Comprehensive Academic Architecture Portfolio Spring 2017

KIRA COLLINS Undergraduate Architecture Portfolio UNIVERSITY OF OKLAHOMA SEMESTER 1-8

KIRA COLLINS Undergraduate Architecture Portfolio UNIVERSITY OF OKLAHOMA SEMESTER 1-8

CONTENTS

ABOUT Resume Preface

PLACE Rome: Study Abroad Drawings and Sketches Wall Workshop Museo Delle Macchine Vault: Community Center JOURNEY Ecoresort Transit Terminal Nature Center

PICTURE Movie Wall Photographer’s Studio

OBJECT Space: Eisenman Study Form: Lights Site: Figure-Ground Order: The Grid

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7 11 13 21

S 2017 S 2017 S 2017 F 2016

31 S 2016 37 F 2015 47 S 2015

55 S 2015 63 F 2014

71 73 75 77

F 2014 S 2014 S 2014 F 2013

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Kira Collins Education 08/2013 - Present

University of Oklahoma, Norman, OK

Candidate for B.Arch degree, minor in History 3.98 Grade Point Average Graduating in May 2018, summa cum laude

Work Experience Intern, TAP Architecture

05/2016 - 08/2016 05/2017 - 08/2017 08/2015 - Present

Student Assistant, Bruce Goff Committee

Helped to organize lectures and workshops by visiting Goff fellows, assisted with publicity, archiving, research, and documentation.

Teaching Assistant, Professor Deborah Richards

Assisted with community-based research and placemaking

02/2018 - Present

projects. Helped with research, documentation, and grant writing.

Honors Spring 2015

Recipient of the the 2015 TAP Prize

Award for best 2 year Portfolio nd

President’s Honor Roll

Spring 2014 - Fall 2017

Earned with 4.0 semester GPA

Fall 2013

Dean’s Honor Roll

Earned with 3.5 or better semester GPA

Member, The University of Oklahoma Honors College

08/2013 - Present

Honors classes and independent research are required to earn latin honors

National Merit Scholar

2013

Organizations/Activities 08/2013 - Present

Member, American Institute of Architecture Students

09/2014 - 08/2016

Member, Architecture Virtuosi

Community volunteering

Participant, OU EcoLatrine build at the Kessler Atmospheric and Ecological Field Station

09/2013 - 04/2014

Study Abroad Spring 2017

Rome: College of Architecture

A semester in Rome, including studio classes and Italian

Language and Culture class.

12/2015 - 01/2016

German Health, Culture And Design

Winter intersession class, held in Berlin and Munich

Skills Rhinoceros 5 AutoCAD Revit

Adobe Photoshop CC Adobe InDesign CC Adobe Illustrator CC

Sketchup Flamingo Renderer V-Ray Renderer

Sketching Modelmaking 3D Printing

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Preface

This portfolio is my attempt to distill four years of architecture school into a unified document that demonstrates the best of what I’ve learned.

My portfolio is a story about ideas, about methods, about research, and about form, space, and order. It is the result of my attempts to take the demands of my professors embodied in their assignments and syllabi and create design work from them. Therefore this portfolio is the product of two forces: the pedagogy and influence of my professors and the curricula of my school, and the unique personal processes and solutions I have developed in response to the problems they have presented to me.

The themes span professors, sites, and chronologies, but I think they provide a useful tool for the reader to orient themselves to the intent and point of development of the work. You could organize the information in many other ways, and the themes are only an aspect of the larger scope of each project. Nevertheless, it is my hope that the reader will use them as a bridge to move beyond one vantage point, and use the material to consider and critique the projects from other angles. There is nothing more exciting, and helpful, for me than to have others point out what I never saw before.

Again, this portfolio is simultaneously the prodI have chosen to present my work in a sequence uct of my wrestling with the discipline of Archithat is both chronological and narrative. The tecture and the larger discipline of Design, and four themes have emerged as my interpreta- at the same time is deeply indebted to those tion of the trajectory of the academic work I who have taught me. It is the result of the efhave done. The projects fall into four divisions: forts of my professors, the constant help of my place, journey, picture, and object. Place covers studiomates, and copious amounts of black tea. my most recent work, and seeks to understand Thank you to you all, I hope these projects reand represent the most: physicality, image, flect back a tiny amount of your care and effort. experience, and history. Journey presents a narrative focus on movement and experience.

Picture covers work precedent to journey, and has a narrative focus on image and perspective.

Object covers my first and fundamental design exercises, and narrates the genesis of my conscious attempts at design. I believe that excellent writing is crucial to the communication of design intent, therefore each project begins with a written explanation.

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Philosophy

Architecture is:

Good Architecture is:

Storytelling.

Storytelling is history.

Our history is our future.

Honest that is it is about who we are Honorable that is it comes from a source of integrity Hopeful that is it looks to foster a better future

Who we are.

Where we came from.

Where we are going.

Words are innocent.

Forms are innocent.

Using them creates the language of inspiration, seduction, danger, sadness, anger, hope.

Everyone speaks.

Architects form.

Architects listen to those words, small, large, few, many, explicit, confused And retells the story as it could be.

In drawings. In words. In pictures.

The specialty of design is to look at what is, and look past to what was, and then to speak of the future.

A little garden for walking, and immensity for dreaming...some flowers on the earth and all the stars in the heavens.

Victor Hugo 4

Place

Place has many different definitions. All of them insist that place requires meaning. Space can be empty. Place must be formed, must be particular, and must be distinct. Architectural place is always defined with reference to the human, or to the divine. We mold or alter its material properties, name and imagine it, experience and embed it in memory. Place exists in many dimensions simultaneously. It carries a fixedness, and an exclusivity: this place not that place, this place in time, this place in the story.

Yet, place transcends its own temporality. It is this complexity that elevates dealing with place above all other sections in this portfolio, and all concerns as a designer. Place is simultaneously intersectional and single. It draws its vital nature from history itself, above object, above a single image, above one experience. Its richness overwhelms. It is in placemaking that the architect reaches past his or her self to touch infinity.

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Rome

Professor Anthony Cricchio Scott Schlimgen Claudia Cremasco

There is no city in the world like Rome. It is like a dream, which the western world has tried to recreate or forget for two thousand years. In many ways it seems like a city fallen asleep, which stirs but seems unable to wake to a postmodern world. Or perhaps the city that has seen republics, emperors, kings, and popes rise and die, and where every street corner is someone’s monument, does not open her gilded eyes on one small student too weightless to ring the bells of history. Still, Rome is beautiful, and the rhythm of the city breathing is captivating. The Piazza delle Cinque Scole children in the morning, the street pizza at noon, the ruins in the sharp afternoon sunlight, the da capo arias at Teatro dell’Opera in the evening, the Pantheon in the moonlight at midnight, all work to pull the human soul into the life of the city. Non esiste una città del mondo come Roma.

My time in Rome was in the spring semester of my fourth year. The program is longstanding in the Division of Architecture at OU, and a partnership with Academic Initiatives Abroad (AIA) in Rome. My studio course was taught by Professor Anthony Cricchio of OU, my lecture course by Professor Scott Schlimgen of AIA, and my Italian language and culture course by Professor Claudia Cremasco of AIA. I lived in the Trastevere neighborhood, and our studio space was in the historical Jewish Ghetto.

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Semester 8

Location Rome Orvieto Florence Tivoli Venice Verona Milan Pompeii

Spring 2017

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Semester 8

Spring 2017

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Wall Workshop and Competition

Location Rome, Italy

A team project with Paolo Burattini (Roma Tre),

Won first place from faculty jury

Nolan Christensen (Iowa State University), and Peter Fonkert (Iowa State University)

This project was the result of an international competition held at L’Università Roma Tre in Rome. Held over roughly thirty-six hours, the competition combined three universities into groups to design a new metro stop. The site was complicated by the ancient Aurelian walls and a Roman Castra discovered right over the top of the stop during excavations for the tunnel. The design was for the interface between ground level and passage to the metro tunnel below.

The main conceit for the project was to “stitch” the walls to the Castra with a zig-zagging path on a gentle slope. Direct travel paths to the metro were added, and the overhang above the Castra was extended to shelter the interstitial space. Skylights connect those on the roof above to the Castra beneath, and the path cuts into the shelter before bouncing back to the wall to bring people right into both spaces. Circulation was further refined to produce the final result.

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Spring 2017

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Museo Delle Machine

Professor Anthony Cricchio

A team project with Kevin Dobbs, Erika

Location Rome, Italy

Omae, and Jacob Stinson

The design for a museum of machines addresses a dense historical infrastructure, deteriorating site, and build potential, by creating a unique green neighborhood, renewing traffic and commerce at the ancient port, and creating a new industrial steel building that imagines the material in a digital future of information, adjustment, and resiliency.

Rome is a city of layers of infrastructure that over time has built people out of natural public space. The project addresses the needs of the city by creating a swath of public green space drawing people to the site, in order to create a new landmark and a pause for the inhabitants.

The site near the old port gates has become

CORE STRUCTURE

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ASSEMBLY 1

forgotten over time. The park creates an approach to the museum marked with machines to remind visitors of the past use, Porta Portese is remade as an important transit stop for the city, and the museum revives the port as a site of industry and technological advancement.

The museum is a teaching building designed to house old technology and showcase new purposes. Its volumes are assembled around the values of the site, and it pushes what a building can be by cloaking itself in a new system of movable, interchangeable, programmable, energy producing steel panels. In so doing, it continues Rome’s history of reinterpretation and restructuring and takes it toward the future.

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Semester 8

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Spring 2017

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The formal organization of the museum is an irregular grid molded around the existing structures, intersected by a volume angled toward Porta Portese. In addition to providing the hierarchy of the building, this mass creates the spine along which major circulations run.

Visitors enter through the existing archway into the inner court of the building, then proceed along the major park axis through the main entry under the volume. Moving to the left on ground level takes you past the cloakroom, bathrooms, auditorium, and classroom. At the end of the axis on the north side of the building is the office and research space and the preservation room, which is glazed on the street façade so passersby can see the work

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being done.

Rising upstairs into the volume lets you enter the gallery space, which you circle through and move south, to the other end of the volume.

Stairs from this end let you down into the Armory, which houses temporary exhibitions.

Under the south end of the volume is tucked the cafĂŠ and gift shop, accessible to the public. The basement under the building contains storage and the large mechanical room, along with the truck loading dock. A specialized elevator runs through the center of the building, intersecting the storage room, entry hall, preservation room, volume, and galleries, making visible the movement of people and machines.

Semester 8

Spring 2017

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SOUTHEAST ELEVATION

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Vault: Norman and Moore Community Center

Professors Michael Hรถffner Daniel Butko Anthony Cricchio Location Norman, Oklahoma

A vault is an arched structure forming a roof or ceiling, it is also a room or compartment for the safekeeping of valuables. The Moore-Norman Community Center is a direct response to both the extreme natural forces at work here and the people who choose to live in this community. It accomplishes the first in the pragmatic sense of being a shelter. It is raised above floods and reinforced against hail, winds, and debris.

It accomplishes the second by supporting and protecting the response of the residents to their environment, surviving to show a building aging here by respecting the power of the weather, and becoming a workshop and gallery for visitors and community members to create and save something that communicates their experience.

site, namely the extreme meteorological and geographic forces at work, and the special ecologies of this relatively natural spot. Moore is hit yearly with severe thunderstorms with tornados, is subject to increasing earthquakes, and in addition the site floods annually.

The Center works to bring people together at a place which showcases both the promise and the threat of their environment. Nothing teaches an appreciation for the natural world like being in it. Perhaps even more importantly, in an increasingly digital age where we physically and intellectually live in ever restricting bubbles, the Center offers a tangible opportunity to see who our neighbors really are, and what they really look like and really think, as we face future uncertainties.

Second, I wanted a building that would communicate that this community is special.

Moore residents tend to get mocked for living in such a dangerous place but I wanted a building that would show who really lives there.

From that came programmatic choices, to have workshop, classroom, and lecture spaces, and then have the work produced displayed in the gallery. The idea is over time the building becomes a reliquary of sorts for the community.

Out of that came two concepts. First, I wanted a building that would respond to nature at work here. I wanted to create a building that time would mark, but not destroy, and that would display the progression of natural processes.

Mainly this comes out in material choice.

The building becomes very solid, with thick concrete walls to resist high winds and debris, raised above the flood line. The accent material becomes metal which can stain the concrete as it ages.

The site for the Community Center is a densely Early in the semester we did several mappings wooded parcel next to a creek situated in a of the site. I chose to focus on what I find most floodplain. The precarious location in Moore interesting about the site, namely the extreme Oklahoma is subject to earthquakes (17 4+ 21

Semester 7

Perspective Hybrid Drawing

Fall 2016

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earthquakes in the last five years in Oklahoma and Cleveland Counties alone) tornadoes (5 major tornadoes since 1999) and occasional forest fires. The proximity to water and hazardous nature of the site gives the ecology a rich chance to flourish, and second growth trees, grasses, and wildflowers have crowded into their little escape, rooted in the clayey soil. The highway presents a constant stream of noise to the site, but surrounding development is hidden as soon as you slip through the fringe hedge of poison ivy and eastern red cedar. The building is set in the middle of this nest of green, just down the slope on the edge of the site densely covered with vegetation seeking the abundant sunlight at the edge. This creates an acoustic and visual barrier to the highway. The building has a relatively small footprint, is raised to offer as little impediment to floodwaters as possible, and is located in a relatively flat and clear space to minimize tree removal.

The building’s thermal mass and tight precast construction help to regulate the internal temperature of the building. The relatively long

thin shape helps to daylight the building. The use of fairly raw materials reduces the total chemical load of the building and helps to narrow the use of toxic manufacturing. The building primarily draws energy from the grid and wind turbines positioned at the entrance, but with increasing use of wind energy in Oklahoma it can be hoped that someday the energy draw will be supplied entirely by wind power. In event of a storm the building’s emergency electricity will be supplied by a fossil fuel generator, a required system that overall should not contribute much to total energy use over the building’s lifetime.

Light is a challenge in this building, since at least part of it must withstand a direct hit from a tornado. My solution is to organize the building largely between two monolithic walls with openings on each end. The glass there will be protected by large storm doors and filtered through screens layered into the wall structure.

The addition of translucent banding to the concrete further helps with daylighting.

Even more of a challenge than light is air. Not

Wind Turbines Prosduce Renewable Energy

Meadow Path

New Trails Explore Nature

Rainwater Retention Pond Helps with Filtration

Woods Path

Oklahoma City

Possible Green Trail Connection to Central Park

Moore Site Norman

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Semester 7

Interstate 35

100 Year Flood Line

Retention Pond Water Storage Tank and Filter

Fall 2016

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only is the building located deep in a flood zone, but Oklahoma has such extreme weather swings that total passive systems are impossible unless the occupants are prepared to deal with unusual comfort standards. My solution has been to organize the building on axis with potential breezes, and to place the HVAC system in as waterproof a basement as possible.

building is precast columns, wall panels, and vaults, reducing waste and improving control over the quality of the final product. Precast concrete manufacturers which use almost entirely local raw materials are in the area to reduce carbon emissions from transit. Leaving the structural material to double as the finish also allows reduction of total product used, and the chemical load on the building. Metal Materials were chosen mainly becase of site components are readily available and are placed conditions. The concrete is an effective and so corrosion over time will further enhance the efficient way to survive a tornado strike and appearance of the building without damaging the resistant to flood forces. It is also a tight its functionality. structural system that resists fire. Most of the

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Semester 7

Fall 2016

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AUDITORIUM

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GROUND FLOOR

SCALE 1/16" = 1'

Fall 2016

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Journey

A journey, in its simplest definition as a noun, is a trip from one location to another. As a verb, it is much the same; to journey is to travel from point A to point B. However, the word is full of connotations beyond this simple definition.

When we journey somewhere, it is not a boring, regular commute. It is an experience, rich and sensory, pleaseant or unpleaseant. It introduces a sense of adventure, and cues a narrative.

Journey does not simply hold movement, it also holds the ground covered and the measures of time. Context is vital to the understanding of a journey. The landscape of our trip changes and develops, and we also change and develop as we traverse the path on which the journey takes us.

At the end, of course, there is a destination. To journey is not merely to wander. It is a charged connection between meaningful places, and therefore holds much interest as a term to describe architectural experience.

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Wichita Mountains Ecoresort

Professors Jay Yowell Dr. Stephanie Pilat Location Medicine Park, Oklahoma

Recently ecoresorts have been gaining momentum as a unique way to vacation. They take a variety of forms, but all involve a place to stay in an ecologically friendly fashion while incorporating education on the local environment. The design for the Medicine Park ecoresort developed out of the concepts of ruin and regrowth, obscurity and notice, and marks and healing. The building is half inside, half outside the hillside, and maintains a dichotomy of experience between its themes.

staircases to the pool.

The plaza around the tower organizes the complex of quiet, introverted spaces, whose simple room volumes are washed by thin skylights. A green roof helps the building to integrate back into the landscape. By folding the building into the earth, the structure both brings occupants into close contact with the ground and provides natural, longwearing protection and thermal insulation. Visitors find a quiet place to pursue research, a point You enter the building by ascending the hillside of departure for excursions into the Wichita on foot, and then entering a dark passage with Wildlife refuge, and an escape into close contact your back to Mt Scott. At the end of the passage with both the earth and the sky. you encounter a room full of wooden pillars like roots penetrating the halls, and pierce the ceiling with daylight. Ascending the stairs, you ascend up into the tower, ultimately arriving at the pinnacle of the structure in the open air, with unimpeded views and an unimpeded experience of the night sky.

The main building zigzags along the slope, hugging the immediate site, while the tower is rotated about twenty degrees further, reaching out directly toward Mt. Scott, and responding to the observation tower on its top. The rest of the building plays with vertical circulation and exposure to the landscape, with a prairie wing to the south, a woods wing on the north slope, and a water cluster moving down toward the pool, fed by a natural spring. You can move out along the passages, or reenter the earth via the 31

Semester 6

Spring 2016

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Mt. Scott Lake Lawtonka

Medicine Park

Elmer Thomas Lake Project Site

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Semester 6

Spring 2016

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Semester 6

First Floor Plan

Spring 2016

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Transit Terminal

Professors Jay Yowell Dr. Khosrow Bozorgi

A partner project with Erika Omae

Location Norman, Oklahoma 37

Semester 5

The program for this project was to redesign the current, architecturally almost nonexistent bus terminal on the Norman campus of the University of Oklahoma into a structure that would become a transit hub serving buses, bicycles, and pedestrians. The project is sited on an existing parking lot next to a beautiful, but underused and maintained park and pond. Our project’s form and development derived from two main conceptual areas: studying the properties of the existing site, and a conceptual approach to circulation.

The placement of the building on the site is the result of studying the existing site conditions.

These divide into two main simultaneous and sometimes conflicting components, the natural and the man made. The building is placed on the boundary between the parking lot and the park to mediate between these two realms.

The building needed to be at the top of the hill to catch the best breezes, take advantage of the best views of the site, and mediate the boundary between the parking, the distant rail tracks, and the park without disturbing the natural landscape too much.

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We needed to accomplish a number of things in the circulation, including redesigning the tangled mess that it is now. We wanted to try and craft the approach, entry, and exit as a bigger process, that the building would slowly unfold itself to you as you moved through the site from various starting points. At the same time we tried to distinguish the different circulation types (bus, car, bike, pedestrian) so that they would no longer conflict with each other. We tried to keep them separate overall, but weave them together as they progress towards and through the building. Each type has its own starting point, but all paths converge at various locations.

The building form developed from the placement choice and the circulation strategies. In essence, it is a matrix of architectural elements defining volumes of space which orchestrate the circulation and respond to the conditions of the site, both natural and manmade. The main structure is a rectangular concrete shell positioned on the major axis of the site, cut down the middle to introduce light and define spaces

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of rest and spaces of movement.

We chose concrete to give a sense of weight and permanence to the materially dense building.

The steel was chosen to explore skeleton and a sense delicacy, contrasting with the volumetric mass, both within and extending outside the shell. The lighter steel rods wrap the building and penetrate the concrete to mediate the connection with the outside and define ancillary, subordinate volumes of space (the food truck pavilion, the bus pavilion). Inside, the concrete recedes to expose the tectonic connections between the steel and the concrete.

Another volume collides with the main structure where all the paths meet, providing a sense of hierarchy, and is oriented along the most beautiful axis in the park, opening up to allow people to disperse off the path into the landscape. This volume provides both the central point through which all circulation paths converge, and completes the process of translating a traveler from the man-made portion of the site to the natural and vice versa.

Semester 5

Site Plan

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Fall 2015

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Nature Center

Professors Anthony Cricchio Deborah Richards Location Oklahoma City, Oklahoma

This project is a design for a nature center located in Wheeler Park in Oklahoma City. The site is a nearly abandoned stretch of land currently marooned between the highway and the river, but which has recently seen proposals for development back into the fabric of the city.

around this central space are the volumes that house the program, which are oriented in the direction of impact from sources outside the site, toward the pond to the east, the river to the south, the highway to the west, and the city to the north. The main gallery extends straight from the drum to the edge of the water, open Wheeler Park is marked by three major sensory only on that end and underground where it and physical characteristics. The first is that the joins the central space. This reinforces the expenatural elements within the site tend to be con- rience of moving from enclosure to open space. densed into clusters with a center and a spread around that loose center. The second is that the On the first floor, the spaces toward the pond experience at the edge of the river is drastical- and city are an activity space commenting ly different from elsewhere on the site. As you on the relationship between the natural and descend from a natural cluster at the top of the the urban. As you move through the space, high bank and descend toward the waterline, the walls holding you in the constructed and the view opens up significantly, and the tex- manmade begin to fragment, allowing you to ture and smell of the water become dominant glimpse more and more of the outside, and the sensory elements, giving a strong sense of ex- dispersion of natural elements in the organic panse and opening. The third characteristic is cluster. When you move to the outside, howthat the park is positioned between the river on ever, you turn the corner to see Oklahoma City one side, and the city on the other, and the ur- in the distance, suggesting that the natural and ban infrastructure on the one side and the life urban are not separate, but integrated and inaround the water are major contributors to the terdependent realms. On the second floor is the experience of the site, without actually occupy- weather activity area, clad in the tectonically ing the land that is Wheeler Park. lighter material of steel, allowing the weather to stain the building. The steel walls arc into the The building starts as a central space located space, suggesting the movement and possible at the intersection of the existing path and the brutality of the Oklahoma winds. The space tolargest cluster of natural organisms, at a central ward the river is the main exhibit area, with the tree. To comment on the verticality of this tree, cafĂŠ in the western volume off to the side. The the central space takes the form of an extruded path travels over this volume, and allows entry circle, reaching up and lit from above. Arrayed at the second story level into the central drum.

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Semester 4

Axonometric Hybrid Drawing

Spring 2015

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West Perspective

Southwest Perspective

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Semester 4

Ladies’ Restroon Men’s Restroom

Open Office Conference Storage

Storage Kitchen

Indoor Dining Urban/Natural Activity Area Storage Weather Activity Area

Gallery

Second Floor

First Floor

Spring 2015

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Facing North

Facing South

Facing West

Facing East

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Semester 4

Spring 2015

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Picture

A picture is a visual representation of a particular piece of reality, typically in two dimensions. Often, we use the term today to refer to the product of photography, but a slightly older usage applies it to painting and movies-�motion pictures.� A picture is something tied to media and time. Whether a picture is good or bad often refers to the level of skill with which the subject is captured in its media, whether paint, paper, film, or digital bits and bytes. We also make judgements about pictures based on their message, which derives from the subject and how it is portrayed. Ultimately, a picture is a window into the mind of the photographer, painter, or filmmaker. It is an attempt to capture a moment or sequence of value, and therefore our pictures are portraits of what we prize.

We often use picture to describe the ideal embodiment of a particular quality. Finally, picture can also be used as a verb, to refer to an act of imagination. When we picture something we return to somewhere in our minds or move into the realm of fantasy. Every act of architectural making involves picture.

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Movie Wall

Professors Anthony Cricchio Deborah Richards Location Oklahoma City, Oklahoma

The movie wall is a project for an outdoor movie theater on a vacant lot in Oklahoma City. The project attempts to create a cinematic experience to recall natural and artificial precedents.

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Conceptually, the members of the wall represent a progression of form of the wall. The main substance of the wall is an organic form, molded to fit the program, and to convey the suggestion of motion and life. The curvature of this layer

Semester 4

gives rise to the spacing of the mechanical, geometric structure bounding the side facing the street, a kind of exoskeleton which serves as an intermediary between the organic form and the street, and describes the organic form without replicating its visually soft nature. This takes the shape of a grid, a stable, static form intended to contrast with the organic while providing points of reference between the two. This grid is supported by and connected to the wall by arms stretching from the major intersections of the grid back into the organic form, and concluding on the reverse side as literal points of reference to the street side of the wall for those on the

theater side of the wall. The grid is again recessed into the side as literal points of reference to the street side of the wall for those on the theater side of the wall. The grid is again recessed into the planar surface of the theater faรงade, serving as an organizational tool for the programmatic elements on the theater side, as well as maintaining the necessary planar surface for the screen. It is also intended to be a reiteration for those moving through the wall from theater to street, with the grid in a solid, hidden at the street, progressing to the organic solid, which in turn progresses to the full grid at the street.

Spring 2015

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Pen Diagram

Shell Diagram

The wall is based on two precedent objects, one mechanical and one natural. The mechanical precedent is a Lamy fountain pen. In its essence, the pen is a writing utensil, a means for making marks on paper. Hierarchically the most important part of the pen is the nib, where ink, pen, and paper come together to form a mark on paper. The hand, interestingly, is moved back from this point, the contact points at one-quarter and three-quarters up the pen. Moving the pressure point back allows for a more delicate grip and better range of pressure, leading to variable line weights. The pen has a linear organization, again to allow for a narrow and precise grip by the hand. As a physical object, the pen addresses issues of interaction with ink, its interaction with the human hand, and its interactions with the paper. The main contribution of the pen precedent to the wall is the idea of traces, which is manifested by the narrative process

by which the wall formed.

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The natural precedent is a garden snail (Cornu Aspersum) shell. It is a protective dwelling for the snail when it is under threat or hibernating.

The shell is secreted by the snail from the center protoconch out, the whorls getting larger as the shell grows around an axis in a logarithmic spiral. The semitransparent shell’s growth is marked by varices. The shell’s structure is thus chiefly expressed by these three aspects: its central axis, logarithmic spiral, and growth in stages. Architecturally, then, the shell may be described as radially organized and ordered on a vertical axis. At the human scale, these shells are very fragile and easily crushed, yet they serve as protection for the snail for all of its life.

The main contribution of the shell precedent to the wall is the idea of interaction between an organic form and its exoskeleton.

Semester 4

Process Diagram

Spring 2015

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Base Model Soft interior form gives rise to hard outer exoskeleton.

Iteration 1 Interior form is modiied to reeect programmatic uses.

Exoskeleton is modiied for a more organic form; structure density reeects stru the curvature of the soft form.

Iteration 2 Soft form is adjusted for a more organic movement, curvature is ne-tuned.

Iteration 3 Exoskeleton structure becomes recessed on the rear of the model. As one moves through the wall from the back to the front, the stages of life of the wall progress.

Process Axonometric

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Semester 4

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Spring 2015

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Photographer’s Studio

Professors Anthony Cricchio Geoff Parker Location Post-Apocalyptic California

Primary inspiration for the photographer’s studio project came from two different sets of precedents. The first was a study of Eisenman’s House I. The second was a set of three different photographers living in different times and working in separate, if sometimes overlapping, genres. The first phase of the project to be completed was the site, which was set before the building was designed. It was developed from the concept of Eisenman’s house as a ruin, decayed, but still retaining the rigorous ordering system.

The design of the studio began by taking grid which Eisenman used as the ordering principle for the building. An additional required element of the site was the wall, spanning the entire width of the site. The study of the three precedent photographers, Eadward Muybridge, Oscar Rejlander, and Annie Leibovitz, resulted in the formulation of two main aspects of their work to drive the design.

The first is the dramatic play of light and dark in their work. The older photographers working in film were perhaps forced by their media to emphasize this quality, but even the modern artist with the plethora of options open to one working in the digital age, Annie Leibovitz, deliberately chose to play up the contrast in her work. Thus the form of the building began as a long rectangular volume just pulled away from the wall, to play with the light filtering down 63

from above. I chose to limit the amount of natural light to just as much as would be sufficient for the interior, and to try as much as possible to preserve the dramatic experience of transition from the brightness of the exterior spaces to the relative darkness of the interior space.

As the form began to condense to fit spatial constraints and align to Eisenman’s grid, the second aspect of the photographer’s work, particularly Muybridge’s, began to take effect.

Muybridge often used photography not for art, but for documentation. He is famous for his series of images of moving animals and people.

I began to think of the building as possibly a camera in and of itself, a device to capture and illumine the human life within. With the building conceived as a camera, I aligned it to a singular direction, facing north. The fenestration became apertures, centered on the units that Eisenman’s grid divided the building into. The volumes of the space were pulled slightly away from the structure, to emphasize the individual unit. The long main volume, linearly organized, became a series of spaces to embody the progression of human activity within the photographer’s studio, like Muybridge’s photographs, giving the building its final form. One enters through the right hand stair tower, and can proceed straight to the lower floor, with studio and dressing rooms. Taking the stairs up leads to the gallery. The left hand stair tower goes up to the private work space and living quarters.

Semester 3

Fall 2014

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Leibovitz Inspired Photographs

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Muybridge Inspired Photographs

Semester 3

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Fall 2014

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Semester 3

Fall 2014

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Object

An object is any thing which can be seen or touched, especially that which is inanimate.

Elementary design exercises produce a series of objects, particularly well named because they do not easily fit other categorization. As a noun, object has a secondary meaning, that of purpose. In this sense object is fundamental to design, and foundational design projects aim to teach the development of such purpose. Therefore object is both the product, and process, of design. They may seem simple, but in reality are full of meaning. In the words of Mies, “Architecture starts when you carefully put two bricks together. There it begins.�

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Space: Eisenman Study - House I

Professors Anthony Cricchio Geoff Parker

This project sought a spatial understanding of Eisenman’s House I. First, I examined three kinds of space within Eisenman’s House I: vertical space, circulation space, and the spaces in the entry sequence. A second iteration added thresholds to the study. Also, a series of

diagrams were made of the principles and systems regulating the spaces. The results were then applied in a series of making studies. The project addresses issues of space, form, order, organization, creating, and making.

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Fall 2014

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Form: Lights

Professors Thomas J. Cline Jr. TA: Ping Lu

A series of lightshades are the basis for an ini- issues of form, illumination, and mathematics. tial investigation of form, and the first attempt mination, mechanics, tectonics, purpose, strucat design for a very simple program. ture, and aesthetics.

The objective of the nightlight exercise was to create a simple lightshade. The process included investigating issues of mechanics, aesthetics, and functionality. This assignment was my first attempt experimenting with the Rhino modeling software plugin Grasshopper. The form was developed from multiple manifestations of voronoi cells. The main form of the shell was generated as a single cell. This was then doubled and nested in order to better control light. Punctuations through the cell were created again using the form of the voronoi cell on a random seed pattern.

The initial intent for the table lamp was to endeavour to physically combine structure and function, with an aesthetically pleasing result.

The working concept developed to achieve this was to puncture a continuous planar shade with supports that allow light to escape, thus using the structural skeleton as the means of diffusing light for the user. As the project evolved and the mechanics of the supports took on a rotational shape, emphasizing the structure became more important, leading to additional openings in the skin. The project addresses issues of illumination, mechanics, tectonics, purpose, structure, and aesthetics.

The design for the hanging lamp began with a purely mathematical concept: the sine curve.

This led to a non-visual process where I did not begin with an aesthetic idea of how the final product would look. Using Grasshopper to generate the line that would eventually describe the finished form allowed me to experiment with a wide variety of parameters. It quickly became evident that tiny numerical changes within the curve equations yielded enormous alterations in form. It also became evident that relative mathematical simplicity was going to be the only way to generate a form that would be possible for me to manufacture as a solid from layers of cardboard. The project addresses 73

Semester 2

Spring 2014

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Site: Figure-Ground

Professors Thomas J. Cline Jr. TA: Ping Lu

The following images are the product of an introductory exercise on the organization of cities. The works seek to understand the broad geometries of space in a dense urban environment. The image to the right is a detailed repro-

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duction of the figure-ground of modern Paris, in the Champs-ÉlysÊes area, done in ink on cold press paper. The image below is an abstracted representation of the geometric ideas behind the figure-ground, done in construction paper.

Semester 2

Spring 2014

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Order: The Grid

Professors Thomas J. Cline Jr. Geoff Parker Dr. Eren Erdener TA: Ping Lu

The grid is one of the fundamental ways we can order objects in space, and as such, it is nearly infinite in possible form and manipulation. The projects in this section are the result of investigating the grid in both two and three-dimensional space.

They are exercises in positive/negative, spatial tension, structure, and tectonics. As well as investigating an ordering device, these projects explore the four elements which describe space: point, line, plane, and volume.

Detail Study

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Semester 1

Fall 2013

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Volume Studies

Gallery Installation Rendering: All Groups

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Semester 1

Gallery Installation

Gallery Installation Rendering: My Group

Fall 2013

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Thank You

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