Benjamin Han - Portfolio 2020

benjamin-han.com

Benjamin Han Portfolio hbenjaminhan@gmail.com

Benjamin Han hbenjaminhan@gmail.com

I am a designer driven by architecture’s grounded telling of stories. In 2020, I graduated from the Rhode Island School of Design with a

benjamin-han.com

I dedicate my practice to building and revising ecological ideas. Currently, I am seeking an Intern Architect or Junior Designer position.

Bachelor of Architecture and Bachelor of Fine Arts, receiving the Wilbur E. Yoder Award for Excellence in Architectural Technology.

Education

Rhode Island School of Design, RISD

Skills, Awards, Exhibitions

Bachelor of Architecture (B.Arch) 2020 Bachelor of Fine Arts, 2019

Work Experience

Grimwood Architecture

Designer

Full design involvement in the preliminary phase of a residential

Digital Software: Revit, AutoCAD, Rhino,

and Urban Design

August - August 2020

project. Work included iterating massing ideas, precedent and

Illustrator, Photoshop, InDesign, V-Ray, SketchUp,

material studies, consolidating information into diagrams, formatting

Microsoft Office, Blender

drawing and presentration sheets.

Mediums: Modelmaking in Metal, Wood, Paper Materials and Foam, Bookbinding and Graphic

Freelance Architectural

Freelance Designer

Designer for an accessible dwelling unit proposal. Work included all

Designer

May - August 2019

aspects of schematic design, drawing iterations, researching and

Design

complying to California residential building code.

Undergraduate President, American Institute of Grimwood Architecture

Architectural Intern

Translated technical drawings into architectural diagrams,

and Urban Design

May - August 2018

built scale models in plywood and museum board, formatted

Architecture Students RISD Chapter

presentation sheets. In addition, I collaborated over email with an

Wilbur E. Yoder Award for Excellence in

architectural renderer to produce renderings.

Architectural Technology

RISD Architecture

Teaching Assistant

Teaching assistant for Architectural Analysis Studio. Developed

Graduation Honors

Department

February - May 2020

drawing ideas with students, lead weekly check-ins, assisted

Provost, Rhode Island School of Design

students with conceptual and technical research.

RISD Special Collections

Rare Books Assistant

Handled and retrieved rare books for patrons, assisted with summer

Architecture Department Undergraduate

Library

June - August 2019

library exhibitions.

Senior Shows

RISD Architecture

Teaching Assistant

Teaching assistant for Modern Architecture Seminar.. Lead weekly

Department

February - May 2018

reading discussions alongside instructor, met with individual

Group show (Curator), Providence, Rhode January 7–February 6, 2020

students to provide feedback for writing assignments. {re}position Atelier FCJZ

Office Assistant

Assisted with office bookkeeping. Assisted with model-building for

Group show, Gelman Gallery, Providence,

May - June 2015

a residential project.

Rhode Island, January 24–March 1, 2020

[1] Dismantling Usefulness: representations of degrowth and ecological resurgence

Through speculative fiction, this thesis presents two grounded truths of the present: we are perpetually caught in irreversible disturbances with our environment, and we urgently need to imagine a set of productive frictions to make possible a future of collaborative resurgence.

We—humans and our machine constituents—irreversibly disturb our environment. We have enlisted systems and pipelines to disentangle landscapes, creating alienated resources from fine-tuned natural relationships.

The end of ecology is a contemporary manufactured project.

Machine of the botanist

Machine of the metallurgist

Responding to the climate crisis and our abuse and denial, my thesis projects into a future to examine our contradictory acts and highlight opportunities for collaborative resurgence ahead. Writing a speculative narrative, I invented two characters springing from my research interests. Mycelium, the fungi network we associate with mold, decay, and decomposition, is a mediator between life, death, and regenerMachine of dismantling

ation; a producer of collaborations between life and environment. Mycelium offers the conceptual grounding for my thesis, and Machine is its foil. Machine is an ally and enemy of human civilizations, an accomplice of modernity and modernization, a construct associated with productivity, efficiency, and simplified ecologies. In the thesis, Machine is tasked with dismantling its manufactured permanence on the environment.

Post-evacuation flooded habitats

Machine of re-excavation

Within the narrative, a small community is left to fend for itself in a Vancouver ravaged by climate disaster. They enlist new typologies of machines to reconcile with the landscape in front of them, harbouring the hope that when machines are liberated from capital, they can and will generate humane worlds, new assemblages of de-centered technology and environment, a future of capital degrowth and coexistence.

Machine of re-excavation unearthing a pipeline

Machine of the forager

Machine of the flour miller

Machine of the botanist

Privatization of high-elevation lakes and habitats

Migration: informal settlements along Trans-Canada Highway

[2] Woonsocket Office Building

A dual-headquarter building for two competing coffee companies, “The Roasted Providence” and “Spicy Bean Rhode Island”. The programs and systems of this building are simultaneously integrated and separated. an undulating glass corridor divide the two competing companies, but the glass enables both companies to eavesdrop on one another whenever possible. No sound can pass through the two offices, but simple switches in the HVAC system allow both companies to sample the smell of the brewing from one another. Construction methods of this dual-office include CLT floors, walls, and framing, raised floor systems, a mix of wall, shading, and glazing systems.

Collaborators: Ka Hyun Kim, Alex Wong, Irene Li

[3] Dwelling Over / Across

This housing project begins with an act of unbuilding. The site, a desolated urban parking lot, is demolished and returned to the bay of the river to form a wetland. Five rows of housing units then sit elevated on piles, allowing a wasteland landscape to regain its ecosystem. Three walkways extend over the river to entice the curious visitor from the other side to explore the hybrid environment of this new project built on the idea of unbuilding.

Engineered Soil Air, Moisture, Root Barrier 8” R34.4 Mineral Wool Insulation

Timber Cladding 6” R25.8 Mineral Wool Insulation

Triple Argon LowE High Solar Gain Window

Continuous Air Barrier 8” CLT Wall Panel

porus block pavement

vegetated area

wetland + bioswales Stage 3: calrifying and reuse

Stage 2: processing via open tanks

Stage 1: primary anaerobic process

The systems and treatment facilities of the housing project become spectacles of public curiosity. On-site water treatment, housed in three shelters separating the multiple stages of water processing, are embedded into the ground as material continuations of the language of the project across the site. Visitors enter the shelter of final water clarifying to observe the release of water back into the river.

green roof

Total Vegetated Area: 90% Stormwater Managed Onsite: 79%

[4] Archive of the City

A developer, anxious about the rapid deterioration of the world, commissions an architect to preserve historically significant inventions into architecture. The architect responds with a proposal based on the typology of the freestanding structural wall. The walls are punctured with openings, fixed with platforms and ramps, occupied with machines performing a task associated to a relic invention. For as long as these structures stand the developer is assured that the inventions and their impressions on humanity will carry into the future.

The LA river is an enduring, artificial infrastructure. This project speculates how mechanical inventions, significant to modernity, can be housed alongside the river within concrete wall-like museum buildings. Four inventions are chosen to highlight the tectonics of each and the overall fragility of modernity.

Collaborator: Yunchao Le

Drawing from Colin Rowe’s writing on Transparency, the buildings are conceptualized at first as seemingly opaque parallel walls, which are then punctured with openings, platforms and extrusions to signify the mechanical functions and programs behind.

Power Transformer

Printing Press / Sacred Texts

Telescopic Camera

Glass Furnace / Production Plant

[5] Library of Small Amenities

There is no singular narrative to this library, only small programs and small spaces created from the single-core unfolding tower typology. Small spaces bleed into one another across floors. Small programs divide into chapters and volumes throughout the building. The library overwhelms in diversity of spaces but not in vastness, suggesting a new model of revitalizing downtown Providence.

[6] - re-in-un-de exhibition

Exhibition of the work of six students, curated based on architectural prefixes..

Collaborators: Aaron Teves, Jake Lefeber, Katharine Solien, Reishan Mcintosh, Yunchao Le

[7] - Market Noise

Noise, animation, and openess define marketplaces across the globe. This architecture does not provide a clean slate for program; rather, it uses structural loudness to animate a hypothetical market with trade, bartering and performance.

Noise, animation, and openess define marketplaces across the globe. This architecture does not provide a clean slate for program; rather, it uses structural loudness to animate a hypothetical market with trade, bartering and performance.

Drawing from Villa VPRO (a building of informal rooms) and Portcullis House underground station (an infrastructure of structural celebration), the building uses diagonal occupied trusses to extend the busy market streets of Kariakoo Dar Es Salaam into a continuous 5 floor market building.

Collaborator: Karin Hostettler

[0] Grimwood Architecture Samples

Project team: Thomas Grimwood Mauricio Trigos Rob MacPherson

A North Vancouver 8-unit residential project. Assisted with iterating siding dimensions, materials, spacing.

Shadowed project architect to layout design development drawings.

Diagrams and sections drawn to convey projects to a broader audience. Diagrams on the bottom row were used to present the project in front of a design panel hearing.

[0] Micro-Living

Schematic design for an accessible dwelling unit in Los Angeles County, California. Freelance work done for a private client. Total square footage: 800sqft. Requirements: 2 bedrooms, 1 bathroom.

Contact Info:

Email

Website

LinkedIn:

hbenjaminhan@gmail.com

www.benjamin-han.com

www.linkedin.com/in/benjamin-han

Thank you for your consideration!