WO R K MARCH 2018
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Selected works from the 2015-2017 academic years at The University of Michigan Taubman College of Architecture and Urban Planning
BENJAMIN WICHMAN
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THE ROVERINE
UNDERGRADUATE DESIGN STUDIO 2 with Kasey Vliet project brief: site location: category: context:
train station and microhousing development former Mich Con lot, Broadway & Depot St. Ann Arbor, Michigan undergraduate 3rd year final project population growth, real estate, pollution, individualism and collectivism, transportation
The poisonous soil does not bother the stilt-legged
R OV E R I N E
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R UNIVERiAN
BUT THE WATER IS UNDRINKABLE. Years after the failed attempts to remove the cyanide from the soil by planting willows, sunflowers, and other phytoremediative plants, the Roverines stepped off the railway chassis into the mud. The ambulatory housing units came from Chicago by high-speed rail and soon after arrived in Ann Arbor, Michigan, where they now inhabit a flat piece of riverfront land long since abandoned due to contaminated sludge left by the old coal gasification plant.
SOLAR LEAFLET CHARGING PANELS
WALL-TO-WALL GLAZING
7-AXIS KNEES
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RAILWAY COUPLING
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HATCH ROOF CANOPY
105SF
HS-1F
115SF
IN-LEG WATER FILTRATION SYSTEM
HS-2F
VS-1
LITHIUM-ION BATTERY CELLS
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Named after a gigantic creature imagined by the Chicago self-taught artist Henry Darger, The Roverine is a fictional home vehicle designed as a sardonic response to the abandonment of polluted land and the high cost of living in urban areas. Living arrangments are reduced to the essentials due to the swollen population. The American cities that once suffered from sprawl are now just toppled wooden frames and and rotted drywall. In this era, utopian visions of the future are at best the topic of tired jokes made while eating lukewarm green beans for dinner in the communal dining car. Each Roverine is designed to house two people, but their inhabitants often decide to join multiple units together even when not using the railways for transit to and from jobs in the city, forming temporary communities and staking ownership of patches of the swamp or other hostile terrain they occupy.
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Capable of walking on concrete, traversing deserts, floating down or fording rivers, quickly filtering unclean water for drinking, fully recharging using solar leaflet technology, and moving at a speed of 280mph when using the rail system and 25 mph on stilts, the Roverine is the most versatile home vehicle in the world.
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CULTURAL DISTRICT THEATRE UNDERGRADUATE DESIGN STUDIO 3 with Mireille Roddier project brief: site location: category: context:
theatre + added program 7th and Fort Duquesne Blvd, cultural district, Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania undergraduate 4th year, 1st semester final project signage, locality, pedestrian accessibility, mental mapping, music performance
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A kinetic section model shows the ground level venue and connected theatre proposed to replace a parking lot in the Cultural District of Pittsburgh, PA. One half of the building is thin, light, and subject to being frequently rearranged by its inhabitants. The other side is fixed, half-buried in the ground. The site is bisected using the existing alleyway as a divider in order to create two seperate places within one site. The theatre relys on interiority for the sense of insulation or isolation it induces.
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Limiting the iterative phase exclusively to floor plans produced nearly endless variation, and the many layers of noncommital are exactly what drive the argument of this project: to create modulation from indecision, making it an intentional asset of the free plan. The second phase involved connecting the kinetic plan to an imobile stereotomic space which was produced in a quicker and more expressive way, despite being the only truly permanent fixture to the plan that is made.
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CABIN OBSCURA UNDERGRADUATE DESIGN STUDIO 1 with Jennifer Harmon project brief: site location: category: context:
development of a formal language within a body of projects, working in section Astoria, Oregon undergraduate 3rd year, 1st semester, project 3 photography, gallery and studio art, private client, small spaces
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Shadows cast by the soldered wire models are captured on cyanotype paper. The shapes they produce then must enter the third dimension once again, translated as a stereotomic mass made of stacked museum board, made subtractively by hollowing out spaces inside of a box.
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Thin becomes thick and emptiness solidifies. A column of air serves as a mediating duct, with openings on three sides, siphoning in a small amount of the outside light.
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The spaces inside the box were held separate by the very thing that connected them. Reinterpreted again for casting in concrete, those spaces become a solid mass.
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A camera obscura room is to be situated in a small cabin- like structure on a rocky shoreline. A pinhole bored through the wall of the studio upstairs focuses the outside light, transforming it into upside-down images of the cliffside and the ocean shore which illuminate the inside of the room. The photographer receives guests and admirers, entertaining them down in the gallery and out on the patio, but spends most days working alone upstairs. Part of the building hangs dizzyingly over the edge and the other rests embedded in the slope that rises up from the beach below.
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Vision Royal Robertson 1979 Marker, ballpoint pen, paint, on poster board 22 x 28 inches Collection of: Souls Grown Deep Foundation
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VISION 1979 UNDERGRADUATE DESIGN STUDIO 4 with Anca Trandafirescu project brief: site location: category: context:
architecture as an act of improvisation unknown undergraduate 4th year, 2nd semester, project 1 selft-taught art, art brut, mental health, the architectural discipline in relation to its clients
Front: recreated from original Robertson drawing 30
Back
Right 31
Left
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CONSTRUCTION
ARCH 317 - CONSTRUCTION with Jonathan Rule project brief: site location: category: context:
produce detailed drawings of Casa Olnick Spanu by Alberto Campo Baeza Garrison, New York undergraduate 1st year, 1st semester, project 3 construction, materials, building codes, CAD conventions
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THA YOU image (also page 16-17) pinhole camera built from foamcore, tin foil, and duct tape, with slot in which to place a phone camera for capturing the upside-down image on the white interior of box. October 2015.
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