Design Portfolio [II. Competitions + Exhibitions]

Design Portfolio - Competitions + Exhibitions

THEODORE BAZIL

COMPETITIONS + EXHIBITIONS:

4. Low Rise: LA

12. Sambou Toura Drame

20. Synapse: Sudbury 2050

28. Mojave Research Campus

36. A New Jorejick Residence

42. Have We Ever Been Regional?

LOW RISE: LA

LOS

ANGELES, CA, USA

PROJECT TYPE: Open Design Competition, Individual Entry

YEAR: 2021

PROGRAM: Multi-unit housing proposals for the city of Los Angeles to combat the housing crisis, focusing on strategies for incorporating missing middle housing (2-8 units) into low-rise, single family neighborhoods. The project is broken into two parallel proposals: one for a ground-up fourplex unit on a midblock lot, and one for a multifamily mix-use project on a street corner doublelot. Project Duration: 2.5 Weeks.

Both proposals are based upon a prototypical Los Angeles residential block: 50’ wide, 150’ deep, flat, alley access at the rear, and surrounded by 1-2 story gable-roof homes set back 35’ from the street. Although both of the proposed buildings match the existing neighborhood street setback, they are oriented flush to the side property lines in order to consolidate the site’s open spaces into a public through-block walkway, landscaped with benches, citrus and olive trees, planter boxes, and permeable xeriscape groundcover. Primary entry to the residences would be from along this walkway, with secondary rear entrances provided from shared, covered loggias intended for communal dining, barbecuing, social gathering, bicycle parking, and utility/meter access. The commercial space, occupying the ground floor at the streetcorner in the second scheme, opens up to both the sidewalk and an outdoor patio, and is depicted in the accompanying drawings as a community food business.

Living areas look out upon shared internal courtyard with xeriscaped zen garden

Residential access via public landscaped pedestrian walkway

Front setback line of neighboring residences is matched for continuity

PERSPECTIVE

VIEW FROM STREET

Landscaped public walkway with benches oriented along shaded (North) side of lot

Charging

FLOOR SITE + LANDSCAPE PLAN (SCHEME 01: FOURPLEX) N 4 covered offstreet parking spaces for residents Five covered bicycle parking rack spaces for residents / guests

Shared waste/ recycling Gray-water collection, solar water heater, and utility meters

SCHEME 02: STREET-CORNER

SCHEME 01: FOURPLEX

GROUND

Public bicycle racks for visitors of commercial space

Enlarged sidewalk at corner

facilitates localized “urban experience” with minimal impact to residential streetscape

Residential access via public landscaped pedestrian walkway

Commercial waste collection has direct access to street

Public bench and curb inlet for city bus stop

Outdoor patio seating for corner commercial space

Side gate entry to covered patio and resident bicycle racks

Shared internal courtyards with xeriscape zen gardens and shaded seating

Covered bicycle parking rack spaces for residents / guests

Eight covered off-street parking spaces with access to rear alley and EV charge points

Gray-water collection, solar water heater and utility meters

Shared waste/recycling

STREET (WEST) ELEVATION

ALLEY (EAST) ELEVATION

STREET (NORTH) ELEVATION

INTERIOR WALKWAY (SOUTH) ELEVATION

Shaded Shared Rooftop Patios

Commercial signage

Ground floor corner

commercial space

(shown here as food service business)

Public bench and curb inlet for city bus stop

CROSS-SECTION THROUGH RETAIL AND TYPE A + E UNITS

Access to shared second-floor patio through translucent channelglass partition

Shared benches along shaded landscaped walkway

Terraced roof gardens for residents to grow their own fruits and vegetables

Low-flow plumbing fixtures conserve water and doublepipe exchangers use outflow to preheat incoming water

Clerestory windows bring in diffuse natural light to residences and aid in stack effect passive cooling

CROSS-SECTION THROUGH TYPE C UNITS

Vegetated xeriscape roofs increase building insulation and aid rainwater catchment efforts for gray-water collection

Corner windows in living areas look out upon shared internal courtyards with xeriscaped zen gardens

South-facing photo-voltaic arrays capture clean energy for all lighting, hot-water heating, refrigeration, shared mechanical systems, and occupant electronics

Low-voltage ceiling fans in all bedrooms and living areas help promote cross-ventilation

Generous ceiling heights in all bedrooms help cool the spaces and also allow for bunk beds

Electric induction cooktop and oven

SAMBOU TOURA DRAME

MARSASSOUM, ZIGUINCHOR, SENEGAL

PROJECT TYPE: Open Design Competition, Individual Entry

YEAR: 2020

PROGRAM: A new elementary school for a small and rural Senegalese town, designed with a maximum budget of 80,000 Euros and to be built easily by low-skilled volunteers and local community members. The plan includes seven classrooms, two offices, a library, a student canteen, kitchen, orchard, chicken corral, outdoor play area, rainwater collection tanks, and a composting latrine system. Project duration: five weeks.

The project's primary design goals are to:

1 Maximize outdoor space for recreation, gathering, and table crop cultivation.

2 Minimize construction-related disruptions to the operations of school facilities.

3 Increase standards of hygiene, safety, and thermal comfort for all occupants

4 Elevate the school's public profile and empower it as a community institution.

5 Minimize material costs through the use of local and salvaged materials

6 Promote replicable and easily learnable construction techniques.

7 Leverage the building design as a vehicle to not only meet the needs of its direct users, but to also meaningfully engage with pressing regional-scale social and eco-systemic challenges.

CLERESTORY

+ AIRFLOW APERTURES

OPERABLE SCREENS + SHUTTERS

PHASE 1 CONSTRUCTION:

PHASE 2 CONSTRUCTION:

SYNAPSE: SUDBURY 2050

SUDBURY, ONTARIO, CANADA

PROJECT TYPE: Open Design Competition, Individual Entry

YEAR: 2020

PROGRAM: An Urban Core Revitalization Plan for the small, Northern Ontario city of Sudbury. Project duration: five weeks.

Sudbury’s current spatial figure is visually and experientially dominated by the downtown location and sprawling footprints of its active railways and train yards. The presence of these infrastructures pose hard, sclerotic limits on the future livability of the city: not only do they spatially constrain the growing downtown business district and limit available and convenient land for housing and new public functions, but they also segment the city fabric and preclude the establishment of vital connections between residential neighborhoods, industrial areas, commercial zones, and public spaces. Articulated as a six-phase implementation plan, Synapse re-imagines Sudbury's future urban form through the simultaneous leveraging of broad zoning, street grid, and multi-modal connectivity adjustments, as well through the agency of specific and surgical design changes to public junctures of the spatial fabric. The proposal is largely based around the retrofitting of the city's current rail yards into a public landscape park, which would operate as a central recreational, social, and civic node within a city-wide system of non-motorized, multi-modal connectivity. In support of this new public connective tissue, the project also lays out future massing, block structure, and hybrid-programmatic guidelines for several adjacent mix-use neighborhood fabrics. A consistent focus on adaptive re-use, ecological sustainability, and social equity, particularly in relation to the provision of housing, non-motorized transit access, and public space, greatly informs the design direction.

URBAN CHALLENGES:

URBAN STRATEGIES:

PHASING:

01. BRIDGE AND JUNCTION

A new pedestrian bridge is constructed over the Southern rail yard, linking the Western residential neighborhoods to Downtown and the train station. A hotel, retail, and commuter parking complex is built to replace existing surface parking and to anchor this new junction. Meanwhile, gaps in the street grid are filled, and work begins on creating a multi-modal trail network.

02. ESPLANADE

Surface parking along Elgin Street is converted into a pedestrian esplanade and public food market. A new train station is built and positioned to take advantage of its adjacency to the new esplanade. The plan’s alignments are articulated to work with both the current downtown fabric, as well as the proposed new central library, arts center, and convention center.

03. “NORTH YARDS”

An industrial mix-use zoning overlay is adopted for the blocks North of the rail yard, allowing for a denser, mixed-use fabric containing commercial space, light industry, and apartments. This new district allows Downtown commercial demand to move West, and promotes existing light industry South of the rail yard to relocate North and adopt a more urban footprint.

04. WEST BRADY “MAIN STREET”

The sprawling, former industrial land south of the yard can be rezoned for a mix of street level commercial and higher density residential. The curve of Brady street is straightened, the road narrowed to allow wider sidewalks, street trees, and street furniture, and platted to encourage development as a multi-story mixed-use main street. New streets are laid out for a future “South Yards” district between Brady Street and the Northern rail yard.

05. “SOUTH YARDS”

The Southern leg of the rail yard is decommissioned and relocated away from the city center. Subsequently, the multi-modal trail will be connected to the train station and pedestrian crossing from phase 1. Later, the yard will be converted into a public landscape park. Meanwhile, higher density housing is developed within South Yards, organized around a pedestrian way and a connected series of interior-block plazas.

06. LANDSCAPE PARK

The Northern half of the rail yard can now be decommissioned and relocated away from the city center, allowing construction to begin on converting this area into more public landscape parkland. Once complete, the Southern half of the park can be opened to the public while the Northern portion remains under construction. Once the Northern portion is done, the multi-modal trail network begun in phase 1 will be fully connected.

MOJAVE RESEARCH CAMPUS

LAS VEGAS, NEVADA, USA

PROJECT TYPE: Open Design Competition, Individual Entry

YEAR: 2020

PROGRAM: A high-tech, environmentally sustainable research station for hyperloop transportation technology development in the Mojave Desert, including laboratory spaces for testing, a training and education facility, staff offices, recreational amenities, visitor programming, and employee residences. Project duration: 5 weeks.

We exist at a moment of intense contradiction and reconciliation between the carefree technological optimism of the 20th century, and an emergent 21st century cynicism fomented by a recognition of the steep ecological and social costs paid by our prior endeavors. Yet, we also stand at the precipice of a new era of technological transformation, and for that we need a new aspirational architecture of critical and sober optimism. Such an expression must remain celebratory and inspirational in physical presence, yet avoidant of the myopic, morphological hubris of past showpiece architectures. It must express humility in massing and material expression, yet refrain from a reactionary retreat into atavistic functionalism. In the spirit of reconciliation, this research campus aspires to work with—not in spite of—the climate and topography of the site by foregrounding ecological and material considerations of thermal comfort, solar energy generation and efficiency, water management, and light quality, while simultaneously promoting spatial and programmatic considerations of openness, transparency, creative flexibility, social collectivity, and communal self-sufficiency.

The main research center is to be housed within a long 200 meter structure, framed by engineered timber trusses and CLT floors to reduce the building’s carbon footprint, and shaded along its entire roof and long southern exposure by a photo-voltaic brise-soleil to take advantage of the indefatigable desert sun. Power captured by the arrays is retained by a battery on the lower level, and is scaled to power the entire facility’s operations, including the robust lab ventilation system. Potable water is filtered and stored on-site in a subterranean cistern, located directly beneath the permeable ground of the sunken outdoor visitor plaza. This siting allows the plaza to function during the occasional rain event as an extension of the surrounding terrain’s natural arroyos: encouraging increased rainwater collection and natural filtration via the adjacent hillside xeriscapes. The sunken courtyard not only provides a basin for water retention, but also creates shade for outdoor activities such as restaurant dining and amphitheater seating for the arena. Additionally, it allows for lower level programs such as the restaurant, training center, and main laboratory to be set into the topography and take advantage of the Earth’s thermal mass for passive cooling. Clerestory glazing and multi-story ceilings in the sunken spaces encourage cross-ventilation, and draw in soft, diffused light: ideal conditions for classroom and training environments. The long bar itself also creates a broad shadow throughout the day, allowing for comparably temperate spaces, indoor and out, on the Northern side of the building. For this reason, the offices—a mixture of interior, glazed volumes and open overlooks for communal gatherings—flank the Northern edge of the building, overlooking the laboratory floor and main visitor hall to the South, and the outside desert terrain and employee residences to the North. The 25 employee residences are conceived as individual bi-level, 2-Br / 1-Ba units, each containing cisterns for rain and graywater collection, rooftop PV arrays, electric batteries, and covered parking with electric vehicle charging capability. The units are organized into two parallel rows, and are connected back to the main building via outdoor landscaped pathways and the underground shared parking garage. Lastly, recreational programs, such as the gym, sun deck, and infinity pool, are housed within a centrally located steel frame which bisects the main laboratory bar, asserting itself as key programmatic interstice between the otherwise residential, educational, scientific, and managerial domains of the facility.

TRAINING FACILITIES

A NEW JOREJICK RESIDENCE

GETAMOCK, ARUSHA, TANZANIA

PROJECT TYPE: Open Design Competition, Team Entry

YEAR: 2020

COLLABORATORS: Samuel Feldman

PROGRAM: A rural dwelling for a multi-generational family of fifteen at a maximum budget of €20,000. Masonry and timber construction. Project duration: 5 weeks.

Our proposal for a new Jorejick residence, sited directly alongside the family's existing huts, creates a productive and communal threshold between the site's existing livestock corrals, agricultural croplands, latrine, and elder brother Nico's house. In addition to facilitating an open and familial relationship with the site's other structures, the NorthSouth orientation of the new building masses maximize Easterly cross-ventilation and allow for deep and comfortably shaded, inhabitable porticos. The design is organized into three distinct volumes, tied together by communal courtyards centered around the site’s existing Acacia trees. At the heart of the scheme is an indoor-outdoor kitchen and gathering area, featuring a foot pump-operated sink, a communal table, and a plein-air stove for the family to cook at during mealtimes and gather around throughout the day. The central volume is intended for the heads of the household to occupy, allowing them to care for both the family's aging matriarch, as well as their young grandchildren who are provided an en-suite sleeping niche. The south volume is intended for the youngest children, as it places them in close proximity to their parents, while simultaneously offering an intermediate stage of independence. The north volume houses the family’s school-age children, and contains an additional study space in the upper story loft. This spatial arrangement is intended to remain flexible as the family continues to grow.

Two showers are incorporated at either end of the scheme, using rainwater holding receptacles controlled by operable levers. Graywater from the shower is collected into additional cisterns below grade, which can be drawn to the surface by hand pump and used for agricultural and other purposes. An inverted roofline is employed to direct water to both the showers and the central cistern, from which potable water can be filtered and drawn.

The durable, yet breathable material selection for the project—clay brick, composite structural wood posts, woven branch screens, and a corrugated steel roof—is based around both what can be easily procured from local suppliers, as well as what can be generated from the oxidized soil of the site itself. We propose utilizing the soil for on-site brick manufacturing, and call for the complete re-purposing of leftover, broken, and discarded bricks: the finer remnants can be recycled as aggregate for the home’s mortar and concrete work, and the larger pieces can be appropriated for use as patio ground pavers.

SECTION E

SECTION D

SECTION A

1. (2x) .05m x .15m Composite Structural Wood Post, Solid Block Below Crossbeams

2 (2x) .05m x .15m Structural Wood Beam

3 Steel Bolt Connection Plate

4. .025m x .1m Roof Purlin

5. .15m x .15m Wood Cross Beam

6.

7.

8.

9.

10.

11.

o.c. with Countersunk Stainless Steel screws.

Corrugated Galvanized Steel Panel

(4x) .05m x .15m Structural Wood Post

Masonry Anchor Bolt

.05m Cast-in-Place Concrete Coping, > 1% Pitch

Local Clay Brick, Flemish Bond

.025m x .15m Treated Wood Slat Screen, Fasten Through Solid Wood Blocking, 3m

PORTICO COLUMNS ROOF FRAMING WOOD SLAT SCREEN

Region

[rē-jən]

1. An administrative area, division, or district

2. a. An indefinite area of the world or universe

b. A broad geographic area distinguished by similar features

3: a. Any of the major subdivisions into which the body is divisible

b. An indefinite area surrounding a specified body part

4: A sphere of activity or interest

HAVE WE EVER BEEN REGIONAL?

PROJECT TYPE: Academic (M. ARCH)

STUDIO: ARCH 8999 Thesis / Fall 2019

ADVISERS: Ali Fard / Esther Lorenz

This thesis project, presented in exhibition format, investigates whether there is anything inherently definite, material, or immutable about our collective conceptions of geographic, regional identities. Accordingly, it adopts the premise that these identities are constructed over time, are perpetually in flux, and will continue to change and adapt within our imaginations in relation to their surrounding environments: at a multitude of physical scales, and with no singular or inevitable end-state. As the world rests tenuously on the precipice of major societal, technological, and ecological changes, this project asserts that is more imperative than ever to engage in a critical and open ended re-reading of geographic identities as figures informed by context, yet constructed within our collective imaginations through time. To facilitate this discussion, the exhibition presents spatio-temporal content from three heuristic devices--a physical timeline, a spatial index, and a glossary of analytical themes--and critically overlays them around a curated series of visually contextualized discussion questions. Each question, though discretely sited, aims to interrogate the extent to which collectively held conceptions of regional geographies have been informed by both their specific physical contexts, and the larger forces surrounding them.

PASSENGER AIR FLIGHT

AGRICULTURAL TRIP ORIGIN

AGRICULTURAL TRIP DESTINATION

1” = 100 miles

[Circle Diameter Indicates Per Trip Tonnage]

In 1970, the futurist Alvin Toffler speculated that the rapidly increasing ease of global travel and communication would lead to the “demise of geography.” [1] Thirty-five years later, the journalist Thomas Friedman famously declared that these same trends, brought forward into the Digital Millennium, had rendered the world “flat.” [2] Yet, for all the positivistic presumptions of its inevitability, a fully cosmopolitan, “Urban Age” [3] utopia has yet to arrive, and seems increasingly unlikely to do so. While modernity has dramatically rewired the world’s economies into an inextricable, global web of production and supply chain logistics, and facilitated instantaneous communication and nearly barrier-less

mobility across the entire planet, it is less clear that these forces inevitably lead to the societal homogenization of regional geography requisite for a truly cosmopolitan future. It is hard to imagine a world where we will no longer care to ask each other where we are from, because the answer will be so inescapably immaterial. Yet, places must change, and for reasons both voluntary or inescapable, people will relocate and leave their imprints upon new geographies. The coming decades are expected to see much of both. What happens, then, to the identities we have constructed around particular geographies and their attendant set of qualities when the materiality of the world changes much

faster than the elasticity of our collective imaginations? Are we then, as Toffler and Friedman have suggested, witnesses to the demise of regional geography in an inevitably singular, globalized world, or has our collective understanding of regional geography always been, to a large extent, imaginary, and therefore, capable of reinvention?

[1] Toffler, Alvin. “The Future Shock.” (New York: Random House, 1970).

[2] Friedman, Thomas. “The World is Flat.” (New York: Farrar, Straus, and Giroux, 2005).

[3] “LSE Cities.” (London: London School of Economics, 2011).

MIDDLE OF NOWHERE / MIDDLE OF EVERYTHING

The geographic focus area below captures a complicated and sometimes paradoxical overlay of flows, spaces, and conditions. Straddling the confluence of three prominent river systems (The Mississippi, The Missouri, and the Ohio), the focus area not only includes a variety of ecological and geological conditions: alluvial plains, carbonate aquifers, and bituminous coal deposits, for example, but also a variety of transportation and logistical modalities: the Passenger air hubs of Chicago, Atlanta, and Dallas, the freight air hub

in Memphis, the trucking empire of Texas and Arkansas, and the railway hubs of Chicago and Kansas City. From a demographic standpoint, the area has also served as a firsthand witness to many of the major shifts and migrations in American history, from the expulsion of Acadians in the 18th century to Northern migration of African Americans in the 20th. Despite its central location, there is no clear or obvious regional appellation to assign the focus area. For one, the Mississippi River has long been seen as the political and cultural threshold between the East and the West, while the Ohio River formed a large portion of the

political border between the antebellum North and South. Geologically, the area straddles two distinct mountain ranges: the Ozarks to the West, and the Appalachians to the East, and sits conveniently between the petroleum capital of the Gulf Coast and the coal seams and shale plays to the Northeast and West. Culturally and imaginatively, it is where the edges of the great plains meet the periphery of the Delta, the Great Lakes, “Appalachia,” and “Tex-Arkana.” It is all of those things, and yet, it is also none of them. This paradox invites deeper interrogation: for a changing world, do we need new definitions, or perhaps none at all?

New Disciplinary Frameworks Inform Chronology

GLOSSARY

Overlooked Themes Emerge

INDEX

LatentSpatialFabricsExposed

Thematic Lenses

Ex: Demographic Change

Spatiotemporal Narratives

Ex: Mass migration of African Americans from rural south to industrial Northern and Midwestern cities

Events

Ex: Prohibition

Contextual Contingencies

Ex: Wine production falls and remains below pre-prohibition volume for 50 years

Regional Fabrics

Ex: Missouri Winemaking Region

Combinatory Cartographic Narratives

Provocation Questions

Ex: Why is Missouri rarely identified with its wine making industry, while neighboring Kentucky and Tennessee are widely recognized for their whiskey production?

GLOSSARY OF THEMATIC LENSES