VAAFOULAY KANNEH PORTFOLIO
LEHIGH UNIVERSITY MUSEUM OF ART (LUMA)
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COLLISIONS, COLLAGES, COINCIDENCES
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PART
PART
I: THE SPATIAL CITY
II: BERLIN HOLOCAUST MEMORIAL
PART III: SHOTGUNS
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ARCHITECTURE AND CINEMA
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VOLUMES, PLANES, AND A HOUSE
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TRAVEL PHOTOGRAPHY
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LEHIGH UNIVERSITY MUSEUM OF ART (LUMA) ARCHITECTURAL DESIGN IV SPRING 2021 The Lehigh University Museum of Art (LUMA) reinforces the historical link between Lehigh University and the city of Bethlehem. Here, programmatic requisites - exhibition spaces, maker spaces, gathering spaces - do not inhibit this project’s nuanced exploration of form and the museum typology. Designed as an appendage to the now-defunct Bethlehem First Reformed Church, the museum’s structure results from a historical study on the First Reformed Church and a structural survey of church architecture. Bethlehem’s First Reformed Church was dedicated to worship in the fall of 1896. Built by and for the town’s then-burgeoning German immigrant population, the doubletowered wheel-windowed brown-stone Romanesque Revival church was meant to announce the optimism with which the nascent community approached the new life in America. Since then, the now-abandoned church in south Bethlehem is a memento of past generations who looked to religion for their raisons d’etre. In LUMA, a spiritual space is repurposed as a museum - forming part of a trend where growing secularism has led to the desacralization of churches around the globe. Rather than signaling some finality to urban religious practice, this act relays a formal reference of the church as a historic site for experiencing art. Though serving as a bridge between the school and the city, inside, the museum preoccupies the individual’s mind solely with art and the historic space that now frames Lehigh’s eclectic collection.
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Lehigh University Campus Greenery Mixed-use Businesses
The First Reformed Church:
The First Reformed Church, completed in 1896, cost its german benefactors $20,000 (or $500,000 in today’s prices) and, at that time, was one of six churches in south Bethlehem.
STEPS Building:
The Science, Technology, Environment, Policy, and Society (STEPS) building was completed in 2010 and is Lehigh’s first and only LEED-Gold-certified building.
Packard Laboratory:
The sandstone building, completed in 1930, is named after famous Lehigh industrialist alumni James Packard and hosts the first car ever produced by the Packard Motor company.
University Center:
The Lehigh University Center was built in 1869 and houses the administrative offices that run student activities. This building also houses the student cafeterias.
A series of projections and three-dimensional transformations translate the geometric details of a flying buttress to the two wings of the new Lehigh Museum. Each wing of the museum consists of stacked, sequenced volumes determined from the closed polyline curves constituting a flying buttress elevation. This marriage of a gothic structural motif to the existing Romanesque building serves as a metaphor for the new lease on life afforded to the existing building by the new museum.
North, South
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B
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C
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B
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A
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C
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West, East
Program
Section A-A: West Wing
1. Art Storage 2. Lobby 3. Bathroom
4. Cafe 5. Library 6. Retail
Basement
7. Staff Offices 8. Gathering Space 9. Gallery
10. Makerspaces 11. Auditorium 12. Digitization Room
Level 1
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A
Section B-B: East Wing
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A
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C
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3 4
Level 3
Level 2
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Level 5
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A 5
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Level 4
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Section C-C: West Wing, Church, and East Wing
West Wing, Level 5
East Wing, Level 4
West Wing, Level 2
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Approach from north-west
COLLISIONS, COLLAGES, COINCIDENCES PART I: THE SPATIAL CITY ARCHITECTURAL DESIGN III FALL 2020
The Spatial City is a conceptual project by French architect Yona Friedman. The project proposes an urban expansion formula that utilizes the airspace above cities. There is usually very little building space at ground level in dense cities. Population growth and expansion often result in urban sprawl. To address this, Yona Friedman proposed elevated habitable levels as a substitute to incessant ground-level sprawl. At increasing heights, the relationship between building masses and void spaces becomes stark. At very high elevations, building masses occupy minimal airspace, and density decreases. Friedman recognizes the imaginative possibility of constructing elevated space frames for engineering habitable spaces at extreme heights. The Space frames allow both for incidental uniformity and diversity of building geometries. There is sufficient geometric clearance between the new elevated structures and the pre-existing building masses to prevent collisions between the old and the new. This geometric clearance also serves to let enough light down to the lower levels of the city. This structured layering of urban spaces produces a collage of simultaneously coincidental and contrasting elements.
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COLLISIONS, COLLAGES, COINCIDENCES PART II: BERLIN HOLOCAUST MEMORIAL ARCHITECTURAL DESIGN III FALL 2020
The Berlin Holocaust Memorial was designed by Peter Eisenman. The Memorial is a field of 2,711 steles noted by visitors as resembling a field of tombstones. The coincidences between Eisenman’s design and the political context it references are very striking. Europe’s history of Antisemitism and the Weimar Republic’s failure set European Jews and a reactionary German state on a collision course. The rectangular grid of steles frays at the edges of the site as Eisenman introduces disorder by randomly erasing cells at the periphery of the grid. These seemingly unorchestrated erasures create a perception of “missing” blocks as the field becomes less dense with increasing distance from the center. The diagrams on the left are color-coded to reveal a variation in depth across the area.
The site’s irregular boundary collides with the neat orthogonal grid on which the steles are placed. The stele grid is also located within the broader network of Berlin’s irregularlyshaped urban blocks. These geometric contrasts are typical of Eisenman, who embraces collisions in his designs.
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COLLISIONS, COLLAGES, COINCIDENCES PART III: SHOTGUNS
Rooms
ARCHITECTURAL DESIGN III FALL 2020 Historians trace the Shotgun to Haiti and Yorubaland in West Africa. The solid communal values of the cultures of these regions are greatly manifested in the typology’s form. Shotguns rarely have clearly demarcated hallways. Instead, an enfilade of openings provides circulation and allows for copresence and openness. For this project, the shotgun is deconstructed into rooms, circulation, ventilation shafts, and gable roofs. The forms are re-combined to show collision, collage, and coincidence in a manner that ultimately characterizes program. Linear circulation is segmented. Ventilation channels are then offset to emphasize a clash between circulation and ventilation. The layout of a typical shotgun house consists of an orderly placement of rooms producing attenuated floor plans; there is very little irregularity in the boxlike arrangements. Here, a 6-room shotgun’s floor plan is transformed into a collage of 14 volumes colliding with each other on multiple planes. These 14 noncubic volumes are bounded by well over 84 vertical, horizontal and inclined planes, presenting exciting opportunities for transitions and coincidences.
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Circulation
Cross-Ventilation
Gable roof
The image on the right shows an edited version of a painting, Shotgun (1987), by Harlem Renaissance artist John T. Biggers. The figures reference the shotgun’s origins amongst black peoples in the diaspora and on the African continent. Biggers’ painting is essentially a flattened view of a railroadside rural vista. The gable fronts in the image are used to create perspective and emphasize coincidence. The illusory essence of this representation is that different possible three-dimensional layouts of the gable fronts are suggested. Shotguns often have garish elevations, which have been replicated here to expose a collage of colliding forms. Circulation involves a procession through a collection of comfortable and awkward rooms resulting from deconstruction and collision. The transformations create interior and exterior spaces that allow for the re-evaluation of this housing typology. The exercise in formal language is primal in this project, with program being ancillary.
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ARCHITECTURE AND CINEMA ARCHITECTURAL DESIGN II SPRING 2020 This semester-long project explores the relationship between cinema and architecture in a two-part process. Firstly the relationship between set, camera, and actors in an approximately 100-second clip from Jean-Luc Goddard’s 1963 film, Contempt, is explored through a series of diagrams. This project’s culmination was to develop a second set, a livework residence for a film director, directly based on a series of diagrammatic analyses of the scenes from the movie clip. SET 1 The clip starts 37 minutes into the movie when the two protagonists walk into their apartment. The camera is initially located in the foyer of the apartment. The characters then perambulate through the kitchen, the living room, the bathroom, and the bedroom while maintaining a conversation. Concurrently, the camera oscillates about the foyer, trying to keep sight of the two actors while simultaneously revealing the apartment’s layout. This approximately 100-second clip is represented with the use of the diagrams shown. First, the camera’s location and the two actors are represented in a static architectural set in plan view. In the second diagram, the camera’s point of view is adopted while the set and actors are represented dynamically.
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Set is Static
Camera is Static
SET 2, Level 1
SET 1 TO SET 2 Conceptual developments for a film director’s residence were achieved through diagrammatic analysis of the film scenes. The set’s geometric center, the foyer, corresponds to the point around which the camera and actors navigate the set. The coincidence of floor-plan-layout and cinematic choreograph is exploited formally. This allows for creating diagrams that provide a transition from the analysis of Set 1, the apartment pictured in the 1963 movie, to the design of Set 2, a retreat for the filmmaker.
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Entrance
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SC. 1
SC. 2
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SET 2,Level 2 1. 2. 3. 4. 5. 6. 7.
Entrance Hall of Fame Drawing room Private Study Storage Master Bedroom Foyer
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Living room Kitchen Dining room Courtyard Cinema Extra room Guest suite
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SC. 1-8
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SET 2,Level 3
15. Swimming Pool
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ARCHITECTURE, CINEMATICALLY STAGED Here, architectural elements are now staged cinematically in a total reversal of the first prompt of this project. Characters from the scenes of my favorite director, Quentin Tarantino, have been inserted in the house’s exterior and interior spaces. Tarantino’s dramatic dialogues and an eclectic ensemble of characters have been applied to bring the set to life. The house is now a tool for activating the imagination of its primary inhabitant the film director. The site produces a scenic environment where the director could envision dramatic settings and events, thereby contributing to the improvement of his craft.
Scene 1: Access Road. Arrival
Scene 2: Entrance Hall. Ascent West
South
SITE The building rests on a site manufactured through a refinement of a series of scripted moves, which involved drawing 33 unique 8-segment lines within a square. These wouldbe topographical lines emphasize motion, transition, and unfolding. The new set, the house, is then carefully situated such that its circular forms resonate with the topographical features of the site. The river, running diagonally, adds a scenic element to the site.
ELEVATIONS: NORTH, EAST, SOUTH, WEST
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Scene 3: Pool. Retreat
Scene 4: Hall of Fame. Exploration
The rooms, diagrammed as volumes, are sandwiched into and cantilevered from a concrete framework of ribbed and truss structures supported by columns. The structural component occupies the central portion of the plan and runs through its full extent. The rooms are of differing heights. These differing floor heights require numerous steps and means of level circulation throughout the house, creating diagrammatic lines on the building’s floor plan. The irregular shapes of these volumes, resembling annular sectors, arranged to provide for a circumambulatory procession around the house, result from the striations on the conceptual diagram developed from the analysis of set 1.
Scene 5: Courtyard. Confrontation
STRUCTURE
Scene 7: Staircase. Descent
SECTION A-A
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Scene 6: Rooftop. Reflection
Scene 8: Access Road. Departure
SECTION B-B
VOLUMES, PLANES,AND A HOUSE ARCHITECTURAL DESIGN I FALL 2019 This project explores form making as an exercise in the organization of volumes and planes to design a Live-Work Residence for an Artist. The semesterlong project involved a sequential tripartite process. The first phase consisted of the study of form as composed of enclosed volumes, and the second phase consisted of the study of form as composed of planes. The culmination of these two phases is the design of an Artist’s Residence, located on a site of the student’s devising and programmed for work, living, and recuperation.
VOLUMES Here, a complex form is produced from the deconstruction of a cubic volume. The faces of the cube are sliced along orthogonal directions and the slices formed into ribs. The result is a system of superimposed ribs rotated on multiple planes. The Lasercut Chipboard model measures 8’’ x 8’’. Translating a clipping from an orthogonal view into a motif provides a transition from volumes to planes. The motif is arranged into a 4 x 4 grid that serves as a plan for constructing a planar structure. 16
PLANES The 4 X 4 pattern has been broken down such that each unit of repetition is constructed from five structures. The model consists of a combination of planar ribs, uncapped surfaces, and shells. The Laser-cut Chipboard model measures 8’’ x 8’’. From a single unit of this 16-unit model, volumetric and planar forms are obtained. These geometries then serve as formal concepts for a house design that utilizes both volumetric and planar structures.
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A HOUSE The house’s design is based on a combination of geometries derived from the chipboard models which are then dissected into spatial volumes and projecting planes. The hypothetical site, an isolated cliff, speaks to the often enlightening amd inspirational experiences that come with isolation. The physical context and the building’s layout embraces the idea that our introverted moments are often responsible for moments of creative genius.
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TRAVEL PHOTOGRAPHY
Havana
Havana 19
Colon Cemetery. 2018
Museum of the Revolution. 2018.
Cancun
Zona Hotelera. 2019.
Havana
Ministry of the Interior. 2018.
Abu Dhabi
‘Metamorphic’, Louvre Abu Dhabi. 2018
Chichen Itza
Munich 20
Funf Hofe. 2019.
Munich
El Castillo. 2019.
BMW Welt. 2019.
THANK YOU 21