SIX_PROJECTS Portfolio
Gregor_Watson
2017
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GREGOR EDWARD WATSON 27 Rue du Temple, Saint Louis, 68300, FRANCE (+33) 7 86 42 60 22 | gregor.watson@wanadoo.fr
Education -Master degree in Architecture from ENSA Strasbourg, September 2017 - Valedictorian -Bachelor degree in Architecture from ENSA Nancy, July 2015 -French Baccalaureat with engineering speciality, July 2012
Master Projects, International Workshops, Competitions -Learning center in Basel (CH), Gradutation project, Prof Thierry Rey, 2017 -Ready Made (AU), International Workshop in Australia with Adelaide Uni and Shanghai CAUP Tongji -Los Angeles (US), International Project, Prof Dominique Coulon, Lionel Debs, & Simon Frommenwiller, 2016 -Housing in Lausanne (CH), Project, Prof Manuel Bieler, 2016 -Gare Actives (FR), Competition, Third place, 2016 -Urban Project, Colmar (FR), Project, Prof Anne Jaureguiberry, 2016 -Changing the Face (RU), Competition entry sponsored entry from Dupont,2011
Professional experience Loic Picquet Architecture, Summer 2016 -Took a key part in the preparation of a building part renovation of an historic building -Contributed on a competition for a school in Sierentz (FR) & Housing in Mulhouse (FR) -Designed floorplans and models of a police station in Guebwiller (FR) -Managed communication tasks including agency website Franรงois & Henrion Architectes, Summer 2014 -Designed floorplans and faรงades for a social housing project in Nancy (FR) -Assisted on a building permit for a classified building renovation in Nancy (FR)
Production ArchiCAD, SketchUp Pro, Vray, Kerkythea, Adobe Suite, GIMP, AutoCad, Cardboard Models, Lasercut
Additional information Born in Britain, with British and French natioanlity. Bilingual in French and English, with an intermediate level in German. 2
SIX_PROJECTS
The end of the studies are for an architecture student are a daunting moment in which we simultaneously look back at our studies and prospect the future, a sense of confusion can arise and we need to review our previous works, and make things clear for ourselves. The portfolio is a valuable tool in order to pinpoint which values are keen to us, what principles do we abide to? Who are our references? And what do we conceive architecture as? Many architects have given their share of answers to this question, where modernists seek for function and hygiene, the postmodernists seek historicism and the relation with context. Nowadays realities are multiple, some might say that the program is key, others the context, others even would hint at construction and form. All of these answers are correct but only their given paradigm, and if we consider the same basic values. The truth of these constructions are only relative and subject to emotion, the recent interest in the notion “Post truth” has only confirmed this bias. It seems that after the proclaimed death of grand narrative designing has become more complex, relative and precarious than ever. However this condition could become the beacon of new ways of thinking, and give us unprecedented freedom that can be used to build an own truth. From these multiple approaches something may emerge, maybe we can imagine that the world has been deconstructed but being fragmentarily reconstructed through these relative truths. This very societal question directly impacts our ways of doing architecture. Each projects must find it’s reason to be “raison d’être”, not only answering a key question Leibniz once asked, "why is there something rather than nothing?", but also expressing it’s core values through it’s own architectural expression. The following projects selected and presented in this portfolio are divided into three short articles describing the key architectural theories used in them. Obviously as architectural conception is not linear, the themes do not exclude themselves.
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2017 - Basel Learning Center Team : Youngnan Yoo, Martin Muckensturm
AROUND THE CORNER
Based on the documentation of two very different projects, the Basel Learning Center and a housing project in Lausanne this article describes an approached developed in the later stages of my studies. Like many students and architects who read and studied Aldo Rossi, the analogical architecture was a strong starting point that instilled a certain amount of values I judged necessary and useful.
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2017 - Basel Learning Center Theierry Rey, ENSAS
Some could dismiss it as inherently conservative, but behind Rossi’s poetics lies the blueprint for an ever-adapting philosophy. Souto De Moura claims, “To be Rossian means to me understanding culture, understanding the history of one’s own city, of one’s own places, of one’s own memory, and intertwine them, following a personal and emotional logic.”
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2017 - Basel Learning Center Theierry Rey, ENSAS
Basel is one of Switzerland’s most industrial cities with leading pharmaceutical companies still producing nowadays. Basel-Nord is currently an industrial no man’s land at the doors of Switzerland. However it is set to change in the next few years. The Novartis campus will specialise in research and development, and the district will become a new international district following the Dreiland plan. Novartis’ need for a learning center would become a key program in this district.
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2017 - Basel Learning Center Theierry Rey, ENSAS
Learning centres have successfully become the focus points of their campuses, their architecture is daring and transgressive but unfortunately ill at ease in a highly urban context. This was the occasion to redefine a fairly young program as a social catalyst and urban program with a strong relation to the city’s history
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2017 - Basel Learning Center Theierry Rey, ENSAS
We thought that the biggest threat to a learning centre is obsolescence; functional and stylistic obsolescence. So the rejection of the glass facade and monstrative architecture was not only due to the professional responsibility of a search for a design that could stand the test of time. From a functional point of view, we thought the best way to fight obsolescence was to design the building in reference to the city’s history
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2017 - Basel Learning Center Theierry Rey, ENSAS
Basel, as with other Germanic cities have specific typologies, one of which is the Hof. Basel has been looking at redefining it’s own Hof’s with key projects like the Lohnhof and Ackermanshof. We decided that we would analogically transfer the hof and it’s principles. The Hof is polarizes four programmatic entities as one around a public space. The central space reveals itself and becomes the raison d’être of the project, a generous addition to Basel as well as a unique space within the city.
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2017 - Basel Learning Center Theierry Rey, ENSAS
The lush garden is like no other in town, and only reveals itself to it’s users or visitors around the corner, it polarizes the four buildings around a space of dialogue and relaxation. The architectural expression radically changes around the corner, the urban side of the project is rigorous, urban and contains more functional usages whereas the inside is free form and creative.
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Coupe dĂŠtail perspective
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2017 - Basel Learning Center Theierry Rey, ENSAS
We proposed matrix of formal and informal work crossed by individual and collective ways of encountering people. In addition to that, we thought that face to face contact is unbeatable when one wants to create knowledge, so we multiplied throughout the building the places where people could meet: from the elevator’s lobby with a bench where to sit if you happen to run into somebody that has interesting information to share, to a transparent atrium where you can sneak into what others are doing while circulating vertically on the staircase.
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2016 - Lausanne Housing Team : Youngnan Yoo
The learning centre emphasized how the full identity of a project could be comprehended around the corner and also how different expressions could form a whole and express different levels of complexity. This was first experimented in a housing project in Lausanne. Lausanne is a sloped city with exceptional spaces that make the most of their situation, for example Flon possess’ an almost piranesian quality. Most of the cities architecture is made of plots on the slopes that slowly become blocs near the lake.
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GALLERIE /ATELIER
DENNER
M GOURMESSA
BISTRO «Au Lac»
AMVITA
KINÉ
2016 - Lausanne Housing Manuel Bieler, ENSAS
Our project was located in Ouchy and was the only place in Lausanne where you could live so close to the lake and it’s sublime landscape. We wished to create a new form for this new situation, a powerful interface between urbanity and nature. The deconstructed the traditional bloc into a weaving line. Often, blocks in Europe have substantially different interiors than exteriors, and we wished to keep this particularity, the light coming in both sides emphasizes this specificity. As with the learning centre the form drastically changes around the corner, as the building’s identity is completed.
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2016 - Lausanne Housing Manuel Bieler, ENSAS
The plan proposed to work with layers, one for night rooms, one with vertical circulations and bathrooms and one with living spaces. The plan shows our will to project the living spaces into the landscape as they extend.
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2016 - Lausanne Housing Manuel Bieler, ENSAS
In the exercise of designing housing building 1:20th scale models and experimenting with sunlight allowed us to have a very real glimpse into the spaces we were creating. The work of Thomas Demand, and of architects like Caruso&StJohn inspired us in their capacity to rendition the project with a spatial quality renders do not have.
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2016 - Lausanne Housing Manuel Bieler, ENSAS
Both projects are opportunistic and follow an almost baroque interest in making the most of space, systems, and gesture. Tension is expressed and plays with order; the intention is generous and expresses what’s most important about a given project. There is a pleasure in making these modifications in the projects, whether they are the soft and ergonomic curves of the learning center or the eroded side of the housing building.
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2016 - Lausanne Housing Manuel Bieler, ENSAS
To make the idea of revealing the full identity of the project “around the corner” it was necessary to appropriate a certain amount of known forms and modify them. I refer here to two main references, Christ & Gantebein’s modification of archetypal forms they call Prinzip der Verformung and Herzog&DeMeuron’s alteration of images and forms.
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Reference Christ & Gantenbein Kunstmuseum Basel
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2017 - Los Angeles D.Coulon, S.Frommenwiler, L.Debs
APPROPRIATION & ALTERATION
There are basic archetypal forms but also newer ones we’ve acquired, one of which is the famous New York “wedding cake” skyscrapers. It could seem conspicuous to talk about an extremly vertical form in one of the worlds most vertical cities, when designing a project in one of the world’s most horizontal cities, Los Angeles.
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2017 - Los Angeles D.Coulon, S.Frommenwiler, L.Debs
There are basic archetypal forms but also newer ones we’ve acquired, one of which is the famous New York “wedding cake” skyscrapers. It could seem conspicuous to talk about an extremly vertical form in one of the worlds most vertical cities, when designing a project in one of the world’s most horizontal cities, Los Angeles. “Where the others spend their time in libraries, I spend mine in the deserts and on the roads." Jean Baudrillard's travel diary of his time in America was first published in 1986. Baudrillard’s words still ring true today, experiencing Los Angeles’ endless horizontality first hand was shocking.
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2017 - Los Angeles D.Coulon, S.Frommenwiler, L.Debs
In the backdrop of this dramatic horizontality the city is redeveloping itself along new public transportation lines and rediscovering a downtown left unfinished after the suburban model swept the United States. In Los Angeles one becomes conscientious of the clash between these historical icons and the ephemeral mercantile world of Fast Food joints nearby, a new tower should respect the downtown’s history but in no way be melancholic.
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Ground Floor
Fourteenth Floor 2017 - Los Angeles D.Coulon, S.Frommenwiler, L.Debs
The downtown is specialising itself in High Technology and alternative business models, and we wanted to propose a building which could cater to many of peoples needs. The approach was by default diagrammatic following the example set by New York’s Downtown Athletic Club. Rather than following a strict diagram and stack, the podiums could become generous spaces. The section is divided in three large areas. A public base with public facilities, Offices and finally housing. Inbetween these large and generous opening give glimpses to the cities skyline with the suburban backdrop, they contain a kindergartens yard, a garden and a gym serving the housing on top of it.
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2013 - Nancy MJ.Canonica
The Los Angeles skyscraper takes it’s form and modifies it into something new, it is a very Angeles thing to do, most of the cities forms and flora are appropriated themselves. In the appropriation of forms one can modify an existing models to create a new instance.
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2013 - Nancy MJ.Canonica
Another form of appropriation experimented consisted in composition of different acquired forms like a slab and a house to design a mixed use project in Nancy. Here the brief called a small research unit for the Nancy Botanical gardens with a living space for the head gardeners.
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Reference Herzog&Demeuron Schaulager, Basel
2013 - Nancy MJ.Canonica
The ground slab is functional, a corridor that serves sleeping quarters for visiting staff, the research unit, and a large kitchen. The plan slightly weaves around a staircase bringing you upstairs.On top lies the most defining form, an archetypal house, image of the guardians house looking over the gardens. The house’s order is disruptive with the lever underneath, and is positioned with a precarious stability.
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2013 - Nancy MJ.Canonica
The stack makes use of the terrain with singular entries at different heights allowing multiples approaches to the building : The house only, the slab, the slab then going upstairs etc.. Even though two antonymous forms and usages are stacked, they form a whole through material unity.
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2015 - ENSA Nancy Joseph Abram
PRESENCE Archetypal forms have instant meanings and will communicate with us in a phenomenological way. The study of these effects have been central in my studies and I have wished to use them in my projects.
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Reference Martin Steinmann Regard Producteur
2015 - Nancy Romain Crozetiere
I’ve especially worked with the notion of sublime, Kant would define sublime as something overtaking our own understanding of things, Burke further categorizes it into four types, Vasteness (dimension), Greatness (signification), Infinity and Uniformity. These four terms becomes four methods for architects, as the last two projects will demonstrate. A project for a Multi-faith House of worship was a perfect instance to experiment these notions. The complex site between two historic gates would be best suited for a discreet urban approach, however the religious program it contained demanded autonomy and immediacy.
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Etage
2015 - Nancy Romain Crozetiere
The need for autonomy was reinforced by the extreme material impact of the surrounding, with two gates, and the old city walls. The geometric deformation gives the building this autonomy aswell as the use of rammed earth and concrete as an envelope GSPublisherEngine 0.0.100.100
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2015 - Nancy Romain Crozetiere
The plan divides itself in four entities, one per religion with a cultural and social programm built around it, through staircases one can go from the chapel to the study area on the top floor. The central area is the meeting point off all the different religion and fosters dialogue through ephemeral events, talks etc..
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2012/2015 - Nancy J.Peschard
A House in a fictional context designed in 2012 and reworked in 2015. Scottish Tower Castles are well documented in architecture and have been a model for many architects including Kahn. One is amazed by the contrast between the simplicity of the landscape, it’s immediacy and the castle.
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2012/2015 - Nancy J.Peschard
A house in the Highlands purpose would be to appropriate these characteristics and through alteration become a new instance of these castles. In altering these images we have freedom from representational norms, in this case the essence of the Tower Castle was abstracted to the Geometric presence of a cube
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Through the documentation of these six projects, I wished to portray an architecture strongly rooted in a contemporary discourse - that takes cues from it, while trying to remain independent and innovative in it’s own way. This portfolio is in many ways only a checkpoint in my career, it excludes rather than include. The portfolio is also personal tool, a summary of my evolution and values. In the next few years, I will look forward to conjugate new knowledge and professional skills to these themes and re-examine my work, as architecture as any language only remains alive if it evolves.
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School competition in Sierentz Internship - produced documents and models Loic Picquet Agence d’Architecture & Lionel Debs
2016
Housing competition in Mulhouse Internship - produced documents, plans and models Loic Picquet Agence d’Architecture & Lionel Debs
2016
Police Station in Guebwiller Internship - produced a model Loic Picquet Agence d’Architecture
2016
Housing in Nancy Internship - produced documents, plans and models François & Henrion
2016
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Dupont - Changing the Face Competition entry sponsored by Dupont . Personnal
2010-2011
Workshop and House Project - designing a work and living space ENSAN
2012
House in Alsace Personnal - Prospective house for a client Study
2015-2016
Office building Project - Experimenting BIM ENSAS
2015
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Living on the threshold Redefining the city’s limit in an interface with landscape Exhibed and published in Colmar ENSAS 2016
Ready Made Redefining a district through existing infrastructure Exhibed and published in Adelaide and Melbourne ENSAS | University of Adelaide
2017
Ready Made II Redefining a district through existing infrastructure Exhibed and published in Adelaide and Melbourne ENSAS | University of Adelaide 2017
Common Ground Investigation Post Industrial fabric Published in Strasbourg and Shanghai ENSAS | CAUP Tongji 2017
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2016 - California trip Luis Kahn’s Salk Institute in renovation
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2016 - California trip John Lautner’s Shears Residence
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2017 - Australia trip Urban Castles
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