Louis Antonio Suarez
Selected Works, 2018 - 2019
Table of Contents Resume ......................................................................................... 1 Studies in Algal Motion ............................................................. 3 American Picturesque and Many Lakes .................................. 8 Alone Together ......................................................................... 15 Truss Stomach .......................................................................... 18 Against Theory ......................................................................... 23 Gleisdreieck ............................................................................... 26 Bibliography .............................................................................. 28 About ......................................................................................... 31
Louis Antonio Suarez L o u i s A n t o n i o S u a r e z Student of Architecture and Music
Web lasuarez.myportfolio.com Email lasuarez@andrew.cmu.edu Phone 412.708.5258
Education Carnegie Mellon University Bachelor of Architecture, Minor in Music (2016 - Present), C umulative QPA 3.72, Studio QPA 4.00 Duquesne University City Music Center Classical Guitar Performance and Musicology (2012 - 2016), Studio of R.J. Zimmerman (Guitar), Brian Buckley (Musicology) Accolades Carnegie Mellon University Gindroz Prize for Travel (2019), I ndependent drawing project in Spain, Fance, and Germany that culminated in an exhibition in October 2019. College of Fine Arts Dean’s List (2017 - Present), T op thirty percent of students in the Colleges of Art, Architecture, Design, Drama, and Music. School of Architecture Honors (2016 - Present), O utstanding overall academic performance. School of Architecture Design Commend (2017 - Present), O utstanding academic performance in design studios. American Composite Materials Association Compost Materials Challenge, Honorable Mention (2018), D esign proposal for reconfigurable formworks using resin and canvas. Vocations Front Studio Architects Architectural Design Intern (2019), Project renderer and editor for principle Art Lubetz’s upcoming book, “Immersive Architecture.” Carnegie Mellon University History of Architecture and Urbanism Teaching Assistant (2020), Professor Diane Shaw. Materials and Assembly Teaching Assistant (2019), P rofessor Gerard Damiani. Design and Research Assistant, Dana Cupkova (2019), E arly conceptual design work for concrete urban structures. Drawing Teaching Assistant (2018 - 2019), Professor Douglas Cooper. Summer Pre-College Architecture Teaching Assistant (2017 - 2018), H ead teaching assistant for design, digital, media, and drawing. Wats:ON? Festival Crew Member (2017), A ssistant for installation and curation of fine arts festival. Carnegie Library of Pittsburgh The LABS Photojournalism Summer Intensive Mentor (2016), D esigned curriculum and assisted in teaching a photojournalism summer course. Organizations Carnegie Mellon university Carnegie Mellon Contemporary Music Ensemble (2019), P erformed Toru Takemitsu’s “Toward the Sea” for alto flute and guitar Carnegie Mellon Guitar Ensemble (2016 - 2019), P remiered original composition “Harvest Song” for guitar duet. Interpunct Journal on Architectural Theory (2018), O rganized and conducted an interview with Kai Gutschow and architectural pedagogy. The Cut Magazine on Music Criticism (2017), Published an original article on the Saint Paul Cathedral Organ Concert Series. 1
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Studies in Algal Motion Fall 2018 | Advised by Dana Cupkova and Matthew Plecity
If ecological awareness is nonviolent coexistence with non-human others, then ecological architecture isn’t simply synonymous with sustainable architecture which aims to reduce negative impact of human built structures on the environment.1 Ecological architecture is more like an architecture mediating the space between humans and others, in which the building envelope is understood as something that also shelters others and program is the mode in which others operate in, each in completely unique ways. In a sense then, all architecture is ecological even when it’s unintentional. Imagine a house on Pittsburgh’s Allegheny river. It’s a house for humans, where they sleep, dine, play, procreate, entertain, or what-you-will. It’s a house for concrete that is poured, sets, and gradually erodes in the river. It’s a house for the river which modifies the concrete, provides gray water for the plumbing, and causes flooding every December. And it’s a house for algae which swims about for (at first glance) no apparent reason partaking in what we call Brownian motion. What this house is is inexhaustible.
Opposite: Computational modeling in employed to evaluating the algal motion at varying container shapes for three different sun positions. Above: A compositional mashup of Friedrich’s Woman at a Window and The Wreck of Hope. What at first glance appears to be scene of strict verticals and horizontals is actually an irregular lens distorting the echoing forms in the distance. Romantic art is surprisingly relevant access mode for interrogating the world because shows how when you actually try to get at objects how weird and manifold they really are. 3
The algae, who is also ontologically inexhaustible, photosynthesizes sugars from carbon dioxide and water. It releases oxygen that the family cat breaths. It swims about, and not in a completely random way, because algae, just like the cat, is more likely to do some things than others. More specifically, algae is reacts to sunlight in a particular way that can modeled with what is known as a Markov chain, or stochastic model describing the total possible sequence of events. By computing this we discover that the algae’s position in relationship to an aperture in a container can be determined probabilistically based on how long it has been exposed to sunlight.2,3 Because algae must be periodically shift between states of intense light and darkness in order to survive, its presence in the house isn’t constantly present. The algae partakes in a fluctuating dance of survival that in turn, mediates our experience of opacity and light, thus effecting how we live in a real-time way. Solidarity is achieved between us and them.
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Below: Algae is employed within the wall poche to create a dynamic shading device based on its proximity to sunlight. This generates an experience of varying opacities. Depending on the time of day, spaces in the housing units undergo differing levels of privacy of daylight, encouraging a more fluid way of life. Opposite: Building envelopes are never single lines. They are manifold with stuff existing between each surface. Following: The lives of others.
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American Picturesque and Many Lakes Fall 2019 | Advised by Heather Bizon
In the three hundred year span from 1700 and 2000 miraculous breadth has appeared in how we think about nature and draw it. American Picturesque and Many Lakes is a project series completed as part of Heather Bizon’s Advanced Option Studio, Future Fictions, where I examine how three representational modes the from previous three centuries: The 18th century English Picturesque, 19th century Realism, and 20th century fractal geometry, would depict a theoretical site along the future Ohio River. This future fiction supposes the collapse of coal mines in the south western Appalachian Basin thus resulting in the formation of new sinkhole lakes. The Claude glass is an 18th century optical device used by landscape artists and connoisseurs. It took the form of a small convex mirror tinted a dark hue. In practice, the painter would face away from the subject (something that I imagine might look like a modern day selfie), acquiring a panoramic view of the landscape with all the extraneous bits shrouded by the dark reflection. The Claude glass is the apparatus by which the picturesque is born.4 Realism in 19th century painting refers to an attempt to capture the world truthfully and without idealization. There 8
Above: A town atop a hill, a stream flowing from its source, A tree’s canopy enclosing the scene. It is pleasant, comfortable. It is normal, natural. Nature is an image, a baseline state in which we operate. Where in the image does Nature stray? In the white space, or perhaps sooner in the periphery? Opposite: When an old coal mine in collapses it often produces an open pit lake. Depending on the condition of the mine, water quality in these emerging geographic formations can vary drastically. Ranging from water that is safe to drink to acidic waters that can kill animals if even small amounts are consumed.
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was subset of this movement known as the Barbizon school spearheaded by Jean-François Millet in the 1830s. A symbolic technique in paintings such as Millet’s The Sower was to reuse poses from Classical art depicting heroes and gods, and import the anatomy to farmers and industrial workers. This technique would reappear again in following century becoming emblematic of the Socialist Realism of the Soviet Union.5,6 In 1972, mathematician Benoit Mandelbrot intented to term “fractal” to describe a new branch of mathematics that uses the concept of fractal dimension to measure a shape’s roughness. The classic example is Mandelbrot’s “how long is the coastline of Great Brittan?” question in which he determines that the island is of infinite length because more detail is revealed as you measure it with a smaller and smaller yardstick. Fractal geometry is an important concept in geography because it provides a new way of measuring shapes that are otherwise hard to describe. Its procedural nature also makes it useful in computer graphics for generating digital models of landscapes.7 Thinking now about aesthetics in the twentieth century, I have begun to examine how these modes can become informative to art in an ecological age. An image constructed using fractal
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Bellow: Perceval contemplates his beloved. The rook dines on her prey. The blood dyes the snow, which in turn, in slow motion, decays the Holy Lance. Opposite: Longinus raises the Holy Lance to take from the espalier tree. He is stuck in a peculiar loop. The originator of and savior from sin. The holy implement which brought us here is the only thing that can lead us back, only to leave us where we already were.
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geometry isn’t that different from the Claude glass or a 19th century painting. Not only are they all descriptions of landscapes, but they also point to how things aren’t quite the way they appear, which is a fundamental concept in Timothy Morton’s ecological philosophy.8 The Claude glass aims to simplify the picture, but only succeeds in heightening to weirdness in its distorted edges. The 19th century painting is imbued with symbolism, providing multiple allegorical level to an image and revealing the twisted loop much like the holy lance in Parsifal.
Opposite: Anfortas’s wound. Right: It could burn for another 250 years. The mine fire is deep underground, but it spreads a plume of ash, toxic gas, and smoke thousands of feet into the sky.
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Alone Together Spring 2018 | Advised by Jeremy Ficca and Lolo Ladron
What do monasteries, libraries, and swimming pools all have in common? Each are typologies with roots in ancient civilizations. They form a contemporary variation of the trifunctional hypothesis. Praying men, fighting men, and working men become modern clergy, athletes, and students.9 And they all also exist as communal spaces in which the occupants remain in solitude. Swimming pools are divided into lap lanes. Libraries contain vaulted reading rooms with wooden reading desks with green reading lamps. The monastery has the courtyard. The Buoys partition swimmers and green reading lamps fashion striations of light and shadow engendering symbolic boundaries between studious individuals. While the courtyard is similar in respects that provides barrier, it forgoes the need to block all sensory access between agents, namely the sense of vision. The courtyard thus, is a space in which occupants exist in sight of each other, though isolated from contact.
Opposite: The Choisy is one of my favorite drawing projection types. Like all forms axonometric projections it is measurable and remains undistorted in at least two axes, but unlike other forms of the projection, it speaks to how the space is expierenced by giving a visceral sense of the overhead enclosure. Above: Corridor to the tepidarium.
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“To circumambulate” is the courtyard’s associated verb, only not quite. Circumambulation, which plays a role in Christianity, Islam, and Buddhism, among other religions, and deriving from Latin for “to walk around,” requires a sacred idol or object to act as the pivoting point for the motion.10 The courtyard, as in the monastic tradition and in the bathhouse design here, removes the center object and re-frames circumambulation as an action of introverted community. Closeness without contact, or in our case of contact without proximity.
Opposite: How does one give form to an introverted building? The courtyard pools serve as nodes that push their programs outward, masking their abstracted forms on the façade. Left: Sight-lines across a courtyard.
Aggregated, the courtyard produces a simulated urbanism. Hackesche Höfe in Berlin is an example of this. A figure ground reading of the complex reveals the buildings as a single mass and the courtyards as streets. Ground contained in figure. Another example is Joseph Gandy’s painting of John Soane’s Bank of England as a ruin. It’s simultaneously an arrogant statement about architecture’s permanence and a floorplan. Not a building floorplan but that of a forum. An introverted building contains its own urbanity. Perhaps even, all buildings do.
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Truss Stomach Spring 2019 | Advised by Matthew Huber and Stephen Lee
On the south bank of the Allegheny River just north of the 40th Street Bridge stands an experimental boarding school. The fundamental pedagogy of this school is based in the ecological literacy of Orr and Capra, or “understanding the systems that make life on Earth possible.”11 To this end, this school aims to create a space in which the architecture becomes a teacher. The school has two massive “stomachs” which are programed as bio-hacking labs where students learn a bio mechanical framework to growing and architecture, by immersion in principles of microclimates and thermal mass. In mathematics, orientability is a property of surfaces in Euclidean space that allows for normal definitions of inside/ outside or clockwise/counter-clockwise to be applied to a surface. For a surface to be non-orientable there must be a closed path around which a figure can be moved only to look like it’s mirror image when it gets back to the start.12 In the case of this project, the stomachs suggest non-orientability by surrendering the building’s interiority to the outside, extending its program to a concrete growing wall. The wall is constructed using robotically fabricated concrete panels. Deformations in the surface demarcate unique thermal zones, creating microclimates to facilitate plant growth. 18
Above: Front elevation showing the two stomachs and overhead truss. Right: Student tends to the growing wall.
Opposite of the growing wall, a double skin curtain wall will aid in natural ventilation and improve thermal performance by increasing glazing assembly R-values through the use of argon gasfilled IGUs and laminated 3/8� glass panels sealed with a silicon sealant. Adjustable mechanical louvers provide three different configurations for the curtain wall for the summer, spring/fall, and winter seasons. By exhausting hot air, pulling in fresh air, and circulating warm air in the cavity.
Proceeding: Transverse section through one of the stomachs.
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Against Theory Spring 2018 | Advised by Jeremy Ficca and Lolo Ladron
“I am a monument!” shouts the new office building. “Ach, such hubris!” retorts the towering church, “How can that be? You’re just an office building and I’m an immovable place of worship.” “But that’s where you’re all mixed up. In four hundred years I probably won’t be an office building but I’ll still have my beautiful parabolic vaults.” Still unsatisfied the church continues, “You’re just a formalistic mess. Architecture is about people and how they interact. Buildings exist to facilitate their lives.” “People come and go; it’s absurd to think we will know the needs of our occupants long into the future. I doubt the Mezquita would ever have expected a Christmas mass to be held in side her walls. No, it’s not our uses that matter but our aesthetic principles.” “Ha! I have caught you with your poor logic. By your reasoning, people’s tastes will also change. How can you be certain that your parabolic vaults will still please future generations?” “No, but at least they will know who our makers were.”
Opposite: In a traditional party wall, two adjacent buildings share one wall. In a modern version, the wall is doubled to facilitate fire protection. What if a “gap” was formed between the two buildings? Almost but not quite touching.
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Gleisdreieck Summer 2018 | Advised by Douglas Cooper and Mareike Lee
It was Sunday that I arrived at the railway triangle, Or wye, switching lines to find my lodgings. Unfinished poem...
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Bibliography 1.
Morton, Timothy. Being Ecological, 2018
2.
Gagniuc, Paul. Markov Chains, 2017
Powell, C. K., et al. Biotechnology and Bioengineering, Vol. VII, 1966 3
4.
Maillet, Arnaud. The Claude Glass, 2004
5.
Murphy, Alexandra R. Jean-François Millet, 1984
Korin, Pavel, Thoughts on Art, Socialist Realism in Literature and Art, 1971 5.
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7.
Mandelbrot, BenoĂŽt, The Fractal Geometry of Nature, 1982
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Morton, Timothy. Dark Ecology, 2016
9.
DumĂŠzil, G. Mitra-Varuna, 1940
10.
Bowker, John. The Oxford Dictionary of World Religions, 1999
11.
Orr, David. Ecological Literacy, 1992
12.
Hatcher, Allen. Algebraic Topology, 2001
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About Louis (born 4 December 1997) is a bachelor of architecture student at Carnegie Mellon University. He loves art, music, reading, cycling, and cooking. As an architecture student he is interested in the art form’s connections with ecology, history, and storytelling and is always seeking to import ideas from music and literature into architecture. Aside from his architecture work, Louis is a classical guitarist of eight years. He has made solo and chamber appearances with the Pittsburgh Classical Guitar Society, the Carnegie Mellon Guitar Ensemble, and the Carnegie Mellon Contemporary Music Ensemble. Louis is also an avid road cyclist. He believes the world is best seen from the seat of a bicycle, and often takes long rides outside of Pittsburgh to explore industrial and agricultural infrastructure along the three rivers.
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