EVAN ORF
PORTFOLIO OF SELECTED WORKS
2 12 18 28 36 42 52 72
Church in Place Hidden Room Revival Revival! Notes on Institutional Adaptation False Fragments Suzhou Fabrication Garden Animate Characters for a Potential City Resumé
CHURCH IN PLACE
Harvard GSD Critic: Pier Paolo Tamburelli Spring 2019
What does a small Midwestern town want in a church? Clyde, Ohio, with a population of just over 6,000, is a comfortable middle-class city with a latent nostalgia for an era in which the town was once more closely knit. Citizens recall memories of a once livelier downtown, of greater value once placed in community, of a once more prominent church life among community members. This nostalgia roots itself in the social interactions associated with both religious and secular events, even more than the events themselves.
In other words, the best part about going to church isn’t the service. It’s being together. So, in the design of a new church, Clyde doesn’t want an icon or an object, but a place for gathering together that both embeds itself in the urban context yet simultaneously creates a more intimate setting unto itself. This project for a small Methodist church in Clyde’s city center optimistically embraces both the religious and secular nature of small-town church life, and poses questions about how these two aspects might interact in a modern Clyde. Constructed and clad in wood, the church operates at the urban scale,
extending the Main Street storefront street wall with a large, open air loggia and inviting the car into the campus through a central driveway. And it condenses that urban context into a more intimate scale in the form of a central courtyard nestled between a community center and sanctuary and shaded by a large red maple tree. These components—the sanctuary, community center, lightwell-loggia, and courtyard—form a simple building diagram that both participates in the city and allows for the kinds of more intimate informal and communal interactions in which Clyde’s sense of nostalgia is based.
CHURCH IN PLACE
4
Site Plan
Spring 2019
Axonometric
5
CHURCH IN PLACE
1
6
Plans
2
Spring 2019
Model
7
CHURCH IN PLACE
8
Sections
Spring 2019
Model
9
CHURCH IN PLACE
10
Site Plan Stop-motion animation stills. Full animation: https://evanorf.com/Church-in-Place
Spring 2019
Stop-motion animation stills
11
HIDDEN ROOM
*published in GSD Platform X
Harvard GSD Critic: Andrew Holder Fall 2016
Four rooms are accessible, one room is hidden. This simple concept drives the spatial and circulatory organization of the project. Entering and leaving each room, the wanderer is presented with three options; choosing the “correct” options will ascend the wanderer through the building via long, winding ramps. Choosing only one of the wrong options will lead the wanderer to the highest space, the “top tier” of the castle, the hidden room.
Along the way, the wanderer will learn that breaks in the continuous winding walls present a crossing of paths or a shift in from one layer of circulation to another, and that dead ends present views over untraversed territory. Traversing the corridors, the highest point in the building will be constantly visible in the distance. As the systems of the building present themselves, the wanderer will realize that they must have missed something.
HIDDEN ROOM
Hidden Room
14
Interior, canyon corridor
Fall 2016
Plan: Rooms 1 and 2 3/32” = 1’0”
1 Plan: Rooms 1 and 2 3/32” = 1’0”
2 Plan: Rooms 3 and 4 3/32” = 1’0”
Plans Plan: Rooms 3 and 4 3/32” = 1’0”
15
HIDDEN ROOM
16
Fall 2016
Model
17
REVIVAL REVIVAL!
*group project with Veronica Smith *published in GSD Platform 11
Harvard GSD Critic: Jennifer Bonner Spring 2018
The story of Revival Style architecture in Los Angeles is founded in misinterpretation. The opulent Revival Style estates of the 1920s misused the functional formal elements of foreign vernaculars as vessels for realizing the owners’ elaborate fantasies. These imitations of Tudor interiors, Mayan porticos, and Classical arcades created sprawling fictional worlds in which to dwell. As these fictions trickled down into mid-century normalcy, the architectural elements that defined them flattened and de-spatialized to facilitate cheaper and denser housing.
Soon, these tacked-on details were mixed, mashed-up, and strewn across the city as lowcost versions of their ancestors. Dingbats wore mansards like ill-fitting hats, stucco boxes mimicked hardwood Tudor timbering in vinyl siding, and bungalows accented their porches with silhouettes of mission bell towers. Standard architecture protocol strongly advises us to hate these little flattened, mashed-up monsters that line the streets of LA, but we just can’t. We love the whimsy, the kit of parts looseness to their assembly, and the fantasy-driven Revival Style
Urbanism they’ve created. In our three high-density housing proposals in downtown LA, we suggest an expansion of this urbanism, re-spatializing the de-spatialized elements of L.A. Revival architecture without sacrificing the whimsy of mid-century mashups. Reviving the Revival story, we misinterpret the flattened elements of our mashed-up forebearers as deep spatial organization that doesn’t veil interior monotony, but wholly reconstitutes the internal program and circulation of the standard housing types into which the Revival elements are integrated.
REVIVAL REVIVAL!
Revival Mashup Studies
s
do
con
tudor chimney
apartment block
r
ba
neo
clas s
20
Revival style mashups, study models and animation frames, above
ical
arca
de
er tow
Spring 2018
apart
ment
s
Tower Twins / Tudor Revival + Neoclassical
m
gothic finial
iss
io
n
be ll
to we r
k loc
mayan gate
t ho ues hou
se a
sard
nd g
man
use
u-b
Components: Revival style elements, housing types, and formal types, below
21
REVIVAL REVIVAL!
22
Neoclassical + Tudor Revival Tower “twins”
Form animations: https://evanorf.com/Revival-Revival
Spring 2018
Mission Revival + French Revival U-blocks “twins”
23
REVIVAL REVIVAL!
24
Tower Plan and Section, condos + apartments + motel rooms
Spring 2018
U-Block Plan and Section, houses + apartments + motel rooms
25
REVIVAL REVIVAL!
26
Model, Warehouse District
Spring 2018
Model, Downtown LA
27
NOTES ON INSTITUTIONAL ADAPTATION
Harvard GSD Critic: John May Fall 2017
The Boston Lyric Opera, Boston Conservatory, and Berklee School of Music are growing and changing rapidly. The BLO seeks new patrons, the Conservatory looks to modernize its approach and to pioneer new music education programs for children on the autism spectrum, and the Berklee School of Music is rapidly expanding its online programs, its affiliations with both companies and other schools, and adjusting to an emerging entrepreneurial music climate.
This project, a hypothetical home for a hypothetical merger of these three institutions built over Interstate 95 in downtown Boston, brings with it all this exponential institutional change, and thus requires a building that will provide a firm foundation yet accommodate this shifting institutional identity. Flexibility and adaptation are explored in this project through precedent and institutional research and physical study models. Along the way, studies included parking garages,
promenades, and a highway rest stop. In its final form, the project reinterprets Le Corbusier’s domino frame and Ito’s Sendai Mediateque as discontinuous hollow cores whose planometric shapes shift depending on the floor. These varying core shapes do not allow for “universal” or “free” plans in the Modern sense, but instead act as an armature for secondary spatial dividers with propensities towards certain types of plans. The result is a building that is flexible, yet specified. Adaptable, but never neutral.
NOTES ON INSTITUTIONAL ADAPTATION
30
timelines: BoCo, Berklee, BLO
Fall 2018
Sectional study model, cores and columns
31
NOTES ON INSTITUTIONAL ADAPTATION
field
32
grid
Planometric core variations and the spatial divisions they suggest
grain
Fall 2018
2
3 Plans
33
NOTES ON INSTITUTIONAL ADAPTATION
4
5 34
Plans
Fall 2018
Model
35
FALSE FRAGMENTS
Harvard GSD Critic: Andrew Holder Fall 2016
Baroque architecture is difficult to replicate, and even more difficult to rip from its context. But that was the problem presented to us for our final project in our first core design studio. We were asked to design a cricket club through the reconciliation of Baroque church fragments an a nine-square grid of columns. Through analysis and reinterpretation of the function of Baroque elements, namely pilasters, apses and arched
niches, this project constructs a narrative of misappropriation that charts distortion in scale and form of architectural fragments from Rome to a small hill between two cricket pitches. Baroque fragements are distorted through the limits of foam cutting on a hot-wire cutter. The inability to cut in multiple axes requires a redefinition of the architectural elements’ traditional function and shape. Niches extracted from Borromini’s
Sant’Ivo alla Sapienza become entryways, apses become winding stairs, and pilasters bend and distort to become practice cricket pitches. In the church, the system of niches, apses, and pilasters in the drum draw the eye to the dome, to the heavens. In the cricket club, this ascencion manifests as a sectional promenade from the field to locker rooms and meeting rooms to spectator seating on the roof.
FALSE FRAGMENTS
38
Distorted Fragments, Borromini’s Sant’Ivo alla Sapienza
Fall 2016
Plan, Section
39
FALSE FRAGMENTS
40
Plan
Fall 2016
Section + Model
41
SUZHOU FABRICATION GARDEN
Harvard GSD Critic: Zhang Ke Fall 2018
The urban composition of Suzhou, China is shifting rapidly. The historically wealthy, ancient garden city is experiencing an influx of new, acontextual buildings that rise high above the low-slung courtyard fabric of the old town. Meanwhile, the ancient gardens scattered across the city embed themselves within the historic districts and isolate themselves from change. They are in a definitive stasis. As such, Suzhou is trying to support two polarizing identities that each attempt to reject the existence of the other.
This project, a woodworking and digital fabrication shop nestled between the Ming Dynasty Changyuan Garden to the west and new built apartments to the east, attempts to mediate these two polarizing identities through an adaptation of the ancient gardens’ own mediator, the meandering corridor. By opening the garden to the community instead of just tourists, rescaling, and creating a new context between both poles, the Fabrication Garden hopes to create a new link between the old and the new.
SUZHOU FABRICATION GARDEN
44
Garden Sketches, Pavilions and Corridor
Fall 2018
Ground Level Plan
45
SUZHOU FABRICATION GARDEN
46
Model, Pavilions and Corridor
Fall 2018
Upper Level Plan
47
SUZHOU FABRICATION GARDEN
48
Section, above
Fall 2018
Ground level perspective, below
49
SUZHOU FABRICATION GARDEN
50
Fall 2018
Model
51
ANIMATE CHARACTERS FOR A POTENTIAL CITY
M.Arch I Thesis Harvard GSD Advised by Andrew Holder Fall 2019
52
St. Louis has character. St. Louis is full of characters. Since the frenetically baroque Louisiana Purchase Exposition of 1904 positioned St. Louis as the next great American city, architects and politicians have treated the city as a testing ground for civic identity. Policies have fluctuated between preservation and eminent domain. Incentives have prioritized both urban flight and urban renewal. The city’s built institutions have woven a transhistorical web of borrowed symbols—from the Diocletian vaults of the Art Museum to the Chateauesque peaks of City Hall.
This agglomeration of abandoned potentials and one-off experiments forms an urban legibility based not on clarity or style or form, but on common character. St. Louis becomes a collection of micro-expressions, individual buildings—characters—each with their own psychological associations and symbolic meaning in relation to their functions and their history. They overlap sometimes. They share references and meanings. They paint a hazy, disjointed picture of St. Louis’s fraught history that never quite forms a whole.
This project, a library and public archive on the site of the historic Lemp Brewery, seeks a new institutional identity for a city whose recent resurgence can be attributed more to the will of its citizens than to the top-down interventions that formed it. Building on methods of character animation and animate architecture from Chuck Jones to Greg Lynn and beyond, this new library attempts to reflect the animate, charged heterogeneity of the city’s institutions while proposing a new empathetic character and potential future for the city.
53
ANIMATE CHARACTERS FOR A POTENTIAL CITY
St. Louis has always been a crossroads, a pitstop for those passing through. Through the 20th century, St. Louis has attempted to embed itself into a national narrative by romanticizing its historical function as a waypoint. The most iconic manifestation of that goal is the arch, a 650-foot, Saarinen-designed memorial to westward expansion. Rather than memorializing the things that have passed through, St. Louis’ efforts should be focused on taking stock of what was left behind, because though the vestigial traces of eclectic architectural styles, symbols, and experiments that stuck around don’t come cleanly wrapped in a 650 foot stainless steel bow, they are far more illustrative of the city as it was in the past and as it is now. Much of this eclecticism can be attributed to residual effects of the 1904 World’s Fair, which situated St. Louis the next great American city—not a waypoint but a destination. Unlike its rational older brother from 1893, the St. Louis World’s Fair was a baroque frenzy, pasting moments from architectural history into strange new compositions.
54
Through the rest of the 20th century, St. Louis’ architects continued in that tradition, treating civic identity like a grab bag of borrowed symbols and architectural signifiers. This fashioned a city with a seemingly illegible gaggle of conflicting architectural identities, still riding the prosperity of the world’s fair. But a closer look reveals common characteristics that shift an animate through St. Louis’ architectural progression, represented in the tracings above. With these tracings, these common characteristics, displayed on the next page, I’m trying to identify the potential for action in the buildings of St. Louis, how those actions are manifested through a diverse collection of buildings, and how those actions manifest within the buildings themselves and across multiple buildings. In this sense the architectural animate is no the physical force-based animate Greg Lynn theorized in the 1990s. Instead, this animate is based in the imaginary, in an exaggerated world in which multiple animate forces—the humorous, slapstick animation that we can relate to and understand— act at various scales, from adjacent building components to transhistorical architectural lineages.
Lemp Brewery, grain silo and office building / stock house
Fall 2019
Animate St. Louis
55
ANIMATE CHARACTERS FOR A POTENTIAL CITY
56
Character study: Shiftstep
Fall 2019
Character study: Vaultron
57
ANIMATE CHARACTERS FOR A POTENTIAL CITY
58
Character study: Kachunk
Fall 2019
Character study: Stretch Silo
59
ANIMATE CHARACTERS FOR A POTENTIAL CITY
60
Lemp Reanimated. Full animations: https://evanorf.com/Animate-Characters-for-a-Potential-City
Fall 2019
Lemp Annotated
61
ANIMATE CHARACTERS FOR A POTENTIAL CITY
62
Characters: Shiftstep + Vaultron in building
Fall 2019
Characters: Kachunk and Stretch Silo in building
63
ANIMATE CHARACTERS FOR A POTENTIAL CITY
64
Plans
Fall 2019
Model
65
ANIMATE CHARACTERS FOR A POTENTIAL CITY
66
Plans
Fall 2019
Model
67
ANIMATE CHARACTERS FOR A POTENTIAL CITY
68
Fall 2019
69
ANIMATE CHARACTERS FOR A POTENTIAL CITY
70
Fall 2019
Model
71
I make a lot of animations for my projects. To view them, please visit:
evanorf.com
August 2016 to May 2020 August 2011 to May 2015
August 2018 to Present
EDUCATION
Master in Architecture I, Harvard Graduate School of Design Bachelor of Arts in Architecture, Lehigh University - Summa Cum Laude
EVAN ORF
evanorf93@gmail.com 314-704-1249
WORK
Design Assistant, Harvard Office of Physical Resources & Planning - part-time work for Harvard’s campus architect during semesters and summers - designed renovation proposals with the campus architecture office for Harvard buildings and landscape through drawings, renderings, and models
January 2017 to Present
Architectural Designer, The Los Angeles Design Group - full-time design intern during Summer 2017, Summer 2018, and Winter breaks - part-time design intern during Spring and Summer 2020 - member of core design and fabrication team for LADG’s 2017 Chicago Biennial installation model - participated in the design development and schematic design of projects of varying scales, from small installations to single family homes to an international urban planning competition
May to August 2014
Architectural Intern, TERROIR Architects - full-time summer design intern in Copenhagen office of Sydney-based architecture firm - assisted with housing research project for the Danish Ministry of Housing - participated in design and representation for Bispebjerg Hospital Competition proposal
Summer 2020
TEACHING
Studio Instructor, Design Discovery, Harvard Graduate School of Design - Hired as an Architecture Studio Instructor for the GSD’s Design Discovery undergraduate summer program - Program was cancelled due to COVID-19 concerns
Spring 2019
Teaching Assistant, Harvard Graduate School of Design - TA for Professor Andrew Holder’s Fourth Semester Architecture Core studio - reserved rooms, organized studio pinups, held modeling and animation workshops for students - held regular check-ins with design students, involving assistance in representation, additional direction for project deliverables, reolving of logistic issues and questions, and relaying of concerns to professor
Fall 2017 to Spring 2020
Digital Media Workshop Instructor, Harvard Graduate School of Design - regular instructor for the GSD library’s Autodesk Maya workshops for six semesters - wrote lesson plans that included tutorials, small design projects, and sample working files for Maya modelling, simulation and animation basics
May to August 2014
Teaching Assistant, Lehigh University - TA for Professor Hyun-Tae Jung’s Architectural Design III Studio - provided regular critique and feedback for students’ designs and representation - held Adobe Illustrator, AutoCAD, and physical modelling workshops for students
2020
HONORS
Advanced Summer Research Grant, Harvard Graduate School of Design - for proposal to explore the potential of digital animation in architectural design pedagogy
2016 to 2020
Merit Scholarship, Harvard Graduate School of Design
2017, 2018
GSD Platform Publication, Harvard Graduate School of Design - Architecture Core I Project “Hidden Room” published in GSD Platform X - Architecture Core IV project “Revival Revival!” published in GSD Platform 11
2015
Theodore U. Horger Visual and Performing Arts Scholarship, Lehigh University
2015
Katchel Prize for Writing, Lehigh University
2014, 2015
Williams Prize for Writing, First Prize, Lehigh University
SKILLS
Software: Adobe Creative Suite, Rhinoceros, V-Ray, Autodesk Maya, Arnold, AutoCAD, Sketchup Other: Modelmaking, Hand Drafting, Presentation, Constructing Narratives, Movie Trivia, Piano