Izzy Witten 2024 Portfolio by iwitten

Landscape Centered Design

Urban Housing Approach

Experimental Investigation, Installation, and Performance

COALESCE

2023 HANSEN PRIZE

Ledges State Park Madrid, IA

ARCH 301, FALL 2022

In collaboration with Bayleigh Hughson

Coalesce: to come together to form one mass or whole, as seen by merging wild land and the domesticated into a newly hybridized environment. The project, located on the edge of Ledges State Park, aims to provide the community with a new center to approach and investigate a unique conjunction of vegetation, topography, animals, and humans. Coalesce acts as an angular extension of the existing landscape, putting the proposed idea that “What it was originally [the landscape] cannot be mimicked” into practice: an abstraction of the topography lines reveals the interdependence of our design with the site. By integrating the building and the landscape, the project reflects their necessary connection and acts as a mediator between realms, highlighting and overcoming the dichotomy between domesticated and wild nature, facilitating their interaction as a hybrid. Coalesce integrates education, research, and community, encouraging these areas to cross over: it houses the functions of an environmental education facility and welcomes the wild into the composition. The project aslo follows the flow of time, allowing Coalesce to become a ruin, evidence of a past time, and at the same time-a new feature, a new piece of the landscape, a hybrid open to new perceptions. Coalesce acts as a reminder that

our roots are forever planted in the earth.

To approach the building, a unique path is set by changes in topography and in light conditions: the journey to the structure is a slow descent into the landscape. The actions taken on the land aim to remind visitors of their deep connection to the land as they are nestled into the ground.

MASS TIMBER MANHATTANISMS

Chinatown New York, New York ARCH 302, Spring 2023

In collaboration with Bayleigh Hughson and Sierra Wroolie

This studio focused on Manhattan’s congestion through operations of lamination at multiple scales. At the scale of material: dimensional lumber is stacked and glued together to form cross-laminated timber (CLT) panels. At the scale of the building: CLT floor “plates” stack to form housing systems defined by notions of laminated space. we designed 24 units of housing with a new notion of hybridity, laminating the work, life, and fun within the New York China Town scene. A tea room interacting with the street level serves as a bridge between the densely packed city scape and the private serenity of flexible apartment living.

REQ • UI •EM

KENNARD BUSSARD PRIZE FINALIST

Black Contemporary Imaginary, Bin NO. 12 Fall 2024

In collaboration with Sierra Wroolie, Elly Schuemann, and Zoë Stenseth

Black Contemporary is Located just south of Ames, Iowa on a defunct seed drying farm consisting of farm equipment scattered throughout the property in an organized chaos with natural prairie threatening to overcome the dormant machinery. Here, previously functioning corn drying bins serve as a vessel for examining ideas within and beyond architecture where the creative output is an experimental set of speculations. We were tasked to answer the question inspired by the 60th International Art Biennial, asking what it means to be a foreigner. The ideas brought forward through the biennial were First of all, that wherever you go and wherever you are you will always encounter foreigners as they are everywhere. Secondly, that no matter where you find yourself, you are always truly, and deep down inside, a foreigner. Our work requiem draws from the latter of two meanings.

Beginning with the void of the corn bin, the darkness creates an intimacy between the person and the room. To a foreign entity, intimacy is a way to relate to a space. The foreignness of the bin is diminished through developing a comforting and intimate relationship as a means of familiarity. Here, a sense of comfort emerges through the repetition of labor. Our work is a body of our labor; a performance of finding familiarity. It touches on the tense relationship between Iowa’s natural prairie lands and the colonial capitalist practices that are now Iowa’s reality. The land and the prairie were once one, now made foreigners.

Requiem curates the prairie to the bin allowing a moment of humble contemplation of the re-imagining of the landscape.