PORTFOLIO //

JULIA HAGER

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house for a potter, undergraduate thesis The thesis explores earth as a building material through the design of a house and studio for a potter. The project is on Sinking Creek in Giles County, Virginia.

Smaller buildings on the site include a clay processing room, kiln house, and barn.

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212 montmeillan, studio with L-architects The housing project explores the idea of a building creating a street on itself.

A nearly 400 meter long community is proposed to link the historic city of Lausanne with the higher La Sallaz community.

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room & garden A 96 square-foot project explores theory about the desires of humanity to have control over nature. The dichotomy between trees in front of white walls with framed views of provides an opportunity for one to experience nature.

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space for art, studio with Aires Mateus ‘Space for Art’ is a low-tech museum on Lake Meade in Nevada. The project was done in a studio with Aires Mateus at the Accademia di Architettura in Mendrisio, Switzerland.

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blacksburg public library The library is a study of public space pulling the building from the street and elevating the first floor’s open air lobby. The project is marked by a rigorous ordering of columns, repetitive shelving, and a generous children’s room.

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tool house in kaua’i This design-build tool house is for a charter school who uses their garden to feed students. In partnership with Peacework International, the project recalls the disappearing vernacular architecture of Hawaii.

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HOUSE FOR A POTTER The move toward temporality in the American family home has caused a lack of connection to one’s community and kin, a decreased sense of belonging to the place, and estrangement between one and one’s sustenance. This house aims to reconcile one with oneself through rooting the experience of living in a deep sense of the place.

Through the study of earth as a material, which is anything but temporal, the program became a house and studio for a potter. As the family lives within thick, immovable walls made of the same earth on which it sits, the study of material and place is magnified inside the adjacent pottery studio. In the backyard rests the empty bed Sinking Creek. The site was specifically chosen due to the nature of the creek, only holding flowing water during times of heavy rainfall. For the majority of the year, there is no water in the creek bed and the exposed riverbank reveals an existing clay seem. This phenomenon allows for the potter to efficiently harvest clay from the site, bring it into an intermediate room to be sieved and wedged before being taken into the studio and formed into vessels. These vessels after firing become mediators between the field and the human stomach for all nourishment. They are canvases for the farm’s bounty.

The experience culminates at the kitchen table. Here, all things are brought together for the fellowship of the family: food is taken from the ground, pots make their way from the kiln into the kitchen and are filled with thoughtfully prepared meals, and the family is pulled from their separate rooms.

In the coming weeks, this room and piece of furniture will become the focus of the thesis.

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212 M O N T M E I L L A N The project explores a building creating a street in itself. The slope of the site and existing communities ask for a link on two axes, the valley-forest axis, and the Flon-La Sallaz axis. A nearly 400-meter long community is proposed to link the historic city with the higher La Sallaz community. The building, made of a single layer, allows direct views from the valley to the forest and vice versa. A building long coursive links the apartments and public spaces to each other creating one continuous community rather than a subdivided community. In public zones, the coursive is widened to encourage community in these zones.

Lausanne is impossible to understand through a singluar plan drawing; the streets are frequently overlapping and layered due to the abrupt change in elevation. This project investigates the new urban street. As cities reach capacity, we build higher, but there remains only one street. The building asks, what would it be to have a lower and an upper street? Where will the upper street lead? How will the light of the lower street be changed with the addition of an upper street?

Projects such as the Highline offer a glimpse into how multi-level cities might be experienced. This four-hundred flat community is entered from the top. Residents would approach through La Hermitage park and walk onto the roof of the building as another street. The roof becomes an active place, runners and bikers line the edges while families picnic and enjoy the view of the historical center of Lausanne and Lake Geneva.

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existing housing

existing housing

using new housing to link two existing communities

existing housing

existing housing historic Hermatige Park

restoration of funicular to gain access to the proposed park

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intervention; removal of DÊchèterie du Vallon and replacement with public park to connect valley community to the historic Park Hermitage

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ROOM + GARDEN Humans require nature to perform in a regimented way. Homemakers everywhere plant flowers in such a way that they grow in a perfect line.

Alas, a dandelion finds its way into the mix. Despite its bright color, it is promptly removed. On city streets, trees are ordered rigorously in a perfect line. All the while their root space is covered over with concrete.

These are the streets we love– the ones we deem picture worthy.

Inevitably, the music comes to a screeching halt as a pedestrian trips over something protruding through the concrete. What’s this? A tree that is refusing to be confined to the small allotment it was given, its roots say there is not enough room. Like clockwork, a city worker comes to rip the tree from the ground to make way for a smaller one that is more easily controlled.

This 96 square foot room in man’s garden explores the long battle for control between man and nature. One would arrive by car, parking as the road becomes blocked by a white marble wall, and continue on foot, lead by a series of free-standing columns. The columns lead into an area with carefully placed trees and hard lined pools of water. The tension between the two pools pushes toward an open breezeway. The breezeway, lined with more regimented columns, leads one into a room with one table and two chairs. Upon exiting the room, trees replace the columns, marching to an opening in the wall; the columns fade away into the woods.

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COLUMNS

POOLS

BOUNDARIES

ROOF

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SPACE FOR ART During my year at the Accademia di Architettura di Mendrisio I had the chance to take a studio with Francisco and Manual of Aires Mateus in Portugal. This semester was one of the most challenging of my undergraduate. We began the semester with a simple prompt: a space for art. This project was not to be a museum or a studio, not a gallery or a home for an artist, simply a space for art. Although we traveled to Dusseldorf and Cologne as a studio, we had the freedom to choose any site in the world or to imagine one.

I struggled at first; this was the most freedom I had ever had in a studio, but by the end of the semester, I learned to fully define and develop a project based on a single concept. Everything, including the selection of the site, was derived from this concept: art should not be displayed in mass quantities as is done in some many museums across the world, we must have time to breathe, to reflect, between pieces to fully experience the artist and their work. For this reason, we must search for art. Here, a series of freestanding rooms multiply into a labyrinth. While in this complex, a visitor is not able to see more than one door from any position. Sometimes one might have to walk the entire perimeter of a room to find its entrance.

The project is sited on the current edge of Lake Meade in Nevada. Over the last fifty years, the water level of the lake has dropped dramatically and is not expected to return due to climate change. Initially, six freestanding rooms are built. As Lake Meade continues to disappear, more rooms are built. The project serves not only as a space for art, but as an evolving marker for change.

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BL AC KSBURG LIBRARY Through the measure and play of architectural elements such as walls, columns, doors, windows, stairs, ceilings, and roofs, an architectural proposition in the form of a library is crafted. Structure, building materials, natural light, form, and boundaries express the architectural search for order. This library investigates the repetition of form through the bookshelves and columns. The shelves are living and become the library, not only a part of it.

Sitting on bustling Main St. in downtown Blacksburg, the building tackles the issue of declining visitation of public libraries by providing a series of public spaces. A seating area cast with the floor slab at the street front, a cafe on the first floor, a lobby that becomes open air during the milder months, a roof terrace hosting an outdoor gallery, and a convertible indoor/outdoor auditorium rent-able for public and private all bring members of the community to the library for reasons other than reading. Getting people familiar with what the modern library holds is the first step in regaining attendance and support.

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TOOL HOUSE In the spring of 2017 a group of ten architecture, building construction, CEM, and industrial design students was established with the goal of designing a tool shed for a charter school in Kaua’i, Hawaii. The mission of the school is to teach students about the indigenous culture, practices, and language of the Hawaiian people. Most of the children that attend the school are native Hawaiians. However, they are entirely detached from their heritage due to being forced into the American school system when Hawaii became a state in 1959.

The school has a garden that is used to grow food used in school lunches. Gardening is deeply ingrained in Hawaiian culture and is thus part of the school’s curriculum. Due to extreme weather conditions and heavy rainfall, the school has not been able to establish the garden.

Over four weeks leading up to the trip, the Virginia Tech team of ten students and two faculty members designed a ‘house for tools’ that could be built in one weeks time with simple and relatively unskilled labor.

I was charged with designing a “window system” that allowed teachers to open and close the windows easily, However, the windows could not have any glass or Plexiglas on them due to the violent storms that occasionally come. The design allows for teachers to lock and unlock the windows, pass tools to students, and let tools rest on a lip as students are asked to cleanup for the day.

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