Jesús Frías Undergraduate Portfolio by jesusfrias007

Roof to Room

A an alternative to affordable housing models

This project is a critque and proposal for collective housing in Bryan, Texas that facillitates a discourse about property lines and the cookie-cutter approach for plot subdivisions associated with suburban tract housing. The current dilemmas that emerge due to the current model for residential tract housing developments means unsuccessful transitions between the public streets and private homes resulting in out-of-the-way or no community parks, and insufficient pedestrian interaction. The goal of the studio was to provide an alternative to this issue while utilizing CLT construction. Our site consists of a part of agolf course along with adjacent existing homes. At the urban scale of our design, our objective was to maintain a relationship with the existing units on the ground level while also developing various types of communal spaces for neighbor interactions while also responing to the needs of the occupants and the units’ degree of independence as a piece of the whole. The elongated units consider the thinness of housing and are designed to the dimensions of an eight foot wide CLT panel. The masterplan emphasizes economic practicality of the shared roof which was inspired by the existing homes which seemed to share the ridge line at certain moments. Communal spaces include efforts for furthering education, fostering neighbor relationships, and commodities such as child care and medicine. An important feature at the urban scale are the sidewalks that permeate the rows allowing for more direct paths and simplified bus networks.

In collaboration with Hannah Lansford

Photo collage interior perspective

The Doll House is a physical maquette of housing that speaks to appropriation of a domestoc dwelling. Doll House

Perspective Section

Urban Trans Oblique

Share Chair

Social Experiment through design

The Share Chair is an experimental piece that attempts to reconcile and confront the individual with trade-offs and sacrifice. Upon beginning the design process, we wanted to create something that would engage two individuals in some form or another, while also restricting ourselves to the dimensions of a 8’x4’ Plywood panel for the construction of the piece. The chair was designed with ingenuity, social engagement, and portability in mind. The conclusion of this design exercise was a chair by way of a combination of 1/2” thick wooden pieces that utilize a simple sliding mechanism to maintain it’s structural rigidity. The chair can be assembled as a single individual chair, or modified into a bench to be shared with another person. Seeing as the majority of the pieces work together to combat shear forces, the transformation into a bench means sacrificing a portion of the structural integrity as well as the arm rests in order to sit with another person . The conversion diagra between single armchair and bench shall be laser engraved onto the seat of the chair when placed in public. It is then up to the user to decide whether they shall indulge in it’s comfort and rigidity for themselves, or sacrifice a bit of both for the bargain of a friendly interaction.

In collaboration with Sarah Wang

Iterattive Catalogue

8’x4’ Plywood CNC cutout

Chair Conversion Diagram

Creative Studies Center

University Campus Building

This center for creative studies was done during my fourth year integration studio which placed an emphasis on tying the conceptual foundation developed through our undergaduate studies into the pragmatic technical understandings of structure and mechanical systems. We were prompted to design a space for students learning in the creative fields on the Texas A&M campus. The criteria for the project was to consider the immediate surroundings and context at large with a focus on structure, passive design, and strong conceptual methodologies. Our design response revolved around the idea of connection. Seeing as the site was adjacent to student housing, a dining hall, and at the fringe of main campus, we saw the project as a place for everyday use by all students. Favoring a public ground floor and more designated learning on the upper floors. Formally, this resulted in a linear gesture on the site with two permeable atriums that filtered students and visitors into the green plaza and use operable windows for passive cooling. The envelope is composed of a green wall, and a ceramic shading system that deviates in orientation and portusion depending on solar radiation to prevent overheating while still filling public spaces with daylighting. The makerspace, although primarily for student use, it’s positioning on the ground floor allows it to be interpreted as a place for public workshops and engagement into the students’ creative works. The project combines student learning with public discourse, allowing for crosspollination of ideas as well as a visual connection to the outside greeenery, thus enhancing the quality of students’ creative work and process.

In collaboration with Alberto Ibarra

Interior Atrium Render

Southeast Elevation

1st Floor

2nd Floor

Northeast Perspective

Northwest Perspective

Reclamation & Void

Critique to the undermining of the territories

Reclamation is broadly known as a process of restoration within mined lands that works to repair harmful environmental effects that took place during the mining process. The objective of reclamation argues that a territory’s ontology, or “being”, is alterable in such a way that it returns to its original, “natural” state. However, the notion of reclaiming an altered territory is problematic. The focus of our research is to critique the redundancy and impossibility of the reclamation process. We illustrate this argument through AI and machine-learning to explore the relationship between solids and voids. In relating the process of reclamation to Deleuze’s philosophy, environmentally catastrophic events not only manifest in “space,” but through their “spatiality” they also change and reconfigure material reality. In other words, a mining site exists as a physical, spatial object while simultaneously modifying the space around it. Once a landscape’s spatial ontology has been modified, its temporal ontology becomes “scarred” with the modification as well. To believe that covering up the effects of a mining site is equivalent to bringing the landscape back to its original, natural state is to believe that the essence of the mine is no more than spatial. This proposal seeks to understand the reverberating ontological effects of spatial changes, possibilities and the radicality inherent in these actions.

In collaboration with Bobby, and Valeri Cangelosi

Folly Close-up

The site is generated through satellite imagery that is run through a text based neural network which uses both text prompts as well as input images in order to train. The output image is then run through a pix to pix model to generate a depth map. The Lidar meshes are then cleaned and displaced through a procedural three dimensionalization process.

Mining Site with VQGAN image imposed

The ungrounding of the void

Chunk Axonometrics

Chunk Section 1

Chunk Section 2

These Follies were produced by taking pieces from the voxel stack, and implementing part of machinery and technologies, that have a hand in pushing for resource mining through consumerism

Architectural Folly #1

Architectural Folly #2

Architectural Folly #3

Architectural Folly #4

Cyber-Hut

A speculation on the role of emerging technologies

Cyber-Hut is a speculative project which attempts to incorporate technologies brought about by the fourth industrial revolution such as A.I., swarm technologies, and biomaterials. The project extracts locally sourced straw from the site which is then spun into bales of rope. The rope serves as a means to give form to the dwelling by weaving and tying. The rope is then innoculated with mycelium then solidified through the process of baking to provide structural rigidity.This fabrication method ultimately leads to an intrinsic aesthetic rooted in the field of architecture, rooted back in history to Laugier’s primitive hut, and Lars Sparbroek’s The Sympathy of things . In using human-machine collaboration, the project attempts to combine new technological capabilities brought about by the fourth industrial revolution with historically rooted architectural techniques for creating form and structure. When contextualized, the extraction of local materials such as straw, can be repurposed and digitized to create a vernacular hut. Through these notions we reach a codependency of the ecosystem of technologies and biological entities extracted from the site. This results in an ecologically rooted take on the development of the Texas triangle, and the integration between humans, robotics, and nature.

Collaboration with Emanuel Diaz, Sergio Espinoza