ARCHITECTURE PORTFOLIO: A COLLECTION OF SHORT STORIES By Anna Badyoczek
CONTENTS THE UNTHEATER
THE ISLANDS AND THEIR PEOPLE
THE OTHERS
FRAGMENTS
THE UNTHEATER GRADUATE THESIS PROJECT Movie Theater and Performing Arts Theater Thesis: Art IS Religion Washington, D.C.
Lewis skipped down the concrete stairs two at a time. He went to the utility closet and grabbed his mop and cleaner to finish the last task of the day. For twenty years, this had always been his favorite part, when the rest of the cleaning crew had gone home and he was finishing up alone; it gave him time to think, and mopping was pretty meditative, anyway. Here and tonight it was different though - he had only recently started working at the UNtheater, preparing it for its opening night festivities. This new theater was in his neighborhood, U St. in Washington, D.C., on the corner of 14th and Swann. It had taken up residence in a former parking lot, adjacent to a brick wall with a funky mural and no windows. Tonight was his last night to get it ready before the opening at 9 p.m. tomorrow. The UNtheater gave him more of a workout than the buildings he was used to taking care of. There were so many stairs; he walked up and down up and down up and down all day, and even in these two weeks felt like he had gotten in slightly better shape.
He started at the top. He liked the view of the city from the rooftop garden, especially at this time of night. The sun had not quite set, and the world looked its most magical. The flower-like structures around him felt as if they were coming alive, and he felt like a small insignificant ant underneath them. He pictured how different the scene would be tomorrow night, with patrons ordering drinks, lounging on sofas, and discussing performances.
The next few levels below the rooftop were all very similar. He always worked from the inside out: first, the black box of the movie theater (each level on a different floor), with its three rows of seating. The inside of the theater had never felt so private; it surrounded him with extra silence, as if it could feel that tomorrow hundreds of people would be inside. In contrast, the glass facade of the circulation spaces around the theater felt like it was inviting the world in, to see what was about to happen. Mopping back and forth back and forth back and forth he started comparing this with his other jobs.
It was similar to churches he had cleaned in the past; the floor plans were similar, and there he had also worked from the inside out and then around. The public spaces in both always required the most work, of course. He did enjoy, however, being able to stand where most others from the public couldn’t; whenever he stood at the head of the church, he had taken a moment to look out at the missing congregation, just to see what it felt like. He found himself doing that here too, standing with his back to the gigantic screen that wrapped around the inside of the theater, facing the future moviegoers, picturing them sitting on those oversized steps, eager in anticipation.
As he walked down the grand staircase on the south side of the theater, he felt the magic of the building. Mini stairs all going up and down, everywhere and nowhere at the same time. It reminded him of a documentary he had seen of the stepwells in India, except these were made of steel and enclosed by two giant glass curtain walls.
The back side of the curved movie screen wrapped around the building and illuminated the staircase and street from behind the glass. As he descended, he imagined children chasing each other up and down the stairs, their playing silhouettes giving a performance to passerby on the street.
When he reached the ground floor, his feet immediately took him to the center of the building. Standing in the middle of the glass floor, he felt like he was floating; above him, the looming black steps of the movie theater and the airy glass floors, and below him, the heavy underground of the performing arts theater. To him, this boundary between two worlds felt like the boundary between the visible and the invisible, between reality and a dream world, between earth and Heaven. A boundary simultaneously separating and joining them. It was in this central place that he had the clearest view of the two theaters, and the fact that they mirrored each other. One rose from the other, lighter and lighter as it grew higher and higher, like a tree with a solid trunk that served as a foundation for its outermost branches. Lewis finished mopping the expansive glass floor, hopped into one of the twin elevators at the front of the building, and disappeared underground. He quickly finished up the lower three floors and put his cleaning supplies away. Tomorrow was an exciting day. Tomorrow he was bringing his whole family here to watch the opening night movie and performance of Alice in Wonderland.
THE ISLANDS AND THEIR PEOPLE LIVING BUILDING CHALLENGE GROUP COMPETITION ENTRY 3 bedroom single-story house Atka, Alaska
It was dawn, and the Shaman sat on the edge of a rock and looked east to greet the day, scanning the vast Bering Sea. The fog had lifted and the water was unusually calm; most days of the year it rained or snowed, and strong winds made the blue mass in front of him choppy, dark, and whitecapped. It felt peaceful and almost too quiet without the constant drizzle and humming of the wind. He felt a positive change coming. This was his hour of reflection; it opened up his heart and his mind to the Islands. He would sit and listen to them daily, hearing what they had to say, as many others had done before him.
ern Pacific Ocean and extending about 1,200 miles westward from the Alaskan Peninsula, the fourteen large and fifty-five small volcanic islands had fifty-seven volcanoes between them. They were all part of the northern Pacific Ring of Fire. But the Unangan people knew how to live here; they had a deep understanding of climate, culture, and place. In the past they constructed barabaras, dwellings excavated from the dirt and partially underground, safe from the harsh winds. They were also skilled fishermen and kayakers, experts at navigation between their islands, which allowed them to subsist on fish and blubber. The people sewed all their clothing: knee-length parkas usually made from seal, sea otter, or bird skins. When the hour was up, the Shaman stood and started walking toward the town. He thought Carving weapons, weaving, and making other pieces of art were also well-known skills. about his people, who had always lived symbiotically with this land. The Aleutian Islands Their culture was a sustainable one, autonomous from the rest of the world. By using local were arguably one of the most inhospitable and wildest places to live: located in the north-
resources and materials they had a net zero impact on their environment. The Shaman thought back to when it all began to change. First there was the arrival of the Russians; many were exploited during that time of fur trading, and most of the local population died from the introduction of new diseases. With the new inhabitants came a new religion, and slowly a majority of the people left their traditions and rituals behind for Christianity. The Shaman came from a lineage that stayed true to the original core of the people’s beliefs: to listen to and respect the Islands and the animals who inhabited them. He felt that the arrival of the Russians began their rift with the Islands. It was the beginning of deviation from listening to their environment.
Approximately one hundred years later, the Russians sold the Islands to the United States. This began a very turbulent time for the Unangan people. Pronounced development began, and the great Second World War followed. Whereas before the area had been largely ignored by the rest of the world, during the war it became a battleground between the Americans and the Japanese, a middle ground fought over to prevent attacks on either mainland. The Unangan were forcibly evacuated before these invasions and were interned at camps, resulting in the deaths of more than 1 in 10 of their 800 people.
The U.S. forces chose to bomb the area for almost three weeks to be sure there were no Japanese left. The angry Island, devastated by the bombings, took the lives of 313 U.S. soldiers by way of disease, frostbite, and fog (which resulted in friendly fire). When the soldiers left two cemeteries behind, the Island quickly swallowed them up in the frozen tundra in an attempt to regain its lost land.
The Shaman had joined with the newly-formed Greenpeace movement to vehemently oppose this testing. Thousands of animals were killed and the environment was devastated.
As the Shaman walked into downtown Atka, one of the few islands spared from the nuclear testing, he could still see the remnants left behind by the war and the outsiders that had lived there. During the war, the town had been burned to the ground to prevent its use For approximately twenty years the Islands were left alone; a return to their former state was by the Japanese. After the war, the U.S. Navy rebuilt the town, and the Unangan began well underway when outsiders began the destruction again. The Shaman thought that this to resettle. Their life, however, was different; most people now worked in commercial fishThe stories passed down to him from previous Shamans described how these events had time in his Islands’ history was the most devastating. He remembered it vividly; during the ing, managed small businesses, or worked in healthcare, education, or transportation. The angered the Islands: there were numerous tales of the Islands thwarting Japanese attacks 1960s and early 1970s, the land became a nuclear bomb testing site. The U.S. government people no longer lived in barabaras but in homes that were extremely expensive to build with heavy rains, or preventing an American attack with dense fog and darkness. On Kiska chose the place due to its remoteness and lack of population. First a small nuclear bomb and maintain, which meant that many of them quickly rotted and suffered severe weatherIsland, the Islands experienced their greatest losses. A planned U.S. attack proved inconse- was tested, and then, two years later, the largest underground explosion in the country’s ing in the windy, wet Island climate. The special bond between the people and the Islands quential for the Japanese, who abandoned the island under the cover of fog. history was detonated. had not been restored. He, along with others in the community, was trying to resurrect the people’s former traditions and encourage them to listen to their environment.
Arriving at his destination, the Shaman walked through the front door of the Community he suddenly interrupted the discussion. Center in the center of town and sat down at a conference room table. Today’s meeting “What if we don’t replace this home? What if we repair it?” The Shaman looked around was one of a series to determine the strategy for the new construction in town. Although the room and saw doubts in the faces of the builder and the engineer. he wasn’t a builder, he was often asked to oversee town affairs and make sure they were in line with the people’s beliefs and values. For him, this also meant being true to the “I don’t think this house can be repaired,” said the builder. “So much of it is unusable and Islands. Today’s topic was the Isux family home. Their three-bedroom wood-framed home we will have to ship materials over from Seattle anyway. We might as well build a new with painted red metal siding was falling apart, and it was scheduled for demolition. The house, it will be so much easier!” meeting agenda was to determine how to cheaply and sustainably build a replacement, The engineer nodded, adding, “The house isn’t structurally sound. Whatever framing we and the participants were arguing about the cost of shipping materials from the closest could salvage wouldn’t be enough to support it.” available port, in Seattle, Washington. But the Shaman was convinced that this idea could work. He felt that it perfectly aligned All of a sudden, the Shaman bolted upright in his chair. Normally quiet during meetings, with the wishes of the Islands - it was less wasteful; it didn’t destroy value; and it used local
resources. All of these were values of the Unangan people. “I’m sure there’s a way to fix this home. Yes, not all of the materials can be salvaged for their original use, but maybe they can be used for something else?” He continued, “There is no sustainable home without a sustainable life. This is what the Unangan are known for, and it is time we get back to our roots. This home should be low tech, and use as little electricity as possible, like our ancestors lived. We should use all the materials and resources we have available here on our Islands.” He saw the builder and the engineer, along with a few others, nodding slowly, but with perplexed looks on their faces. With this new big idea, the committee decided to adjourn and resume their meeting two days later.
When the two days had passed and the committee reconvened, there was a different feeling in the air. Everyone had spent the time coming up with ideas for repairing the existing home and for ways of designing a sustainable life within it. The builder spoke up first: “I took a look at the existing house yesterday, and I think a lot of it can be salvaged. I think we could use the existing roofing, roof sheathing, and roof trusses, the doors and windows on the east and south walls, the interior partitions, and the existing insulation.
“You know, I looked at the ground around the site too. There is a lot of peat there, we could excavate and use that to supplement the insulation,” added the engineer. “We could use the rest of the material from the excavation in other ways too,” he continued, “Especially as structural support. I’ve seen this idea about compressing earth into compressed earth blocks, called CEBs. They’re used like bricks and we can fabricate a press to make them from scrap metal we find in town. Supports could be strengthened with an outside CEB wall.”
The Shaman saw the spark in their eyes and couldn’t contain his excitement. It seemed as final design had 5 large CEB walls, with the 6� blocks made by the older teenagers one by though this idea was actually going to move forward! one. The excavation had provided cold storage underneath the east side of the building, where the walls are located, as well as peat to add to the salvaged fiber glass insulation. The Over the next month, the entire community got involved in the design process of the home. existing wood trusses were salvaged and turned upside down to create more interior height Everyone saw the potential of this idea as a beacon for the future of their town and those inside, and the roofing was salvaged and reused as siding. The smaller children were asked on the neighboring islands, and it filled their hearts to come together in the process and to to find old 55 gallon drums in town, and these were used for the new roofing. The exciting know that they were responsibly working with the environment around them. new feature added to the house was a greenhouse, which would allow the Isux family to At the beginning of summer, the townspeople got together and rebuilt the Isux house. The grow their own food. The greenhouse also acted as a thermal barrier on the west side of the
house, and water was collected from the roof to a storage tank beneath it. The water system cycled through the building as well: the water used in the sink was reused in the toilet, and this water was filtered through a septic system and separated, with solids enriching the greenhouse soil and the water emerging purified. Only the plumbing and electrical systems were sourced from the Pacific Northwest, minimizing the costs of the building and setting a new standard for building in Atka.
When the home was finished at the end of the summer, the community gathered in the open room on the ground level to celebrate. The Shaman looked out of the salvaged windows, three of which faced east and gave spectacular views of the ocean in the morning light, and remembered that morning sitting by himself on the eastern shore. In this home he once again felt like he was a part of the Islands, with nature and weather all around him, except this time he wasn’t alone. The whole community was there to enjoy it with him.
THE ORIGINALS GRADUATE STUDENT PROJECT Art Museum Blacksburg, VA
In 2009, there were only two Originals, one ever-so-slightly older than the other. Outer Wall (“OW”) and Inner Wall (“IW”) were twins, although Outer Wall had technically been started and finished first. Both were nearly identical: very tall (definitely above the average height), made of solid, red brick, and with the same openings for people to walk and birds to fly through. Two vast, square planes, although Inner Wall had a slightly shorter reach than his brother, which he always got a hard time about. In the beginning, their personalities didn’t really differ. They stood together, tall and proud, and surveyed the landscape around them daily. The green grasses and deciduous trees on their land were always swaying, and the rolling hills in the distance were their point of reference for the changing seasons. The closest manmade element to their abode was W Campus Drive, a street that separated them from their neighbors, the buildings at Virginia Tech, and the next-largest field, the drill field. In those first few months they didn’t have any responsibilities; all they did was talk all day about their neighbors and their neighbors’ inhabitants, tiny people frantically moving from one end of the campus to the other, often multiple times a day. “What for?” they thought. “It’s so much more pleasant to be still, with no hurry, nowhere to be, and nothing to do.” Within several months, however, things began to change. More and more tiny people were visiting their field, and one by one, two younger brothers were born. OW watched the construction pessimistically, while IW had a more hopeful attitude. IW was physically closer to his new brothers and wanted to have a relationship with them. “I don’t see why you care about them,” OW would say to IW. “They’re just copies of us. We are the Originals.” IW understood why OW felt this way; after all, OW had only two views: one of his twin brother, and the other of nature and the campus across the street. OW couldn’t have the same perspective that he did. IW’s views were the ones changing, and now he could see not only OW and nature, but also his youngest brothers. He was in the middle of it all, and he thought that maybe OW was beginning to feel like an outsider instead of one of a pair.
The changes were happening faster as summer flew by. First, a new addition to the family: she was an L-shaped glass curtain wall. After this, IW noticed that OW would only talk about the oppressive heat, and the repetitive coming and going of the students across the street. Without anything to do, OW’s moody thoughts were occupying all of his time. IW, for his part, tried to ignore his brother’s mood and focused on the exciting changes in his new family.
At the end of the summer, everyone was given their responsibilities. OW and IW jointly Before everyone had time to get settled into their new responsibilities, a newcomer apupheld a steel staircase between them, and IW also got the job of supporting the family’s peared. She was built lightening-fast: a metal space-frame cube with her own staircase. roof beams along with his younger brothers and sister. A roof followed shortly thereafter. She was hung from the roof beams. The younger brothers also supported two floors: one for a library, and one for offices and a conference room, as well as another set of fire stairs and a few restrooms. OW complained and was given an elevator.
Together, the new family formed a cube within a cube. The outer cube was heavy, emerging from the ground, and contrasted the other cube, which was light and appeared from the sky. Everyone worked harmoniously together, making their shared spaces feel grand. Except for OW. “I don’t get what she is doing here,” OW would say to IW. “She doesn’t look like any of us, and she’s an eyesore to our neighbors too. She doesn’t serve any purpose, and is just using all of us.” “But she’s beautiful because she’s so different,” IW would respond. “She may not have a job yet, but she’s inspiring the people across the street to look over and notice us. They can see her through our shared openings, and they’re marveling at her. Aren’t you proud that you’re giving them this view?”
As fall was nearing an end, the family watched as 15 trucks drove past the campus and up their road. Tiny handlers reached into their trucks and lifted out a precious cargo: five Calder, five Giacometti, and five Henry Moore sculptures. The family was to host them for the upcoming semester, and the students had given them a new nickname, “The Art Gallery”. Suddenly, their youngest sister finally had her job - she would support Calder’s hanging mobiles and Giacometti’s thin metal sculptures, floating the visiting art in the heart of
the family for all of the public to see. Some of the Henry Moore sculptures were placed on the ground floor of the building and some outside of it; notably, right in front of OW’s Original feet. Towering above something so beautiful broke OW’s bad mood, and he finally saw that everyone had their purpose. When the family opened their doors at the beginning of the spring semester, he stood tall and proud, with his twin brother and the rest of his family, to welcome their visitors.
FRAGMENTS VARIOUS PERSONAL PROJECTS Sketching, Oil painting, Printmaking
I studied abroad in the spring of 2009. My group was based in Riva San Vitale, Switzerland, a small town about twenty minutes drive from Como, Italy. Most of our time, however, was spent traveling - we started in Munich, and then traveled to Salzburg, Venice, Basel, Barcelona, Paris, and Berlin. I set a personal goal to sketch every building and place we went to, and during this process fell in love with architecture.