GRACEANN E. NICO LOSI B . A . A r c h i t e c t u r e , Ya l e U n i v e r s i t y ‘ 2 0 Undergraduate Portfolio
contact email: graceannnicolosi@gmail.com website: graceannnicolosi.com
Selected Work Design Projects
Nomad Way-Staytion: Salt Haven
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Pop Smith Community Baseball Center
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Crown Street Community Wellness Center
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Amager Common Eatery
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Design Exercises
Dwelling and Site
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Mobile Life
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Dominant void
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Salt Haven Senior Studio, Spring 2020 Critics: Steven Harris, Gavin Hogben, Deborah Berke
Nomadism has a long and dignified history within human cultures. Although it pre-dates the settled patterns of agricultural and urbanized societies, it now survives only as fragmentary practices at the margins of a hyper-normalizing C21 global culture. In the United States, people are giving up traditional housing, either by choice or circumstance, to start their lives on the road; living in vans, RVs, ‘schoolies,’ trailers, and campers. Some drive across the country chasing seasonal jobs, while others are simply seeking an adventure. Salt Haven works towards reimagining how community gathering can take place in a nomadic society. The scheme finds a middle ground between settled and nomadic. It places an emphasis on creating communal, temporary, and adaptable spaces.
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Creating an environment that is consistent with the transient nature of nomadic communities led to early explorations of a ‘pop-up/down’ community, which accentuates the ‘here today, away tomorrow’ nature of nomads. To alleviate the lack of private space, the site offers nomads an opportunity to temporarily expand their home. Individual campsites are constructed from a set of movable and foldable walls. The position and arrangement of the walls can be tailored and customized to meet specific, individual needs of each occupant.
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L: Axonemetric Rendering R: Push, Slide, Unfold Wall Mechanism 5
Alamo River
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The site for this project is located at the shores of the Salton Sea in Southern California. Although it was once a thriving vacation destination, the salinity levels of the lake have become so dangerously intense that it has resulted in not only the abandonment of its tourism, but also the loss of nearly half of its once booming fish populations. Wetland Canals puncture the site to both organize the campsites and to correspond to a larger water filtration system. The proposed water system interacts with the greater site by filtering out and preventing harmful chemicals from entering the Salton Sea through a multistep process involving the Alamo River, sedimentation ponds, algae ponds, and constructed wetlands.
salton sea
constructed wetlands algae pond sedimentation pond
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L: Site Plans ntaR: Water Filtration System
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Section exploring different arrangements and uses of camp sites 9
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L: Arrival of visitors and possible configurations R: Close-up rendering of an individual camp site 11
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Pop Smith Community Baseball Center Senior Studio, Fall 2019 Critic: Turner Brooks and Adam Hopfner
The Pop Smith Little League Baseball Team and its facility is one of the oldest in the New Haven area, and also one that is very run down and badly needs to be re-designed to support and accommodate the increasingly enlarging vibrant community that it serves. This center is designed to address not only the needs of the players, but also the friends and family of those players. The center includes a cafe, study space, storage rooms, meeting spaces and an indoor batting cage in an effort to remain conscious of the variety of weather and seasons in New Haven.
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Site Plan 17
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L: Ground Floor Plan R: Lower Level Floor Plan 19
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L: Section Facing South R: Section Facing North 21
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L: South West View R: Interior Roof Detail 23
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Community Center Junior Studio, Spring 2019 Critic: Micheal “Surry” Schlabs
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Currently a mid-block parking lot in downtown New Haven, the site bears a historical relationship to both the lively Crown Street corridor and city’s storied theatre district. Considering the complex social history and diverse population of New Haven while also engaging with the work of the New Haven Farms and Common Ground High School, the center seeks to explore the amorphous, hybrid characters of program. The main programmatic elements of the Crown Street Community Center include a green house, cafe, kitchen (large enough for cooking classes) and a yoga and meditation studio.
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L: Site Plan R: Elevation 29
cafe
kitchen
information center
greenhouse
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work shop
reception
yoga studio
terrace
L: Ground Floor Plan R: Upper Level Floor Plan 31
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L: Lobby Render R: Greenhouse Render 33
Amager Common Eatery Danish Institute for Study Abroad, Foundations Studio, Summer 2018 Critic: Søren Amsnaes
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Tasked with designing a pavilion that would serve as an eatery and a gateway to the adjacent Amager Common, a large nature area by Ørestad. The eatery is to be used by the passersby and those spending the day in the area, embodying a contemporary take on the tradition of Danish eateries and creating a genuine atmosphere of ‘hygge.’
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KITCHEN/ STAFF AREA
SEATING
RESTROOMS
Graceann Nicolosi
PLAN 1:50
ELEVATION 1:50
KITCHEN/ STAFF AREA
SEATING
RESTROOMS
PLAN 1:50
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ELEVATION 1:50
KITCHEN/ STAFF AREA KITCHEN/ STAFF AREA
SEATING SEATING
RESTROOMS RESTROOMS
PLAN 1:50 PLAN 1:50
ELEVATION 1:50 ELEVATION 1:50
L: Concept Sketches R: Plan and Southern Elevation 27
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L: Site Plan R: Model Showing Water Facing Side 37
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Model Photographs Featuring Light and Shadow Study 39
Dwelling and Site Senior Studio, Spring 2020 Critic: Steven Harris and Gavin Hogben
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This brief project jumps into explorations of how dwelling and site interact within simple geometric constraints. The project entails three schemes, all of which highlight issues of scale and the programmatic trade-offs that are intrinsic to the architectures of the domestic. First, we were to design a single dwelling, then thirty, and then three house structures that occupy a site. The introduction of many more structures within the same geometric bounds can be thought as presenting the problems of density, or, less abstractly, of switching typologies from the lone villa to the suburb to the neighborhood.
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Scheme 1: A single elementary dwelling and site based on volumetric and areal constraints. Equal weight given to the imaginative invention and development of both the house and site, so that the overall design is the integrated outcome of a dialog between elements of equal status. and the site is not a simple subordinate frame for the house. 43
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Scheme 2: Thirty houses within the same volumetric and aerial constraints. This can be seen as a change from focusing on a singular relation between house and landscape to dealing with plural relations between each unit and its neighboring units - with landscape perhaps being relegated to composing the residual field. But, seen another way, for every particular house structure, there is also a relation to an equally particular landscape where neighboring structures are just locally prominent aspects of the overall terrain 45
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Scheme 3: Three houses that occupy the site. With just three houses, relations, both among the structures and of each to the site, may seem more singularly particular and less generic than when dealing with thirty houses. The imaginative effort and the intellectual rigor may be directed toward different demands, perhaps, less to questions of the individual and the repetitive and more to the blurring of the identity of the three structures, their programs or their domains - an investigation of co-dependence rather than independence. 47
Mobile Life Senior Studio, Spring 2020 Critic: Steven Harris and Gavin Hogben
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Tasked to examine the transformation of nomad vans from motion to rest, from ‘road mode’ to ‘camp mode,’ we were to design the devices, appliances, and mechanisms that fit out of a van relative to both stealth camping and open camping. The goal of this brief assignment was to build a detailed image of mobile life within a 1950s Citroen H Class Van, particularly to understand the close intimate scale of the van’s cabin space and to explore the devices that extend and retract when the van is at rest and is engaged to its surroundings as a camp.
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L: Plan of Van in ‘Camp-Mode’ R: Folding Mechanism of Walls and Murphy Bed 51
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Scarcity is the ruling spatial determinant, so van transformations generally retract one element to extend another, allowing for serial rather than parallel activities - and often default to a ‘stowed-for-the-road’ configuration. 53
The Dominant Void Senior Studio, Fall 2019 Critic: Turner Brooks and Adam Hopfner
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This is a full- scale installation made with raw furring strip boards. The intent was to create a void more palpably present than the structure that defines it. It calls for a rethinking of the boundary between solid and void. It questions customary definitions of “front” and “back,” and the way we interact with an object that remains stationary, yet propels the viewer to move through and around it.
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Rotated Views of Scale Model 57
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Full Scale Dominant Void Installation 59