BRODY WALSH DESIGN PORTFOLIO
Storytelling as Design: The Wooden House Little did I know, when stopping to sketch a section of the nicest wooden house on Nan Jin Jiao Jie, I would make a new friend. An elderly woman emerged from the house to offer smiles, cigarettes and places to sit. She eagerly wiped off seats and offered up more smokes before the first one’s were even gone. The house has been re-designed as a mix of permanent and temporary housing in order to capture her welcoming energy and serve as a cultural exchange center. The building is designed in order to feed interactions among strangers, while also proving that one can design through storytelling, but also that stories can be told through design.
Pre-Fab Modular Housing in Berlin This site, located just off of the Boddinstrasse stop on the U-Bahn in Berlin was a tight squeeze, so minimizing on site construction was almost a necessity. This was a deciding factor in incorporating pre-fabrication into the building process. Pre-fabrication is often associated with ideas of modularity. Berlin has a rigid grid layout on an urban scale, but history is consistently trying to refute the orthogonal nature of the grid. With my design, I tried to represent the need to adapt and grow with a site as opposed to fighting change and remaining static in an ever-changing world.
Sensory Museum There are many senses beyond the five we typically think of, but even those are taken for granted. We don’t appreciate our ability to see and hear on a daily basis and we should. The goal of this project was to draw attention to a site that is constantly ignored for all of the attractions surrounding it while also causing people to notice how grateful they really are for their five basic senses. This is done through exploring what the senses can do for us and pushing them beyond the ways in which we typically think to engage them both individually and as a group.
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Storytelling as Design: The Concrete House The gentleman currently living in a small concrete structure on Nan Jin Jiao Jie has had a lifelong relationship with the building. He grew up there when the house was owned by the church. In 1957, the church was outlawed in China and the property was seized by the government. When the property was redistributed, the boy moved in as a man, with a family. My redesign for the home includes the addition of an upper floor in order to maintain the cyclic nature of the people inside. New people can move in upstairs and move below when the time comes, making space for family.
Cultural Exchange Hostel at MIT MIT is famous for their countless achievements in the intellectual world. It is rare that you find someone who hasn’t heard of the Institution, but do we know what it’s like on the inside? It can be considered an intimidating place as students are so focused on their work. They also have everything they need to stay on campus working nonstop. With this project I wanted to bridge the gap between MIT’s campus life and the unique perspectives that outsiders could offer. People from all over could come stay in the heart of the campus sharing knowledge and exchanging ideas.
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Contemporary Art Museum
(Group Project with Nathaniel Villemaire, Kerri Estano, and Christopher Meyers)
What was once a Cadillac dealership on Automobile Row is now a Boston University art gallery and educational building at 808 Commonwealth Avenue. When converting it into a contemporary art museum, we decided to juxtapose the abstract painting styles of artists like Jackson Pollock with the functionality of Albert Kahns original building design. We wanted to create a visual gradient from old to new and demonstrate ways of blending the two ideologies in a cohesive and aesthetically pleasing way, on both the interior and exterior.
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Storytelling as Design: The Brick House Walking down the small village that is Nan Jin Jiao Jie in Taizhou, China, it is impossible not to notice the concrete peeling throughout the entire street, revealing the brick below. The site has a voice that has been silenced. The material dialogue on site inspired the conceptual design allowing the site to express its own temporality. The concrete layer will be pushed back, into the building, exposing the brick beneath. The wooden frame of the building will also be given a chance to shine as an exterior structural grid and balcony system. The project is a look back, moving forward.
Lynch Family Skatepark Working with the Charles River Conservancy in documenting the Lynch Family Skatepark during its construction phase was a dream come true. Boston has been trying to get a skatepark for far too long and I got to watch first hand as it finally happened. I photographed the site from several different angles every week for about six months. The progress was outstanding from week to week and the final product could not have come out any better for everyone in Boston to enjoy.
Personal Artistic Works Thinking creatively is an obvious and essential part of design. Making art keeps my creative juices flowing and keeps my mind working. It is therapeutic and I, along with so many others, could not begin to imagine a world without it. These are just a few ways I like to express myself in order to create something new and feel truly free.
FREELANCE DESIGNWORK
Club Pins: Nursing Students Without Borders
Business Card: Front
Business Card: Back