Academic & Professional Portfolio of Work from 2012 -2019
Eric Lawler Selected Works: 2012-2019
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Portfolio
Curriculum Vitae
iii Education 2016
Curriculum Vitae
Ball State University College of Architecture and Planning, Muncie, IN BS in Architecture, Minor in Philosophy
Work Experience 2018-Now Kevin Daly Architects / Los Angeles, CA. Junior Designer Facebook Offices in NYC and LA 2017-2018 Morphosis Architects / Los Angeles, CA. Architectural Intern Unicorn Island Beirut New Embassy Campus Shenzhen Towers Vialia Estación de Vigo 2016-2017 Bureau Spectacular / Los Angeles, CA. Junior Designer InsideOutsideBetweenBeyond exhibit, SFMOMA PS1 Proposal, Pool Party 2015 Mark Foster Gage Architects / New York City, NY. Architectural Intern House on Île René-Levasseur 2015 Ball State University FabLab / Muncie, IN. 3D printer and CNC mill assistant 2015 Stance: An International Undergraduate Philosophy Journal. Graphic Designer Bibliography 2019 2019 2018 2016 2016 2014
Archinect ED: Normal, “How Would You Like Your Utopia?” Midwest Architectural Journeys, Belt Publishing, “Estranged Twin Cities: Gary and Magnitogorsk” CLOG: Artificial Intelligence, “Do Androids Listen to Electric Bleats?” Revista Arquitectura Entre Lineas, Grand Old Object Party Total Latin American Architecture, Actar Publishers, by Ana de Brea, Photography Ball Point, “Projecting a Diagram, Not a Hologram, of Archigram Today,”
Exhibitions 2017 2016 2015 2015 2014
Team B REJECTED Show / Cincinnati, OH, Rejected Covers for Stance Journal thinkfast Exhibit / Muncie, IN; Manhattan, KS; New York City, NY, Immaterialism AIA Ohio Valley Region Convention / Columbus, OH, INFOSHIP Muncie Makes Lab / Muncie, IN, Solo Exhibit, Immaterialism Design Communications Association Conference / Atlanta, GA, Scene Machine
Grants, Awards, Honors 2016 Ball State University, Academic Honors in Writing 2015 Ball State University College of Architecture and Planning, Honorable Mention for INFOSHIP 2014 Indiana Architectural Foundation, IAF Scholarship 2014 Indiana Concrete Masonry Association, Honorable Mention for Scene Machine 2014 Ball State University College of Architecture and Planning, 50th Anniversary Banner Prize 2014 Ball State University Writing Program, 1st Prize in Annual Writing Contest 2014 ASPiRE Undergraduate Creative Arts Program, Grant Award for Immaterialism project
Eric Lawler Selected Works: 2012-2019
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Portfolio
Table of Contents
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Table of Contents
Academic Works 02 Ice Cream House / Spring 2016 a suburban deviation of two primitives 10 Plug-In House / Fall 2013 a middle ground between apartment block and suburb 22 Gary Mixed-Use Building / Spring 2018 a chunk of landscape urbanism within Indiana’s most blighted town 34 A Playdate with an Industrial Ghost / Fall 2014 another toy block metaphor 44 INFOSHIP vs SUPERDOME / Spring 2015 a counterpoint to New Orlean’s capitalist behemoth 56 Grand Old Object Party / Fall 2015 a study of the aesthetic ‘other’ 68 2 Prototype Towers For a Capsular Civilization / Spring 2016 an urban deviation of two primitives 76 Scene Machine / Spring 2014 a pursuit of anti-gravity architecture Professional Experience 84 House on Île René-Lavasseur (Mark Foster Gage Associates) / 2015 a peak into the weird world of object relations 88 Galileo Project (Bureau Spectacular) / 2016 an unrealized turntable for Bertolt Brecht 96 SFMoMA: insideoutsidebetweenbeyond (Bureau Spectacular) / 2017 a momentary freedom from The Developer 104 China Telecommunications Center Competition Model (Morphosis Architects) / 2017 or how to sculpt acrylic sheets with a heat gun with minimal error margin 108 Unicorn Island Competition Model (Morphosis Architects) / 2018 a combinatory urbanism, reloaded
Portfolio
Eric Lawler Selected Works: 2012-2019
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Academic Works
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Eric Lawler Selected Works: 2012-2019
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Academic Works
Ice Cream House Spring 2016 - prof. James Kerestes Ice Cream House is a deviation of primitive geometry and primitive typology: the sphere and the typical single story American home. The project began as a continuous topological surface created from the pulling of spheres from a central core: a ‘goop jack,’ no longer visible save for the highest portion of the house. In this way, legibility was fought by finding power in difference. In elevation, the house produces a gradation from legible to abstracted, from sphere tops to sharded remnants. Beyond its existence as a self-justified architectural object, it’s appearance within a context of banal forms produces a very uncanny effect. A picket fence, a cozy tree; each echo centuries of familiarity, but not the house. Such an effect reminds us why enormous and new yet monotonous worlds like Disney’s Tomorrowland leave so much to be desired and why Tokyo’s eclecticism satisfies the heart much more than any hexy grand plan. Ice Cream House
But what of this house’s contribution? What does it give us? Probably nothing- but it has a clear direction in its pursuit of an upheaval of the accepted norm. The nature of normal is in absolute flux, arguably in a state of constant progress, crushing any point in deviating. An true embrace of the norm is support for trend. Yet in the same way that science fiction speculation has largely driven innovation, the future needs a manifest, a bumper for guidance. If all the avant-garde produced speculative work on ‘goopy’ formalism, the likelihood that the built future is goopular is very high. This project, rather than advocating for a Goopy Coruscant, pushes for difference and thus a distinctive urbanism that is all inclusive, echoing the balanced tension in Koolhaas’s City of the Captive Globe. A lot of repetition can be balanced with a stark opposition, a mental image in support of such a shardy yet goopy house amid trimmed trees and a homey picket fence.
Eric Lawler Selected Works: 2012-2019
Portfolio
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Longitudinal Elevation
Academic Works
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Ice Cream House
Latitudinal Elevation
Eric Lawler Selected Works: 2012-2019
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Longitudinal Section
Academic Works
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Ice Cream House
Latitudinal Section
Eric Lawler Selected Works: 2012-2019
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Physical Model (3D Print)
Academic Works
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Ice Cream House
Physical Model (3D Print)
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Eric Lawler Selected Works: 2012-2019
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Academic Works
Plug-In House Fall 2013 - prof. Andrew Wit Tokyo is among the densest cities in the world and with this status comes issues of FAR optimization and how to design spaces for people where the only possible direction is up. Through code blind spots, designers and contractors can create “impossible” floor area through the addition of lofts, attic renovations, balcony closing, and other techniques. Legality aside, these transformations challenge the definition of a useable room. Additionally, the resale value of property in Tokyo is quite low, compelling clients to commission homes with less regard for resale value, leading these dwellings to be highly unique one-offs. This leads to the reputation of Japanese architecture in the last few decades to revolve mostly around the design of homes, specifically the methods employed by their architects to invent and mold space within the tight framework of a highly dense archipelago.
Plug-In House
This house is for two individuals: an architect and a musician. It includes a practice room, a lesson room, a meditation room, a drafting room, a study, a bed room, a kitchen, and living space. The house is a part of a stack of individual dwellings. Plug-In House sits second on top of the first, providing support for both itself and the cantilevered third dwelling above. This project was done in 2013 and features updated graphics from 2017. This immense time gap deserves some reflection. I mark this time of my life as the beginning of something. It was the time where I really started figuring myself out. Andrew helped begin the process of constraint-lifting that Josh Coggeshall continued the semester after this. I was very resistant to formalism and the idea of artistic freedom. They taught me the value of experimentation, a sapling that grew bigger and brighter each successive spring. The lessons they imparted upon me, beginning with Plug-In House, launched me into the career I’m now at the floundering early years of. I didn’t know it then, but the intuitive design methods Andrew extracted from me into this house were promising. So here it is: a remastered, technicolor directors cut of the beginning of something.
Eric Lawler Selected Works: 2012-2019
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Portfolio
Work and Teach Plug
Study and Wash Plug
Life Box
Practice and Sleep Plug
Anatomical Diagram
Academic Works
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Work and Teach Plug 3. Private Lessons 5. Event Promo 7. Private Lessons
Plug-In House
Study and Wash Plug 1. Wash Up 2. Meditate 8. Read
Practice and Sleep Plug 4. Practice 6. Nap (Rare)
Schematic Organization
9. Sleep
(Typical Monday as an Off-Season Musician)
Portfolio
Eric Lawler Selected Works: 2012-2019
detail blow-ups
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Academic Works
r ed fo n n a l t e is p architec s u o n h This people: aan. This e two a musici a practic , a and e holds hing roomtion hous , a teac medita roomy room, aroom, a , stud , a bed ng room room en, a livi ground ce. kitch uses the s a terra and l home a leve
Plug-In House
The two concrete slabs that sandwich the semi-public area are flanked by brick-covered
Passers-b refer to th y must only to unders e fenestration gaze is w tand where their where it iselcome and not.
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Portfolio
Eric Lawler Selected Works: 2012-2019
Interior Renderings
Academic Works
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Fourth Level House
Third Level House
Plug-In House
Ground Level House
Relationship to Houses Above and Below
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Portfolio
Eric Lawler Selected Works: 2012-2019
First Level Floor Plan
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Academic Works
Plug-In House
Second Level Floor Plan
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Eric Lawler Selected Works: 2012-2019
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Academic Works
Plug-In House
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Eric Lawler Selected Works: 2012-2019
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Academic Works
Mixed Use Building for Gary Winter 2018 - Side Project
MUB combines a housing complex, theater, leasable office tower, commercial arcade, and an undulating park that forms a connective tissue between all the interior functions. The commercial arcade and theater is street-based, offering a place for the neighborhood to come shop, eat, and relax. All apartments in this community are rent subsidized, where rent is income based according to the average median income.. If Pruitt-Igoe was the end of Modernist idealism, this project maintains a contingency plan in the event that the government decides to cut funds. MUB’s strong commercial center serves as a backup supply of income to support the housing subsidy. MUB is a social condenser, motivated by the Constructivists’ idea of an architecture capable of shaping society into inhabitants free of ignorance and prejudices of the past. In this vein, MUB draws on skip-stop housing strategies developed in the 1920s by Constructivist architects of the OSA known as the Stroikom Units. In particular, this project draws on the lessons of the K-Type, which provided space for a kitchen and play room, and the F-Type, which lacked these amenities with the assumption that communal daycares and kitchens could remove the need for such space-wasting functions.
Mixed Use Building For Gary
MUB recalls the day when Gary was radical enough to inspire the young Soviet Union to model their industrial capital in Magnitogorsk off of the US Steel plant in Gary. Founded in 1906, 25 miles south of Chicago as a company town for US Steel, Gary was to be home to the largest steel works in the world. The world was increasingly being dominated by the output of human industry and capitalism was adapting. It was becoming apparent how lucrative it was to own not just the means of production, but the people and its city as well. To the industrialists, bankers, lawyers, and politicians who headed US Steel, Gary Works was a dream. Yet this interest spanned ideologies. The Soviets too saw in Gary a key to the fast-forwarding of their future. It represented to them a foundation upon which a powerful socialist economy and military could be built. In a world where they stood alone to defend their revolution, the future would have to be forged in steel.
Eric Lawler Selected Works: 2012-2019
24 1mi.
2mi.
N
CHICAGO (20MI)
LAKE MICHIGAN
U.S. STEEL GARY WORKS
Tyler St.
SITE
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Polk St.
GRAND CALUMET RIVER
GARY
Site Analysis - Macro
Academic Works
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0
.125 mi. 660 ft.
.25 mi. 1320 ft.
N
Van Buren St.
Harrison St.
Tyler St.
Polk St.
Fillmore St.
Pierce St.
W 4th Ave.
GARY POLICE DEPARTMENT
GARY HEALTH DEPARTMENT GENOA HEALTHCARE
ve. th A
GARY DEPT. OF INFORMATION TECHNOLOGY
MERCY HOSPITAL (ABANDONED)
W6
LAKE COUNTY ZONING RESIDENTIAL DISTRICT BUSINESS DISTRICT SPECIAL DISTRICT
Site Analysis - Immediate
Mixed Use Buiding For Gary
SITE
W 5th Ave.
Eric Lawler Selected Works: 2012-2019
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Program Distribution Diagram
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Academic Works Area Distribution Residential:
103,000 ft²
1. Housing Block 8 Floors: 2 at 6,500 ft², 6 at 15,000 ft²
43.6%
Commercial
65,000 ft²
2. Arcade Retail 1 Floor, ground level
27.5%
16.9%
40,000 ft²
3. Tower 10 Floors: floor area varies between 3000 and 5500 ft²
Grocery:
28,000 ft²
11.9%
4. 1 Floor, ground level, column-free
3.3%
Cultural:
8,000 ft²
5. 1 Theater, public and private showings, community priority Green Space:
28,000 ft²
6. Single surface, ground & roof space
Total Built Area: 236,000 ft² Total Open Area: 135,000 ft² Total Site Area: 150,000 ft² 89% Open Area
Mixed Use Buiding For Gary
Office:
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Portfolio
Eric Lawler Selected Works: 2012-2019
Floor Plan @ +5’
Floor Plan @ +50’
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Academic Works
Mixed Use Buiding For Gary
Floor Plan @ +100’
Site Plan
Eric Lawler Selected Works: 2012-2019
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Portfolio
SOUTH
NORTH
WEST
EAST
Elevations
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EL: +93’-0” TOP LVL OF F UNIT EL: +88’-6” MID LVL OF F UNIT EL: +77’-0” LWR LVL OF F UNIT EL: +69’-0” TOP LVL OF F UNIT EL: +61’-6” MID LVL OF F UNIT EL: +54’-0” LWR LVL OF F UNIT EL: +37’-6” TOP MEZANNINE EL: +26’-9” 5TH ARCADE LVL EL: +21’-0” 4TH ARCADE LVL EL: +17’-9” 3RD ARCADE LVL EL: +12’-6” 2ND ARCADE LVL EL: +8’-9” 1ST ARCADE LVL EL: +0’-0” GROUND LVL
SECTION AA
EL: +93’-0” TOP LV LOF F UNIT EL: +88’-6” MID LVL OF F UNIT EL: +77’-0” LWR LVL OF F UNIT EL: +69’-0” TOP LVL OF F UNIT EL: +61’-6” MID LVL OF F UNIT EL: +54’-0” LWR LVL OF F UNIT EL: +45’-6” BOTTOM LVL OF F UNIT EL: +38’-0” BOTTOM LVL OF F UNIT EL: +29’-0” BOTTOM LVL OF F UNIT EL: +21’-0” BOTTOM LVL OF F UNIT EL: +0’-0” GROUND LVL
SECTION BB
EL: +93’-0” TOP LV LOF F UNIT EL: +85’-6” MID LVL OF F UNIT EL: +77’-0” LWR LVL OF F UNIT EL: +69’-0” TOP LVL OF F UNIT EL: +61’-6” MID LVL OF F UNIT EL: +54’-0” LWR LVL OF F UNIT EL: +45’-6” BOTTOM LVL OF F UNIT EL: +38’-0” BOTTOM LVL OF F UNIT EL: +29’-0” BOTTOM LVL OF F UNIT EL: +21’-0” BOTTOM LVL OF F UNIT EL: +14’-5” ROOF SRF OF PARK
EL: -11’-3” GRND LVL OF GROCERY
SECTION CC
Sections
Mixed Use Buiding For Gary
EL: +96’-6” 10TH LVL OF TOWER EL: +88’-6” 9TH LVL OF TOWER EL: +80’-0” 8TH LVL OF TOWER EL: +72’-6” 7TH LVL OF TOWER EL: +64’-6” 6TH LVL OF TOWER EL: +56’-3” 5TH LVL OF TOWER
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Portfolio
Eric Lawler Selected Works: 2012-2019
Exterior rendering
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Academic Works
Mixed Use Buiding For Gary
Exterior rendering
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Academic Works
Playdate With An Industrial Ghost Spring 2015 - prof. Andrea Swartz This is a proposal for an industrial history museum for the city of Muncie focusing on its past as a regional center for manufacturing, and its eventual descent into the infamous ‘rust belt’ club. This project imagines possible new spaces that emerge from the interactions between already existing forms or ideas. It turns the existing context into a building block set of forms, using them to create new experience.
This project takes contextual typologies and arranges them in forms similar to those a child would make with a bunch of foam blocks. It appropriates the present for the creation of a new, interesting yetto-be. Architecture could continue infinitely with the possibilities that come from the rearrangements of present form; it wouldn’t have to design any new ingredients or parts. But this isn’t a future this project is arguing for. It focuses on the production of questions rather than claim a particular direction is the right one. It encourages discussion and makes no demands. This project is interested in unrecognizable form made up of recognizable parts. The shapes that create the project are regular industrial typologies readily found in cities across the country, but in this circumstance they become an unrecognizable hulk. Regular parts, crazier wholes.
Playdate With An Industrial Ghost
Several parts of the brain deal with facial perception pattern recognition. They have been instrumental in our evolutionary survival in helping us identify friends or foes. We recognize emotion and intention instantly from the vaguest impressions, to such a large extent that it often applies to non-humans as well. Faces emerge in toasters, plugs, cars, windows, food, and clouds. The minimalist smiley face is merely three shapes. Architecturally, this is exciting because when personify non-human things. We also include the attributes of character and personality, and these objects come alive within our imaginations. Architecture would be much more exciting if we saw it as something to interact with, like a character in a story, rather than a monolithic object in a field glorifying some soon-to-be obsolescent technology or some distant, detached and ambiguous formal process. ‘A Playdate with an Industrial Ghost’ aims to be both a fun character in a narrative and a formal exploration of spacial organization.
Portfolio
Eric Lawler Selected Works: 2012-2019
Industry depicted as formal fields
Industrial blox (top), toy blox (bottom)
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Academic Works
Playdate With An Industrial Ghost
Industrial blox assemblages
Toy blox assemblages
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Ground Plan
Lobby Plan
Floor Plans
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Academic Works
3rd Floor Plan
Playdate With An Industrial Ghost
4th Floor Plan
Floor Plans
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Portfolio
Eric Lawler Selected Works: 2012-2019
Perspective Section Rendering
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Academic Works
Playdate With An Industrial Ghost
Structural Frame Diagram
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Eric Lawler Selected Works: 2012-2019
Detail Rendering of Exterior Staircase
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Playdate With An Industrial Ghost
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Academic Works
Infoship vs. Superdome Spring 2015 - prof. Andrea Swartz and Robert Koester Completed for the 2015 ACSA Steel Competition in collaboration with Clint Johnson NEW ORLEANS, LA: Infoship stands as the newest character in a long history of narratives. It joins the architectural cast of characters like the new kid on the block, excited to make new friends and become part of the city. It plays dual roles as both part of a historical discourse on architecture and as a super-object in the city. Infoship allows simple dissection but difficult reassembly, where parts are easy to point out but process of assembly is rigorous, circumstantial, and subjective. It avoids any sort of blurring of the ingredients by featuring whole spheres, untrimmed cubes, and extruded cylinders in their unaltered states.
Superdome stands as a Modernist Colossus posing as an aluminum UFO. It spends its time looking good for the media by hosting world renown sporting events, concerts, and Popes. Superdome supports the financial elite who in turn will make large claims about their vast provision of opportunities and ‘trickle down economics.’ It helps the rest of the citizens here and there, but never allowing them the full benefit of its incredible revenue. This financial barrier inherently places Superdome at odds with the majority of the people of New Orleans. Superdome’s massive scalar dominance over the city creates an undeniable monument to those with the actual power. This must be contested with a new monument to the people, those with the true rights to power. The gentle giant Infoship emerged as a solution to New Orleans’ need for a democratic counterpoint to the capitalist hulk Superdome. Whereas Superdome is merely concerned with reaping profit for its financiers and providing mass entertainment, Infoship selflessly works as the city’s vanguard for the provision of free and equal access to opportunity.
Infoship vs. Superdome
Infoship was created from a systematic development of individual parts that then were compiled into one final compound whole. In one totalizing combination, positive solids, subtractive voids, celestial cafes, sky gardens, Martian landscapes, and a 9 square support grid were squished into a final form.
Portfolio
Eric Lawler Selected Works: 2012-2019
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c.
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d.
Above: Parti diagram applications condensed into 4 iterations preceding Infoship Right: Architectural stoup of contextual and programmatic elements 1. unrecognizable boundary 2. friendly topography 3. compressed location 4. curious structure 5. ambitious void 6. differing void 7. defiant void 8. wandering void 9. puncturing void 10. liberating void 11. reversing solid 12. plopping solid
Iterations
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1.
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Form Evolution Diagram
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Infoship vs. Superdome
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Portfolio
Eric Lawler Selected Works: 2012-2019
Exploded Axonometric Diagram
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Academic Works
Ground Level plan
Infoship vs. Superdome
1st level plan
Roof Level Floor Plan
Floor Plans
Eric Lawler Selected Works: 2012-2019
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Portfolio
Computer Lab
Lobby
Coffee Kiosk
Children’s Area Perspective Interior Renderings
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Academic Works
Infoship vs. Superdome
Axonometric Renderings
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Eric Lawler Selected Works: 2012-2019
Physical Model (3D Print)
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Academic Works
Infoship vs. Superdome
Physical Model (3D Print)
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Eric Lawler Selected Works: 2012-2019
Physical Model (3D Print)
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Academic Works
Infoship vs. Superdome
Physical Model (3D Print)
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Eric Lawler Selected Works: 2012-2019
RENDERING
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Academic Works
Grand Old Object Party: a Memeseum for the Universal Salon Fall 2015 - professor Rachel Dickey GOOP is a multi-purpose development for a market, pop art museum, and residences located on the south side of the intersection of Essex and Delancey on Manhattan. GOOP is a collection of theory, histories, pop culture, and democratic art movements. Its focus on objects welcomes all sorts of entities capable of interaction. One can find Piranesi’s Campo Marzio, Hejduk’s One-Half House and Diamond House, Nyan Cat, Niel deGrasse Tyson, and Serlio’s treatment of poché. On this level, it operates as a conversation of architectural theory or simply a cabinet of curiosities. On a more democratic level, this project presents a public space open to artists of all types, a Universal Salon of sorts, playing off cultural tropes and trends to produce reflections of the Now.
G.O.O.P.
Meme culture is today’s Pop Art. It arises out of an era of iPhones, plasma screens, a mass epidemic of loneliness, and an overly complicated world of too many souls in conflict with their self-perceived sense of detachment. It’s the product of a global culture coping with the ethos of Disneyland’s “It’s a Small World” and the struggle to maintain some sort of identity in a world of 8 billion people, all of us fighting to find ways to relate to each other. Situational humor is one of the strongest mechanisms to destroy this wall of difference. Buzzfeed feeds off the perceived notion of loneliness by introducing lists of relatable objects in lists such as “27 Struggles That Were All Too Real To ‘90s Kids” or “24 Things You’ll Only Know If You Have Nigerian Parents” or “38 Things All Architecture Students Know Only Too Well.” Memes run off the same momentum, creating massive amounts of customizable jokes based of one single concept or relatable character. Oftentimes they take a dunk into the ocean of absurdity, spreading virally simply because of their otherness, distinct from anything related to the norm while reinforcing new status-quos.
Eric Lawler Selected Works: 2012-2019
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Residential Level 6
Residential Level 5
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Residential Level 4
Residential Level 3
Memeseum Level 2
memeseum Level 1
Market Level 0
Exploded Program Diagram
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Academic Works
G.O.O.P.
Speculative Fabrication Method
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Eric Lawler Selected Works: 2012-2019
Level One Floor Plan: Market
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Academic Works
G.O.O.P.
Level Two Floor Plan: Memeseum
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Eric Lawler Selected Works: 2012-2019
Levels Three to Six Floor Plan: Residences
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G.O.O.P.
2-Way Section Rendering
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Eric Lawler Selected Works: 2012-2019
Interior Perspective Renderings
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Academic Works
G.O.O.P.
Exterior Rendering
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a. escalator street e. delancey street entrance to memeseum entrance to market on the corner of essex f. “goop” exterior and delancey b. catwalk light portals for residences c. “goop” exterior d. concrete skylights
Physical Model (3D Print)
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Academic Works
G.O.O.P.
Physical Model (3D Print)
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Eric Lawler Selected Works: 2012-2019
RENDERING
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Academic Works
2 Prototype Towers for a Capsular Civilization Spring 2016 - professor James Kerestes This project sought to bring a common ground to two opposing giants of form: verticality and horizontality. This ground is significant; the past century of modernism included many significant figures divided on the issue of building tight or spreading out; designing for a new future or returning to the past. Le Corbusier’s Ville Radieuse and the majority of 60s Europeans and Japanese Metabolists imagined ultradense megastructures erected in deserts, outskirts, and in place of razed, soon-to-be obsolete cities of old. This project sought a political allegiance with these latter figures while finding most audience with the theories of Archigram and their dual focus on both the individualistic consumer and the compressive, supermassive built world they live in.
Archigram and Kisho Kurokawa were captivated by the science fiction implications of the space capsule as well as the ever increasing number of personal cars on the roads and the construction of vast networks to support these capsules-on-wheels. The car for them was an extension of the house, an artificial interior. We transitioned from beings in-situ to beings in-transit; in trains, in tubes, in trams, in buses, and most of all, cars and planes.
2 Prototype Towers for a Capsular Civilization
Formally, this common ground between up and out led to an aesthetic of sweeping bends and elbows. This extruded-aluminum-gutter formalism was a natural means of connection from a horizontal plane to a vertical tower, supporting a politics of pull and launch rather than an exclusive keeping-out-of-reach or notso-ivory ivory tower. It’s apparent that we live in a capsular world, where we exist clothed with garments that act as our second skin, and live in buildings that function as our third. The notion of literal capsules brings forward our fourth skin, the most reclusive stage yet, the largest distance from our defenseless nature. This is the very reason their comfort and safety is so high; there is only one way in and no possibility for monsters under the bed unless you allow them in. Modern man is under constant attack from an overload of stimuli which require a defense mechanism that creates a natural need for shelter- for a capsular world.
Eric Lawler Selected Works: 2012-2019
70 The technique of constraining one’s self to deal only with a limited set of forms gains further authorship when one doesn’t just choose among Plato’s list, but creates their own!
Temple
Portfolio
Tower
PRIMITIVE
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5 Now, kitbash them into towers! Deviations of Made-Primitive
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Left: Kitbashed Tower; Right: Lofted Tower
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2 Prototype Towers for a Capsular Civilization
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Eric Lawler Selected Works: 2012-2019
Latitudinal Section of Base
2 Prototype Towers for a Capsular Civilization
Latitudinal Section of Top
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Eric Lawler Selected Works: 2012-2019
Physical Models (Contoured Cardboard & Casted Plaster)
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2 Prototype Towers for a Capsular Civilization
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Eric Lawler Selected Works: 2012-2019
RENDERING
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Scene Machine Spring 2014 - prof. Josh Coggeshall Looking at the historic presence of the Indianapolis site, Scene Machine recalls the day when Indiana was nothing but a fertile forest, free from humanity’s thirst for timber and charcoal. The tree canopies paid no attention to the financial efficiency of space through stacked volumes nor it they have any monetary pressures to worry about. Scene Machine mixes with contemporary reality by combining the freedom of a tree canopy and the pure function of a factory. It becomes a machine producing a creative art scene where the mind is nurtured and the heart followed. The factory workers are artists, curators, local artisans: Indy’s most creative minds. It produces a cultural product: a progressive creative scene for a most bustling Naptown.
Scene Machine also reacts against the pancake slabbing of contemporary architecture culture. As the capstone project of a second-year architecture student, the angst of isolation was high with this one. In fact, second-year Eric even had to tilt each floor in order to sleep at night, knowing that he won’t be indoctrinated into capitalist pancake architecture without a fight. Designed at the same time as I was working on a research paper on Archigram, one can easily see how I was interested in the notion of architecture-asutopian-machine. I was also inspired by their rejection of the MO of their contemporary architecture world and their refusal to accept the status quo. They longed for modernism’s start-up utopianism and cursed the profession for falling into dogma and uncritical acceptance of ways of doing things rather than having any higher motivations, passions of any kind, or some kind of hope for a better tomorrow. Scene Machine concurs.
Scene Machine
This project pursues an architecture of anti-gravity. The idea is that the structural engineer is the liberator of the build world. With steel by one’s side, one mustn’t worry about being trapped on Earth for too long. Cecil Balmond’s poetic feats inspire Scene Machine and all world builders seeking to portray the impossible.
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5. 1. why build static, flat-lining pancakes? 2. empty site 3. topography emerges 4. CMU foundation falls among the hills 5. steel superstructure forms the skeleton
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e. a. conventional program: banal beginning b. gravity switch on: program elevated to provide spatial interaction c. density applied: public connectivity d. redirection: orientation faces views and sunlight e. final touches: circulations injected
Concept Diagrams
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Scene Machine
Program / Section Diagram
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Eric Lawler Selected Works: 2012-2019
Exterior Renderings
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Scene Machine
Physical Model (3D Print)
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Eric Lawler Selected Works: 2012-2019
RENDERING
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House on Île Rene-Lavasseur Summer 2015 - Mark Fostver Gage Architects Project done with Ryan Wilson
House on Île Rene-Lavasseur
First named Fat Crystal, House on Île René-Lavasseur began as a timeless monument, appearing to have no beginning, no origin. Its design was a response to the kitbashing technique developed from MFGA’s 2014 Helsinki Guggenheim proposal, where the legibility of the objects were not hidden, but instead were essential to the reading of the design as a whole made up of discrete parts. Hippos ate breasts, minions waved hello, and Thor’s hammer anchored it to the earth. In contrast, the forms of House on Île René-Lavasseur show no sign of their identity. The kitbashed parts can’t be read as they had with Helsinki. In terms of Object Oriented Ontology, there’s more intentional emphasis on the discrete whole rather than the allowing of legible parts an equalizing degree of existence. While the Helskinki proposal was a more party-line translation of OOO’s formal possibilities, House on Île René-Lavasseur invites more focus on the architectural object than its parts. In this sense, Fat Crystal is an exploration in character creation through once-discrete parts, now blurred. Its formation escapes identification. No corny push-pull diagrams can be quickly drafted here.
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Eric Lawler Selected Works: 2012-2019
Exterior Renderings
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House on Île Rene-Lavasseur
Exterior / Interior Renderings
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Eric Lawler Selected Works: 2012-2019
SECTION DRAWING THROUGH STAGE D (LEFT) TO STAGE B (RIGHT)
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Redrawing Galileo Summer 2016 - Bureau Spectacular Project designed by Jimenez Lai, Man-Yan Lam and Steve Martinez For the Galileo project, I produced a series of detail drawings for the carousel assembly, an animation, and updated renderings for the whole scheme. The size of the stage required an investigation into robust, scalable carousel designs. In addition, my task was to produce a preliminary framing diagram with which the stage would be able to built. While the project did not get built, it serves as one of the clearest manifestations of Bureau Spectacular’s idea of architecture as narrative, a platform for the story of life to play out.
The project opened up an opportunity to thoughtfully engage the idea of back-of-house. Working with a very large poché space in which the building organizes front and back by graphically blocking out black and white patches, the proposal will allow actors, stage managers, make-up artists, technicians, musicians, and other personnel to meander and circulate within the thickness of the walls. The human action behind the scenes will constitute a very large back-of-house. We imagine a bustling world stuffed into the thick space behind Life of Galileo. The rotation allows for the changing of architectural conditions including altering of plans, sections, and elevations. These qualities are made possible through a pivoting stage, explored below.
Redrawing Galileo
The stage is a four-sided turntable that spins around one central pivot, similar to the action of a merrygo-round. The rotation activates the four elevations -- there are four positions the stage can snap to, fully utilizing the geometry of the square. After studying the play we organized all the scenes (14 in total) into categories: small, medium and large environments, in addition to a backstage area, thus assigning architectural program to each of the four sides (ABCD) of the square. The four sides are as follows: Side A the back of house area for the actors and managers to prepare for their tasks, Side B a large interior (town hall, royal quarters, etc.), Side C exterior scenes (harbor, street scene, etc.) and Side D a small interior (apartment, attic, etc.). Each side can be considered an architectural cut, as they relate closer to an architectural section drawing rather than a traditional stage. To slice off each world is to suggest each reality is on the edge of another universe, and that the forth wall is always a gestural cut between spectator.
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Carousel Technical Drawings
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Redrawing Galileo
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Eric Lawler Selected Works: 2012-2019
Axonometric Renderings
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Redrawing Galileo
Worm’s Eye Axonometric Renderings
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Eric Lawler Selected Works: 2012-2019
Top: Stage A Elevation; Bottom:Stage B Elevation
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Redrawing Galileo
Top: Stage C Elevation; Bottom: Stage D Elevation
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INSTALLATION PHOTO
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inside//outside//between//beyond February 2017 - SFMoMA: Bureau Spectacular Site photo courtesy Don Ross; all successive photos courtesy Injee Unshin. Models fabricated in collaboration with Sohun Kang, Mark Kamish, Lucas Budgett, and students of UCLA and Cal Poly Pomona
SFMoMA was extremely warm and supportive during our time there installing and touching up the models. This project wouldn’t have happened without their critical insistence on quality and a method of storytelling that doesn’t just invent a world of its own, but instead strives to check itself against the vast complexities of the real world out there, living and breathing, waxing and waning.
inside//outside//between//beyond
For inside // outside // between // beyond, I managed the project in its SD, DD, CD, fabrication, and installation phases until the opening reception at SFMoMA. This project wouldn’t have happened without the curators’ critical insistence on storytelling that doesn’t just invent a world of its own, but instead strives to check itself against the vast complexities of the reality; living and breathing, waxing and waning. The premise was simply that cities are oppressed by the financial interests of developers, and that an urbanism more interested in reflecting the characters that live within it would be a much more empathetic place to live in. If buildings are designed to reflect the quirks and personalities of its inhabitants, the city would be much more open to nuanced moments and surprises resulting from the imperfections manifest in the designs. Fully extruded site boundaries create oppressive monoliths of capitalism that restrict the idiosyncrasies of personal expression.
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Bubble Apartments Full Shot
inside//outside//between//beyond
Detail Shots
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Floating Public Building Full Shot
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inside//outside//between//beyond
Detail Shots
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Eric Lawler Selected Works: 2012-2019
Atypical Core Full Shot
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inside//outside//between//beyond
Detail Shots
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China Telecommunications Center Competition Model Winter 2017 - Morphosis Architects All photos courtesy Jasmine Park, model in collaboration with Eric Meyer, Fredy Gomez, and Ilko Iliev
China Telecommunications Center
This model was produced for a competition project proposal for a Chinese comunications company headquarters in Shenzhen. The competition asked for urban design proposals for an “urban village,” here combined into a compound scheme of two solitary towers unified by a single plinth. It included a retail artery through the base, an office tower, a residential tower, and public plaza and park areas. The shop was tasked with the fabrication of a 3’ x 1’ presentation model, made up of 3D printed chunks (floor slabs and structural skeleton) mounted on two aluminum cores, and skinned with chromed acrylic, heat-formed to fit the gestural facades. Throughout the process, we worked with the project manager and lead designer and refined techniques of 3D print cleanup and resin treatment, chrome painting, texturizing chipboard via laser cutter, heat forming facade segments, tolerance adjusting, seam removal, material grain removal, and miscellaneous touchup work.
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China Telecommunications Center
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MODEL PHOTO
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Unicorn Island Competition Model Spring 2018 - Morphosis Architects All photos courtesy Jasmine Park, model in collaboration with Eric Meyer, Fredy Gomez, and Ibrahim Ibrahim This model was produced as a part of a competition proposal for a new district in Chengdu, China to support the development of “Unicorns” or, privately held startup companies valued at or above a billion dollars. The competition asked for an urban proposal that combined business districts, green infrastructure, and housing. The shop was tasked with the fabrication of a 4’ x 4’ presentation model, made up of 3D printed urban chunks attached to an MDF base and skinned with laser etched chipboard. Interspersed throughout are resin-printed towers and housing blocks. Throughout the process, we worked with the project manager and lead designer and refined techniques of 3D print cleanup and resin treatment, tolerance adjusting, seam removal, material grain removal, and miscellaneous touchup work. Unicorn Island
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Unicorn Island
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Thank You.