Emily Dinnerman 2023 Portfolio

2023 Portfolio

Master of Architecture I ‘23 Southern California Institute of Architecture

As an interdisciplinary experimenter in design, I utilize a blend of research and fabrication techniques to craft intricate representations of spatial volumes. My creative drive is rooted in the dynamic interplay of forms, collaborative endeavors, and community-centric initiatives. Beyond my design pursuits, I find joy in free-diving, salsa dancing, and car racing, while also forever pursuing the flawlessly executed 3D print.

In my role as a student researcher, I am enthusiastically contributing to the co-authorship of an educational pamphlet focused on Community Land Trusts, a vital initiative addressing low-income housing challenges for Los Angeles residents. My diverse portfolio, spanning AI exploration, affordable housing solutions, material fabrication, and graphic representation, reflects my unyielding passion for materiality and innovative design concepts.

I genuinely appreciate your time and consideration in reviewing my body of work.

— Emily Dinnerman

emily.dinnerman@gmail.com

Instagram: @thedinnermanparti

Inert Inversions

DS Vertical Studio | Instructor: Dwayne Oyler | Team: Barbara Soo | Spring 2023

The idea of the line is an expressive tool that can represent a solid in plan, hidden volumes in elevation or guides in construction lines. Much of our ambition was committed to balancing the line with circulation in an airport terminal bypass located across the LAX Theme Building along the new Automated People Mover. The project proposes an exhibition hall that is fed by different forms of circulation (vehicular, pedestrian, and train) and transforms the extension of a line into dual pathways and rhythms across the airport site. We were especially interested in coupling pacing and space through the circulatory line. The first idea relies on the constriction and swelling of space, which defines how slow or fast a moving element runs through the course. The circulation adopts a split pathway, where one route churns fast, linear, and simple tricks. The other engages in a series of complex tricks, collection chambers, and hide-and-reveal moments. By intensifying the relationship between solids and voids, and creating moments of pause through circulation, our final proposal highlights the relationship of pacing in volumes through the dynamic line and split pathways.

Link to the Marble Run Machine video.

Opposite: Final physical model.

Initial concept massing model.

Opposite: Final physical model.

Ghost City DS Vertical Studio | Instructor: Casey Rehm | Fall 2022

This project emphasizes the relationship between architecture-to-ground through the application of artificial intelligence. A strict dichotomy of environmental conditions in a desert space emerges: The light and desert heat vs the shade and wetland coolness.

Neural networks are used to rescale and translate dense urban typologies into an optimized desert city. Three mutually beneficial systems are proposed: moss wetlands, a city, and a greenhouse city. Moss purifies the air and regulates local temperatures, the city prioritizes communal spaces for public flow, and the elevated greenhouses power the city below. The greenhouses convert heat into energy, house rich vegetation, and provide shade for the city below. Mashrabiya-inspired screens give naturally lit interiors, passive cooling, and protection from the sun. The thick concrete facade responds to the desert city’s diurnal swings with its high thermal mass. Tall and narrow corridors with self-shading buildings protect inhabitants from direct heat from the desert sun.

Link to the Ghost City movie.

Opposite Top: Aerial of the greenhouses. Opposite Bottom: City composition.

Top: Plaza view.

Bottom: Moss ecosystem between city platforms.

Top: Balcony view.

Bottom: Interior view of louvers.

Houdini Exercises

AS2711 Design Lab | Instructors: Eli Joteva, Case Miller | Fall 2022

This course is complementary to the Architectural Technologies Design Studio, encouraging us to explore the application of Houdini and Unreal Engine software. The following images are experiments in physics, color ramps, and object design in Houdini.

Exploding stars physics experiment.

Opposite Top: Applying flower geometries and color ramps to my 3D scanned body.

Opposite Bottom: Creating paths for particle physics flow.

Community Collider

AS3140 Project Delivery | Instructors: Pavel Getov, Kerenza

Harris | Team: Emily Dinnerman, Benjamin Jepsky, Wonjae

Lee, Tiffany Yu | Fall 2022

Community Collider is an attempt to bring the outdoor public plaza into a protective cover of a boxed off domescape. The 250,000sqft building located on 941 San Julian Street, Los Angeles offers four programs: A public market place first floor, open art studio second floor, commercial office space third floor, and private residential fourth floor with an outdoor courtyard overlooking the dome top. The design challenge focused on the integration of glass brick and ceramic brick exteriors and a glass dome interior. Special attention was paid to the floorplate to glass dome joinery sections and glass brick to ceramic brick attachment systems.

As team leader, I set project deadlines, assigned tasks to each group member, and finished drawing sets per requirements. Specifically, I worked on modeling the building in Revit, creating complex curves for the domed walls, drew the elevation and part of section, and the drew the detailed views of exterior brick and facade system.

COMMUNITY COLLIDER

Bundled Chutes

DS1121 2GB Studio | Instructor: John Enright | Spring 2022

The fabric of the city serves a platform for sight, monument, and intersection. Markets, cafes, construction sites, children at play meet in these moments. How do we bring this vibrant energy into the building? The proposed program examines the relationship between architecture and the city through a large urban campus. A plus program at the ground level serves as a playground where the public and private meet in motion: a roller-blade park and a derby rink. The ultimate goal is to gather a collection of parts into one unique component like an individual within their community.

Drawing from the site’s proximity to Chapultepec Park, this project focuses a series of volumes on the park and castle. Arranged as a loose multi-story “bundle” of volumes, they organize the interior spaces linearly and are reinforced by a series of ramps that engage circulation beside an open atrium. A secondary “C” shaped wrapper encapsulates the bundles and creates a more solid face towards the south and sky in order to minimize solar exposure.

Conceptual geometry.

Rooftop Garden Graduate Studies

Undergraduate Studies

Residential

Education Support

Administration

Rollerskate Park

Program.

Top: Circulation diagram.

Bottom: Structural axonometric diagram.

Urban Ring

DS1120 2GA Studio | Instructor: Marcelo Spina | Fall 2021

Urban schools must grapple with the demand for a holistic education in a secure space. The mat building is one approach to bring students closer to their environment with a sense of formal unity and cohesion. Urban Ring proposes a single, continuous mass that enables students to produce and perform within the protected boundaries of an elevated disc.

Puzzle pieces, which serve the primary programming, fall onto a base circle geometry. The pieces arrange into a circular programming, bound by a formal organization of the retaining circle. The building is dappled with a continuous pattern of the puzzle piece at scale. Architecture and urbanism meet at the intersection of grain (skylight) and slab (massing). As the day passes, students move through the site in clockwise formation.

The two extremes of the line and curve dictate the behavior of the puzzle pieces, encouraging them to conform, distort, and break the mold of the perimeter, underlying a pedagogy for the students within.

The courtyard at night. Opposite: Section cut through the central courtyard.

ADUs Without Borders

HT2520 AI+ADU: Housing and Neural Networks |

Instructors: Casey Rehm & Mimi Zieger | Team: Daniella Cadavid, Charlene Chen, Emily Dinnerman | Spring 2021

This research project utilizes machine learning and data analysis to make legible current housing conditions and speculate unexplored opportunities.

As of April 2021, the Los Angeles County zoning law requires an additional parking space for homes located more than a half mile from a major transit stop. Homes inside this radius are considered a part of Transit-Oriented Communities (TOC). In light of the affordable housing crisis, this project proposes a solution to fast-track accessory dwelling unit (ADU) development in neighborhoods outside the TOC boundary. The goal is to see if expanding the TOC boundary would add homes to the affordable rent pool.

We trained an image classifier program to identify feature differences between TOC and non-TOC homes. We classified 200+ two-bedroom rentals into 5 price ranges at $500 gaps. The program outputs rental values with a 65% accuracy rate. We believe the results of this project point to uninvestigated confounding factors that contribute to home value, including proximity to food deserts and amenities and neighborhood reputation. Future research could use these additional factors to further contextualize the data and develop a more robust home evaluation algorithm. The data from this ongoing research would simulate the impact of policy change in relationship to housing.

Website: https://research.sciarc.edu/projects/15backyard-home-data-explorer

Top map with added layer of available affordable homes in blue.

2D map of Los Angeles County with TOC 0.5 mile boundary in purple and Metro lines in green.

Model Making

Fall 2020 - Present Day

1:500 Site Model. Team lead for organizing, printing, and positioning all models for the class.

Woods Bagot Internship

Summer 2022

During my internship with Woods Bagot in Summer 2022, I had the opportunity to contribute to a diverse range of projects. These tasks spanned from utilizing Grasshopper scripts for Master City Planning and development, to creating presentations using Illustrator and InDesign, and conducting rendering work using Enscape, Rhino, and V-Ray.