ARCHITECTURAL
PORTFOLIO GRANT MORTHLAND UNDERGRADUATE WORKS 2020
GRANT MORTHLAND ASPIRING ARCHITECT 563.940.8341 grant.morthland@gmail.com
REFERENCES Nick Senske
4636 Norfolk Place Bettendorf, IA 52722
IOWA STATE UNIVERSITY | AMES, IA
Christian Fortuno
BACHELOR OF ARCHITECTURE -Study Abroad | Rome, Italy -GPA: 3.54
christian_fortuno@gensler.com 954.850.0015
EXPERIENCE
Gensler | Associate
Danielle Elzahr
Gensler | Studio Director
danielle_elzahr@gensler.com 305.350.7077
SKILLS Hand Drawing Conceptual Design Presentation Drafting Fabrication 3D printing CNC Modeling Robotics 3D Animation AR & VR Design
PROFICIENCIES Revit Rhinoceros Grasshopper Sketchup AutoCAD Photoshop Illustrator InDesign
www.linkedin.com/in/grantmorthland
EDUCATION
ISU | Associate Professor nsenske@iastate.edu 515.294.8711
https://issuu.com/grantmorthland
Expected May 2020 Spring 2019
GENSLER | MIAMI, FL
Summer 2019
LEGAT ARCHITECTS | MOLINE, IL
Summer 2018
PROFESSIONAL STUDENT INTERN -Lifestyle Studio -Drafted various drawings in development, construction, and administration phases. -Lead designer on Intern project in collaboration with Miami Dade Department of Transportation. -Worked within multiple design teams on projects of varying scales. ARCHITECTURE STUDENT INTERN I -Drafted various drawings in development, construction, and administration phases. -3D modeling of existing buildings from outdated plans for future renovations. -Performed life safety inspections at all Rock Island elementary schools.
AWARDS & ACHIEVEMENTS -Iowa State H. Kennard Bussard Award Finalist -Iowa State CSI Competition Award Finalist -Lightfoot Internships in Architecture Scholarship -Iowa State Kalahar Competition Award Finalist -Iowa State Dean’s List
ORGANIZATIONS -AIAS -Alpha Sigma Phi Fraternity -The National Society Of Leadership and Success -U.S. Green Building Council
Fall 2019 Fall 2019 Summer 2019 Fall 2018 Fall 2017 - Present
TABLE OF CONTENTS ENQUIRIUM 2045
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BOSTON, MA ARCH 403 FALL 2019
AFFORDABLE HOUSING
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CHELSEA, MA ARCH 302 SPRING 2018
FOOD HUB
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MINNEAPOLIS, MN ARCH 202 SPRING 2016
LANDSCAPE X ARCHITECTURE
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AMES, IA ARCH 301 FALL 2017
THIS IS NOT WILDERNESS
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COLORADO RIVER BASIN ARCH 401 FALL 2018
ENQUIRIUM 2045 Boston, MA STUDIO: Nicholas Senske TEAM: Obhishek Mandal, Doyeun Kim FALL 2019
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The future is uncertain, but if current trends in technological progress, climate change, and human lifespan persist, then learning – to reskill, to adapt, and to grow – will be essential for meaningful participation in 21st century life When, due to artificial intelligence or other disruptive shifts, people no longer have the same career, or a single career, over their lifetimes, then one’s learning pursuits, rather than their profession, may become their primary source of identity. This argument for lifetime learning occurs at a time when technological and cultural forces are challenging traditional notions of education. This objective of this studio is a new building typology for learning architectural design in the year 2045.
THE NARRATIVE
Albert Einstein once said, “If i were given 1 hour to save the planet, I would spend 59 minutes defining the problem and one minute resolving it”. This is a quote that is very relevant today and will become critical in the future. This is because as the innovation of technology progresses we will be capable of producing solutions rapidly and more efficiently as ever. However, the most important factor in the production of solutions is defining the right problem. But how do you know when you’ve identified the right problem? The most important factor in finding a suitable solution is the rigor with which the problem is defined Without rigor we end up wasting resources on trivial pursuits of innovation stemming from a superficial understanding of the issues at hand. That is why we need to become better at asking the right questions, so we can tackle the right problems. With the abundant resources we will have access to in the future, rigor will be the element that separates an effective designer from a lazy one. That is why the Enquerium is needed. The Enquerium is a school that teaches students to rigorously ask questions and provides the tools to allow them to explore their own initiatives. Students in this institution are encouraged to question anything and everything to find truly meaningful solutions to problems inspired by their own curiosities. Through informal engagements with peers, research, and rapid prototyping the only limit to what students are producing and exploring is their own imagination. The project brief states that “When, due to artificial intelligence or other disruptive shifts, people no longer have the same career, or a single career, over their lifetimes, then one’s learning pursuits – rather than their profession – may become their primary source of identity.” That is why unlike traditional institutions, our school does not dictate a single path, but a divergent flow of exploration beyond just architecture. The design of the school and its curriculum is based on investigating the unknown, understanding it, and acting upon it. The curiosities of the unknown begins throughout the open informal spaces where students can wander about endlessly, exploring the acts surrounding them. The openness and transparency of the spaces provokes constant movement that materializes into discussion. This ever present dialogue defines the spaces where they were conceived, transforming the physical environment into a canvas which assumes an expression of the life within.
Throughout the architecture lies villages of studios, planned adjacent from each other. As a continuation of the informal spaces, curiosities of the unknown are brought into a more intimate atmosphere. Within the studio is where problems are rigorously identified and acted upon. Through trial and error teams work to pursue thoughtful initiatives that respond to the collective’s quest. The studio is a space for collaboration, research, and production. Each space is designed to be tailored to the needs of the project that it houses, creating distinctively unique experiences within and around the studios. These experiences are what define the spaces, and the collection of these identities create varying atmospheres among the villages. This results in a constantly changing experience within the studio itself, its surrounding village, and throughout the rest of the architecture. The technology of the future has allowed architecture to be free from restrictions of various factors. Spaces that are free from structural or formal limitations enable the learner to think freely and increase the likelihood that a variety of conversations and activities can take place. A mixture of virtual and physical space forms the architecture, allowing learners to explore and experience a variety of direct and indirect tasks. Thus, the elements that fill this future space will be dematerialized (nonmaterial/immaterial) elements such as activities, dialogues, and interactions. This borderless space allows users to interact and collaborate with diverse fields, customize the space, and expand upon it. The collective of experiences, work, questions, and conversations are remembered by the architecture and stored within the vary element that upholds the structure. The translucent stalks that bear the physical and intellectual load act as archives accessible to anyone who enters the space. Within these stalks any aspect of past and present projects are readily available via holographic projection which visualize all kinds of interaction and thinking of learners. In this process, even the memories the archive collects have rigor which is translated back to the collective. The future holds unlimited opportunity with the technology that is to come, if we can manage it. Artificial Intelligence is much like a genie in a bottle in the fact that it will be capable of resolve many of the issues we throw at it, but the quality of the solution will only be as good as the quality of the question it is asked. That is why a repeated cycle of ask and rigorous exploration is needed to train designers to be thoughtful, deliberate, and creative in the questions they ask. 2
CONCEPTUAL DRAWINGS
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GROUND PLAN
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32
64 ft
MID-LEVEL PLAN
ROOF PLAN
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MID-LEVEL PERSPECTIVE
ROOF LEVEL PERSPECTIVE 5
MID-LEVEL PERSPECTIVE
ROAD LEVEL PERSPECTIVE 6
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AFFORDABLE HOUSING Chelsea, MA STUDIO: Kevin Lair SPRING 2018
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The people of Chelsea, MA are hidden within an undesirable, polluted, and industrial district outside of Boston. Since this land is undesirable property is cheap. It is because of these factors wht Chelsea has become a gateway community for for both undocumented and documented latino immigrants. Like many low come neighborhoods, Chelsea receives little to no help in revitilizing the area. The only help this community gets is from non-profit organizations. One fear within this community is that even if there was an effort to revitilze the neighborhood, it wouldn’t benefit the people of Chelsea, but instead gentrify the neighborhood. The question to be answered in this studio is: How can we as architects what is our role in providing social and environmental justice, without putting the community at risk of being displaced due to gentrification? There is no clear answer to this complex problem. However, providing affordable housing with a living over the store approach creates economic opportunities for the community. As well as providing opportunities for community engagement through pragmatic design. The design includes shared amenities, a community garden, and a marketplace. The site is across the street from a large salt pile which provides a large region of the United State with road salt. Even though there is a lot of industrial activity happening near the site there is opputunity to create a prosporous community. This is because the site is also along the waterfront. In the future the neighborhood can be transformed from an industrial district to a healthy space for recreation and detoxification.
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TYPICAL FLOOR PLAN
MEZZANINE LEVEL PLAN
GROUND LEVEL PLAN 11
EXPLODED AXON OF UNIT
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FOOD HUB MINNEAPOLIS, MN STUDIO: BOSUK HUR SPRING 2017
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This Project Spans the range of the problem to look at a new typology, ‘Food Hub’. The project demands the engagement with the questions of food culture,food security, food equity, and food miles in a rigorous way and to produce a program for the community of Minneapolis and the neighborhood. The program is a vehicle for understanding food culture now in 2017, and what food culture could be in Minneapolis in the future. The essence of the problem is food, and the building, or the spatial intervention on the site,will serve as an architecture device for enganging the community with the problem of food.
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The design satisfies the need for public green space with an expressive form that brings the green roof to ground level by submerging the rest of the structure underground, so it may be accessed by the street. As one ascends to either side of the roof the Minneapolis skyline is revealed. In a dense city like Minneapolis it is important to impliment green space to bring balance to the urban environment. The area underneath of the South East canteliever also serves as a protective public space for pedestrians waiting for the bus. The concaveed green roof also provokes pedestrians to slow down their fast pace lives to interact with the architecture at a smaller scale. Most of the architecture in Minneapolis are beautiful highrises which are great for admiration, but cannot be interacted with. 15
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THE NARRATIVE
LANDSCAPE X ARCHITECTURE
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Ames, IA STUDIO: Firat Erdim FALL 2017 A Narrative from the year 2040 that tells the story of the evolution of forts built by various groups of kids within the parks of Ames, IA. This project celebrates the creativity and ingenuity of children. The project also expresses how the forrest acts as a place of wonder and enchantment.
Over the last 40 years teenagers have been designing and fabricating increasingly more complex assemblies made of local reused materials at three different sites located within Ames sequentially. These forts exist only in moments, and change on a daily. Over time each fort zone develops until it experiences disruption causing the kids to abandon the current fort, and forces them to start a new one. Starting at Ines Grove in 2020 The fort members discovered some ruined foundation from an old structure and built on it. The fort was small, and it wasn’t long before the fort could no longer contain the growing number of participants and their various interests resulting in a fort feud. Shortly after many of the kids decided to start building new forts at McCarthy Lee Park. This time the kids built multiple independent forts to accommodate more activities. The kids used whatever scrap they could get their hands on to create assemblies that became increasingly more complex. Including a stargazing fort which had a retractable roof, and a fort which used a water bottle wall building technique which transforms the earth into the wall, seating, and roof. After some more time Ames experienced the worst flooding in centuries leaving a large amount of infrastructure in ruin. Although the kids lost their forts they used this flood as an opportunity to acquire an abundance of building materials to construct a new fort. What they found consisted of mostly damaged wood framing from houses, tires, a garage door, a fence, rope, mattresses, and some wreckage from the old forts. The kids worked hard over the next couple summers to develop a new kind of fort which they eventually named, “fort-town”. Instead of leaving the forts on the ground the kids decided to elevate the forts utilizing the trees inside Brookside Park as the primary structural support. This concept was made in response to the flood, also to anchor the forts to its environment and creating a new relationship with the ground, the sky, and the sectional qualities of the landscape in between. Fort Town consisted of three separate structures spaces unified with a bridge and improvised zip lines. Each of these structures housed various activities throughout the years, but what makes them special are the improvised assemblies which defined the joyful spaces. One of the forts is a double level structure which used the first level as a landing, or circulation space, and the second level located 20ft within an area clear of limbs provided an unobstructed view of the nearby creek and sky as a private glass box in the trees. The kids reused windows to construct the East and North facing walls which extended to the lower level of the fort to create a desired transparent environment. Since the space is in a small clearing a roof was designed from an old garage door so that it could be transformed into the South facing wall, so the kids could stargaze and to act as a sunshade. North of this fort is another unique fort 10ft in the air which includes barn doors as movable walls so that kids could see the environment on both sides of the fort, and to control the cross-ventilation. The most exciting component of this fort is that there is a zipline that extends 66ft to the ground on the West side of the fort zone. Over the last forty years the once simple kid fort, has evolved through a resilient process of development and destruction, as well as multiple iterations into the integrative super fort, known as “Fort Town”.
DETAIL DRAWINGS
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FRIEZE [ILLUSTRATION OF NARRATIVE]
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THIS IS NOT WILDERNESS Colorado River Basin STUDIO: Shelby Doyle PARTNER: Seth Jenkins FALL 2018
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This project examines how housing could be distributed through a bureaucratic system during times of crisis - what happens to this system if there is an infrastructural collapse in the the Colorado River Basin? Our project proposed how rapid housing production might adapt to this failure. In order to properly place housing within the basin, sites were selected at the confluence of three existing infrastructure systems. In order for these sites to be properly supplied, they were located where water sources, train infrastructure, and dense junctures of the power grid. This confluence takes advantage of existing protective canopy of infrastructure in order to maximize livability of the proposed architecture.
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The delivery of these units works with the existing networks as well, and utilizes the mobility of the train-based infrastructure of the American west. The structures are able to be assembled and packaged in urban rail yards within close proximity to construction materials and labor, and shipped to the site. This also builds a network between the sites of the basin, and will allow users to travel between sites within the basin. This is a proposal of a system that was properly planned and executed by a bureaucratic planning structure, and is assembled with an assumption that all infrastructure systems remain during a crisis situation. But, as we all know, the world is not perfect, and disaster cannot be properly planned for by any state entity. We are proposing that this system was deployed but not fully executed, as the power and transport structures failed and decayed before the complete system could be properly deployed. This leaves the proposed architecture in different stages of development and occupancy throughout the landscape, and allows for occupants to adapt the different forms of these structures within the encroaching ecologies of the future Colorado River Basin.
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6 ASSEMBLY/TRANSPORT SEQUENCING
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DRONE SURVEY/OCCUPANCY ANALYSYS
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ON-CAR FACTORY ASSEMBLY
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LOCOMOTIVE TRANSPORT
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LOCOMOTIVE/TRUCK CARGO TRANSFER
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TRUCK DELIVERY TO SITE
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ON-SITE PLACEMENT/ASSEMBLY
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The design of the dwellings themselves draw from the two models of FEMA housing from the past, being the pre-fabricated trailer, and the disaster tent. Both models on their own have proved to be unlivable structures due to climatic conditions and toxic materials. Our design mitigates these issues through the combination of both models, which allows for better performance with cross ventilation on all surfaces of the structure with sun shielding that is detached from the building itself. The design includes an exterior framing system that the housing modules nest in. This frame is to be assembled on site by highly trained professionals to ensure that occupants sit safely off the ground. The frame has legs which can be customized to adapt to any environment it is placed in as illustrated in the drawing to the left. An advantage to this structural system is that they have minimal impact on the land by leaving a very small footprint on the earth. This is important because many of the sites throughout the Colorado River Basin lie within national parks which is precious, well maintained space.
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THE NARRATIVE
As resources diminish and the infrastructure collapses.The climate refugee housing initiative is abandoned and both the architecture and the people inhabiting them are forced to adapt to a new world isolated from the rest of the nation. Within this new infrastructure-less context people and architecture are forced to abandon a dependence on infrastructure and structures of government and state. To adopt a new lifestyle where nature is embraced and relied on; instead of being exploited, over-managed, and manicured. As the narrative progresses the aesthetics of the drawings change as well. When the the housing modules are initially deployed the architecture is represented by a dull grey and technical aesthetic like the other drawings above. This is to represent the standardized or “one size fits all� solution which is implemented. When the system fails and nature reclaims the land and infrastructure, the architecture behaves in a way it was not designed to. The architecture was initially designed to be separated from the earth on stilts and to remain untouched by the elements as it sits under a large canopy. When partially deployed modules with no tents, or stilts are scattered throughout the wilderness of the basin with no protection from the elements, the architecture takes on a new identity which reciprocates the initial design concept. This new identity allows both nature and people to take ownership of the space in a symbiotic relationship. The change and adaptations that both the architecture and inhabitants endure are aesthetically represented by a gradient from greys to a vibrant color pallet. There are many ways that the architecture adapts to this new world and the last four images represents possible iterations. One shows how deployed modules reacts to the overgrown environment. The other represents how some building components can be repurposed according to function. Such how a tent structure can be repurposed as a sail to harness the power of the wind to move an undeployed module left left on a train car. 23
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