hannah liechty b.s. arch. ball state university
Personal Information : _email : hannahjoyliechty@gmail.com _phone : 260.413.1813 _instagram : img__0001
Education :
2013-2017 Ball State University College of Architecture and Planning Muncie, IN. B.S. Arch with Honors
Awards & Recognition :
2016 2015 2013-2017 2013-2017 2013-2017 2013-2017 2013-2017
CRIPE 4th Year Capstone Competition “Design of Note” Indiana Hardwood Lumberman’s Association Competition Finalist Lilly Endowment Community Scholarship Ball State University Presidential Scholarship Ball State Honors College Residency Scholarship Carl and Margorie Strohm Scholarship F.H. Kilbourne Scholarship
Employment & Experience :
2016 Hirsuta Architectural Intern 2016 College of Architecture and Planning Assistant to Graduate Program Director, Janice Shimizu 2016 CAP Fab Lab 3D-Printing Assistant
Exhibits & Publications :
2017 College of Architectue and Planning Lecture Series Poster Graphic Designer 2016 Materials and Applications Contributions to “The Kid Gets Out of the Picture” 2016 Harvard Graduate School of Design Contributions to “The Kid Gets Out of the Picture” 2016 104th ACSA Annual Conference Work presented by James F. Kerestes as part of the “Standard Deviations” Panel 2016 GLUE Publication 12 Studio work and photography featured 2015 Muncie Makes Lab Photography and graphic art on display
Skills :
Software
Rhino 5, V Ray, ZBrush, Grasshopper, Photoshop, Illustrator, InDesign
______________content______________ _cloudspotters local 151 ______________________________ 01 _lil house on the anywhere ____________________________ 07 _the kid gets out of the picture _________________________ 17 _society of phat animals ______________________________ 27 _improvised ________________________________________ 33 _plaster children ____________________________________ 41 _meditation capsule _________________________________ 45 _deviated geneology _________________________________ 53
cloudspotters local 151
______________Instructor: Enrique Ramirez______________
In a subculture, mundane objects become icons of great meaning. Collecting, compressing and reimagining these physical representations of skating culture generates a collage of discourse. Discourse fosters resiliency in any culture—it allows a culture to expand and contract and change. Every culture is constantly changing, so it is important to be constantly reimagining the ideas, values, icons, and spaces that make up a culture. The resiliency of punk culture can be credited to its spirit of disrupting and reorganizing meaning. These proposals disrupt and reorganize the image of skating to reimagine the spaces that are meant to preserve that spirit. Skate parks are urban collages—collecting urban elements, calling them from their inconspicuous orientations, and surgically removing them to press them together at a higher density for a new purpose. Skate elements mediate between plan and elevation, making the axonometic drawing an information-rich technique. This information, compressed into elevations creates profiles derived from straight lines and tangent curves. What does the skate park become at different densities? On the spectrum of densities, there are certainly very skatable profiles and non-skatable profiles. I’m interested in finding the ambiguous “almost skatable” profile—one that flirts with the threshold of uselessness (still reminiscent of skate elements, but condensed beyond original function _____Fall2016
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and assigned a new program.) The “almost skatable” profile is looped and reoriented to the sky to augment its transformation of density and program. Skate parks borrow the formal language of found urban elements. They look like city components, but are fundamentally not cities, and do not function as cities. This pavilion redeploys the formal language of a skate park, but no longer functions like a city nor a skate park. The new function is cloud watching, an activity which epitomizes this operation of compression as a form of cartooning. The cartoon flickers between familiarity and defamiliarization through hyperbolic distortion—if you replicate something badly enough, it becomes something different, something new. We flatten clouds into profiles and cartoonize those profiles into caricatures of familiar objects for a new narrative in our minds. In the same way, skate parks are cartoon versions of cities, and the pavilion is a cartoon version of the skate park. Cloud watching says, “That’s almost a bunny.” The skate park says, “That’s almost a city.” This pavilion says, “That’s almost a skate park.” Features are compressed into different trick zones around existing skate features, and combine skating and observation spaces. Creating the new by choosing the old, traditional features; combining, compressing, and giving them a new form and meaning ecourages people of all backgrounds to enjoy skating and art.
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_almost a bunny
_almost a bunny
_urban elements
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_almost a city
_skate elements
_almost a skate park
_almost a bunny
_urban elements
_low density
_almost a city
_skate elements
_almost a skate park
_high density
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_skatable profile
_almost skatable profile
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lil’ house on the anywhere
______________Instructor: Enrique Ramirez______________
This proposal to the 2016 CRIPE competition, follows the strict requirements of the competition prompt for a community of housing for Muncie’s homeless, while it also serves as a critique of the assumptions made by the competition prompt itself. These tiny houses for the homeless are a study of dollhouses as the world’s tiniest houses and the mansions they believe they are. Dollhouses are objects to be possessed and imposed upon for the purpose of acting out a fantasy of inhabitation. They are the physical models of the dream—the ideal life. The collective power of humanity assigned convention and value to this one particular, but arbitrary and morally neutral model of life. Our conception of that life has been compressed into the dollhouse, a cute physical representation of the dream, imbedded with our associations, values, and emotions. The dollhouse as a concept is resistant to change (because it is conventional) but changeable (because it is arbitrary). This project seeks to investigate the convention of American houses, specifically those that have been reinterpreted as dollhouses, and acknowledge the powerful entities they have become, while simultaneously questioning the assumed permanent and inherent nature of these assigned values. The dollhouse is not abstract in its representation; instead it exactly scales down a mansion until we can hold, manage, and monitor the house and its inhabitants. Dollhouses are containers, more than anything and sometimes appear as toy boxes decorated in the image of a house. These containers are prized for their content more than their normative form, and the function of each room is loudly and obviously _____Fall2016
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in collaboration with Michael DePrez
communicated through the decoration applied to it. Each layer of decoration carries the teleological and aesthetic information a culture has assigned to them. Because of these qualities, the dollhouse becomes an appropriate image of demeaning domesticity in social housing. Dollhouses embody the common cartoonization of homeless men and women into the conceptual “problem of homelessness” and the fetishization of these people into one more experiment of a dying architectural trend. The simplistic, popular solutions of social housing are often counterintuitive, go unquestioned, and make many assumptions about the lives of the homeless Though they are probably well-intentioned, they are ultimately demeaning in their perception and representation of the homeless. We design modular systems that work only on a conceptual level to give the perception of choice. We design to contain, manage, and, monitor and we call it autonomy. This dollhouse serves as an object that critiques architect’s surveillance, containment, possession, and exhibition of the homeless as the architect’s dolls. All the while architects congratulate themselves on how humane their inherently demeaning design is. It is clear that our justice system is broken because our philosophy of justice is broken, so following that same philosophy when designing is destined to fail. This project reimagines and reveals with stark honesty our broken philosophy of the poor that we’ve hidden behind good intentions, but are actually communicating and imposing upon the poor through our social housing.
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_notched construction method
_wall section
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the kid gets out of the picture
______________work done for Hirsuta______________
The Kid Gets Out of the Picture explores the language and aesthetic principles of the 19th century English picturesque. Hirsuta’s contribution was to be a manifestation of the lumps, clumps, and masses of rocks in these picturesque paintings. Geometry had been adapted from the asteroid Ida, and simplified until it became an ambiguous object, its legibility flickering between rugged and geometric, natural and artificial. The painting of the individual faces follows the specific color range restrictions for picturesque paintings, organizing them in a gradient across an unrolled map of Ida. The unrolling of the map reveals the underlying logic of the form and the relationships between its parts. The black semi-opaque finish mutes and blurs the explicit transitions between colors and continues to distort the legibility of the form, emphasizing the dramatic changes in its profile when viewed from different perspectives. _____Summer2016
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_photos courtesy of Jason Payne
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_short elevation
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_long elevation
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_Ida inserted into William Gilpin’s picturesque landscapes
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_CMYK values for individual faces
Pink
Rose
Brown
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C0 M5 Y0 K0
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Beige
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Yellow
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_color map 24
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_Materials & Applications show
_Harvard Graduate School of Design show
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society of phat animals
______________Instructors: Ana de Brea & Andrea Schwartz______________
A society of animals gathers near a watering hole. Their fat blurs borders. Where does one animal begin and another end? Aesthetically, these unusual fat volumes, as singular objects, would rise out of the terrain in monolithic fashion. Collectively, the animals appeal to the idea of a cluster. Simple forms, static or animate, are attractive in large pools because the nuances between forms promote evolutionary progress. Nuanced societies of objects allow a person to select a single component as a favorite and imagines an intimate interaction and relationship with a special part of the whole. Each animal’s ego is reflective, as our human egos are. As a strong individual identity produces a respect and understanding for the whole, deliberate comparisons and contrasts reinforce the individual ego. Societies are systems within systems. Objects within objects. Spaces within spaces. These interstitial spaces occur where fat breaks skin, bleeding out from one entity to another, creating separate, but intertwining animals: a partitioned but open and flowing system. As the animal supports the society, it supports itself. The animals are formed by the nature of their typology and the nurture of light, water, and human interaction. _____Spring2016
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The function of an animal within the society determines how it interacts with other animals and the society as a whole, and its environment determines its human scale, orientation to light, and response to water. The site, made subterranean, is introspective. The animate forms of animals are made recognizable by legs, suggesting movement and hierarchy. These legs are only experienced and understood by descending into and through, what first appears to only be a gelatinous object. Once within the subterranean landscape, the cluster of blobs is revealed to be a society of individual animals with legs retaining mobility and fat pressing into the surrounding animals and environment. Louis Kahn’s value of roughness is condensed and reinterpreted as a meaningful loss of definition. These animals lose their pure shape, taking on weight and identities of their own, while their obese figures press into one another, blurring the lines of what is owned and prescribed space and what is communal and circumstantial.
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_nine square grid
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_Louis Kahn’s “society of rooms”
_nine square society of phat animals
_form evolution in primordial soup
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improvised
______________Instructors: Ana de Brea & Bob Koester______________
Improvisational comedy depends on performers’ ability to say “Yes, and…” Improvisation is a dichotomy between complete freedom and lack of control. Improvisation is about accepting fear and overcoming it. “The art of improvisation is the art of making something happen and, as such, a liberation from the absence of the work.” Queen of Improv, Tina Fey proclaims, “There are no mistakes, only opportunities.” Any step taken to further the development of the skit, performance, or piece of work is valid and prompts response. Missteps are funny, mistakes are humanizing, and misunderstanding is meaningful. The fleeting quality of improvisational performances may seem to be a missed opportunity. However, ephemeral, aberrant, and humble acts are actually assets. The unknown has value. Unique interactions with the audience breed intimacy, much like an inside joke between friends. “I guess you had to be there!” Improv comedians offer a service of entertainment and laughter, while also learning from an audience how to be spiritually and philosophically more bold. “You want this to be a more interesting world, and you want to be a braver person, and then in a dingy improv classroom someone is saying it to you.” _____Spring2016
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in collaboration with Michael DePrez
Improvisation requires a balancing act between individual advancement and group collaboration. These qualities and values are important in the spaces where we live, work, and play. A community should be a safe place to take risks by saying yes, and…” Community members collaborate while finding and establishing their own identity. The tubes create a system of individuality while the globs create a system of communal spaces. Each system recognizes the other’s individuality by either eroding or dominating at different moments, creating a symbiotic relationship between equals. Tubes erode to capitalize on possibilities of cavernous communal spaces or remain consistent when order and modularity are beneficial. The interplay of the tubes and globular forms create spatial opportunity and variety. Private living spaces are organized around communal caverns, semi-private workspaces invite collaboration, and cavernous forms become performance halls. Differing durations of tenancy provide the stability and flexibility needed to take risks. Individuals must recognize themselves as strong egos and allow others to be independent beings to contribute to a strong whole.
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_live
_work
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_circulation
_theater
_office ^ space public work
theater
^ circulation semi-private shared circulation
private^ conference room
classrooms
_apartments ^ space public work
^ circulation semi-private
^ conference room private
private public semi-private workspace circulation conference room
^ space public work
single bedroom
^ multi private conference roo bedroom
^ circulation semi-private shared circulation
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plaster children
______________Instructor: James Kerestes______________
It began as the breeding, bastardization, and deviation of pure form. Le Corbusier said, “Light and shade reveal these forms: cubes, cones, spheres, cylinders, or pyramids are the great primary forms which light reveals to advantage: the image of these is distinct and tangible within us without ambiguity.” But, there is an unexpected virtue in awkward ambiguity. The unnatural can be energetic and enticing. The initial casts were created in the interstitial space between two of Corbusier’s pure forms. The resulting objects reveal a faint memory or impression of the primitives. This subtle but pronounced suggestion of normality creates a bizarre contrast. The objects are simultaneously familiar and unfamiliar. As Nietzsche says, “alien yet uncomfortably near.” And yet, an assembly of forces aside from the primitive forms was acting on the plaster molds. The condoms, the books and the table left obvious physical remnants _____Spring2016
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in collaboration with Michael DePrez
on the plaster artifacts. It became an opportunity to study the less apparent forces that act on the mold and affect the material qualities. Time, air, and water were more ephemeral forces that could be manipulated to produce curious affects and accentuate weirdness in the composition of the offspring. By manipulating the amount of time before placing the plaster in the mold, the quantity of water mixed in the plaster, and the excess air in the condom, unique qualities arose. Air pockets, craters, and exceptionally thin shells were created. Each manipulation brought about a unique quality in the resultant creation, some predictable and some unpredictable. Corbusier’s pure forms began to serve as catalysts that drew attention to these affects. A balance between the control of ephemeral factors and the acceptance of unexpected results was reached. In the end, a deviant family of distinctive yet undeniably related children was created.
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_tear
_unpackage
_unroll
_plaster
_water
_stir
_pour
_inflate
_stretch
_tie
_shake
_mold
_place
_cut
_peel
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meditation capsule
or [the unexpected virtue of awkward ambiguity] ______________Instructor: Ana de Brea______________ The mystery of beauty is in our lack of ability to describe her, though humanity has a common experience of her. If beauty cannot be fully described, any execution of it must not be explicit. We fall in love not because we know a thing explicitly, but in fact it is our inability to fully grasp who or what a person, work of art, or a place is that attracts us. Narratives express this seductive beauty, not through scientifically listing events, but through hinting at what cannot be fully contained in language. Narrative distilled is a series of relationships and collisions. Beauty through collisions is investigated in Object Oriented Ontology (OOO). It separates an object into its “surface”— the collection of descriptors that are visible and can interact with other objects—and its “being”—the hidden quality of an object that cannot be touched, transformed or described. Any relation or collision between two objects distorts both “surfaces,” while retaining their individual “beings,” and can even define a new object through intersection. This new object is a fragment left over from the collision and it hints at the narrative of its parents. Nonlinear narratives converge and diverge, and though associated with danger and uncertainty, are often truer to reality. Disorientation challenges our perception. When we embrace the randomness that we encounter in everyday life and explore the benefits of confusion, the resulting chaos can be productive and beautiful. Perception is not about knowing reality objectively, but about contemplating our own experience. There is potential in the spectator through interaction and as much value in their relationship to an object as the object itself. An interaction with an object is an opportunity for reflection or mediation. Meditation is more than clearing the mind or quiet
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_____Fall2015
contemplation on invisible concepts. Mindfulness meditation is becoming aware of your environment, body, and mind. It is a valuable exercise to allow body and mind to collide. Meditation is an acceptance and inquisition of the obscure or unknown. This means meditation can be deep contemplation, but also playful reverie. The unknown can be a concept, an object, a space, or the physical body. Because meditation is not prescriptive, a meditative space must be ambiguous, allowing every individual to encounter, explore, and converse with the space, which becomes its own object or entity. While public meditation is acceptable in some parts of the world, it is a very private activity in the United States. A transportable capsule would allow an American to comfortably meditate in public environments. The capsule is inflatable for transportation and challenges our perceptions through the ephemeral qualities of an object’s surface, how surfaces collide, and allowing a person to not only observe, but also interact, or collide with the object. This tactile conversation between the object and person, which are both ambiguous and changing, creates a space where the uncertainty and disorientation in us all are valued. For this vulnerable interaction to exist, an egalitarian relationship must be established: the person cannot overpower the object and the object cannot intimidate the person. A large-scale object—larger than a human—dominates a person and is inhabited. A small-scale object—smaller than a human—is dominated by humans either through utilitarian or aesthetic use. For a meditative object, it became valuable to design within an awkward scale—it is unclear whether the object and its voids are meant to fit a human. This ambiguous scale encourages an exploration of the object and its interaction with the body. This flexibility and obscurity allows for a space and a meditation that is for everyone and different for everyone.
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_observation 47
_interaction 48
_private meditation capsule
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_public meditation capsule
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_small scale 51
_awkward scale
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deviated geneology
______________Instructor: James Kerestes______________
These tests of deviation and ruination of familiar forms explore the spectrum of familiarity in deviations from the familiar in order to find a critical moment where the familiar becomes illegible, and vice versa. Understanding how three-dimensional modeling tools construct these forms allows for those tools to be broken and used to glitch the familiar, breeding new forms using the DNA encoded in the geometry of the originals. Adding, subtracting, or rearranging lines of code produces different deviations of varying intensities. Deliberate acceptance of these ruined forms embraces the tension between perceived meaning and futility. This ambiguity of meaning within weird aesthetics encourages curiosity and breaks assumptions regarding the value of the familiar. _____Spring2016
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