Dhyan Sharma - Architecture Portfolio

Selected Work 2016-Present

Dhyan Sharma Architecture Portfolio Cornell AAP B.Arch ‘21

Ithaca Music Hall Spring 2017 B.Arch Second-Year Studio Instructor: Peter Ballman This project proposes a music hall and auditorium for downtown Ithaca, sited at an entrance to the Ithaca Commons, a pedestrian commercial and cultural center of the city. The project recognizes and responds to its unique opportunity for community activation through performace spaces that engage both patrons and the public. To do this, the buidling is first placed at the intersection of the site’s primary axes, delineating a public square on one end and a more private courtyard on the other. Second, the traditional parti of a music hall was re-interpreted, ‘sliding’ the music box out beyond the enclosure to create a space oriented both into and out of the building. The auditorium slides out over the courtyard, while

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the other (relatively informal) performance space does so over the public square. These exterior conditions are expressed as continuations of the building through materiality and detailing; the paving of the courtyard and swaure are used within the building as well, and mullions are embedded in the floor slab to minimize interruptions in the ground plane. From here, the operation of ‘sliding’ was developed into an architectural language: by sliding performance spaces, the scheme creates a sense of hierarchy and uses the resultant voids to house secondary spaces, circulation, and structure. This strategy has the effect of wrapping the served, performance spaces in service spaces, organized into bays.

Spring 2017 Second-Year Studio

SLIDING The music box slides out of the enclosure box, creating a space oriented both in and outwards

Ithaca Music Hall Sliding a music box

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ICON The geometry of the music box is derived from the formal needs of an auditorium, giving the operation’s icon

INDEX The void created by the operation is given form, casting a relief of the music box that registers the operation

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Spring 2017 Second-Year Studio

Ithaca Music Hall Sliding a music box

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Spring 2017 Second-Year Studio

GEOMETRY Organized on a 3x7 square grid, combining units for a hierarchy of spaces

Ithaca Music Hall Sliding a music box

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STRUCTURE Entirely comprises loadbearing walls, deployed along service bays

PROGRAM Sorted between central served spaces and wrapping service spaces

CIRCULATION Vertical circulation in bays, horizontal circulation wraps served spaces

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Spring 2017 Second-Year Studio

Ithaca Music Hall Sliding a music box

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Modular Housing Fall 2020 B.Arch Fourth-Year Studio Instructor: Leslie Lok, Partner: Grace Cheng This project proposes a modular housing system for the urban fringe of Hangzhou, China that attempts to challenge prevailing models of urban development—namely, the tower desert superblock—by reintroducing considerations of scale, communal living, and street culture. The proposal identifies a particular building typology of the more informal urban fabric, wherein commercial program is pushed toward the street-front in plan and the domestic program pushed back, to inform a larger housing scheme.

Similarly, the project features a unified, linear façade of commercial program along major street infrastructure to negotiate between the more formal urban fabric and the more informal housing

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system. Behind this interface, the housing block grows as a series of bridges and courtyards.

Recognizing the opportunity for robotic fabrication in urban centers, the project employs notched CLT panels as a specific but versatile module that can be shipped to surrounding areas. By modulating height and width, the panels can produce a variety of plan and section conditions, generating an architectural language that address privacy and intimacy in domestic spaces not by carefully delineating rooms but by leveraging shifting platform heights and layering of spaces. The shared spaces emerge in the form of courtyards and communal terraces, helping residents develop a sense of community.

Fall 2020 Fifth-Year Studio

maeb mm 002 x 08 draob doowylp mm06 CNC htiw

noitalusni digir mm021 maeb mm 002 x 08 draob doowylp mm06

CNC htiw htgnel sehcton

noitalusni digir mm021

cigol larutcurts

cigol larutcurts

etis ot seceip tuc pihs .3

etis ot seceip tuc pihs .3 maeb mm 002 x 08 draob doowylp mm06

CNC htiw htgnel sehcton ezimotsuc .2

noitalusni digir mm021

SOURCE CLT panels are constructed from locally-sourced plywood to prepare the modules

MACHINE The panels are notched based on the specific needs of each module’s placement

TRANSPORT The panels can be easily stacked and transported to urban fringe sites

AR BUILD AR is used to specify panels and placement in building particular designs

cigol larutcurts

margoloF htiw elbmessa .4

margoloF htiw elbmessa .4 m 04. 2

margoloF htiw ezilausiv .4

etis ot seceip tuc pihs .3

margoloF htiw ezilausiv .4

CNC- h1/4tiw - htgnel sehcto n ezimotsuc .2

2. customize notches length with CNC

m 04. 2

Modular Housing Wood panel housing for the urban fringe

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Fall 2020 Option Studio

Material and Tools Phase 2

80 x 200 mm beam 60mm plywood board

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120mm rigid insulation

material system

traditional Chinese timber building

structural logic

dou (斗)

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dougong

Fall 2020 Fifth-Year Studio

Modular Housing Wood panel housing for the urban fringe

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Fall 2020 Fifth-Year Studio

FallFall 2020 2020 Option Option Studio Studio

AR BUILDING The above module’s construction demo is shown to the right. The augmented reality app Fologram was used to project the model onto a sidewalk, and an accompanying Grasshopper script was used to identify the placement and order of pieces.

Modular Housing Wood panel housing for the urban fringe

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Customized Customized Housing Housing Phase Phase 3 3

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VIEWING ANGLES Domesitc spaces are designed in section such that living spaces can be visually connected across units, while more private spaces are sheltered

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NICHES AND C Modulations in the fabr are used to carve niches addressing the system

Fall 2020 Fifth-Year Studio

COURTYARDS ric of courtyard facades and moments of shelter, at a more human scale

Modular Housing Wood panel housing for the urban fringe

CANAL VIEWS Communal terraces, which reintroduce agriculture as an aspect of lifestyle to the community, are stepped backwards to ensure views of the canal

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House with a Library Fall 2020 B.Arch Fourth-Year Studio Instructors: Pezo von Ellrichshausen This project is a reactive exercise, designed in a sort of found condition to house a residence and library shared by a keeper and temporary resident, on Fire Island in New York. The project affirms the centrality of discourse in any academic endeavor, positing that the role of a library is not merely to collect books, but to enshire the collaborative effort of dialogue in the exchange of ideas, and the sharpening influence of criticism that follows.

The result is a library of social friction, where life is invited to intersect literature, thereby animating knowledge from simple text to discourse among its inhabitants. However, this collaborative aspiration is held in tension with the unfamiliarity of the space’s occupants; the true challenge of

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the project to both shelter personal curiosity and encourage collective discussion. The approach is incremental: a courtyard, whose function and condition is a shared project, A tree at its center serves as a metronome of the space, marking time with leaf litter and new growth. Niches carved out of stacks surround the courtyard, comfortable spaces for private reading. However, the more one examines a text the more questions and ideas come forth; at this point, the steps rippling from the living spaces invite readers away from shelter into spaces of discussion. Passing this threshold takes on a ceremonial character, for to summon intellectual vulnerability, culminates the academic journey.

Fall 2020 Fourth-Year Studio

PERFORM A painting, the project’s progenitor, was produced by dripping paint

House with a Library A found-condition building

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TRACE Interested in interfaces between different viscosities, a unique shape was traced

CONSTRUCT The shape was rigorized through straight-edge and compass constructions

INTERSECT A mechanical shape was introduced to form house’s the found-condition plan

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Fall 2020 Fourth-Year Studio

House with a Library A found-condition building

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AAP Staircase

Fall 2020 B.Arch Fourth-Year Elective Instructor: Rodolfo Dias This project proposes an interior staircase for Cornell AAP, connecting the Foundry to form a closed circuit of AAP buildings. Sited between Milstein’s dramatic northern cantilever and the Foundry along University Ave., the brief called for a permanent, fully-enclosed construction that would allow uninterrupted access between the two buildings. Recognizing the need to preserve the structural expression of Milstein’s cantilever, the design for the stair manifests as a cylinder inserted into the gap between the two buildings, making only tangential contact with either building in plan and terminating below the level of Milstein’s roof to further the expression of this autonomy of parts. The cylinder is articulated as

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an inversion of Milstein’s enclosure, where the concrete is deployed instead as an exterior shell and the glazing as an inserted glass tube. A helical stair orbits the tube, before spilling out beyond the shell at the base, draped in a continuous surface of wood to warm the space. This wood finishes the steps, and carries up into a carved concrete wall to form the left handrail. Importantly, the stair’s connection between Milstein and the Foundry is designed to be as non-destructive as possible—requiring the removal of only a single pane of glass from Milstein’s façade and plugging directly into a window alcove of the Foundry. The natural form of the helix maintains a 7’ clearance above the sidewalk.

Fall 2020 Fourth-Year Elective

AAP Staircase An uncontainable spiral

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An Ecologists’ House Fall 2017 B.Arch Second-Year Studio Instructor: Rubén Alcolea This project imagines the narrative of a married couple that works with Cornell to study ecology, and the house is therefore designed to facilitate the immediate and intimate study of the natural world. Recognizing the unpredictable and volatile nature of living things and their interactions, the house must enable direct observation of natural processes while ensuring minimal intervention into these processes by the observer. Thus, the house is designed as a square plan encasing a courtyard of wilderness, the perimeter of which manifests as sunken corridors allowing the ecologists to move freely and unintrudingly as they observe the courtyard. Sited in Ithaca along one of the gorges just before Ithaca Falls, the house uses its

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split focus, caught between views of wilderness and views of scenery, to guide its separation of program. Spaces of work and of home are clearly delineated by an uncompromising wall, the former looking into the courtyard and the latter looking out over the gorge. Moreover, primary spaces for both types of program are placed on opposite ends of the house. Importantly, the courtyard is not rigidly bound: the house sits over a crack in the landscape, allowing it to serve as more of a natural habitat than an artificial one by enabling natural circulation to penetrate the structure. To complement the more natural courtyard, sunken habitats and terrariums instead allow for collection of specimens and more controlled observation.

Fall 2017 Second-Year Studio

An Ecologists’ House A courtyard of wilderness

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Fall 2017 Second-Year Studio

An Ecologists’ House A courtyard of wilderness

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College of Climate Spring 2020 B.Arch Fourth-Year Studio Instructors: Philippe Rahm, Ryan Otterson This project proposes a new college for the study of climaticism at Cornell and uses thermal inertia to reconsider notions of materiality in architecture, shifting its focus from the aesthetics and phenomenology of materials to their climatic sensitivity and responsiveness. This is done on two distinct scales: the parti sorts program along a gradient of required thermal stability based on scheduled occupancy of spaces, embedding high-stability spaces in the earth to take advantage of thermal mass and suspending low-stability spaces above the surface for daylight. Here, the choice of site, Cornell’s Libe Slope, is of note because its active topography is responsible for numerous different soil types, allowing for the use

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of a palette of materials. The building enclosure stitches these spaces together with a series of atmospheric volumes, connected to form a single flexible climatic zone. On the surface, the interstices of the underground program form ‘containers’, each filled with its own soil type from the Slope to generate unique thermal and topographical conditions. Concurrently, at the scale of detail and materials, the project explores the tactile experience of climate, deploying higher thermal inertia materials in cooler convective zones and vice versa to adaptively respond to daily and seasonal temperature fluctuations.

Taken together, the building choreographs use and habitation around thermal inertia.

Spring 2020 Fourth-Year Studio

College of Climaticism An architecture of thermal inertia

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Spring 2020 Fourth-Year Studio

College of Climaticism An architecture of thermal inertia

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Spring 2020 Fourth-Year Studio

LARGER SCALE The simulations to the left show how the building as a whole responds to thermal interia: the spaces suspended above ground are largely thermally unstable, as their temperatures fluctuate during the day (above) and night (below), while spaces embedded in the ground are largely stable

SMALLER SCALE The simulation to the right shows how specific material expressions can be used to create particular thermal enviornments. Using high thermal inertia materials (concrete, seen below), which can draw heat from the body, in cooler convective zones makes them more comfortable in the summer. Conversely, using low thermal inertia materials (wood, seen above) in warmer convective zones makes them more comfortable in the winter.

College of Climaticism An architecture of thermal inertia

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Elemental Beings

Fall 2016 B.Arch First-Year Studio Instructors: Val Warke, Luben Dimcheff, Dillon Pranger This project was developed through a process of defamiliarization and refamiliarization. First, the project studied the Moon Lily flower and its unique relationship with the element of Fire through a series of analytical drawings. These informed a performative model, through which the mechanism of the flower’s blooming was investigated in the design of a drawing machine.

The drawings produced by this machine offered formal and conceptual opportunities, developed in models. These concepts were fully realized in the final project, an architectural scheme for an island dwelling for a single occupant, designed as an opportunity for them to experience their infatuation with Fire. Here, the project forwards

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a reading of Fire (taken purely as energy) that fundamentally expresses the threshold between order and disorder; its animating presence marks the transition from one to the other— namely, change. This reading from the fetishes was recontextualized as a series of interventions across the landscape, dividing the site in two by carving through the Earth, separating two distinct worlds, one rigid and directional and the other flexible and adventurous, across a central axis; a series of bridges, then, gave this threshold form.

The dwelling itself exists as a series of volumes above the site, allowing for moments of clarity above the curated landscape and championing the movement of light through their spaces.

Fall 2016 First-Year Studio

ABSTRACT The blooming of the flower reads as a system of static and dynamic points

Elemental Beings Fire and the Moon Lily flower

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REPRESENT The kinetic model illustrates the flower’s interaction with Fire as it blooms

PERFORM The drawing mechanism stores energy in a battle between human and machine

INTERPRET Moments of contact between the orderly and the unpredictable were studied

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Fall 2016 First-Year Studio

Elemental Beings Fire and the Moon Lily flower

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dhyan sharma

ds843@cornell.edu 607-339-6204 306 Stewart Ave. Ithaca, NY 14850

experience

Architecture Intern (2018)Ballman Khapalova Worked on concept design for residential and institutional projects, built and documented physical models for launch of new website Design Collaborator (2020) forIndiaToday Worked in collaboration with CHHAT on technical documentation of COVID-19 relief kits and design of short- and long-term COVID interventions for schools and markets Design Collaborator (2021) Design Connect Worked with a team of designers and planners on a renovation to convert a warehouse into an arts center for Waterloo, NY

education

skills

IB Diploma (2014-2016) Oakridge International School Higher Levels in Math, Physics, Visual Arts 43/45

Material Practice Metal and woodworking experience

B.Arch Degree (2016-2021) Cornell University Concentration in Architecture Science and Technology Minor in Philosophy GPA: 3.74

languages

English - fluent Hindi - intermediate Spanish - basic

Software AutoCAD Rhino (with Grasshopper) SketchUp V-Ray Adobe CC suite (Photoshop, Illustrator, Indesign) Microsoft Office

Digital Fabrication Laser-cutting 3D printing CNC milling AR construction