LUKE ANGERS
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ARCHITECTURE PORTFOLIO
EDUCATION
PUBLISHED WORK & EXHIBITIONS
McGill University (Fall 2014 - Winter 2018) Royal Danish Academy of Fine Arts (Winter 2017)
Centre Nautique McGill, published on the McGill SoA
HONOURS McCaig Family Scholarship in Engineering (2015/16) Favretto Scholarship in Architecture (2016/17) Gluskin-Sheff Travel Scholarship (2016/17) Deans Honour List, Faculty of Engineering (2015/16/17) Wilfred Truman Shaver Travel Scholarship (2017/18)
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Student Work Website and in the 2015-2016 McGill SoA Student Work Book
Pavilion for the Mile End, published on the McGill SoA
Student Work Website and in the 2015-2016 McGill SoA Student Work Book
Museum for the Mile End, displayed in the McGill SoA accreditation exhibition “From Arch 303 to Arch 683” First Nations Garden Pavilion Analytique, on the McGill SoA Student Work Website
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BONAVENTURE HOTEL
CONTENTS CONTACT luke.angers@mail.mcgill.ca (514)-572-2352 19A Rue Lavigne Gatineau, Quebec, J8Y 3H8
Bonaventure Hotel / MSOA 1
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Fictive Transcripts / KADK 1
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Amager Urban Housing / KADK 2
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Centre Nautique McGill / MSOA 2
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Selected Drawings / MSOA 3
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Museum for the Mile End / MSOA 4
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Architecture and Mutualism / MSOA5
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MSOA 1
BONAVENTURE HOTEL
BONAVENTURE HOTEL / MONTREAL McGill University SoA, 2017 / Design and Construction 3 Professor Howard Davies / Collaboration with Odile Lamy
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DESIGN STATEMENT 12/12/17 Starting out, we were interested in the notion of originality in terms of architectural ideas and how we could sublimate archetypes into a project that was buildable in the context of a technical studio. The prescribed program of a hotel on our site at the edge of Montreal’s recently deconstructed Bonaventure Expressway prompted notions of disintegrating modernist infrastructures (and dreams) and their relevance to the current architectural situation. An especially fertile point of departure were the subconscious ideas associated with the notion of the canonical hotel and the uncanny environments their architectures create due to an irrational forcing of homeliness outside of the home.
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The project explores the multiplicities of influence modern architecture can have on a community; most important was the subconscious interface between human experience operating on level of archetypal perceptions and the inherent psychology of the built environment. The assigned technical scheme of a dual-program manifested itself as the horrific trope of a clone or doppelganger which came to embody the program’s formal expression through a double tower; an engaged twin straining for separation into two distinct volumes that are ultimately confined to the singular block. The division of the site and reduplication of the building form purposefully identifies issues of uniqueness, identity, and deviance, which, in turn, inform the architectural experiences of the interior.
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The split programming also references the manifestation of modernist desires in the Downtown Athletic Club and Waldorf Astoria Hotel outlined in Koolhaas’s Delirious New York. Its productive and rational critique of the indulgence and congestion of the high-rise typology is embodied in our project but given an inappropriate twist with the introduction of a vertical hydroponic farm. As such, the programming merges notions of industrial production, rationalism and the uncanny experience of the hotel. The project’s grid, which typically internalizes the modern ambition of subjugating if not obliterating nature, is also twisted and broken; the archetypal glass megastructure of modernist fantasies is inappropriately deformed, opening itself to inhabitation by the exterior environment it relegated to obsolescence and denying the superiority of mental construction over environmental reality.
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Above / Interior Renderings Centre / Generative Sketch Opposite / Massing Diagram ; Design and Plan Progression Skethes
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Above, Opposite / Construction Plans, 1:300
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BONAVENTURE HOTEL
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130mm CAVITY (SEALED AIRSPACE) RS1 ~ 1
STAINLESS STEEL WEBNET
1+1mm LOW IRON LAMINATED GLASS (LOW-E DUAL PANE) RSI ~ 5
STEEL MEMBRANEVAPOR BARRIERBATTING INSULATION-
-30mm CONCRETE TOPPING -RADIANT HEATING -CONCRETE SLAB
ALUMINUM SKIRTING
4TH FLOOR 24 700
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SUPPORT ROD TOP RAIL
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TRIPLE CELL TRACKING SHADE (LOW-E COATING) RSI ~ 5 INSULATING FABRIC RSI ~ 2
EFFECTIVE R-VALE LOW-E GLASS - 5 130mm SEALED AIRSPACE - 1 LOW-E GLASS - 5 TRIPLE CELL SHADE - 5 + FABRIC - 2 18
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Above / NS Construction Section, 1:300 Opposite / Construction Detail, 1:10
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BOUL. ROBERT-BOURASSA FACADE SCALE - 1:300
Above / Construction Elevation, 1:300 Opposite, Next / Physical Model, 1:200 Next / Construction Plans, 1:500
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ARCHITECTURE AND MUTUALISM
MECH. RM. ROOF 69 500
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KADK 1
FICTIVE TRANSCRIPTS
FICTIVE TRANSCRIPTS / COPENHAGEN Royal Danish Academy of Fine Arts, 2017 / The Fictive City Professor Carolina Dayer / Collaboration with Erin Poppy
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ON THE CITY AND THE CHURCH “Films act as cultural, social and poetic entities that carry within their plots a lot more than the stories they mean to tell. Places, habits and history are framed through fictive narratives that mirror structures of reality.” This excerpt from the project brief describes the initial investigations which led realization of the work displayed here. It also describes the process of my cultural acclimation to the city of Copenhagen, which I explored both physically (by bicycle) and fictionally (through film). Stemming from an analysis of Thomas Vinterberg’s Submarino, my partner and I conducted a chiasmic study of the aesthetics of the city through the aesthetics of film and vice versa. This process is represented in the first image (previous page), an aerial photo of Bipesbjerg and the surrounding neighborhood of Købehavn NV where much of Submarino was shot. Areas of the image are cut away in a cartographic exercise to reveal film stills relating to the surrounding area and early maps of the region before it was developed. The project culminated in a film exploring a central location (Grundtvigs Kirke) of both Submarino and the city (right) and an architectural transcript of its experiential qualities (next page). The film has no characters or explicit narrative; it acts as a probe into the architecture and materiality which constitute the spatial and emotional dimensions of the church and Copenhagen more broadly. If the film is a probe, then the transcript is a embodiment of the data retrieved. It combines traditional architectural representation in working drawings through collage and manipulates their scales to desired effect. Three distorted drawings merge into a cohesive image forming the shape of a crucifix, which is later sketched over with graphite to reveal lighting and evoke the softness of the building’s interior. Constituted of a plan, unfolded section, and detail, reading of the drawing mimics the significant cortical experiences of the church; beginning with an oversized view of the threshold, through the rhythmic section, and culminating in the centre of the cross at the locus of spiritual internalization.
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FICTIVE TRANSCRIPTS See full film Title / Filmic Mapping, Købehavn NV Above, Below / Film Stills in Sequence Next / Architectural Transcript, Grundtvigs Kirke
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KADK 2
AMAGER URBAN HOUSING
AMAGER URBAN HOUSING / COPENHAGEN Royal Danish Academy of Fine Arts, 2017 / Studio Finder Sted Professors Peter Alexander Bullough, Robert Gassner, and Camilla Hornemann
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APPROACH AND PROGRAM
The fact that this project is based on the elusive qualities essential to Lynch entails the requirement for aesthetic and programmatic precedent to not only be taken from the site but from the greater context of the architectural uncanny experienced within it. Therefore, the project does not restrict itself to the aesthetic of the existing buildings of Amager but takes influence from the uglier realities of industrial neighborhoods more broadly, like those of Lynch’s early life in Philadelphia or Inland Empire’s shooting location of Lódz in Poland, as they all share the same psychological topography of human experience. The resulting building is one that reflects the realities of the site and context without being grounded; an uncanny representation that reminds us of Amager, but simultaneously produces spaces of otherness in our fundamental psychological experience in the same manner that Daniel Libeskind is reminded of the transitory nature of the buildings in Lódz. “So familiar and yet so strange. Uncanny and magnificent, yet full of sadness. That’s how Lódz felt to me. The city appeared to be made of cardboard, a decaying set for a movie that wrapped long ago.” Using Mark Pimlott’s notion continuous interior as intellectual precedent, new construction will insert itself directly into existing infrastructure, linking established residences with new units and refurbished spaces in an interconnected polychrome conglomeration. The continuous interior forges a direct link to the otherspace that permeates the literature of the architectural uncanny; the combination of existing typologies is intended to create a gestalt-esque tertiary (other) space or space of equivalence in which habitation can be accommodated along with a public program containing workshops and exterior gathering places. The corridor along the central axis of the built addition which connects existing apartments with new units is illuminated through a series of openings from the functional spaces of apartment interiors. This examination of architectural boundaries also makes its way into the internal organization of units through a system of curtains and sliding walls that intentionally question standards of personal space and behavioral reactions to privacy. Finally, this project celebrates its staircases as a Lynchian chambers by separating them from the internal building volume and allowing processes of the architectural uncanny to be put into practice, namely adjusted scale and combinatory typologies. The staircase serves to literalize the pursuit of the uncanny that drives this project; they are to be constructed from brick recycled from surrounding industrial buildings into conical volumes containing modified industrial spiral staircases. This shrunken smokestack typology plays with the perception of scale and is reminiscent of the industrial past which can still be observed in the decaying brick and peeling paint of the derelict buildings on the site.
Title / Physical Model on Site Model, 1:100 Opposite / Damaged Physical Model, 1:100
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AMAGER URBAN HOUSING
The general concept for this project is to subvert the typical limitations of the modern housing development in a distinctly Lynchian manner; an approach inspired by an analysis of the films of David Lynch carried out at the Danish Film Institute. The spaces Lynch creates in film constitute the architectural underpinnings of the work, but the building is not attempting to recreate them in any capacity. However, Lynch’s influence was incorporated more generally into the programmatic functions, organization, representation and materiality of the architecture, creating spaces that are at once familiar to the site and existing urban fabric of Amager (area of southeast of Copenhagen) but maintain an air of elusiveness.
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AMAGER URBAN HOUSING
Above / NS Section Watercolour, Collage Opposite / EW Section Collage, 1:50
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AMAGER URBAN HOUSING
Above / Final NS Section, 1:100 Opposite / Exterior Renderings
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Above / Final Plans, 1:150 ; 1:750 Opposite / Damaged Physical Model, 1:100 Next / Physical Model on Site Model, 1:100
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AMAGER URBAN HOUSING / COPENHAGEN
AMAGER URBAN HOUSING
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MSOA 2
CENTRE NAUTIQUE MCGILL
CENTRE NAUTIQUE MCGILL / STE.-ANNE-DE-BELLEVUE McGill University SoA, 2016 / Architectural Graphics and Elements of Design Professor David Covo / Collaboration with Thibaud Gagnon-Guimaud Published on McGill SoA Student Work Website and in the 2015-2016 McGill SoA Student Work Book
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CONNECTING STUDENTS WITH LAC SAINT-LOUIS This project was born out of discussions around past development plans for McGill University’s MacDonald campus and is intended to challenge the conventional community centre. Despite the site’s location on the western extremity of the Island of Montreal close to Ste. Anne de Bellevue, the university believed a boathouse providing access to the water along with equipment could increase student interest in the second campus and foster outdoor activity. As such, a proposal for an underutilized stretch of waterfront property on Lac Saint-Louis was produced with the intention of adding to the recreational capacity of the existing campus infrastructure. The project’s program is separated between its two primary floors, with rowing facilities (including boat storage, locker rooms, a classroom, and cafeteria) on the ground level giving access onto the waterfront, and a reception space (with a kitchen, dining space, and large terrace with views over the water) on the gallery floor. Accessibility is addressed through an elevated lobby and a series of ramps letting onto both floors while encompassing meeting spaces to create an active entrance threshold. The building, in turn, promotes the outdoors by drawing the visitor within and through to the waterfront site regardless of the path they take. Its form was strategically generated to suit these purposes and serves to celebrate outdoor space over indoor. Construction is intended to be as sustainable as possible, employing wood framing and natural ventilation as conditions to drive the design. Special focus was given to the circulation of fresh air throughout the upper floor; the terrace was carved out of the southwest edge of the building as to capture the breeze coming off the water and to draw stale air from the lower floor out of the building through suction. Strategic placement of skylights and windows further reduces the need for consumption of electrical power as much of the interior space is lit naturally throughout the day. This philosophy retains the administration’s vision for a responsible and mutually beneficial intervention that will connect students with Montreal’s natural beauty and serve as significant cog in McGill’s Macdonald Campus.
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CENTRE NAUTIQUE MCGILL
Title / Physical Model I, 1:200 Above / Design Progression Watercolours and Sketches Opposite / Physical Model II, 1:200
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1. Main Entrance 2. Lobby 3. Ramp to Gallery 4. Ramp to Main Floor
5. Janitor’s Closet 6. Central Corridor 7. Men’s Lockers 8. Women’s Lockers
9. Cafeteria 10. Boat Maintenance 11. Boat Storage 12. Classroom
GALLERY
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CENTRE NAUTIQUE MCGILL
16. Men’s Restroom 13. Ramp to Gallery 17. Foyer 14. Fire Stairs 15. Women’s Restroom 18. Kitchen
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Above / Final Plans, 1:400 ; Final Elevations, 1:300 Opposite, Next / Physical Model I, 1:200
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Above / Final NS and EW Sections, 1:150 Next / Final Site Plan, 1:500
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TITLE / QUEBEC CITY Urban Sketch for Architectural Sketching
SPREAD 1 / MONTREAL Carceri Expansion Exercisze for Architectural Graphics and Elements of Design
SPREAD 2 / MONTREAL Invisible Cities - Zenobia Storyboard for Architectural History 1
SPREAD 3 / STOCKHOLM AND QUEBEC CITY Urban Sketching for Finder Sted Studio and Architectural Sketching Displayed in the McGill SoA accreditation exhibition “From Arch 303 to Arch 683”
SPREAD 4 / MONTREAL First Nations Garden Pavilion Analytique for Communication, Behavior and Architecture Published on McGill SoA Student Work Website
MSOA 3
SELECTED DRAWINGS
SELECTED DRAWINGS / VARIOUS LOCATIONS McGill University SoA, 2015-17; Royal Danish Academy of Fine Arts, 2017 / Various Courses Professors Ricardo Castro, David Covo and Anne Romme Multiple works published and exhibited
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Previous / Carceri Expansion Exercise Above / Invisible Cities - Zenobia, Storyboards Opposite / Invisible Cities - Zenobia, Plan
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SELECTED DRAWINGS
Above / Urban Sketches, Quebec City Opposite / Urban Sketches, Stockholm Next / First Nations Garden Pavilion Analytique
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MSOA 4
MUSEUM FOR THE MILE END
MUSEUM FOR THE MILE END / MONTREAL McGill University SoA, 2016 / Design and Construction 1 Professor Vedanta Balbahadur Displayed in the McGill SoA accreditation exhibition “From Arch 303 to Arch 683”
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ART, SPACE, AND THE ALLEY In the context of the dense urban neighborhood of Montreal’s Mile End, buildings reinforce the street and mold the space of the yards and alleys to their backs with irregular, projecting shapes. The site for this museum proposal is opportune because it is one of the few areas in the surrounding context that does not reinforce the street. Unfortunately, the space is designated as a parking lot and little public activity is allowed to take place. In the redesign of the site there was a conscious choice to leave the street side of the site empty, activating it as a space for the public, and allowing the alleyway to serve as the spine for the new building. In this way, the museum reverses the focus of vernacular Mile End architecture by reinforcing the alley. The museum is also a theoretical exploration of a great incongruence in museum design; the requirement for receding, practical spaces against the creation of a place of importance which distinguishes itself from other institutions through its architecture. The earliest concept sketches of the building envisioned it as a network of projecting spaces tied around a centralized circulation core situated at the back of the site. As the design began to materialize as a three-dimensional model, it became clear that there would have to be some kind of reconciliation between the form in the original sketches and the requirement for a functioning museum program. Many of the airborne projections were dragged down to rest upon a base volume along the building spine, but one remains, stretching away from the constraints of the site, context and practical architecture. The main volume was simplified into two geometries constituting the gallery and public space respectively, both spanning from one end of the site to rest on top of its constituent at the other end in an ‘X’ shape. The geometry of the gallery space is considered as opaque, heavy architecture, providing the separation and insulation required for complete immersion. The materiality of the functional public space is considered as a translucent, lighter architecture, providing the natural light and openness required for productive work environments and a view of the city to orient visitors. The remaining projection is then considered as a dual space in itself, with both a gallery and public space, where insulated gallery ‘pockets’ and open public areas with views to the exterior exist in unison. As the building footprint only occupies about half of the site, a lot of focus was given to the landscaping and entryway. Depressions are carved into the terrain from either street corner as a way of extending the alley into the visitor experience and dramatizing the entrance threshold; as people reach the reception space on the basement floor the 3-storey circulation atrium is revealed only after a descent. The museum is ultimately a celebration of space, art, and their collaboration in the human experience; the culminating, cantilevered projection serving as the transitory architectural element which binds these elements of the architecture together.
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Title / Rendered EW Section, 1:200 Centre / Design Progression Sketches Opposite / Site Plan Progression Sketches
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Above / Planning Sketches ; Generative Sketch ; Third Floor Plan, 1:350 Opposite / Planning Sketches ; Final Floor Plans, 1:500
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Above / Interior Rendering ; Watercolour and Sketches
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Above / Sunpath from Laurier and St. Urbain on Physical Model, 1:200 Opposite / Aerial Sunpath on Physical Model, 1:200
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Above / Landscaping and Interiors from Physical Model, 1:200 Next / Detail from Physical Model, 1:200
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MSOA 5
ARCHITECTURE AND MUTUALISM
ARCHITECTURE AND MUTUALISM / QUEBEC McGill University SoA, 2018 / Design and Construction 4 Professor Gilles Saucier
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MUTUALISTIC ARCHITECTURE IN THE POST-INDUSTRIAL LANDSCAPE This project arose out of a speculative reaction to the studio brief which called for ‘the design of a productive topography and cultural centre’ on a fictional site somewhere in Montreal’s rural surroundings. Considering the unconscious assumption embedded in such a statement - that a piece of land in Quebec’s St. Lawrence Platform would not be productive as such - I formulated a narrative in which its validity would become self-evident. The site was therefore imagined as the locale of a vestigial community characterized by unsustainable mining and agricultural practices that had rendered it unsuitable for permanent inhabitation. Consequently, the project’s articulation shifted from a single building (which the damaged terrain would be unfit to support) to a collection of small-scale and precise interventions focused on the joint rehabilitation and cultivation of the landscape. The first leg of the project’s development began with the digital fabrication of the site. This process employed scaled pointscans of endemic granite samples to generate topographies that were both organic and detailed enough to border on realism. The most compelling aspect of these models was, in fact, their provocative approximation of reality. They possessed an element of the uncanny in their disproportioning of a found object which could have easily been taken from the imagined site, and this intriguing characteristic would come to drive the formal approach of the architecture. Once a scan had been decided upon, it was further manipulated through the addition of water and flattening of vertical extremities typical of erosion processes caused by industrial settlements. With the site model completed, a period of research on the historical establishment of rural communities was undertaken to inform the design and construction of the relatively sparse buildings along with their placement in the landscape. As this research progressed, the design focus shifted from the architecture itself to its integration with the productive aspects of the community and site. Ecological texts became driving sources of information as the project increasingly became an exercise in landscape architecture - the establishment of mutualistic agriculture, specifically through the modern innovation of forest gardening, became the unifying idea behind many of the built interventions.
COMMENALISM IN THE POST-INDUSTRIAL LANDSCAPE
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“No expert advice informed the brother’s design decisions. They forbade the keeping of cows and hens and encouraged the occupants to create flower and vegetable gardens, but in the end they simply built for their employees slightly smaller versions of the old farmhouse in which they had grown up. As the decades passed and more visitors – some from Europe – arrived to see the wondrous simplicity, as more essayists discovered “contented labor,” the brothers may have wondered at the fuss. After all, they had only improved the landscape in which their father had begun business at the close of the eighteenth century, and they had avoided all European principles and styles.”
Stilgoe, John R. “The Planned Residential Community.” In Borderland: Origins of the American Suburb, 1820-1939, 252-260. New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1992.
“Each structure was built as both a re-enactment and a present tense action. All of the participants were simultaneously tellers and listeners creating a shared space of the social contract.”
Title / Final Pin-up and Physical Model, 1:100 Above / Site Plan with Buildings and Vegetation, 1:2000
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ARCHITECTURE AND MUTUALISM
With the functional program of the project defined (facilitate the establishment and service a network of forest gardens), the architecture was able to take shape with a greater certainty. Once the site plan and general layout of the buildings had been formulated, a series of quick elevation sketches (next page) were performed to define their formal expression. This process did not involve careful consideration of the specific building being drawn but was rather an imaginative exploration of the underlying architectural vernacular common to many rural settlements. This technique generated a variety of archetypal representations which could, in turn, be analyzed and selected based on the need of each building to visually address the specific social aspect of a particular program, place, and person (for example, a house for two brothers or an irrigation shed). Each intervention is intended to be built by a community as a social act, a celebration of the individual and collective imagination, and as an exploration of the places between landscape and architecture.
ARCHITECTURE AND MUTUALISM
Above, Opposite / Conceptual Elevations
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ARCHITECTURE AND MUTUALISM
Above, Opposite /Detailed Axonometrics and Plans, Various Scales Next / Site Axonometric, 1:2000
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\\ As the site’s history becomes the design driver that pushes that landscape into the fourth dimension, the uncanny articulation of the pseudo-vernacular buildings results from their relationship with the imagined site. The project is a cemetery and the disquieting return of humanity to its landscape is the necessary manifestation of the archetypal structure of settlement. 04/20/18
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ARCHITECTURE AND MUTUALISM
Reflecting on the brief and its intention to have the site ‘designed’ prompted a deeper reading into the underlying tendency of industrial society to rationalize and impose frameworks on existing productive topographies. The only rational approach to ‘creating’ a productive topography would, in fact, be to first assume the elimination of the natural one provided.
ARCHITECTURE AND MUTUALISM
Above / Generative Sketch Opposite / Individual Physical Models, 1:100
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BONAVENTURE HOTEL
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