Duncan White Portfolio

duncan white portfolio academic and professional june 2013

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*All drawings and models in this portfolio are my own work

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RESUME

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ACADEMIC WORK HISTORY, REPEATING (MArch Thesis) GOVERNORS ISLAND SHOULD BE A MAZE SCATTERED MONUMENT PARTERRE IN THE AIR PROJECT FOR A CLIMBING GYM

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PROFESSIONAL WORK HANGAR UNDERGROUND RESIDENCES BACCARAT VILLA IN RABAT FLYING POINT HOUSE

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Résumé

Duncan White / duncan.w.white@gmail.com / 314.398.3353

education

RICE UNIVERSITY Houston, TX Master of Architecture WASHINGTON UNIVERSITY St. Louis, MO BA in Music, Coursework in Architecture and Playwrighting

activities / honors

Instructor, ARCH 305: Architecture for Non-Architects, Rice U. Worked with a team of five other grad students to teach an intensive Architecture seminar for undergrads. Prepared and delivered the “Drawing” and “Concept” lectures.

1st Place, Rice Habitat for Humanity Shed Design Competition Collaboration with A. Tehranian and N. Weiss 2nd Place, Rice School of Architecture 2011 Charrette Competition Collaboration with G. Angelini, J. Scherer and A. Tehranian 2nd Place, Rice School of Architecture 2010 Charrette Competition Collaboration with G. Angelini “Understanding Dittersdorf: Towards a Transformative Hermeneutics of Outdoor Theatrical Performace,” (one-act play) produced in the 2008 Washington U. spring play festival

publications

“Governors Island Should Be a Maze” (Text and Drawings) PLAT Journal 3.5: Model Misbehavior, Expected November 2013 “The Stacks: A Picturesque Factory Farm for Rice University” (with G. Angelini, J. Scherer and A. Tehranian) Mole Magazine Issue 1: Cute Little Things, Expected January 2014

Duncan White Portfolio

employment

KILO ARCHITECTURES, Paris Intern Architect Involved in the design of an apartment complex in Rabat and was also briefly involved with several other projects, all in Morocco DEBORAH BERKE AND PARTNERS, New York Intern Architect Collaborated on a wide range of projects at different scales and stages, including the Bard Bito Conservatory of Music, Hangar Underground, Fredonia Arts Center, and many houses STELLE ARCHITECTS, Bridgehampton NY Intern Architect DIVISION LLC, New York Assistant Numerous fabrication/metalworking projects for clients in design, science and the arts, worked on sculptures, custom hardware, furniture and an aluminum architectural model MURPHY BURNHAM AND BUTTRICK ARCHITECTS, New York Technical Assistant

references

Deborah Berke, Principal: Deborah Berke and Partners dberke@dberke.com / 212.229.9211 Linna Choi, Principal: KILO Architectures lc@kilospace.com / +33 1 53 10 02 99

skills

Graphic Design, Model Making, Architectural Graphics, Foam Cutting, Drawing, Rhino3d, Creative Suite, AutoCAD, Writing, French Language, Classical Guitar

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Academic / Thesis

HISTORY, REPEATING NEW YORK HISTORICAL SOCIETY Bryony Roberts, Advisor

Basic Unit Once

Basic Unit Twice

Basic Unit Twice

Basic Unit Four Times

Basic Unit Twice

Typical Void Interlock

This project is a study in doing the same thing again and again and again.

Limiting design to the repetition of a single idea, it introduces a new affect to architecture based upon the experience of self-similar spaces in an uninterrupted and seemingly endless sequence. It reimagines the typology of the large history museum, proposing an open-ended series of moments of historical totality as an alternative to the cumulative or narrative unfolding of content. It is at once a primitive formal game and a spatially complex reinvention of a venerable American institution. It is an architectural contraption that reorders a universe of artifacts.

Duncan White Portfolio

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Above: Auditorium Perspective Left: Partial Model

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Academic / Thesis

The principal spaces of this new building for the New York Historical Society consist of several dozen variations on a void, which interlock like puzzle pieces within a rectangular mass on Central Park West between 76th and 77th street.

These proliferating voids, all produced by a simple formal game of overlapping and juxtaposition, function as spaces for the display of typological groupings of historical objects.

Exploring this museum produces a sustained free association on historical themes structured by a recurring moment of encounter. Each gallery samples the full sweep of history, collapsing vulgar and sacred, ancient and contemporary, tragic and comic, priceless and trash, into a single crystallized moment of historical totality. No gallery offers any less thorough a summary than any other, none builds on or supplements Above: Perspective from Central Park West Opposite Top: Partial Model Bottomt: Catalogue of Galleries

the evidence in any other. Rather than circulating along a linear sequence towards a cumulative understanding one wanders among innumerable and incompatible microcosms of history.

Duncan White Portfolio

Gallery 1

Gallery 2

Gallery 3 Gallery 8

Auditorium

Gallery 4 Gallery 7

Gallery 6

Gallery 5

The Sikorsky Collection of American Helicopters

The Meyer Rosenberg Hall of Historic Chandeliers

The Eris Field Gallery of Giant Stone Heads

The Patricia H. Klingstein New York Hall of Pots

The Guilder-Lehrmann Hall of Urban Clocks

The Davidofsky Arboretum

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Academic / Thesis

MOS, Villa at Ordos (2008)

Mansilla + TuĂąon, MUSAC (2005)

SAA, Maribor Gallery (2010)

Taken from the dynamic point of view of circulation, each of these precedents appears not as a spatial composition (to be taken in all at once) but as a sequence of discrete moments of encounter in time. As though destined to relive a single moment on loop, one discovers through further exploration only further iterations of the same simple pattern of experience.

Successive mutations seem only to deepen the impression of repetition: with every iteration, one encounters the repeated shape as though for the first time.

Above: Precedent Study, Sequential Perspectives

The “whole� of the building becomes de-emphasized, open ended, and the relationship of the parts, ambiguous. Any fragment stands in and summarizes the project in its entirety. Repetition transforms the experience of time from a present that recedes into the past and advances into the future to a single present moment that simply persists.

Duncan White Portfolio

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0 Deg: Hall A, Gallery 1

360 Degrees: Hall B, Gallery 3

90 Degrees: Hall A, Gallery 2

450 Degrees: Hall A, Gallery 3

180 Degrees: Hall B, Gallery 1

540 Degrees: Hall A, Gallery 4

270 Degrees: Hall B, Gallery 2

630 Degrees: Hall B, Gallery 4

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Circulation Diagram: Simultaneous Spirals

Vertical circulation takes the form of four continuous upward spirals, one in each quadrant of the plan. The project does away with conventional organization by floors in order to ensure an experience of spatial repetition. The boundaries between units within each quadrant always coincide with a sectional shift of three feet, so that each full revolution around a quadrant makes the equivalent of a sectional change of one story.

One circulates by going in circles.

Repetition at the level of the basic unit gives a consistent rhythm to the passage through the building, a clockwork oscillation of solid and void that persists throughout.

The trajectory of the circulation spirals threads among multi-story spaces with alternating orientations relative to the project as a whole. Across recurring moments in time, the sequential unfolding of voids previously encountered, discovered for the first time, and yet to be explored further follows an irregular pattern that seems to collapse past, present and future.

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Academic / Thesis

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West 72nd Street

West 71st Street

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Central Park West

Above: Ground Level Plan

This thesis project is a history museum that jettisons the responsibility of weaving all-encompassing narratives, providing instead an open-ended structure in which the unruliness and infinity of history can remain be experienced in an improvisatory way, where the whole picture is never revealed but each fragment evokes the whole. Here history resembles an obscure document read one letter at a time, in no particular order, through a magnifying glass.

Duncan White Portfolio

Plan at 11’

Plan at 23’

Plan at 35’

Plan at 47’

Plan at 59’

Plan at 83’

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The Robert H. Smith Teapot Gallery contains a ramp that links this corner cell to the next cell in the quadrant.

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Emerging once again from the solid of the basic unit to the void, and looking back once again toward the Guilder-Lehrmann Hall of Urban Clocks.

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The Eris Field Gallery of Historic Chairs.

Upon discovering the Barbara K. Lippman Hall of Carriages, occupying a void which fits together with the Guilder-Lehrmann hall of Urban Clocks.

Duncan White Portfolio

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The Emerson Corporation Gallery of Long Barrel Firearms.

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Entering the Barbara K. Lippman Hall of Carriages once again from a new vantage point.

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The Lefkowitz Collection of American Urinals.

One looks back again on the Guilder-Lehrmann Hall of Urban Clocks from a much higher vantage point.

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Academic / Fall 2011 Studio

GOVERNORS ISLAND SHOULD BE A MAZE...

PLAN FOR A PARK Troy Schaum, Instructor

#16: DEN OF INIQUITY

#17: BADMINTON ARENA

#18: DEPARTMENT STORE

#19: CHILLER PLANT

#20: COMBINATION PIZZA HUT + TACO BELL

#21: KABUKI THEATER

#46: PETTING ZOO

#47: ORANGERIE

#48: GREENHOUSE

#49: MICROBREWERY

#50: ARTILLERY MUSEUM

#51: SKI LODGE

#4: AGRICULTURAL DISTRICT

#5: DISTRICT OF FRANTIC CELEBRATION

#6: INCLINED PLANES DISTRICT

#7: DISTRICT OF EARTHLY DELIGHTS

#8: LAWN SPORTS DISTRICT

#10: THEATER DISTRICT

#34: FOOD COURT

#35: BLOOD SPORT DISTRICT

#36: BOTANICAL DISTRICT

#37: BLACK MARKET DISTRICT

#38: DISCOUNT SHOPPING #39: RED LIGHT DISTRICT

Governors Island should be a maze. Its surface should be a thickened mat of trenches, walls, hedges, plateaus, shot through with a thousand voids of different scales and characters. It should be a mad sorting device for people, amplifying the improbability of being always somehow here, in this clearing, with this handful of strangers, out of a galaxy of possible destinies that increases exponentially with each bifurcation of the path.

A permutational set (open-ended and perhaps infinite) of pavilions inhabit the maze, containing the hidden museums, theaters and beer halls of Governors Island. They make for ambiguous benchmarks, similar but never quite identical, to be diiscovered once by chance and then never again in the course of a wandering trajectory.

Duncan White Portfolio

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Site Oblique

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Academic / Fall 2011 Studio

We need synthetic white-sand beaches and alpine slopes covered year-round with snow; we need tulips and we need polar bears, a scrap of purple mountain’s majesty, a patch of fruited plain, all of nature in one spot, all four seasons simultaneously, the entire spectrum of leisure activity in an area the size of seven Manhattan blocks. A new kind of nature should be created—congested, compressed, contradictory— to suit the pace of the city it serves. Visitors should feel the benefits of a week of relaxation in every frantic hour.

But Governor’s Island, for years a peculiar void in the city, should not surrender its darkness.

If navigation were frustrating, counterintuitive, even treacherous, if its contradictions revealed themselves gradually, if on each visit it seemed like a totally different place, this tiny island could become a bewildering vastness.

Top: Site Section Opposite Top: Aerial Perspective Across: Narrative Sketches

Circulation through this park should be engineered to simulate enormity. It should be dense and convoluted beyond comprehension, so that its very impenetrability forces the abandonment of personal preference. The island will decide whether you will swim or ski, whether your visit lasts an hour or a week.

Duncan White Portfolio

On a WNYC call-in show, Javier from Murray Hill claims to have stumbled upon a Sauna. Gone ice fishing. Killed a bear with a branch. A short piece in the New Yorker describes a French formal garden with lewd topiaries. The consensus: it’s a hoax.

Most of your friends have seen the petting zoo: a sort of pasture with llamas in it. (The llamas are friendly.)

Three or four have been to the beer garden, which is near the shooting range (but far from the Kabuki theater). It was a nightmare getting back to the ferry.

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Someone you know who discovered the nude beach attempts to describe where it was: “First a left, then another left, then straight, straight on, then left, another left, through the peach orchard, right, left, then I think right. Or something.”

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Academic / Fall 2011 Studio

Structure

Circulation

Mechanical

Top: Systems Diagrams Right: Pavilion #35 (Department Store) Plan

Duncan White Portfolio

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4-inch Rigid Insulation Standing-Seam Zinc Panel Roof Steel Roof Deck 8-inch Spanning Members

16-inch Major Members

Interior Plasterboard Cieling

2mm Coated Aluminum Faรงade Panel

Low-E Insulated Glass Units

Wood Flooring 12-inch Duct Concrete on Metal Deck 8-inch deep Floor Beam

Interior Plaster Finish

12-inch Concrete Bearing Wall

8-inch Foundation Slab

Geothermal Coils

Left: Typical Section Detail

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Academic / Fall 2010 Studio

Multipurpose Hall

Playground

SCATTERED MONUMENT EAST END ANNEX Dawn Finley, Instructor

Mediathèque

Exhibition Space

Library

Entrance

Foyer

CafĂŠ

Vertical Circulation

This project, for a courthouse, library and community center in a residential context, is a continuous public foyer punctuated by a scattering of rectangular masses. The composition of the plan implies discrete zones within the continuous space, while suggesting a strong equivalence across them. Indoor and outdoor, bureaucratic and recreational, programmed and unprogrammed are all caught up in the leftover spaces of the same ambiguous formal game. A translucent roof provides a singular gesture that unifies the composition of volumes and establishes a consistent linear datum at street level. Boundaries are porous, the interior embedded in the adjacent public realm of street and sidewalk. Different programs acheive different levels of continuity with both the surrounding fabric and with one another.

Duncan White Portfolio

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Above: Ground Level Plan Opposite: Enclosure + Program Diagrams

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Academic / Spring 2011 Studio

Site Plan

150’

PARTERRE IN THE AIR MUNDANEUM IN BRASILIA Fares el Dahdah, Instructor

150’

150’

This project is a 1200’ linear extension down the Brasilia’s axis. Intimate urban spaces are linked within thickened region on the upper levels, where a sloping linear park is superimposed above a tiered, outdoor plazas, each with an entrance to a different program area of the building. These two layers of space are woven together at intervals by interruptions in the plane of the park. Within a dumbly repetitive structure of 150’ long modules, this project provides a meandering, topographical trajectory that brings together a world of heterogeneous activities and conditions.

Duncan White Portfolio

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Seventh Level (109’ Elevation)

Third Level (49’ Elevation)

Mezzanine Level (19’ Elevation)

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Academic / Fall 2009 Studio

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MODELNUMBER TRADENAME PRODUCT MATERIAL

MODELNUMBER TRADENAME PRODUCT MATERIAL

MODELNUMBER TRADENAME PRODUCT MATERIAL

MODELNUMBER TRADENAME PRODUCT MATERIAL

MODELNUMBER TRADENAME PRODUCT MATERIAL

Third Level Plan

MODELNUMBER TRADENAME PRODUCT MATERIAL

Roof Plan

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Second Level Plan

PROJECT FOR A CLIMBING GYM HOUSTON, TX Blair Satterfield, Instructor

Ground Level Plan

The most interesting thing about a climbing gym is that it forces into coexistence two very different types of surface. Walls (conventional flat planes that divide space) coexist with climbing walls — irregular, highly articulated programmatic expanses that themselves are a form of occupiable space. When the climbing surfaces line the inside of a generic shed, as they typically do, the result is both conceptually unsatisfying and, since it invariably yields a mute, windowless box, functionally deficient.

My project keeps these two systems distinct from one another and plays up their inherent contradictions. Rectilinear and non-orthagonal geometries cohabit the building in nested, juxtaposed, and layered relationships.

Duncan White Portfolio

Elevation: South

Elevation: East

Elevation: North

Elevation: West

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Study Model

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Professional / Summer 2012

HANGAR UNDERGROUND CONTENT INCUBATOR, BROOKLYN Deborah Berke and Partners

The Hangar Underground Studio was proposed for a city-sponsored RFP as a collaboration between Deborah Berke and Partners and a team of entrepreneurs in the summer of 2012. Situated in a renovated industrial building in Brooklyn, it would have been a community resource serving amateur and inspiring online content creators, offering a sound stage, equipment rental, screening rooms, editing studios, classrooms and a cafĂŠ. I joined the team as the project was developing and made this series of renderings for the final charette.

Duncan White Portfolio

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Opposite: Sound Stage Perspective Above: Ground Level Plan

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Professional / Spring 2013

Townhouses

Studios

Penthouses

Public Gardens

Private Gardens

RESIDENCES BACCARAT HOUSING IN RABAT KILO Architectures

I was involved in the design of this courtyard-type apartment building in the spring of 2013. The basic parti— a ring of apartment units with penthouses and private gardens on top— was in place when I joined the office, and I worked closely with the partners and project manager to design the facades, refine the massing, and improve the individual apartment plans. These details were in a constant state of flux during my four months at KILO, and I was perpetually carrying out perspective studies to propose and test different strategies. The two drawings at right, which I prepared for a client meeting in April represent the project at a peak of resolution before another cycle of redesign was begun. Having come directly out of my thesis semester at Rice, I appreciated this intense engagement with the fundamentals of architectural detailing.

Duncan White Portfolio

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Top: Street Perspective Above: Courtyard Perspective

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Professional / Spring 2013

HOUSE OF HOLES VILLA IN RABAT KILO Architectures

Project for a single family house in Rabat, Morocco. The house consists of a rectangular balancing on a slope, with an outdoor living space and garden below.

Angular holes of different sizes puncture the plan and create links between the indoor spaces above and the garden level. Briefly part of the team, I built and photographed the model at right, and later prepared a series of drawings for a publication that the client was organizing.

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Top: Study Model Opposite: Exploded Axonometric

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Professional / Summer 2010

FLYING POINT HOUSE HOUSE IN BRIDGEHAMPTON Stelle Architects

I worked at Stelle Architects (now Stelle Lomont Rouhani), a small office in Bridgehampton, NY during the summer after my first year in the MArch program at Rice. The firm had a limited repertoire of representational techniques, and in the work I did for the Flying Point House, I was encouraged to explore new ways of drawing and modelling. I made the above exploded axonometric as an argument for more stylized and synthetic drawings as an alternative to the murky “photorealistic� renderings that the office defaulted to whenever a 3D study was needed. The model is the culmination of a period of experimentation with various materials, textures and finishes.

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Opposite: Exploded Axonometric Above: Model Phots