Alex Vernon Selected Works, 2019-2022
email: alexvern@umich.edu phone: (307) 286-4212
ALEX VERNON “It is not what is the cost of architecture? It’s a question of what is the cost of not having architecture?” Architecture has been the lens under which I have chosen to understand sociocultural existence. Consuming and producing architecture has been my vehicle for change.
EDUCATION Master of Architecture
University of Michigan, Taubman College of Architecture and Urban Planning. Ann Arbor, MI.
Master of Arts
University of Wyoming, History (Architecture), Laramie, WY.
Bachelor of Arts
University of Wyoming, History; Philosophy. Laramie, WY.
2022 2017
2015
EXPERIENCE MOA Architects Design-Build Intern, Summer 2021
Guemes Island, WA | Brooklyn, NY
Architecture Research Assistant (GRA), Spring 2020
Taubman College of Architecture, Ann Arbor, MI
Fellowship 2018-2019
ArcPrep Instructor, Fall, Spring 2019-2020
SKILLS
This 4 month internshhip was a collaboration between three interns and the client that served as a prototype design-build program that has since been inagurated into the Architectural Association in London. Executed all stages of design processes from SD - CD’s regarding built-in furniture for client’s home as well as fabricated the designed work. My specific assignment was to design, document, fabricate, and detail the stairs and woodstorage outbuilding. Study models, CAD-drawings, and a portable CNC router called the Shaper Origin occupied the majority of the internship and other general contracting duties were scattered in between. Working with incoming graduate students, and professors leading their classes, I acted as the liaison between the students, the assignments, and the softwares. This included creating tutorials beforehand in Rhino, Vray, Adobe CC, and Enscape, as well as leading live tutorials and office hours
Glenstone Museum, Potomac, MD
Assisted with the opening of the expansion of a new contemporary art museum. Glenstone is a private art museum with a collection of over 1,300 works created after 1945. It is designed by architects Charles Gwathmey and Tom Phifer. Wrote the architectural glossary for the museum through close collaboration with Tom Phifer and gave presentations during visitor hours.
UofM ArcPrep. Detroit, MI
ArcPrep is an initiative designed to prepare students in highschools throughout Detroit the formal and fundamental elements of architecture. Using Rhino, Creative Cloud Apps, drawing basics, curriculum consultations, and spatial thinking strategies, ArcPrep prepares students interested in pursuing architecture at a college level.
AWARDS - AIA Wyoming Scholars Grant (Summer 2020) - Graduate Research Grant: Redlining and Spatial Oppression (2020) - Sonic Scenographies (2020) - Hazmat (2020) - A. Alfred Taubman Merit Scholarship (2019) -AHC Research Grant (2017) -Larson Steckle-McGee Research Grant (2017) -Dick and Lynne Cheney Study-Abroad Grant (2015) -”Course Development” Grant (2016) -Siren Memorial Internship Scholarship (2014)
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d Internship -15 orative
GIVE + Gain Sugar Hill Nighborhood, Detroit, MI. Sugar Hill was once a vibrant, energetic center piece to a growing entertainment and music district in the heart of Detroit. It was one of the only racially integrated neighborhoods in the area, fostering a sense of community, collaboration, and independence. As evidenced by the number of parking lots and lack of animation and jazziness, this sense of place has been lost to the perils of deindustrialization and population decline. How can we renew this vibrance? How can architecture act as a catalyst for cooperation and autonomy? How can we bring back the jazz? This project was a semester-long group effort designed to intricately weave systems development with form and concept. Our project sought to use systems-based logics to determine occupant negotiations through material, light, utilities, and space. All of the drawing were done by our group as collaborative, iterative efforts that have our own touches on each drawings. My work focused on the visualization and sections, Elyssa focused on individual unit and overall plans, and Noah worked on massing and concept. SYSTEMS STUDIO | Collaboration with Elyssa Bakker & Noah Russin Instructed By Claudia Wigger and Craig Borum, Fall 2021
Site Typology Institutional Hood
Analysis
Programs like KitchenConnect, Museum of Contemporary Art (MOCAD), and the Eastern Market initiative all act as typlogical precedents for our residence. We have identified these culinary, creative, coworking spaces as the institutions lacking most in the Sugar Hill neighborhood. Our project seeks to rehabilitate Sugar Hill through the use of shared, unprescribed spaces, what we are calling “unprescribed commons” or UC’s for short. We argue that the community created through this project can manage their own collective resource, in this case space and the objects which make up that space. We chose not to prescribe these commons through program because success of the space should be defined by the residents themselves. Instead, we define the commons through characterizations of the spaces. The unprescribed commons throughout our project create scales of interaction and economies of scale, allowing the residents to build equity on their own terms. What is given to the residents in terms of shared space is gained through equity and community building. This project exposes the myth of the tragedy of the commons. This economic theory states that any resource not regulated by government intervention or privatization will be depleted quickly due to self-interest and greed. In reality, resource depletion is more commonly found outside the commons where resources are taken to their absolute limits so that a small number of people might realize short-term economic gains. In order to revitalize Sugar Hill and to sustain that revitalization, our project provides these unprescribed commons as a means to create long-term success through collaboration, independence, and sharing.
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2nd Floor Plan + Unit callout
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Spatial Negotiations The logics of each space are informed at different scales. Objects placed in the units allow for spatial negotiations between co-habitants. Larger objects at a wall/floor/or skylight scale allow for negotiations between other tenants. Where an upstairs neighbor lacks a skylight, they may make up for in space while another neighbor has access to that skylight. Our unprescribed common spaces consist of “wet, acoustic, light, and transparent” - these are qualitative driven spaces that do not have any one program. They are shoehorned into the building and cause inhabitants to negotiate their private spaces with these unprescribed spaces that range in scale themselves.
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Fungi(ble) Mary's Peak, Oregon Permaculture (a term coined as the combination of permanent agriculture and permanent culture) economies predate shopping, and may outlive markets as we know them. For now, though, they range from neighborly choke-cherry jams to migrant mushroom wars in Japan. These exhanges happen on roadsides, front doors, and often back alleys. Foraging economies span more than just distance as well; foraging’s socioeconomic motivations span from local hobbyist to professional, rich to poor, yet very little infrastructure or architecture exists within these permaculture economies. But shopping, observationally is in of itself a form of foraging. Selections, recommendations, tools, travel, perishable goods, all derive from foraging strategies. However, foraging does not necessitate a formal architecture. But what if it could? This project proposes what types of architectural typologies could exist to establish a permaculture-economy based on foraging. By folding in grocery store tropes into an otherwise primitive act, how does nature become commodified? INSTITUTIONS STUDIO with Neal Robinson, Fall 2020
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Derrived from cold frames, each unit serves as an educational/processing center that facilitates the users understanding and shopping experience of foraging. In-situ, deployable materials allow for an almost kit of parts assemblage and egress, floor plans exist as trail maps to embrace, if not romanticize the representational approach of mountain rhetoric. The store's language allows for a cohesive aesthetic, while maintaing minimal intrusion on the landscape. Floating floors that hang off of the columns, polygal roofing/siding imply transparency, and open door systems promot continuity on the trails . The project also hosts migrant mushroom camps, a small group of immigrants, mostly from SE Asia who forage for Matsutake mushrooms - delicacy mushrooms in Japan that have picked over since 1945. This project proposes an architecture for these communities to serve as both storage and distribution networks, relieving the pressure of an otherwise strenuous profession.
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Program Cold frames dictate the formal logics of these structures, however the concept of walking from hut to hut only to discover the architecture itself as a space of respite, relief, and recovery, has a much more ancient cousin. Highland Bothies Each hut is equipped with not only a different program to cultivate foraged goods based on season, it is also used for sleeping, camping, and escaping from urban or weather pressures. Highland bothies are structures placed across the Scottish countryside that allow “ramblers”, or people walking/hiking, to spend the night or relax. They are shed-like in nature and usually exist randomly on large estates. Each hut offers the hiker or forager the opportunity to relax mid-collection or even stay the night and set up a tent or hang a hammock.
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Design-Build Studio, MOA #WIP Guemes Island, WA The following works demonstrate my produced work that came out of the MOA internship studio hosted by Mobile Office Archietcts. MOA designed a small home on the island of Guemes, an hour outside of Seattle, WA. The inagural internship brought in 3 different interns to collaborate on built-in furniture interventions and general contracting duties. Each intern, aside from working within general systems of the home like electric, siding, landscaping, and documenting, was assigned a different space in the home to design their furniture to be fabricated on site of high-finish maple ply - this included the kitchen, living room design, cabinets, staircase, and mudroom, and dining table interventions. My project was the staircase. The staircase is an alternating tread bookshelf made of units of sandwiched ply treads in varying geometries, and stacked, laminated fillers designed to look like one whole mass of stacked ply. Alongside fabrication of each unit and installation, shop documents, Shaper Origin files, measurments, and material sourcing had to take place. Custom stringers, under-structures, and built-in railings create a whole unit of maple ply in a half-span stairwell MOA small project studio hosted by Dustin Stephens
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999 Good Bricks Camden, London Situated in central London, London Redux borrows used materials from existing properties and places them strategically into a shotgun-style floor plan. Soft white slurry coated stretcher-bond brick work envelopes a pine interior on a sloped London site. The courtyard features replace the typical third bedroom and a double-height ceiling allows for views down to the kitchen space. These material choices specifically allowed for a reduction in footprint and program in the existing home. This project was a collaboration in building out the construction model and the drawings with Nicolai Carlson and Kara Bowers. It is difficult to locate exactly who contributed what element as each was meticulously adjusted in a collaborative environment. In the model, my work consisted mostly of the brickwork, the foundation section, and the balustrade floor. 999 Good Bricks refers to the monk turned speaker Ajhan Brahm who, after taking weeks to build a gorgeous wall at his monastary, noticed that two of his bricks were misaligned. While contemplating destroying the wall to start over, Brahm realized that the two bricks that immediately caught the eye of the observer actually highlighted the 998 good bricks in the wall. In a story of true optimism, this mantra held true as this project was the culmination of roughly three weeks worth of work in just a few nights. CONSTRUCTION with Claudia Wigger, Fall 2019
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Architecture Student Research Grant (ASRG) Taubman BioLab Prescott Trudeau Alex Vernon Acknowledgements Thank you to Adam Smith and Lisa Sauve of Synecdoche, Ann Arbor for their generous support of this project and the ASRG program. Short Abstract Taubman BioLab proposes a material-driven course of study through the integration of a deployable lab in the pursuit of bio-material exploration. At its core, it seeks to reduce waste generated by material and model studies at Taubman while also giving students the opportunity to explore new material options. The project and exhibition materials suppose the full integration of the BioLab into the curriculum by examining a potential studio. This Propositions studio, NapTime, explores human form, critiques architectural pressures, and utilizes apparatus within the lab to generate sleeping furniture to be built across the school by a group of nine students. Project Description This research project seeks to identify methods to incorporate biological sciences into architectural education, from the materials used to produce models and represent built work to new pedagogical futures for bio-based design. Blending architecture and biology has yielded not only biomimetic strategies for environmental control and resiliency, but also an array of environment-friendly, plant-based building materials that come from renewable sources. Taubman BioLab proposes a material-driven course of study through the deployment of a pop-up lab that operates within the traditional studio context. The temperaturecontrolled environment allows for organic and sustainable explorations into growing biomaterials and investigating design opportunities within the emerging field of ‘Living Architecture.’ At its core, it seeks to reduce waste generated by material and model studies while also providing students a design process that balances hands-on learning with digital technologies. This lab is woven into the curricula of both graduate and undergraduate programs, particularly within certain studio semesters. This project and exhibition materials suppose the full integration of the BioLab into the curricula by examining a potential studio. This Propositions studio, NapTime, explores human form, critiques architectural pressures, and utilizes apparatus within the lab to generate sleeping furniture to be built across the school by a group of nine students.
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BioLab’s Nap Time studio asserts that sleep is a human right, a fundamental function of existence. It is an interval of time for the mind and body to recalibrate and unplug from protocols of labor and as such, it clashes with the 24/7 demands of consumption and productivity. This studio asks students to design an intervention of rest and relaxation into Taubman’s own 24/7 environment. Students will employ a wide range of physical modeling techniques, working within the BioLab to grow renewable and biodegradable material assemblies, as well as sourcing commercially available biomaterials. While digital technologies will be utilized, emphasis is placed on tactile experience and knowledge transfer as processes for investigating connections between design and nature.
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Alex Vernon thank you!
email: alexvern@umich.edu vernon.alex1993@gmail.com
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