Eli Hockett_ArchitecturePortfolio_2024

Portfolio

main interests are architecture, critical theory/philosophy, photography and cinema. My philosophical work and interests are primarily centered on existentialism, phenomenology, and critical theory. The foundational thinkers for me are Michel Foucault and Fredrich Nietzsche. In architecture I am interested in both professional and academic practice, my primary interest is architectures intersections with critical theory/philosophy, and am particularly interested in the phenomenological architecture of Tadao Ando, Kenzo Tange, and James Turrell.

Education

Montana State University, B.A. Environmental Design Program

Dean’s List

MSU Academic Achievment Award Honors College

University of North Carolina Charlotte, Bachelors of Architecture Program

Chancelor’s List

Experience

Carlos J Moore Architect P.A. Intern

Designed and generated construction drawings for a wide variety of projects, particularly upfits and re-use. Significant experience in measuring and documenting old construction as-built, as well as architectural drawing production via AutoCAD

Hight Architecture Library Assistant

Manage and assist in distribution and organization of library books and other resources.

UNCC AIAS General Body Member

UNCC School of Architecture Admission Reviewer

Worked alongside UNCC SOA faculty to interview prospective students for admission into the Architecture

Sunrise Movement Boone Hub Actions Organizer

Coordinated with other members of the leadership team to educate and mobilize the community to advocate for climate justice and sustainability.

2020-2021

2020-2021

2020-2021

2021-Present

2021-Present

2023-Present

2022-2023

2020-2021 2022 Present

2019-2020

17801 Sedona Way

Cornelius, NC 28031

ehockett@uncc.edu

704-792-8454

Eli Hockett, Periscope

Black Muji Shirt

Dickies 874 Work Pants- Khaki

Michel Foucault, The Order of Things

Orange paint stainunremovable

Rip in pants cuff from being caught in a fixed gear bicycle drive-train

Doc Marten 1461- Black

West Oakland

Tryptych

Course: Arch. 3101

Instructor: Johnathan Desi-Olive

The Assignment was titled “The West Oakland Center for the Future” and its program a “Public Health Center”. Central is architecture’s ability to propose a future. One cannot ethically propose a future without beginning in the past. The first panel of the triptych looks at the history of West Oakland as it has been a site of systemic violence, a violence which uses urban planning rather than guns. West Oakland is defined by a highway system used as a spatial weapon which encircles, pollutes, and segregates a historically black community. West Oakland is also known as a sight of resistance, most notably as the birthplace of the Black Panther Party.

What then for the present? First we must think about “public health”. To diagnose health you must first determine the body to be diagnosed, chose the political body, i.e. the ability for one to decide what one’s world and life is to be. Most of us exist in a world in which architectural meaning is forever out of reach, an object wielded by those with money and power to build or decide what is to be built. So for the present, proposed a factory, one which will produce a kitof-parts to be distributed throughout the community, to be built and configured by the members of said community, regardless of zoning ordinances and property ownership.

And for the third panel, what might this future look like? It may seem chaotic, “anarchy” some might cry, but It does not lack organization or structure, it has its own rhythm, a rhythm created by a radical kind of democratic construction.

Final Presentation “Tryptich”

The Site is organized based on semitruck turning radii.

Manufacturing program is oriented in relation to truck radii whereas public program faces the neighborhood.

A central structural core for circulation and an assembly line connects the programmatic blocks.

Process Diagram

Typical Structural Bay

Community design and meeting spaces face the neighborhood to facilitate management and planning of the factory. The remainder of the site is for manufacturing and distribution of the Kit-Of-Parts

The typical structural bay is repeated along the site.

Axonometric

Perspective Section - A Community Assembly

The central core holds the robotic assembly line for the Kit-Of-Parts. Distribution, storage, and design studios flank either side.

Perspective Section - A Community Assembly

The factory produces the Kit-Of-Parts system. It is distributed throughout the neighborhood. Construction becomes radically democratized, disrupting established exclusionary logics of private property and moneyled development.

West Oakland Futures

Droop

Course: Arch. 3101

Instructor: Johnathan Desi-Olive

Collaborators: Kelly Carnahan, Valeria Berrones-Escobar

Beginning as a study of the Tama Art University Library by Toyo Ito, Droop is a pavilion proposal for an imagined West Oakland site which seeks to riff off of the spatial and structural qualities of its precendent. Droop Inverts the arches of the Tama Library through the application of heavy duty steel nets filled with rocks creating a “gabion net”.

Different nets are filled with differing weights of rocks creating a diversity of spatial qualities both above and below. The arch and the hanging chain are equal and opposite reactions, Droop takes Hooke’s law and manifests it spatially.

Tama Art University Library

Our “Riff”

Exploded Structural Model

Mccoll Center Annex

Course: Arch. 2102

Instructor: Michael Southard

Collaborators: Leila Mercer

Featured at the Mccoll Center

Gallery architecture traditionally seeks to imbue its art with an air of objectivity, either through linking it to the history of western antiquity, or through its placement within blank white boxes, seeking to display art outside of history, society, and the dynamics of power which served as its patron. The traditional gallery seeks legitimacy either through a connection to western traditions, or through the rejection of history, displaying art as something “primordial”, “essential”, and “transcendent”. Our design rejects both systems. The history of the parsonage is scribbled across by the rusty metal forms which latch onto its skin. The gallery spaces are non-objective, complicated, and difficult to maneuver through and to place art within. Gallery architecture seeks multifunctionality, our gallery only provides constraints, constraints which produce an art specific to the annex’s unique spaces and qualities. Our gallery rejects narratives of historical legitimacy, as well as the idea that art can exist outside of history, economy, power, and society. In the annex art is a product of constraints, contradictions, and the world. Art is created for a specific time and place, and like all that exists, it will be slowly destroyed by the flow of time.

Views of existing parsonage ruin.

Views of ruin become gallery volumes.

Volumes are connected by circulation.

Circulation wraps around the ruin to maintain its existing interior qualities.

Art Gallery

- Used to showcase Mccoll Center artist work

-Difficult to use to display work, art must be made to fit into its context within the gallery

Underground Bar

- Open 6PM-12AM M-Thurs, 6PM-2AM F-Sun

- Alternate source of income

Ruin & Sculpture Garden

- Public Space, open always

Cardboard

Confessional

Course: Arch. 2101

Instructor: Mckenzie Canaday

Collaborators: Valeria Berrones-Escobar, Allen Maldonado, Bella Olmstead, Kayla Kelly

Each student is tasked with designing a “confessional” to be construtcted out of a limited number of sheets of cardboard. The designs are then voted on and a limited number constructed by a team of the lead designer and other students. My design for the confessional draws from the primary structural grid and organization of the UNCC SOA building (Storrs Hall) while contrasting this grid through its placement off axis highlighting its position at the primary intersection of major axes of the building. The design was developed through analysis of effeciency in terms of material usage and fabrication.

Desing is based off of efficiency in both material usage and manufacturing. The confessional is made from a series of smaller parts which are connected together, through both interlocking joints and glue, into larger and larger assemblies. This method (of small parts combined into assemblies which beget even larger assemblies) streamlines and automates production allowing all manufacturing to be done on a 24”x32” laser cutter.

Orthographic Drawings

Design Development

Axonometric Assembly Diagram

Thrive Chicago

Course: Arch. 2102

Instructor:

Dr.

Julio Diarte Almada

Thrive Chicago is a community health center located at the intersection of Wabash and Harrison in the Chicago Loop. The site is a parking lot with two adjacent buildings. The site’s main feature is the elevated rail, or “L”, train line which cuts through the site diagonally.

My project uses a network of circulation, made by a grid of exterior catwalks, elevators, and stairs to connect independent volumes occupied by the center’s different services. This design language seeks to recreate the relationship between the city street and the city block to manifest the city within the structure. The building does not feel or read as a building, but as a thickness. Similar programs such as community spaces, health care offices, or fitness are located in proximity to one another to organize the use of the structure; circulation between programs is facilitated by the network’s primary axis, or “spine”, along the “L” line.Circulation separates blocks, breaks into others, or is terminated by some. The structure has a strong construction and organizational logic, but like the city, it sometimes actively subverts this logic, creating a collection of diverse and unique spatial conditions, blurring the lines between inside and outside, street and block, public city and private building.

Taking note of the city’s organization, a grid is applied over the site.

Grid is oriented not along the grid of the city, but along the length of the train which cuts through the site.

Areas of the grid which fit in the site and do not interfere with the set-back become spaces for smaller local towers or “pods” which will be connected by a networks of “streets” or exterior catwalks.

The typical structural bay is created by a system of pre-fab concrete columns and beams which form interlocking assemblies from small to large scale.

structural bay is rotated around the overlayed grid.

Typical Structural Bay

Process Diagram

Pinwheel

Artifacts and Errata

Foregrounding much of my work and process are intrests and explorations in hand drafting, photography, and other media which help explore more abstract ideas before needing to force them into architectural terms. Sketching, drafting, photography, and other media are important to me because they keep the design process as non-linear and avoid the traps and built in tendencies of typical architectural design stratagies, creating new opportunities not clearly afforded by typical diagramming, model making, or other typical “architectural” techniques.

Eli Hockett, The Reverse Cyborg

Sanja Matsuri, Asakusa Tokyo, 2023

Untitled

Bodies and Difference

Paint on Fabric

Smoothed and Striated

Black and Red Graphite on Paper

Bodies and Difference 2 Paint on paper

Mapping Nature

Black Graphite on Paper