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PORTFOLIO of selected works BY GRAYSON WORD
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GRAYSON WORD
contact me
email call or text Memphis, TN Knoxville, TN
mhn964@vols.utk.edu (901) 652 8733
316 N McNeil St, 38112 217 E Glenwood Ave, 37917
RESUME > education
cont.
University of Tennessee
The Haiti Project
University of Arkansas Rome Center
Appalachia Seminar: Moving Forward in Oneida, Kentucky
Knoxville, Tennessee Bachelor of Architecture candidate Class of 2021 3.91 design GPA Rome, Italy Spring 2020 Study abroad
Spring 2019 International design partnership between UTKCOAD & the Haiti Christian Development Fund
Fall 2019 Phase 1 of a design/build studio investing in rural Appalachia
Central High School Memphis, Tennessee Class of 2016
> honors
ACSA International Housing Competition
AIA Middle Tennessee
Exhibition of Undergraduate Research & Creative Achievement (EUReCA)
Brewer Ingram Fuller
College of Architecture & Design
Drawing workshop led by Perry Kulper - Dec. 2019
3rd Place - 2019
Silver Award - 2019
Award of Excellence - 2019
Dean’s List
Summa Cum Laude F17, S18, S19, F19
> experience
Swim Lesson Instructor
Midtown Memphis, Tennessee 2010 - 2019 Group and private lesson swimming instructor (children age 2.5 yrs+)
Teaching Assistant
Fall 2019 First year representation course Professor R. Abudayyeh
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creative skills
Revit Rhinoceros 3D Adobe InDesign Adobe Illustrator Adobe Photoshop Microsoft Office Laser Cutting Sketching, drawing, drafting! Painting (mainly oil but also acrylic) A little bit of sewing! (machine)
Student Design Award Nominee - Fall 2019 Sustainable Design Award Nominee - Fall 2019
Aerial_Acrobats
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> CONTENTS
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NESTED LEARNING HAITIAN HOUSING VISUAL ENCOUNTERS digital analog
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NESTED LEARNING fall 2019 professor R. Mark DeKay PhD teaching assistant Melanie Watchman - University of QuĂŠbec > in collaboration with Katherine Hill AIA Middle Tennessee Student Design Award nominee Brewer Ingram Fuller Sustainable Design Award nominee Assigned an existing elementary school in Quebec, Canada, my partner and I had the challenge of designing an addition of new classrooms and supporting facilities while also introducing to the site the concept of Biophilia. Biophilia, we learned over the course of the semester, is the natural instinct and urge to be connected with and experience the natural environment. More specifically, biophilia concerns itself with the benefits to human health that the natural environment offers. Katherine and I focused on a typical condition in primary schools that showed particular promise for improvement. In order to reach outdoor spaces such as courtyards, playgrounds, and sports fields, primary students must usually trek through the school to official egress points. To capitalize on the benefits of biophilia, each classroom now has direct access to a balcony or ground floor patio space shared with one adjacent classroom. This reconfiguration of the plan opens up multiple opportunities for outdoor engagement. Small group discussions, science experiments, lessons on facilitating plant growth, and simple delight are encouraged in these private gardens. A protected courtyard in the rear offers room for large-scale recess and assembly to welcome familiar play.
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Integrate natural and classroom environments to facilitate iterative learning which accommodates all types of students. Typical classroom conditions are not suited for more learning types than visual and auditory. Our desire to accommodate more learning types goes beyond the classroom walls, pulling in the natural environment as an opportunity for all-student engagement and a legitimate teaching tool. Promote an improvement in mental and physical health, cognitive development, and subsequent academic performance in students. Even more important than educational goals inside the classroom is an investment in the student as a whole. Changes made to the existing school aim to integrate the physical and mental wellbeing of the child into the benefits of the architecture through abundant access to play and physical activity. Harness existing and dynamic climatic conditions to reduce environmental impact. A large goal of this semester was to gain an understanding of the ways in which architectural systems interact with and complement one another. Our design aims to maximize the site micro-climate through geothermal heat pumps and passive ventilation for minimal environmental impact.
> Our school, whose name is undisclosed for privacy reasons, is located in the Canadian province of Québec, in a small town between Montréal to the south and Québec City to the north. Set amidst a dense suburban neighborhood, our primary school is surrounded by a small forest and low lying berms that were formed with the excavation and leveling of the site when the school was constructed in 1983. Much of our design involves a wrapping of space, creating interior and exterior courtyards, reflecting on the innate nesting of space within the site and context.
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In order to accommodate an outdoor space for every classroom, we sacrificed 9 classrooms in exchange for a shared, multi-use buffer between two. This new classroom configuration introduces new zones of learning and student/student and student/teacher interaction. A smaller, more private room serves as a meeting, reading, or ‘breakout’ space while also facilitating the local circulation of fresh air. In addition, this intermediate zone offers room for adjacent classrooms to collaborate.
Adjacent to this smallerscale learning ‘pod’ is an unconditioned garden space. Supporting our intention to accommodate all types of students through many methods of learning and teaching, each classroom has immediate access to a balcony or ground-level garden for mood-boosting access to fresh air and sunlight. Moreover, this outdoor spaces offers chances for the cultivation of plants, accessory lessons on ecology and agriculture, and opportunity for science experimentation.
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HAITIAN HOUSING spring 2019 professor A. Katherine Ambroziak > in collaboration with Allie Ward + Nicole Hamel ACSA International Housing Competition 2019 3rd place EUREcA Silver award Award of Excellence The Haiti Project began in 2011 as an opportunity for students in the College of Architecture and Design at the University of Tennessee to serve design needs in Haiti following the devastation of the earthquake. The studio has developed over time into a design/ build studio, leading to multiple constructed works, including a secondary school and other facilities in the small town of Fonddes-Blancs. This semester, we had the privilege of building upon the legacy of the Haiti Project, using schematic master planning work from previous students as the strong foundation for a new modular housing proposal. Our housing proposal invests heavily in the importance of transition, keeping in mind that, as an initial and very rough generalization, a traditional Haitian family occupies their home in zones of ‘black’ and ‘white’. The front porch acts as the most public and social zone, only steps away from an enclosed, private interior. This interior zone is perfect for cooling off from the sun but detrimental to the ambitions of community strength held by our studio partner, the Haiti Christian Development Fund (HCDF).
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Our proposal defines a new gradient of living, designed to be familiar and cost-efficient while promoting layers of visual and social transparency. This transition between ‘white, grey, and black space’ allows for a new zone: a visually permeable living space encouraging connection between community members even during family dinners or cooking. The plan above shows the relationship between a most public pathway and more private alley-ways.
most private semi-private least private
A.00 BASE 2 ROOMS 1 BATH 1 KITCHEN 1 GREY SPACE 1 GALERIE
A.01 + A.02 BASE EXTENDED + BASE WITH INDIVIDUAL 3 ROOMS 1 BATH 1 KITCHEN 1 GREY SPACE 1 GALERIE
3-4 ROOMS 1 BATH 1 KITCHEN 2 GREY-SPACES 1 GALERIE
B MULTILEVEL 4.5-5 ROOMS 2 BATH 1 KITCHEN 2 GREY-SPACES 1 GALERIE 2 BALCONIES
Folding bamboo screens allow for a sense of privacy, enclosure, and ownership while maintaining the visual permeability that is necessary for community members to interact. This visual ‘availability’ defies western, American housing traditions by allowing the home to be open-air and even vulnerable.
2019 HOUSING PROPOSAL
2018 HOUSING PROPOSAL
Three team ambitions directed the process of design in its entirety.
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A workable design that inspired dignity and pride through its own ability to be customized and adapted to the preferences of its inhabitants was most important from the beginning. Thus, elements of the design can be retrofitted with varying local materials, textiles, and methods of construction to best reflect the resident.
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A visually extravagant, conceptually bold, and unusually innovative design was not of critical importance to our team. Rather, a design that would serve the community and its inhabitants best made its way to the forefront of our concerns. Thus, familiar materials and methods of construction have been used to form a series of homes that would be accepted by the Haitian people and satisfy underlying cultural concerns of perceived stability and strength, both physically and financially.
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Rather than introduce a completely new housing typology, our team was eager to expand upon the successes of existing housing typologies and hopefully improve areas where they under-serve their communities. Thus, we analyzed the physical qualities of existing Haitian housing and the spatial relationships to understand how these could better serve a rural but densified Haitian community.
The rich ambition of the Haiti Christian Development Fund is for Haitian people of all economic status and present financial means to come together in a stable, rural working community near the town of Fond-desBlancs. Along with this dream comes a condition that these groups of people— differing in their finances but united through their common Haitian heritage and willingness to invest in the community — would not be asked to live in monotonous, lifeless ‘track’ housing, devoid of character for the sake of ‘equality’. Rather, differences are embraced and celebrated through levels of housing that differ just as the residents do.
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When folded up, the screens allow for a blending of zones, in which porch or ‘galerie’ is extended deeper into the interior living space.
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This vulnerability prevents community members from permanent retreat but maintains deserved and desired privacy in more intimate spaces.
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> VISUAL ENCOUNTERS fall 2018 professor Nate Imai For this project, I was asked to design “a mixed-use building for two distinct institutions that have partnered together to form a new vertical academy on the intersection of Knoxville’s historic Gay Street and Wall Avenue: the Knox County Public Library and a dormitory for Knoxville’s growing student population.” ‘What constitutes a physical threshold to our activities in the ubiquitous digital culture of today?’ This semester, I investigated the idea that human connection that happens as a result of visually permeable space either does not occur or is significantly hindered in architecture with walls and circulation that aim to individualize the human experience. This individualization separates people, a quite American ideal that I argue is antithetical to good public architecture. This program of a public library fused with state university housing has the potential to create an entirely new community within Knoxville as academia fuses with the hubbub of Gay Street. However, if individualized space is the goal, this community will fizzle. Visual connectivity and the forced intermingling of dormitory resident and library patron will serve as primary middleman between town and gown. Physical edges to our daily activities can be delineated through programmatic controllers such as light, material, and circulation. However, without visual access to these spacial cues, thresholds may lose their atmospheric value and are reduced to simple programmatic dividers.
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Along with the concept of controlled visual access in the design process came an exploration of regularity and the deviation from it. A rigid column grid serves as a replication of and homage to the architecture of Gay Street, whose facades loom high above the pedestrian head. A deviation in floor plate design from the rigidity of this grid allows for public library program to reflect the openness of academic pursuit. Floor plates pull away from the structure, creating triple-height spaces of learning and social connectivity. Necessary programs in both the library and student housing type have the opportunity to use vision for the benefit of the user, allowing sight lines to penetrate through spaces to connect and promote human interaction.
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DIGITAL VIEWS
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> DISCOVERING BLUENESS In December 2019, I had the opportunity and privilege to participate in a drawing workshop led by architect and visual creative Perry Kulper. All 23 participants had the task of designing a cast of ‘Aerial Acrobats’ who populated a created world in the sky. Each student chose one or more painting from Katsushika Hokusai’s Thirty-six Views of Mount Fuji, from which to imagine a new world of infinite possibility. LEFT - Tōtōumi sanchū no. 34 MID - Kōshū Kajikazawa no. 32 RIGHT - Bushū Tamagawa no. 27 In the Blueness exists the knowledge of good and evil. Only a cast of composite acrobats, trained in the practice of uncovering a subterranean material that extrudes upon contact, can be used by humankind to reach her enlightenment.
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ANALOG VIEWS
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> THEJOYOFMARK-MAKING In Spring 2019, I was finally able to fulfill a childhood vision of mine: taking a visual arts class in college. I drew and painted constantly as a child, perched on a tall chair at the kitchen counter watching in disbelief as my mother colored carefully inside the lines with a stubborn wax crayon. This intro. to oil painting class was everything I imagined a college art class could be. Taking this class was a true joy. I learned how to build a stretcher and stretch canvas, to find the right ratio and consistency of water to gesso, to loosen up and hold my brush from the end to let the marks make themselves. Painting has taught me to have patience with my medium, whatever that may be in life, and to be patient with myself. Moreover, it has shown me how important it is to accept the things I cannot control; to embrace the opportunities that come from stepping back.
During my few weeks studying abroad in Rome, I had the privilege of working with Italian professors in an intensive on-site sketching course in which I was able to challenge my handdrawing ability while being blown away by some of the most amazing monuments of Rome.
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THANK YOU! GRAYSON DOUGLAS WORD
University of Tennessee Bachelor of Architecture 2021 mhn964@vols.utk.edu 901 652 8733