh ground site and threatening sea level rise, the architecture is supported by forty-foot pilings upon which the mat foundation is cast. This system stilts the entire structure to ensure minimal site imposition and maximized parking potential. The ground floor is used entirely for car parking, delivery services, as well as housing the mechanical systems and elevator shaft rooms. Cores are built up from precast structural elements with the appropriate fire and insulation ratings and house the firestair, elevators and bathrooms on either end of the short side of the building—this orientation ensures ample natural sunlight entering the structure. These massive cores resist lateral forces coming from either axis, while gravity loads experienced by the pre-fabricated, 56 foot T-Beams are directed through columns at the periphery and center of the floorplates. This sequence of column, T-Member and six inch poured top slab is repeated for each of the five floors of the building. The extensive precast concrete structural system also avoids the demand for a bulky internal structural system, allowing these large open floors to have no more than five centrally located columns allowing for multifunctional and flexible shared workspaces.
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Top: Shared Office Space, Zoom Groupwork
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The Architecture of Social Immobility in J.E. Wideman’s Philadelphia Fire Fall 2016 Professor Mark Sherman
John Edgar Wideman’s Philadelphia Fire from 1990 is an
exploration of the urban disintegration of African American communities in the context of the violent 1985 police intervention and bombing of 6221 Osage Avenue and their inhabitants - members of the Afrocentric, anarchoprimitivist organisation named “MOVE”. Fictional in its nature, but at times autobiographical, Wideman tells the story of the protagonist Cudjoe, an African American writer from Philadelphia. What starts as his search for a boy who survived the bombing of Osage Avenue and the desire to write a book about his experiences turns into a series of personal revelations of Cudjoe’s youth and life in the city before his flight to an island in the Aegean Sea. Readers of Philadelphia Fire are introduced an array of characters, such as Margaret Jones, a former member of MOVE; Timbo, Cudjoe’s childhood friend, now a “cultural attaché” (Wideman 72) to the mayor of Philadelphia, Cudjoe’s ex-wife, children and friends, the “Money Power Things” gang and JB, a college-educated but mentally ill homeless African American. At the centre of the story lies the city, and Wideman’s lively description thereof. Most notably, Wideman relates Philadelphia to human bodies and geometrical grids, inherently creating tension between
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these two poles of narrative. Furthermore, Wideman refers to Philadelphia’s colonial past and its influence on how the city is perceived by different communities of inhabitants. This essay will examine how Wideman successfully conveys how African American communities experience the inner cities of America through his portrayal of Philadelphia, specifically how he defines its “shape” and the implications thereof.
From this vantage point in the museum’s deep shadow in the
greater darkness of night it seems an iron will has imposed itself on the shape of the city. If you could climb high enough, higher than the hill on which the museum perches, would you believe in the magic pinwheel of lights, straight lines, exact proportions, symmetry of spheres, gears meshing, turning, spinning to the perpetual music of their motion? … A miraculous design. A prodigy that was comprehensible. He can see a hand drawing the city. An architect’s tilted drafting board, instruments for measuring, for inscribing right angles, arcs, circles. The city is a faint tracery of blue, barely visible blood lines in a new-born’s skull. No one has used the city yet. No one has pushed a button to start the heart pumping. He can tell thought had gone into the design. And a person must have stood here, on this hill, imagining this perspective. Dreaming the vast emptiness into the shape of the city. In the beginning it hadn’t just happened, pell-mell. People had planned to live and prosper here. Wear the city like robe and crown. (44-45)
This passage begins to draw out Philadelphia’s identity struggle
as a city – the identity of a grid, a sketch or a design, with specific purposes in mind, or that of an organism, a living and breathing body. Cudjoe describes to the reader how the city was designed by an architect, using a “tilted drafting board, instruments for measuring, for inscribing right angles, arcs, circles” (45). To give some historical background, the person the protagonist describes at the drawing board could arguably be William Penn, as he is reminded of the Founding Fathers in the next paragraph; “Dead now. Buried in their wigs, waistcoats, swallowtail coats, silk hose
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clinging to their plump calves. A foolish old man flying a kite in a storm” (45). The link to William Penn as the symbolic architect of the city is further given weight as Wideman uses his Instructions as an epigraph to the novel: “Let every house be placed, if the Person pleases, in the middle of his platt... so there may be ground on each side, for the Gardens or Orchards or fields, that it may be a greene Country Towne, which will never be burnt, and always be wholesome”.
According to Jean-Pierre Richard in “Philadelphia Fire”, or the
Shape of a City, Penn is giving instructions to raise a “latter-day Paradise” (604), similar to the creation of a god-like figure that is meant to last “for ever and ever”; the city, according to Penn, will “never be burnt” and “always be wholesome”. Furthermore, though Richard argues one should not ignore theological interpretations, contemporary advancements during Penn’s lifetime in science might have had an influence on his ideology regarding city planning and the architecture of towns. William Harvey, an English physician credited with the discovery of blood circulation, died when Penn was thirteen years old (604) – the concept of “easy flow of circulation through broad avenues and large squares” (604) was henceforth applied as a blueprint for cities.
Taking another work of Wideman into account, Fever explores the
“physiological foundation of the city … at variance with its ethical reality” (604), likening men in cities to circulating blood in the body, and their selfishness to the clogging of arteries and blood vessels, preventing the necessary exchange between communities leading to isolation and despair. With its gridded, “angled and straight edged” (Fever 248) arrangement, Philadelphia is a reflection of Penn’s ideal city as portrayed in Fever, “the mirror of [Penn’s] rectitude” (248); a city that is meant to “reflect in its layout one of the most basic but vital principles of human life – blood circulation” (Richard 605). However, the city ironically turns out to be the antithesis: a lifeless, inert structure. According to Wideman’s stories, Philadelphia does not enable “circulation” between communities, as the town splits into the gridded and angular centre of the city and the “chaotic
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maze of periphery where the latest immigrant and the vast majority of the Black inhabitants barely survive” (Richard 605). What was conceived by Penn – the symbolic architect behind the city’s layout – as “a faint tracery of blue, barely visible blood lines in a new-born’s skull” (Philadelphia Fire 45), grows into the grotesque abomination mentioned earlier in the novel.
Using historical reasoning, Cudjoe identifies the will of a white
colonialist as the defining legacy of Philadelphia, and therefore sees the city inherently intolerant to the African American communities, banishing them “for ever and ever” to the edges of the structure, “cocooned like worms” (Wideman, Fever 248) consuming a rotting body. Mary Paniccia Carden adds to this interpretation with her analysis of Wideman’s novel in “If the City is A Man”: Founders and Fathers, Cities and Sons in John Edgar Wideman’s “Philadelphia Fire”, an exploration of the “raced and gendered spaces created by white founders” (Carden 472). As Cudjoe makes his way back home from a basketball game with childhood friends, he sees Philadelphia as it “was meant to be viewed. Broad avenues like bright spokes of a wheel radiating from a glowing centre. No buildings higher than Billy Penn’s hat atop City Hall. Scale and pattern fixed forever. Clarity, balance, a perfect understanding between the parts” (Philadelphia Fire 44). Carden argues that Cudjoe wants to believe in the myth behind the symmetry of the city and to trust in the security of citizenship. “I belong to you, the city says. This is what I was meant to be. You can grasp the pattern” (Philadelphia Fire 44), he hears the city speak, yet he understands that this longing upholds the stronghold on power behind the “founder’s scale and pattern” (Carden 482), fixed forever. The struggle of Philadelphia, conceived as a grid for morality and production but grown into a monstrous and divisive form, can therefore be backed by examining Cudjoe’s view of the city in its historical context. The two poles of gridded layout and organic body show the compositional tension within the city, influencing the present through its past.
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Madhu Dubey’s Literature and Urban Crisis: John Edgar
Wideman’s Philadelphia Fire further follows this line of ar¬gumentation of a designed but flawed city. The “order” that is implied by Penn as the symbolic architect of the city more likely conveys the implication of “law and order,” suggesting a “rigid system of exclusions protected by cruising police cars” (580) rather than the “miraculous design” (Philadelphia Fire 44) desired by the Quaker colonialists. Cudjoe conveys one of Wideman’s core issues, the repressive maintenance of order within the African American and other racially and economically profiled communities, in the same breath as describing his view from the vantage point by the art museum:
Everybody had zones. Addicts, prostitutes, porn merchants,
derelicts. Even people who were black and poor had a zone. Everybody granted the right to lie in the bed they’d made for themselves. As long as they didn’t contaminate good citizens who disapproved. As long as the bed’s available to good citizens who wished to profit or climb in occasionally. As long as everybody knew they had to give up their zone, scurry down off this hill, no questions asked, when the cops blow the whistle. (46)
The term “contamination” in the context of the perfect,
symmetrical and designed city could refer to JB, the college-educated homeless man. After Cudjoe’s lavish meal in an expensive restaurant paid for by the government through Timbo, Wideman illustrates the grotesque consequences of extravagant consumption as Cudjoe contemplates “possibility of excess made real by the city” (92):
Accumulating. Bloating. Smiling and chattering while piles of
bones, hunks of fat, discarded gristle and cores, skins and decorative greens and sculpted peels, corks, cans, bottles, grease, soiled linen, soggy napkins, crumbs on the floor, shells, what was unconsumed and unconsumable [sic.], waste and rot and persiflage heaped up, the garbage outweighing him, taller than he was, usurping his place. Eaten by refuse faster than he can cram it down his throat (92).
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The passage illustrates the consequences of the tensions
between the gridded city and its reality once the heart of the city starts beating and running its course. What is regarded by the luxury restaurant – representing the socio-economically privileged of Philadelphia’s society and arguably the government – as waste, becomes “a necessary means of survival for JB” (Dubey, Literature and Urban Crisis 583). Waste and scarcity are the inherent of the progress achieved by a city of oblivious consumption: “At the same time over in the north and in the west where people from here [are] forced to move, what’s growing is garbage dumps” (79). Dubey continues to argue that the “most conspicuous proof of consumer society’s aestheticization [sic.] of waste” (583). Hence, the ideologies of consumption that are backed by the “designed city” work by “fetishistically repressing the structural interdependence between the renovated city centers and their adjoining urban wastelands” (583). These “garbage dumps” are populated by the likes of JB, whose expulsion enables the creation of the city according to the ideals of the architect. The trash, both materially and symbolically in their attitudes, of this privileged, consuming society is what clogs the arteries of the grid and prevents the body of the city to function properly. The city begins to rot under the heaps of garbage, enabling the compartmentalisation of communities such as the African American inhabitants of Philadelphia.
This transformation from the idealised grid to a languid, rotting
body is illustrated as Wideman leads Cudjoe through an instance at the beginning of the novel while travelling to meet Margaret Jones, a former MOVE member:
If the city is a man, a giant sprawled for miles on his back, rough
contours of his body smothering the rolling landscape, the rivers and woods, hills and valleys, bumps and gullies, crushing with his weight, his shadow, all the life beneath him, a derelict in a terminal stupor, too exhausted, too wasted to move, rotting in the sun, then Cudjoe is deep within the giant’s stomach, in a subway-surface car shuddering through
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stinking loops of gut, tunnels carved out of decaying flesh, a prisoner of rumbling innards that scream when trolleys pass over rails embedded in flesh. (Wideman, 21)
Carden quotes William Carlos William’s vision of Paterson, New
Jersey, to give another account of a city as a body, as
the city … the man, an identity ... an interpenetration, both ways:
Paterson lies in the valley under the Passaic Falls its spent waters forming the outline of his back. He lies on his right side, head near the thunder of the waters filling his dreams! Eternally asleep, his dreams walk about the city where he persists incognito. Butterflies settle on his stone ear. Immortal he neither moves nor rouses and is seldom seen, though he breathes and the subtleties of his machinations drawing their substance from the noise of the pouring river animate a thousand automations. (Carden 485-486)
Williams’s description of New Jersey as a dreaming giant,
embodying “the mythic masculine potency that animates the American city” (486), stands much in contrast to Wideman’s immobile monster of a city. The lethargic abomination is “unmanned” (486), the city void of possibilities, and the rotting body renders Philadelphia exposed to violence towards its most powerless inhabitants. The African American is a prisoner, “deep within [the] stomach” of the city, an immobile and impotent “patient laid out on a table” (Philadelphia Fire 82), consumed by the gridded city and the colonial ideal that failed to live up to the demands of the present.
Timbo himself doesn’t seem to be entirely sure how he perceives
the city. For one, he explains to Cudjoe how the mayor is “orchestrating forms of progress that will redeem the city, creating solid gold out of stone ghetto, producing high-tech replacements for old, worn-out parts of the city’s guts” (Carden 486). Alternatively, Timbo also admits the banishment of poor African Americans “off the map” and into the previously mentioned “garbage dumps”; the clogged arteries of the body. The city continues to compartmentalise its citizens by race and class according to historically colonial ideals: the mayor’s new city “repeats and extends the exclusions
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of the old in zones containing difference” (Carden 486). Timbo resumes: “What’s the mayor gon [sic.] do when the city starts to cracking and pieces break off the edges and disappear. It’s thin ice, man” (Philadelphia Fire 80). The argument that the colonial ideal with Penn as the figurative architect of Philadelphia has failed its wide variety of citizens is supported by Carden. She argues that “the layered fragility of this new/old city suggests the potential collapse of the founder’s vision without offering alternatives … instead, Timbo scrambles to remain above the thin ice, to avoid joining the other Philadelphia’s growing population of dispossessed and lost citizens” (Carden 486).
The solution to this fundamental problem – to return to the central
topic of Philadelphia Fire – was offered by John Leaphart, founder of MOVE, in the destruction of what he viewed as a progeny of the “manmade systems built by technology and geared around consumption” (Dubey, Literature and Urban Crisis 585): The gridded, designed city. Leaphart identified the systems “as all forms of technology and culture, including science, industry, medicine, electricity, and education” (585). Continuing this line of argument, King, the character modelled after Leaphart in Wideman’s novel, describes human beings as “seeds” destined “to carry forward the Life in us” so that, when “society dies from the poison in its guts, we’ll be there and the Tree will grow bigger and bigger till the whole wide earth is a peaceful garden under its branches” (Philadelphia Fire 11). Ironically, his metaphorical description of his utopian idea of a garden city “aimed at recovering an essential human nature” (Dubey, Literature and Urban Crisis 585-586) seems awfully similar to that of Penn’s “greene Country Towne”. Nonetheless, Wideman acknowledges Leaphart’s primitivist intentions partially: “Even though he did it wrong, he was right” (13). The reader is to understand that although MOVE was right to reject the consumerist notions predicated by the capitalist intentions behind colonialism and the inherent structure of the city, it was wrong to seek to “recapture an organic ideal of community which is not only impossible to maintain in modern times but is also deeply suspect even as an imaginary ideal” (Dubey, Literature and Urban Crisis 586).
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King’s idealism is also found in “The Book of Life” authored
by Richard Corey, the novel’s counterpart to Donald Glassey, co-author of the MOVE Manifesto. In the book, Corey likens MOVE to the Tree of Life “that would regenerate the decaying city” (587). After he and his wife are assaulted by a group of adolescents, arguably by the “Money Power Things” gang, he realizes that the metaphorical “seeds of hope the book [were] meant to breed, embodied in the children of the city, have degenerated as they grew into terrible weeds” (Dubey, Literature and Urban Crisis 587) and are “gnawing at the gates of the temple of reason. The Life Tree is wizened, gaunt, crooked, dying at the top, dripping sickness in dead leaves that are drowning the city” (Philadelphia Fire 175). Disillusioned by the distortion of his “green ideal, Corey translates the secrets, stores in the sacred Book of Life into the snarly pig tongue of law and order” (Dubey, Signs and Cities 82), by informing on MOVE for the police. It’s to no surprise that Corey chose the 19th floor of a bank building that’s “taller than Billy Pen’s hat” (Philadelphia Fire 173) to commit suicide. The “spanking new Penn Mutual Savings Bank” (173) symbolises the eruption of modern capitalism that goes beyond the colonialist ideals of Penn’s contemporaries. It proves as an unsurpassable obstacle for the sort of idealism that MOVE represents. Neither MOVE, nor the misguided interpretation of “The Book of Life” by the MPT gang were able to “unclog” the modern city.
In conclusion, Wideman establishes Philadelphia’s timeline
starting as a colonialist and capitalist centre of white commerce to the present situation of crime, poverty and decline for a majority of the population. He draws parallels between the city in its current state to a monstrous, rotting body; a grid that has decayed into chaos like the rotting carcass of an animal. The garbage of a conspicuously consuming minority clogs the once “barely visible blood lines” (45) of the city as the button has been pushed to “start the heart pumping” (45). The passage where Wideman has Cudjoe gaze across the city panorama is of principal
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importance to establish the inner conflict both Cudjoe and the city experience. It is arguable then, following Carden’s interpretation, that it is truly the minds of the individual subjects of a city are animating its body, and it’s their responsibility modernise Penn’s ideals for the sake of citizenship for all the people of Philadelphia and cities across the United States.
2017 Winner of the RISD Literature Prize
Works Cited Carden, Mary P., If the City Is a Man” Founders and Fathers, Cities and
Sons in John Edgar Wideman’s “Philadelphia Fire”. University of Wisconsin Press, 2003. Dubey, Madhu, Literature and Urban Crisis: John Edgar Wideman’s Phila-
delphia Fire. Indiana State University, 1998. Dubey, Madhu, Signs and Cities: Black Literary Postmodernism. University of Chicago Press, 2007 Richard, Jean-Pierre, “Philadelphia Fire”, or the Shape of a City. Johns Hopkins University Press, 1999. Wideman, John E., Philadelphia Fire, Mariner Books, New York, New York, 2005
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The words “noonday hillside” suggest that the world does not have rigid topography but optional configurations. At 4 p.m. it might not be a hillside at all. We take our identities from our relationships, just as the earth takes its configuration from the time of day, the position of the source of light. This is a warm, fluid world. Richard Hugo
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Charcoal Drawings Foundation Studies Professor Eleanor Lazarek
Drawing from life requires intense concentration and observation, and during the process the subject matter begins to disintegrate and reveal new truths. Bones scaffolding layers of skin, which are folding over and rolling in the soft light, begin to inform the movement of hand and body over the paper, building up and erasing layers of charcoal lines and washes. Presenting this miracle of light and form requires the artist to gain a degree of freedom of movement and interpretation of what is appearing in front of them. The following drawings attempt to convey the atmosphere of bodies in space, the interplay of shadows with mass, in studies ranging from five minutes to entire mornings. This RISD Foundation class developed my understanding of the role of artists and representation through the medium of charcoal.
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Light, Water, Form Spring 2017 Professor Stefanie Pender
Light fundamentally guides our experience of space. In this project, time and space are brought into a fluid relationship through the process of refracted light over a surface. The superimposition of refracted waves of light through a tank of water onto the brick surface, triggered by the passing-by of a pedestrian, shows the impact we have onto our environments. This final project for the Spatial Dynamics Foundation class at RISD required planning a complex project over a few weeks while learning new skills in programming the tools, building the machine and finally presenting the final project in a video that is accessible through the code below.
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Left: Light/Water/Form, Arduino Microcomputer
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Right: Light/Water/Form, In Scene
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Top: Light/Water/Form, Video Still
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Non-referential architecture can, precisely because it does not rely on some kind of larger consensus beyond itself, only be universally valid and understood if it is an expression of something true or actual, something as close to the truth as possible - similar to the triumph of tectonics over matter. Insofar, non-referential architecture is above all a matter of form, concretely: the design of spaces, from within and without. The form creates a spatial experience, which in turn holds meaning. Valerio Olgiati
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Tulip Light Fall 2018 Professor Dana D’Amico
Bent lamination is a process where thin sheets of veneer are bent into the shape of a curve and glued up in layers, allowing for tight radii along structurally stronger grain of wood. This design departs from a single mold, where wood is bent over two different radii, flipped, shifted and cut to form a varied collection of curved laminations. For the final project, the separate pieces were sanded at an angle which allowed them to be arranged radially. Small holes around the shell had to be drilled for wire, which was used to keep the pieces under tension while glueing.
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Left: Tulip Light, In Scene
Right: Tulip Light Construction, Joining Separate Laminations
Below: Tulip Light, 128
Details
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Rocking Cow Spring 2018 Professor Will Wells
As a continuation of my interest in laminated wood products, I designed and built a rocking toy for children. The original Swiss Trauffer cow was used as a point of departure. That original toy is the product of an industrial wood process where two distinct outlines are cut, stacked, mirrored and glued together. I translated these outline silhouettes into six separate lamination molds, combining the ash veneer with lap joints into two unified silhouettes, paying homage to the original cow. The veneer curves create beautiful gradients of lights and darks—as the kids grow up and the toy is no longer a use-object, it could gain the status of a sculpture to live on in that capacity.
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Top: Rocking Cow Construction, Joining Separate Laminations
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Right: Rocking Cow Construction, Mold Breakup
Below: Rocking Cow, Details
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Architectural Analysis: Carpenter Center Spring 2019 Professor Chelsea Limbird
The Carpenter Center at Harvard is Corbusier’s only building in North America—as such it had to fulfill his five points. The drawing pulls apart the architecture, extending the pilotis ad infinitum, while showing off the open plan, free facade and the idiosyncratic ramp connecting the two sides of the lot. Images of the building are inserted at their respective angles. For the final exhibition in the RISD Architecture Gallery I built frames for the drawings and a concrete model at sixteenth scale, which intersects a series of copper grids informed by the piloti and tree grid that extends beyond the building. The grid is fastened with screws at points where columns would pierce through—the resulting figure resembles the architecture as an archetypal model.
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Top: Architectural Analysis, Exhibition at RISD Architecture Gallery
Right: Carpenter Center Analysis, 142
Piloti Ad Infinitum
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Left: Carpenter Center Analysis, Archetypal Model
Right: Carpenter Center Analysis, Exploded Form
Right: Carpenter Center Analysis, 144
Exploded Form Details
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Steel Structure: Birdwatcher Fall 2019 Professor Lydia Moog
For the final assignment in the Steel Structures class we were asked to design a steel pavilion at a lake in a forest in Massachusetts, using concepts we had covered. When visiting the site, I noticed a tree had fallen into the lake. It fell in a way so that one could almost climb onto its trunk, and hover out over the water. This informed the idea of taking visitors on a journey. An accessible ramp is cantilevering over the lake, before switching back onto a platform twelve feet over the slightly sloped ground. The visitors are taken from the ground over the water, and finally into the crowns of the trees surrounding the site, allowing them to birdwatch. All columns, the platform and the trusses within the ramp were calculated for the final project, proving the feasibility of a 60 foot cantilever.
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Left: Birdwatcher, Conceptual Model
Right: Birdwatcher, 152
Structural Analysis Outline
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Left: Birdwatcher, Photoshop and Rhino Collage
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Top: Birdwatcher, Plan Section
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Constructed Ground: Lot Park Winter 2017 Professor Johanna Barthmaier-Payne
In the Landscape Architecture Masters studio Constructed Ground we designed a park on a parking lot adjacent to the architecture building. The focus was on expressing an idea through technical drawings using CAD—in this case, the park becomes a forum for conversation between the Industrial Design and Architecture departments. The bifurcation of land “tongues” that recede and emerge from the ground allows for differentiated spatial experiences: a forum and an outlook. Details were drawn for the forum seating, the fixed furniture and the ramp connecting South Main Street to Water Street.
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© ALEXANDER KERN 2020 The text and work in this book produced are for academic purposes only. No part of this publication may be reproduced, distributed or transmitted in any form or by any means, including photocopying, recording or other electronic or mechanical methods without the prior written permission of the publisher, except in the case of brief quotations embodied on critical reviews and certain other noncommercial uses permitted by copyright law. Set in Berthold Akzidenz.