Objects, Spaces & Environments

Diego Fernรกndez Morales

O.S.& E.

is the work of Diego Fernรกndez Morales. B.Arch and BFA from the Rhode Island School of Design Concentration in Nature and Culture Sustainability Studies. Awarded with the Henry Adams Award for Academic Excellence. Committed to design cultural products with a deep undertaking in history, society and the environment. To actively engage with resource economies,labor, environmental footprints, and context.

Table of Contents

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Academic Projects

The Grid & The Cloud School of Art and Design Palm Tree City Passive Micro House Roma Miscegenated Buildings

The Grid & The Cloud

Redefining Wood Mass Timber’s environmental and structural properties make it as modern as steel or reinforced concrete in the times of Mies van-der Rohe. Just as steel and concrete were shaped by Mies and other of his contemporaries, mass timber’s form and conventions are yet to be defined by today’s practice. Precedent as Process Without a definite archetype for long spans or tall structures in wood, the study of precedents became essential to the process. A translation of Van der Rohe’s Seagram building’s structure into mass timber showed the challenges and opportunities of building tall with wood. It revealed the possibilities of a relentless grid. Aside from rational organization, a rigorous grid allows for something else to emerge. The phenomena that weaves through the grid reveals space itself. Mies meets Agnes Martin. Community Center for Portuguese Wood. The project is sited in Ponta Delgada, the largest city in the Azores. It is rapidly becoming a capital of mass timber production. The building will be a community center intended to foster the future community surrounding the wood industry. It will provide a variety of public spaces like classrooms, a garden, a cafe/media forum and a basketball court that weave into the civic realm of the city.

The Seagramâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;s building seemingly perfect steel grid is dependent of structural enablers such as diagonal bracing and sheer walls.

A hypothetical translation from steel to mass timber, transforming the structural enablers into eccentric bracing localized in relationship to lateral shear forces.

The building design started with a detail and expanded outwards, considering wood and all of

ff its effects throughout the design.

The building acts like a truss that enables the clear span for a basketball in the lower level.

School of Art & Design

Interdisciplinary Maker Building This building attempts to bridge the gap between a highly specialized program and spatial universality. It seeks an architecture that allows for the shifting of furniture and tools by providing spaces of recognizable character and different scale. A studentâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;s creativity must never be limited by the spaces in the building. Here it is supported by the possibility of transformation in their personal workspace. Structure & Space The underbelly of a universal flat floor slab was used to define space through the shaping of ceiling and light. The pouring of concrete into fabric defined both the structural section and the diagrammatic floor plan of each slab. The result is a landscape of creative infrastructure of different scales under a single roof. Cultural Identity This building, like the Rhode Island School of Design, is an outlier within the city. Unapologetically different. Whoever has the courage to peak inside, discovers a world different from the city outside and the possibilities of things to come.

Like RISD, the building is an outlier nested in the city

mechanical

mechanical gallery lecture hall faculty

work

faculty

work

work faculty

individual workspace auditorium

print cafe

lounge

kitchen

lounge

work

faculty

work print

discussion work

lounge

work

discussion

administration

parking

specialized workspace material recycling

print storage

The program was developed through qualitative and quantitative studies.

Floor openings and structural cross section were derived through physical modeling.

Structure and light are used together to create a diverse portfolio of universal spaces with dis At the same time, sectional porosity weaves these spaces together.

stinct identities.

st or ag e

sh op s

na la tur b e

1.5

Palm Tree City

Research as Practice Site and program for this project were re-defined and selected through research of urban history and culture. This project revolves around Rio de Janeiro’s past as one of the busiest ports of the transatlantic slave trade which grinds against its bleached present of tourism. The current development of the port threatens to erase the history of its people. Story-telling Narratives, fictional or not have the power to transform our understanding of the shared environment. By using stories held by the built environment, voids in history were highlighted and made literal. An archaeological dig at the port’s landfill and a displaced palm tree collection became the counter-monument to the colonial exploitation of Rio de Janeiro. Cannibalizing Public Space The project aims to expose our history and the gaps in its recording. It aims to question what and who is allowed in public space? Who decides so and for whom is it constructed? The project is the literal decomposition of acceptance and the status quo. It disrupts the tourist experience and ruins the Calatrava photo opportunity. It allows for water to accumulate and for vegetation to grow. It is hard to police and impossible to maintain. It scales down the European plaza to the scale of people and a provides much needed shade. It is the infrastructure for Rio’s “informal” commerce and street parties to explode.

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The science museum design by Santiago Calatrava was part of the Olympic City effort and had a cost of $230 M Reais. 2 Statue of 1980’s Tycoon, founder of the Bank of Brasil and one of Brasil’s industrializers 3 Elevated highway that connected Santo’s Dumont airport and the bridge Rio-Niteroi to city by cutting throught the neighborhoods of Gamboa, Saude, Caju, São Cristóvão and Santo Cristo, 1950-2013 4 Rio’s first highrise and first building made out of reinforced concrete.

Tunnel which replaced the Elevado da Perimetral as a part of Porto Maravhila Project. 6 A Quilombo is an encampented of escaped slaves that achieved freedom through self defense. Pedra do Sal was in close proximity to the largest slave landing in America. It came to be the epicenter of the creation of Samba which at the time it was illegal. It is the heart of what was known as little Africa. It was until 1984 that it was recognized as a historical and religious site.

Story - A Garden at the Port On November 15, a number of tourist reported a gas leak in front of Rio’s Art Museum, at the newly transformed Praca Maua. As the broken pipe was being repaired technicians came across an old iron chain. One of the technicians was the manager of the museum/house of the Cemetery of the New Blacks. He identified it as an artifact of the transatlantic slave trade and brought attention to the find. Local authorities and human right advocacy groups spiraled into fiery debate as to what to do with the artifact. As the government received more and more pressure to acknowledge the find, an archaeological dig was ordered by the Ministry of Culture. Digs were to be done in customary archaeological phasing of the site, intervals of thirty two meters throughout the plaza. The 1852 coastline, predating the port’s landfill, was approximated and used as a starting reference. A small team of archaeologist started working as soon as the tourist season ended. Well into the archaeological dig, more and more holes were changing the landscape of Praca Maua. The municipality started to get more and more worried since tourism was decreasing, photo views were being blocked and the risk of people being injured was getting higher. After two years of digging, hardly anything was found. This coincided with the president of Brazil, Michel Temer, dissolving the Ministry of Culture all together. With no Ministry of Culture and an Olympic sized debt, no one took responsibility for the digs. The museum directors were furious but essentially paralyzed. Finally, the dirt and potential artifacts were permanently abandoned. The municipality released an emergency ‘beautifying’ plan. For all of the digs in which nothing was found, they would transplant a temporary palm tree from elsewhere in the city. They used the hashtag #savetheport. After ten years the palm trees, the holes and piles of soil are still there. Now normalized by people and taken over by occurring plants. Some of the digs have gathered water and become fully fledged ponds. People now snake between the holes and palm trees as if they were always there. Some set up shade and buy food from the street vendors, they wait for nightfall, play music and dance amongst the mounds of earth.

Passive Micro House

Micro Housing In the never-ending Suburbia of the mid-size American city, there is often a lack for affordable housing and an abundance of residual space. The project proposes model infill dwellings that give an answer to large-scale problems through small-scale solutions Urban Ecologies The proposal is an affordable, customizable and tangible patrimony. The micro-scale of the project allows for passive house standards and an affordable project cost to coexist. Prefabrication and modularity were incorporated from the smallest detail to the agglomeration of units. This new housing type is designed to expand through time and increase in value, eventually creating resilience in the urban environment both for the building and the people living in it. Resource Autonomy Environmental performance was assessed and fine tuned using dynamic energy models utilized in the passive house industry. Daylight simulation, energy consumption, and occupation patterns were important variables. The Micro Passive House is able to garner water and solar energy beyond its needs. Additionally, on-field interviews, and cost models heavily influenced the design process.

R69 R41

R23 Heating Load 7.9 kBtu/ft2hr Mineral Wool

Passive House Standard

Heating Demand

2.91 kBtu/ft2yr

Cooling Demand

2.8 kBtu/ft2yr

Heating Load

2.7 Btu/hr ft2

Cooling Load

4.01 Btu/hr ft2

Site Energy

-2.69 kBtu/ft2yr

Roma

Site: Rome The Summer of 2016 was spent as a teaching assistant to RISDâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;s European Honors Program program. I had the opportunity to develop an independent research on architecture and the city. Drawing, Surveying and Mapping The plan of Rome by Gian Battista Nolli was the primary resource to navigate the city and its many layers. Drawing was the primary tool of documentation. The palimpsest of ancient and baroque architecture became a prime focus to distill the processes and forms that have prevailed through time and have permeated architecture worldwide. Surveying and drawing on site was used to make measured drawings of architectural and urban works. Archaeological sites were reconstructed through drawing. The relationship between a perspectival drawing and its orthographic projections came to be understood as a constant re-conception of light and space, both redefining each other as one moves through space and time.

Miscegenated Buildings

Opressive Monocultures Colonization and global capitalism are similar in that they are social systems where cultural overwriting is necessary for ‘development’; Where architecture has become a tool of homogenization. Still, architecture’s cultural value within modernity depends on its ability to be a medium of cultural production. To produce diversity and offer alternatives. Problematic Buildings This project identifies a problematic but relevant typology as a site of operation. The most abundant convenience store chain in Mexico, Oxxo, is the first sign of the induction of a place into a larger network of consumption. These stores reveal a process of cultural homogenization through the placement of buildings. Since the proliferation of the Oxxo is nowhere near its end, could it transcend its program and become a cultural product of the place it will land on? Re-production A building has the potential to become a testament to a social agreement and a cultural product of the people who build it. Architecture has a say in the sourcing of a building’s materials and the tolerance required to construct it. Labor miscegenates architecture between what it is and what it is supposed to be. Through history we understand that the space for revolutionary material production from within an overpowering monoculture exists in the miscegenation of its existing parts. The end of the colonial world showed us the power of appropriation and disfiguration in the creation new identities. Through reproduction, there is the opportunity for mistranslation and cross-pollination. We can apply these lessons within global capitalism to foster the creation of alternatives and new ways of thinking and being.

The apparent simplicity of the Oxxo allows us to define it in very straightforward terms. Anythi 1.It must display its brand. 2.Given its bidding process; It must use the cheapest construction processes available or othe 3.It must be able to hold the program. Sale racks, refigeration unit, storage, and parking space

ing can be an oxxo if it falls under this set of conditions:

erwise offset its costs. e.

This proposed Oxxo has grown out of itself to become something else. The concrete masonry found not to far behind the site. The resulting hole from the sourcing of the brick became a fut an operation in of itself and became a fully fledged brick factory. And finally, the shrewd entrep people involved in the building to eat and drink at the end of the day.

y unit typically used for construction, was replaced by a brick manufactured with a substrate tbol (soccer) court partially bellow the ground. The manufacturing of the bricks expanded into preneur who competes against the Oxxo with his taqueria became the favorite place for the

Thank you, Diego

Contact:

diegofernandez93@gmail.com 347-866-866 @diegofmo