Architecture Portfolio PDF, 25 Pages 8.50� x 11.00� 2019 David Ramis 1315 S. California Chicago, IL 60608 davidramis-us.us info@davidramis-us.us
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Table of Contents Personal and Employed Work Chores A (pages 1-2) Prescriptive Housing at a Given Site (pages 3-5) Rude Carpets Nos. 1, 2, and 3 (pages 6-8) Interior Elevations at Three Quarters Scale (pages 9-11) Foam Lamp No. 1 (pages 12-13) Blue Table (pages 14-15) Tripoli Special Economic Zone Competition (pages 16-19) Pleasant Springs Cottage (pages 20-25)
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Personal Work Chores A (Video, 25 Min.) This was the first video in a series that’s still in progress which is, generally, about paths, repetition, boredom, accidents, prettiness, expectations, and chance. The videos are long and literal, easy understand and easy to look at. In fact, they should be received and understood as still images; you won’t gain any further information by watching longer. Any missing information is filled in by the viewer and it hardly matters if it’s “correct”. On screen action is repeated in kind, not verbatim–the dynamics of the system will not allow for it. The on-board Roomba® camera scans a room detecting obstacles, particularly dirty
areas, and steep drop-offs and translates this 3-dimensional data to a best fit 2-dimensional performance map systematically covering a rooms maneuverable floor area. The technology is known as an indoor positioning system (IPS), a cousin to the more universally known global positioning system (GPS), and provides a profound yet mundane example of natural biases in visual perception in terms of relativity and priority. The animation is shot pseudo-documentary style considering modest changes in scenery and overall ecology. Same but different but still really the same.
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Personal Work Prescriptive Housing at a Given Site: Preface Rules are the language of authority. Adherence to each rule is predicted by the strictness of that rule. Harsh penalties ensure deference to rules–the harsher the penalty, the higher the incentive is to defer, and vice versa. In building, the document is established as the rule and the architect as the authority. Strictness in the rule, through exactness in contract documentation, ensures high levels of predictability by a non-authority— the contractor. When rules are given flexibility, through flubbed measurements, erroneous graphics, over-generalizations or non-specificity, predictability is lowered and the purview of the non-authority expands. The architect’s role becomes uncertain.
A geotechnical engineer will then conduct an investigation of the site flagging areas of concern and consequently mapping out, in tandem with grade and other site anomalies, optimum foundation locations for N number of houses. Locations determined, a site drawing and shop drawings for a typical foundation, structural walls, and roof are provided to the general contractor. The architect will not perform any site visits during construction. N number of foundation slabs are poured in-situ. N number of structural walls and roofs are poured as independent parts, and wait to be craned into place. Concrete contractor is relieved of duties.
Prescriptive Housing at a Given Site: Instructions A land surveyor surveys the site and provides drawings to reflect existing conditions.
The crane operator is paid by the job and not required to place the roofs in any particular orientation. The crane operator is relieved of duties.
Property lines, setbacks, and other zoning regulations are to be complied with without Houses complete, the architect performs the exception or administrative relief. first and final site visit.
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Drawings Top Left, Sample House Set Top Right, Slab Foundation Plan Upper Middle Right, Slab Foundation Section Middle Left, Wall Rebar Plan Diagram Bottom Left, Wall Rebar Section Diagram Middle Right, Roof Quarter Plan Lower Middle Right, Roof Bevel Elevation A Bottom Right, Roof Bevel Elevation B 4
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Personal Work
seen such halcyon days. Most have barely started an arc, much less a circle, with reRude Carpets Nos. 1, 2, and 3 spect to transcendence. So the idea with this project is to make landscape (literal) paintings A collection of carpets which are still in the (analogy) with the conceptual kicker being to R&D phase that use fiber length and density make familiar the thought that allows spatial/ as well as color and type to alter the materi- visual/tactile properties of a given material a al properties of conventional cut pile carpet. degree of flexibility. Not so rigid in the limits Paint’s ubiquity as a transcendental material that have been drawn around them. is not surprising; it’s been so long accepted that paint can take on just about any quality A nice part about the project is that the carthere is that contemporary painting has most- pets work like carpets and aren’t precious and ly shirked the idea and come back around there’s no need to take your shoes off if you the circle and allowed paint to be about itself don’t want. Let them become a new type of (again). Other materials, like carpet, have not background. 6
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Personal Work Interior Elevations at Three Quarters Scale An art gallery in Cincinnati held a small competition to design an event space for an ongoing lecture series they planned to hold in spring 2016. I ending up losing the competition and was unhappy with that so I went ahead and built it anyway. Some relevant questions that came up during construction: How do you plum a wall on an uneven surface? What is the expected tolerance when cutting drywall? And what brand blade cuts best? How many trips to Home Depot does building a wall take and why does it seem to rain every time I go? Is there a healthy amount of gypsum dust to breathe in? How many pounds is thirty sheets of drywall? Why should you always use the same tape to measure everything? Is the ruler straight? How is it even possible to achieve a level 5 finish? Will it stand? Conceptually, the project had to do with separating the image (the reliefs) from the medium which is the image is applied, its bounding box (the wall frame) though traditionally the two occupy the same space, the extent of a painting’s image being part and parcel to the painting’s bounding box (the canvas). The wall serves as an architectural extension of a precedence in image making that defy this tradition, namely the later screen print works of Andy Warhol and the paintings of David Salle, where the painting and the canvas are not so much in relation as they are independent facts of a process. If we can say that an interior elevation is an image, it would follow that it too is ripe for defiance. The literally freestanding (as in not anchored to the floor due to certain propietor logistics) wall vignettes four contextually removed interior elevations. Image of both canvas and painting are reduced to a grid. The first layer of 36” (so a standard sheet at full scale) wide drywall panels with reveal beads establish the bounding box’s (image) and the second layer the painting’s.
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Drawings Top (page 10), Concave Elevation Upper Middle (page 10), Framing Plan Middle (page 10), Convex Elevation Lower Middle (page 10), Top Anchor Plan 11
Personal Work
The profile is vague, like a suggestion of some uncertain typology, somewhere between a Lamp No. 1 parody and a tribute. Not ironic but it would be hard to argue full sincerity–maybe it’s like These floor lamps are nondescript. Light- a single quotation mark without a partner just weight, almost fragile, except for they are an sort of hanging there in a casual way saying EPS foam–a material that eschews fragility, I’ve got time I’ve got no place to be. partly due to its material structure and partly due to the fact that it just isn’t all that valued The lamps come in a five-pack which sells for other than in a use then toss sort of way. The $129+S/H and are packaged in the same matelamp is radially symmetrical, save for the ves- rial that they themselves are made from. tigial cord and plug and pull chain light switch, which makes for fairly rapid production on a CNC with the appropriate axes. The lamp functions like one in that it lights up. There is a battery powered bulb that screws in to the top and is a concession to the design as it adds an undesirable level of complexity (e.g. recharging, replacement, bulb unconventionality). But lamps produce light so it would be hard to call it one if it didn’t.
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Personal Work
though where those use ‘Y’s or ‘H’s to connect, these pieces are ‘L’s. The table’s tecBlue Table tonics are put on display–joints run past one another, edges signal direction, and the grain This indoor/outdoor table made from Coro- is slightly tactile from the flutes below. It can plast® brand corrugated plastic is lightweight be picked up and moved around or dissemand waterproof and fairly straightforward. It bled and transported. It can be hosed off. can be flat-packed and shipped once all 58 pieces are cut. No tools, adhesives, or fas- This is the blue version of the table. Other teners are required for assembly. Pieces slide colors available are white, yellow, and black. in and support one another, not so dissimilar This table sells for $1295. to children’s balsa wood puzzle animals, al-
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Employed Work Tripoli Special Economic Zone Competition A competition for a knowledge and innovation center was held in spring 2019 to design on a 75,000 square meter site within the Oscar Neimeyer designed Rachid Karami International Fairground campus in Tripoli, Lebanon. The original project was abandoned in 1975 after a decade’s worth of construction due to the country’s civil war and has just been kind of left there to sit and grow long grasses and
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essentially be a modern ruin. We proposed construction of two new buildings, a larger, longer commercial building and a shorter residential block with a few different apartment layouts, and a parking structure. Each structure is cast concrete with colorful aggregates and assembled in a way that looks like some very large, human-scale really, hand-made models. The larger building with stacked planes supported by fat, cylindrical columns and all vertical transportation moved outboard leaves a perfectly open floor plan. The shorter with two layers of overrunning perpendicular
sticks supporting each plane also has the outboard elevator shafts and rotini-looking stairs. The construction’s pseudo-primitiveness lends itself to feeling hand-made, albeit with an extremely large hand.
large boulders like sitting lawn ornaments, reflecting pools, and canopies cast with regional stones partially covering the site’s pathways. A number of Cedrus libani, also known as the Cedar of Lebanon are planted as is traditional with many Lebanese parks and gardens. This The images, done by me, are an attempt to project was done in collaboration with Paul make something somewhat photo-real but Preissner for Paul Preissner Architects. We more like a photograph of scale model where did not win the competition. proportions are a little out of sync. The rest of the site is left mostly undisturbed leaving the grasses and assorted wildlife that has taken hold in the past 50 years. Exceptions are the
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Drawings Left, Commercial Block Ground Floor Plan Middle, Typical Apartment Plan
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Employed Work Pleasant Springs Cottage Conceptual plans and renders were done for a family who bought a half acre of land in Pleasant Springs, WI. The summer home is modest in nearly all aspects, a reflection of the town, though the house’s arbitrary relationships reveal a somewhat cavalier undercurrent. You might call this something like suburban deconstructivist or hysterical rural where normal and unfussy construction meets a certain level of part to part autonomy. Joints are expressed, compositional weights are unbalanced, unlikely components are given priority through repetition or location, or a combination of the two, and the plan is as normal as possible. And all of this without succumbing to silliness or irony but just a sense that these familiar things are not quite right, with the upshot being to expand the range in elements that have enjoyed relative stability in the public domain with respect their affect and efficacy. Lines of identical casement windows run down either long side and seem to sit in a different plane than the facade they appear on, as though the frequency of fenestration is not so much out of sync but is more just indifferent to it’s containing wall assembly. The dormers pop up on the west elevation which faces the street about 70 feet away and is the house’s “front” although it is the only facade without an entrance. A little less than halfway up each exterior wall wood plank wainscoting transitions to a lapped vinyl siding. The roof is metal and hangs over the short ends weighing the whole thing down while also providing a covered entrance–more visually than actually functioning. The materials and their transitions are flattened out and unified by single paint color, a more somber than not yellow. The jogged shotgun plan is neat, compact and what realtors might call cozy, though the cathedral ceilings give it some sort of expansiveness. This work was done for SMNG-A Architects.
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Drawings Top, Roof Plan Middle, First Floor Plan Opposite Top, West Elevation Opposite Middle, East Elevation Opposite Bottom Left, South Elevation Opposite Bottom Right, North Elevation 22
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