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PORTFOLIO
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GRAYSON WORD
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> GRAYSON WORD mhn964@vols.utk.edu (901) 652 8733
> education
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 3.92 design GPA Rome, Italy Spring 2020
Spring 2019 International design partnership between UTKCOAD & the Haiti Christian Development Fund
Central High School
Fall 2019 Phase 1 of a design/build studio investing in rural Appalachia
ACSA International Housing Competition
AIA Middle Tennessee
Exhibition of Undergraduate Research & Creative Achievement (EURēCA)
Brewer Ingram Fuller
College of Architecture & Design
Drawing workshop led by Perry Kulper - Dec 2019
Memphis, Tennessee Class of 2016
> honors
3rd Place - 2019
Silver Award - 2019
Student Design Award nominee - Fall 2019 Sustainable Design Award nominee - Fall 2019
Aerial_Acrobats
Award of Excellence - 2019
Dean’s List 2017 - 2020
> experience
Allen & Hoshall Inc. Summer 2020 Design Internship Memphis, Tennessee
Teaching Assistant
Fall 2019 First year representation course Professor Rana Abudayyeh
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creative skills
Revit Rhinoceros 3D Adobe InDesign Adobe Illustrator Adobe Photoshop Microsoft Office Laser cutting Sketching, drawing, drafting! Oil & acrylic painting Rubber block print-making
Swim Lesson Instructor
2010 - 2019 Midtown Memphis, Tennessee Group and private lesson swimming instructor (children age 2 yrs+)
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> CONTENTS
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2ND AND MAGNOLIA NESTED LEARNING HAITIAN HOUSING TIBER ART HOUSE VISUAL ENCOUNTERS digital mirage analog pilgrimage
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2NDAND MAGNOLIA fall 2020 professor L. David Fox South Pittsburg is a small town located near the three-way intersection of Tennessee, Alabama, and Georgia, just thirty miles west of Chattanooga. South Pittsburg once hosted a booming steel industry, a promising economic powerhouse that inspired the town’s name but soon abandoned its few faithful inhabitants. Like many towns in the southern United States, South Pittsburg was once divided into Black and white communities. This dividing line was 2nd Street, which runs east to west from the town’s main street, through the quiet neighborhood, up into the hills of lower Tennessee. Today, the separation is still very much apparent, even decades after the end of Jim Crow laws. North of 2nd Street remains the predominantly Black community. South of 2nd Street, the predominantly white community. Of course, lines have blurred as society has slowly progressed. However, upon visiting South Pittsburg, the history becomes clear and possibilities of the future dance carefully over the double yellow lane line. North of 2nd street are small houses — some shotgun style, some pre-fab, some so unique there is no term to describe them. Many are dilapidated. Large, old trees loom overhead, providing shade for local residents working in the yard or sitting on the porch. Compared to the south side of town, it’s obvious that the north side has received significantly less attention. Sidewalks, wide roads, and concrete curbs on the south side reveal the favoritism of the city’s public funding. This project is about imagining an investment in the north side and the start of a dialogue between both, hitherto discouraged by the mere 30 foot width of 2nd Street.
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AMBITIONS
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Imagine beautiful and well-designed housing for an area of town that has, historically, been told that it is not worth investment. Design a duplex that explores a relationship between two unique unit & inhabitant types: a smaller unit for a young professional or couple and a larger unit for a more established, permanent family of 3 to 5. Embrace the challenge of designing an efficient floor plan to appropriately fit on a narrow corner site.
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NESTED LEARNING fall 2019 professor R. Mark DeKay PhD teaching assistant Melanie Watchman - University of Québec > in collaboration with Katherine Hill AIA Middle Tennessee Student Design Award nominee Brewer Ingram Fuller Sustainable Design Award nominee My partner Katherine and I were assigned a claustrophobic, singlelevel primary school in Québec, Canada and were challenged to design a significant number of additional classrooms and supporting facilities while also introducing to the school the concept of biophilia. Biophilia, as we learned over the course of the semester, is the natural human instinct and urge to connect with and experience the natural environment. More specifically, biophilia concerns itself with the benefits to human mental and emotional health that access to the natural environment offers. Katherine and I focused on a typical condition in many primary schools that showed particular promise for improvement. It is common that students must trek through their school building to official egress points to reach outdoor spaces such as courtyards, playgrounds, and sports fields. To reap the benefits of biophilia, each classroom now has direct access to a balcony or ground floor patio space that is shared with one adjacent classroom. This reconfiguration of the plan opens up multiple opportunities for outdoor engagement, such as small group discussions, science experiments, lessons on facilitating plant growth, and simple delight in fresh air and sunshine. A protected outdoor courtyard in the rear maintains space for largescale recess and assembly to welcome familiar play.
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AMBITIONS
Integrate natural and classroom environments to facilitate iterative learning and accommodate all types of students Standard classroom configurations are not optimized for learning types other than visual and auditory. Our desire to accommodate more learning types goes beyond the classroom walls, pulling in the natural environment as a legitimate teaching tool and an opportunity for all-student engagement.
Promote an improvement in the mental and physical health, cognitive development, and corresponding academic performance of 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 ours this semester was to gain an understanding of the ways 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.
Set within a dense suburban neighborhood, the 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. Our initial instinct involved opening up the interior of the dense building mass, bringing in significantly more daylight. Much of our design investigates a wrapping of space, creating interior and exterior courtyards that reflect on the innate nesting of space within the site and context.
In order to accommodate an outdoor space for every classroom, we sacrificed nine classrooms in exchange for a shared, multiuse buffer between pairs. This new classroom configuration introduces new zones of learning and student / student / teacher interaction. A smaller, more private room serves as a meeting, reading, or ‘break out’ space while also facilitating the local circulation of fresh air. In addition, this intermediate zone offers space for adjacent classrooms to collaborate.
Katherine Hill
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Adjacent to this smaller-scale 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 groundlevel garden for mood-boosting access to fresh air and sunlight. Moreover, this outdoor space provides opportunities for student gardening, lessons on ecology and agriculture, and scientific experimentation.
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TIBER ARTHOUSE spring 2020 professor Andrew Kranis > initial phases in collaboration with Schuyler Daniel University of Arkansas — Rome Center study abroad Rome is one of the most famous cities in the world for its architecture, food, and art. For decades, enjoying fine art in Rome has been reserved for those who can afford steep entry fees into one of the many distinguished museums across the city. Additionally, famous, priceless art produced by world-renowned names was considered best. As the spread of technology continues to give power and a voice to ordinary people, however, contemporary art has begun to take its place at the forefront of creative culture; on our home feeds, explore pages, and Pinterest boards. Art is finally accessible. The Tiber River has been rejected, contained, and feared for over two thousand years because of its tendency to flood and spread disease. Initially, only marginalized and alienated communities lived closest to the river due to its repellent nature, while later development populated the banks with private sporting facilities and clubs, including tennis courts, rowing houses, and swimming pools. This thick band of privatization has since blocked all visual and physical access for average citizens, rendering the river inaccessible and perpetuating its reputation as a forbidden zone. Tiber Art House pins back this private zone, extending the existing arts network of Flaminio to the river’s edge. With a new hub for studios, exhibitions and public discourse, this beacon for creative collaboration forms a new aperture to the public river embankment that hides in plain sight amid the hedges and ball courts.
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AMBITIONS
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new aperture
Celebrate the power of the Tiber River and its neglected banks as an original ancient artery and perpetually dominant urban scission Extend and highlight the existing arts network of Flaminio from Renzo Piano’s Parco della Musica and Zaha Hadid’s Maxxi National Museum of 21st Century Art to a new node of artistic creation and dialogue Frame a new aperture down to the river and across Ponte Duca d’Aosta to Foro Italico, a sports complex of the 1960 Summer Olympics that sits upon the base of Monte Mario as a relic of the nation’s fascist history
vertical circulation + support
ground level galleries auditorium
private artist studios
Ponte Duca d’Aosta
Zaha Hadid’s MAXXI Museum
view of the TIBERRIVER
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Allie Chamberlain
HAITIAN HOUSING spring 2019 professor A. Katherine Ambroziak > in collaboration with Allie Chamberlain + Nicole Hamel ACSA International Housing Competition 2019 3rd place EURēCA Silver award Award of Excellence The Haiti Project began in 2011 as an opportunity for students in the College of Architecture & Design at the University of Tennessee to serve design needs in Haiti following the devastation of the earthquake. The project has developed over the past decade into a design/build studio, resulting in multiple constructed works including a secondary school and other facilities in the small town of Fond-des-Blancs, on the east end of Haiti’s Sud Department. This semester, we had the privilege of building upon the legacy of the Haiti Project, using schematic master planning work from previous University of Tennessee 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 basic generalization, many traditional and rural Haitian families occupy their homes 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 staying cool but antithetical to the ambitions of community strength held by our studio partner, the Haiti Christian Development Fund (HCDF).
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Our proposal imagines 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
Allie Chamberlain
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.
AMBITIONS
HCDF Public Community Programming
HCDF Residential Development
Weak Connection
Social Infrastructure + Commercial
Existing Residential
2018 HOUSING PROPOSAL
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Fond-des-Blancs Main Road
Neighborhood Road*
2018 Housing Proposal
Local Means of Movement Neighborhood Footpath*
Communal Yard*
Connector
25’
100’
200’
Using the 2018 Housing Proposal’s principles of spaces for gathering and socialization, we aimed to reinforce those spaces through the individual housing unit design.
400’
2019 HOUSING PROPOSAL
*In the 2018 master plan analysis, these are places of congregation
Strong Connection
2019 Housing Proposal
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Residential
A workable design that inspires dignity and pride through its ability to be customized and adapted to the preferences of its inhabitants was most important from the beginning. Elements of the design can be retrofitted with varying local materials, textiles, and methods of construction to best reflect the resident. A visually extravagant and unusually innovative design was not of critical importance to our team. Rather, a design that can serve the community and its inhabitants best made its way to the forefront of our concerns. Familiar materials and methods of construction have been used to form a series of homes to be more easily accepted by the Haitian people and satisfy underlying cultural concerns of perceived stability and strength, both physically and financially. 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. Nicole, Allie, and I analyzed the physical qualities of existing Haitian housing and its spatial relationships to understand how our proposal could better serve a rural community that is densifying.
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.
When folded up, the screens allow for a blending of zones, in which porch or ‘galerie’ is extended deeper into the interior living space.
Allie Chamberlain
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VISUALENCOUNTERS fall 2018 professor Nate Imai “a mixed-use building for two distinct institutions partnering 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 is promoted by visually permeable space. This connection 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 seems 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 prioritized, this community will fizzle. Visual connectivity and an encouraged 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 be reduced to simple programmatic dividers.
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AMBITIONS
The concept of controlled visual access was paired with an exploration of regularity and the deviation from it in the design process. 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 MIRAGE a flashlight is useful but subservient to the giants in the distance. excel spreadsheets on a drug of your choice. minds like mine milling about. can they see us out here?
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DISCOVERING BLUENESS In December 2019, I had the opportunity and privilege to participate in a drawing workshop led by University of Michigan based architect and visual creative, Perry Kulper. All 23 participants had the task of designing a cast of ‘Aerial Acrobats’ who populate a created world in the sky. Each student investigated one or more paintings 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 violently upon disruption, can be used by humankind to reach her enlightenment.
“ GUNK SPACE “ As a way to have fun while also exercising our creative energies, two of my roommates and I ventured to begin a series of digital drawings. Our first 3 drawings began upstairs in our house in a cozy nook, 2 of us on the couch, 1 on the blue bean bag. We decided: square in proportion, 10 minutes to collect as many images and graphic resources as we needed, and 40 minutes to “draw”! While there are plenty of things to be serious about in life, our goal was to embrace our creative consciences apart from the added pressures of academic deadlines and architectural commitment. These 15 images represent, for me, a cherished final year of undergrad and a taste of what is possible when I ‘just have fun with it’!
Check out @gunkspace on Instagram for the entire collection!
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ANALOG PILGRIMAGE as if just thrown by a catapult, blues meet again . . . discussing, yelling, wrestling for the lead. darkness thins and a grey of miles spreads thru to be ingested by the other side. this is promising.
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While studying abroad in Rome, I had the privilege of working with Italian professors in an on-site sketching course in which I was able to challenge my hand-drawing ability while learning about some of the most amazing monuments of the medieval & ancient world.
THE JOY OF MARK-MAKING In Spring 2019, I was finally able to fulfill a childhood vision of my future by taking a visual arts class in college. I loved to draw and paint 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, waxy 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, how to find the right ratio and consistency of water to gesso, and how to loosen up by holding 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.
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THANK YOU!
GRAYSON DOUGLAS WORD University of Tennessee, Knoxville Bachelor of Architecture 2021 mhn964@vols.utk.edu 901 652 8733