Joseph Raffin | The Cooper Union
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page 06: introduction page 08: the urbanism of information: Brookl [IN] bad faith page 22: body dynamics: the body expanded page 32: architecture of [objects] of architecture: M. Arch 02 Thesis page 57: resume and contact information
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a comment on agenda This book highlights two studios and one thesis that I completed during my year at The Cooper Union for the Advancement of Science and Art. It is part retrospective, part display, and part manifesto. It briefly approach their intentions, exhibit their graphic or design sensibilities, and ultimately bears out my own professional and academic motivations.
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a comment on design Design sensibility could mean anything really. It is nonetheless sensibility worth mentioning due the volumes that will unfold throughout the book. If school has taught me anything it is that purpose lies at the crux of motivation. So it is natural that motivation lies at the purpose of architecture. Uncovering the purpose of architecture remained my motivation throughout school and will likely be a career transition into a career long endeavor. Any student or professional at some level has attacked this issue. Personally, the most compelling positions are those that dually hold architecture both complicit and distinct from the act of building. Naturally, the technologies, methodologies, and best practices of building making deeply inform how architecture is engaged, and even more so how it comes about. However, construction comes around to architecture when any practitioner distances themselves the everyday practice in order to formulate a critical position on the meaning of architecture and how it is being positioned in a broader cultural scope and sociological context. The book ends with a conceptual thesis that claims to find an architectural positioning within the signifying qualities of built structure (particularly iconic structures). Therefore the technical framework that exists between the skin and the structure of the building become of the utmost importance since this determines how and what is signified. It also becomes the a crucial node by which the practice of architecture can reign in it’s own dissemination within a culture or a society as well as suggests a methodology by which more meaningful and critical buildings can be produced. 0007
The Urbanism of Information: Brook[IN] Bad Faith Year of Study: Fall 2017 Instructor: Pablo Lorenzo Eiroa
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Brooklyn exists in a bit of a Sartrean identity crisis. Historically Brooklyn is a gridded morphology that overtime has formed fractures in response to the socio-economic and environmental conditions that surround it. Today, information informs Brooklyn as much as anything, which is skewing Brooklyn’s image across virtual internet platforms. For example, Brooklyn’s representation on Twitter is being dictated around hotspots that correspond to high income fractures. This is a project about mapping out how Brooklyn is fractured by these virtual platform and other factors such as income and park access. The task that arrives is to speculate on how these bits of information can be overlayed and conglomerated to inform further urban interventions around virtual information.
Brooklyn land plots_NYC open data
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Brooklyn land plots_fractured per waterfront access and twitter usage 00010
Brooklyn blocks fractured per income
Brooklyn blocks fractured per twitter usage 00011
Brooklyn blocks_fractured per income and re-organized as a linear city 00012
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Brooklyn blocks_fractured per income, park access and twitter usage and re-organized as a radial city 00014
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Brooklyn twitter and income fractures overlayed_possible proposed connections 00016
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Brooklyn block fractures 00018
Brooklyn block fractures 00019
Brooklyn block fractures 00020
Brooklyn block fractures 00021
Body Dynamics: The Body Expanded Year of Study: Winter 2018 Instructor: Diana Agrest
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Our bodies, in sickness or in health, are fully integrated with the world around us - specifically the world of humanmade objects. Nowhere is this clearer than in the medical field, where bodily organs are constantly being substituted with temporary machines external to ourselves. This condition compromises clear distinctions about the boundaries of our bodies as well as posits a common bodily condition in a fully integrated environment. This project speculates on the nature of this new environment. Intelligent “skins� become the medium for space making, outpatient servicing, and medical evaluation services. The project also challenges common medical spaces and their heterotopic otherness by proposing a space that blurs the boundaries between open social space and outpatient treatment institution.
Breif history of anatomical illustration and bodily augmentation 00023
Bodily augmentation against a continuous surface
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Analysis of dialysis, endoscopy, and imaging 00025
Expanding the scope of the body through mechanical exchange
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Expanding the scope of the body through mechanical exchange
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Augmented bodily space: axonometric
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Augmented bodily space: plan
Augmented bodily space: detail
Augmented bodily space: 1:1 mock-up
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TURN BOOK SIDEWAYS
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TURN BOOK SIDEWAYS
Instructor: Mersiha Veledar
Year of Study: Summer 2018
Material Indexes, Vertical Icons, and Mechanisms of Signification
The Architecture of [Objects] of Architecture:
Conventionally, a structural system is erected and then surrounded by a material skin that dually indexes an image and lofts it up into a framed view, surrounded by an urban matrix of boulevards, streets, and avenues. This vertical iconography is consumed, commercialized and objectified, immediately or over some time, by a corresponding city culture. New York City has become a field of verticality, with ever more (generic) icons being consistently generated. The core of this thesis aims to rupture this conventional relationship by isolating these vertical mechanisms of iconicity through the agency of analytical representation,
This [hypo]thesis reverse-engineers the tectonic mechanisms of objectified skin and structure that define vertical icons of New York City in order to proffer a more evolving, [de]objectified, and [de]familiarized mechanism of vertical iconicity.
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Translative properties of material indexing
In order to crack open the nature of the disseminative properties of a building, one needs a readily available cultural icon on which to operate or work from. The Chrysler Building and The Statue of Liberty leap forward in the ubiquitous of its mass produced and it’s apparent recognizability as an iconic presence on the New York skyline.
This new iconicity moves existing vertical icons towards a de-objectified and a malleable system that aims to create a multiplicity of ever evolving [animate] figures. This investigation opens up these relationships through methods of dissection, in order to show how the manipulation of the city’s icons can lead to their familiarization/ defamiliarization, or objectification/ de-objectification.
while removing and unfolding skin from structure and dissecting, scaling and reconstructing novel figures within a new structural system where vertical iconicity is re-imagined that both distances the vertical icon from it’s previous associations and opens up a multiplicity of experimental readings.
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Translative properties of material indexing
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Animate multiplicities of iconic digital indexes: Statue of Liberty/ Chrysler
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Each city imagines that in an instantaneously progressive world, the only real scarcity to be dealt with is the scarcity of culture. In this scenario, the roles of the architect and urban designer becomes more about an expertise in form and space than anything else. And the main architectural problem is creating cultural form in the midst of extremely advanced systems.
he study, Seven Allegorical Cities, is a second thought experimentthat questions the purpose of architecture. This part sets up a grand thought experiment that speculates on the future of the architect. That is, it creates a scenario in which the role of the architect is wholly dependent on the survival of humanity. Each city depicts a reality set in a distant future. The idea is to set a vision for the spot on the “Architectural Styles Curve� timeline directly to the right of the asymptotic projection explored on the right.
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The Statue of Liberty_flayed
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The Statue of Liberty_isolated structural relationships
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The Chrysler Building_flayed
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The Statue of Liberty_isolated structural relationships
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New York City is a field of vertical iconicity
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Typological Prototype_ towards a defamiliarizing iconicity
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education |
University of Detroit Mercy School of Architecture Master of Architecture: 2014 Bachelor of Science in Architecture: 2013 Detroit - Volterra Study Abroad: 2013 The Cooper Union for the Advancement of Science and Art: Master of Architecture 02: 2018
experience |
Hamilton Anderson and Associates: 2015 - 2017 Virtuoso Design Plus Build: 2014 Detroit Collaborative Design Center: 2013 zpd+a llc. architects: 2012 Raffin Construction Company: 2009, 2011, 2012
notable awards |
Outstanding Thesis Award: 2014 Runner-up. The Crisis of Aesthetic 2014 Master’s Thesis Project SEED Design Award: 2014 Impact Detroit/ DCDC how-to-guide pamplet graphics Vertical Studio Design Excellence Award: 2011 runner-up. Grand River/ Woodbridge Intervention Project. Vertical Studio Design Excellence Award: 2012 first place. Emergence Urbanism. rethinking planning Founding Editor of UNION student journal: 2018 Editor of Dichotomy20 student architecture journal: 2014
publications |
Lunch8 University of Virginia student architecture journal: 2013 Future Sites Unknown. Emergent Strategies: Towards Nonplanning Dichotomy 20 student architecture journal: 2014 OLD. Five Allegorical Cities: The Future of OLD in the New Paradigm
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selected professional projects
Wayne State University Student Housing: 2017 Construction document organization/ exterior cladding details/ space planning Orleans Landing residential complex: 2016 Submittal Review/ Construction Administration Quicken Loans Training Center: 2016 Multi-story renovation of the existing Detroit News Building/ Construction Document Organization/ Construction Administration Monroe Street Masterplan: 2014 Master-planning street boothes, furnature and planters along Detroit’s Greektown Monroe Street corridor Innovation City Convention Kioskes and Millwork: 2014 Complete Design/ Build of Innovation city showspace for conventions/ design of assembly instructions Impact Detroit: How-To pamplets : 2012 Graphic design of pamplets for the Livernois community center in Detroit. Pamplets highlight ways in which citizens can directly improve their city
skills | Rhino Hand drawing Hand modeling Autodesk Auto-CAD Grasshopper Revit Autodesk 3D MAX Design Adobe Photoshop Adobe Illustrator Adobe InDesign Sketchup Rhino
contact | 295 Hawthorne St, Apt 2A Brooklyn, NY 11225 jsraffin@gmail.com 219 252 0595
interests | Theory and History Writing Sketching/ Drawing Traveling 00057
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Joseph Raffin | The Cooper Union