PORTFOLIO Elsa Hoover
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ACADEMIC Travel Studio pg1 Stretch the Border
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ACADEMIC Design Studio Impermanent Forum
ACADEMIC Thesis Project Bloodless
ACADEMIC Design Studio Bright City
PROFESSIONAL Maps pg17 Empire’s Tracks
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STRETCH THE BORDER: re-engaging desire lines in the arctic >Design Studio, Fall 2016 >Elsa Hoover, Rana Aksoy /Professor Karen Fairbanks 36” X 48”
Bounded by the borders of Norway and Russia, bonded by a pidgin language, and cast into the global phenomena of the 21st Century, this site belongs to many places. In summer 2015, refugees on bicycles subverted Norwegian law and crossed into their new nation. Norway’s response: build a wall. The new 200m fence is mocked locally by peoples who have for centuries shared markets, reindeer pastures, and a land of extremes. This stretchy border proposes that interrelation, not isolation, provides safety and belonging. As the temperature line defining the ‘Arctic Circle’ shifts southward, these regional, environmental, and inherited relationships shape movement responsively, loosening distant political claims over space. Expanding this border line produces a place that is more easily opened than closed: a wandering zone...
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...that reflects local networks and flirts with forms of closure and control. Winding paths with sharp corners provoke coincidental movement and provide the freedom to gather at the fringes of national order and the center of a region. We used an intensive mapping process to study these relationships and their overlap at extreme distance.
L_large-format 36� x 48� site plan 1_borders 2_zones 3_territories and reindeer herding 4_layered data chart, maps and text printed in color on acetate 5_climatic and environmental boundaries 6_claims and movement around the North Pole
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A_Elsa Hoover and Gizem Karagoz: curation and installation of two-week gallery show, including 10 group and individual projects; two large-format photo boards; plotting (by curators and others) and handmade tape lettering, February 2017 R_pavilion imposed on the UN site, superceding fences, barricades, and the division of land between the City of New York and the United Nations. Digital model sections (Rhino) and physical models
temperature
snow depth
migration season
snow
rain
northern lights
clouds
daylight
darkness
A_calendar of seasons and movement in the trination border area, including daylight, weather, and reindeer migration, divided into 12 months B_coastal landscape of arctic border islands
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IMPERMANENT FORUM: site provocation for the United Nations >Design Studio, Spring 2015 >Elsa Hoover /Professor Kadambari Baxi
Land is the foundation of national identity and political rights for both nation-states and Indigenous peoples. The tension between these often-conflicting claims on land was evident at the United Nation’s 14th Permanent Forum on Indigenous Issues (2015), where Indigenous delegations were shoehorned into a hallway space for their foremost social and cultural gathering. This is a proposal for unbuildable protest architecture. A tensile pavilion reclaims UN space for Indigenous delegations’ use. It bypasses regimented barriers to allow unauthorized people to witness and take part in these gatherings from beyond the fence. Ungrounded and imposed, these drawings approach the political and historical tensions that are collected at such secured boundaries, and conceive them as a tense and unsettling structure.
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BLOODLESS: indigenous headspace and the geographies of home >Independent Study/Thesis, Fall 2016 >Elsa Hoover /Professor Karen Fairbanks
This is an experimental book project charting the entangled relationships among housing, homeland, and citizenship for young people living on the Blackfeet Reservation. These four books put people and systems in conversation using fragmentary interviews, recollections, maps, photography, satellite imagery, and graphical experiments; their juxtaposition examines each medium’s ability to represent and convey deep human relationships and fundamental indigenous rights. The project aims to tell true stories well and provoke more critical representations of Indigenous communities in academic and political work through visual media.
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L (above)_treaties, executive orders, and agreements confining Blackfoot territory, 1865-present L_interview network maps record homes and movement over contributors’ lifetimes L_books 1 and 4 focus on maps with conversations about history and blood quantum A_books 2 and 3, chart interviews with satellite imagery, photography, sketching, diagrams, and paper manipulation
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BRIGHT CITY: building sunlight into harlem’s changing landscape >Design Studio, Spring 2016 >Elsa Hoover /Professor Brad Samuels
C4-4A C4-7
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[site] Zoning District - Base FAR - ICB - Max. FAR
2015 125th St. and 5th Ave., Harlem: Zoning allowances limit building height along the main commercial corridor where the site is located.
R6A 3.0 C4-4A 4 .0 C6-3 6.0 2.0 8.0 C4-7 10.0 2.0 12.0 [site] Zoning District - Base FAR - ICB - Max. FAR
2016 Rezoning approved in 2016 allows mixed-use and taller buildings, dramatically altering the neighborhood and its access to sunlight.
Harlem’s National Black Theater has been a focal point of the neighborhood and its political life for 50 years. This new theater complex and residential tower will cement NBT’s presence at 125th and 5th for the next 50 and beyond. By adapting to new zoning that is transforming Harlem’s skyline and culture, this structure preserves sunlight and open space in the form of a community garden-outdoor theater. Through three large intrusions, sunlight infiltrates the rigid Upper Manhattan concrete and creates vertical relationships between theater and residential programs.
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STREET TYPOLOGY
SITE MATERIALITY
L (above)_current and future 125th St. Commercial Corridor zoning and FAR allowances L (below)_1/16� scale chipboard model of new 16-story mixed-use theater and residential complex anchoring the National Black Theater’s home at 125th and 5th A_analyzing green space typologies in Harlem for light infiltration, material properties, and the interface of built and planned infrastructure with organic elements. These spaces included permitted community gardens, city parks, and guerrilla urban farms making use of abandoned lots. From left to right: Harlem Grown (134th St. and Malcolm X. Blvd.), El Sitio Feliz (104th St. and 3rd Ave.), Electric Ladybug Gardens (111th St. and Frederick Douglass Blvd.)
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A_using GIS and street observation to map green spaces in Harlem, including public parks and community gardens, urban farm projects, and reclaimed green space on vacant private property B_study models investigate greenhouse typologies and other light-bridging strategies for subterranean, interior, and urban block spaces relevant to the Central Harlem site
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A_public/private ground floor entrances to the new National Black Theater and corner gardens at 125th and 5th, 1/32� R_vertically scattered theater spaces that climb the structure according to light voids and, inversely, their resulting dark enclosures, floors 2-5 of 16, 1/64� 5
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A_longitudinal section of grove theater and black box studio, touching all three structural voids, 1/64� L_transverse section of entrance void from 5th Ave., 1/64�
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A_study models examine the infiltration and channeling of light in multi-level structures R_final 1/8� scale model with detachable façade revealing public/private theater programs, vertical circulation, and adjacencies for floors 1-5
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EMPIRE’S TRACKS: mapping persistent territories >Professional maps, 2018 >Elsa Hoover /Author Manu Karuka
This map series visualizes geographical and memorial ties in the histories of labor, resistance, and dispossession within the global development of colonial infrastructure. Each chapter of Empire’s Tracks: Indigenous Peoples, Racial Aliens, and the Transcontinental Railroad follows a people and the railroad as it is built through the lands of the Lakota, Pawnee, and Cheyenne Nations, among hundreds of others, with the exploited labor of Chinese migrant workers. Author Manu Karuka and I worked to develop visual language and wayfinding that respect these stories and the lands to which they belong. The book includes ten fullpage maps that accompany five narratives.
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L_Cheyenne Nation, map 1 1_Pawnee Nation, map 1 2_Pawnee Nation, map 2 3_Cheyenne Nation, map 2 4_Global railroad imperialism, map 1
5_Global railroad imperialism, map 2 6_Lakota Nation, map 1 7_Lakota Nation, map 2 8_Chinese labor, map 1 9_Chinese labor, map 2