MATTHEW H. SHULMAN Master of Architecture Candidate 2019
MATTHEW H. SHULMAN 508 N 5th Avenue Ann Arbor, Michigan 48104 301-520-9973 | Mttshlmn@umich.edu
EDUCATION
University of Michigan Taubman College of Architecture and Urban Planing Master of Architecture Candidate 2019, GPA: 3.85
Taubman Scholar
University of Rochester
Danish Institute for Study Abroad
Yale School of Architecture
Bachelor of Arts 2013, Departmental Honors Major: Sustainable Urban Development Minor: Chinese language and Culture
Pre-Architecture and Design Program Copenhagen, Denmark, Spring 2012
Chinese House from Courtyard to City Beijing, China, Summer 2010
Cornell University
Japanese Falcon Program Ithaca, New York, 2008
WORKSHOPS
Practice Sessions with Johnston Marklee
Becoming Digital with LAMAS
Three-day workshop centered on the roofing structure for the firm’s UCLA Arts Studio in Culvar CityCalifornia
Three-day weekend workshop focusing on Lamas’ ongoing project Delaroius Facades
EMPLOYMENT HISTORY Hollwich Kushner New York, NY
Design Intern, June 2017 - August 2017 Assisted in the schematic design and design development phases for two of the firm’s projects located in NYC.
Architizer New York, NY
Market Analyst, June 2014 - June 2016 Developed advertising partnerships with more than 75 different building product manufactures
The Trust for Public Land Washington, DC
American Planning Association Washington, DC
Lehman Smith McLeish Washington, DC
Research Assistant, January 2014 - May 2014 Held responsible for the research and development of TPL’s Green Infrastructure Guidebook
Research Assistant, June 2013 - August 2014 Wrote for the organization’s annual publication titled Great Places in America
Design Intern, June 2011
ACTIVITIES
Site Visit Podcast Ann Arbor, MI
Dean Search Committee Ann Arbor, MI
2016 National Real Estate Challenge Austin, TX
Producer, September 2017 - Current Responsible for managing, editing each episode and marketing the podcast
Group Participant, September 2017 - Current Responsible for managing, editing and marketing
Team Participant, October 2016 - November 2016 Responsible for market research and design
ArtAwake Rochester, NY
Group participant, September 2012 - May 2013
SKILLS
Rhino, AutoCAD, VRay, Microstation, Final Cut Pro Adobe Creative Suite, Microsoft Office, Python, Grasshopper, Blender, Matlab
FIRE STATION NO. 1
Fall 2017 | Critic: Christian Unverzagt.......................................4 -17
PUBLIC POOL Fall 2016 | Critic: Adam Fure....................................................................18 - 25 SITUATIONS Winter 2017 | Critic: Thom Moran................................................................26 - 35 COMPUTATIONAL DESIGN Fall 2017
Critic: Perry Kulper...................................................38 - 41 Critic: Erik Herrmann...............................................42 - 45
WHITE HOUSE DANCE PARTY Winter 2017 | Critic: Thom Moran....................44 - 47
FIRE STATION NO. 1
Ground Floor Plan
Second Floor Plan
My proposal for a new fire station located in downtown Ann Arbor, Michigan replaces an existing fire station that serves as the headquarters to the cities fire department. The current building is a simple rectilinear brick box made of brick, and can be characterized by a bureaucratic aesthetic typical of small city government buildings.
The massing of the building is composed of a series of different parts placed in a calculated arrangement that would sit appropriately on the site and work with the required fire station program. Unlike other city institutions which are typically be characterized as extruded boxes, this fire station reimagines institution as an architectural artifact for the city.
PLANS
Third Floor Plan
Fourth Floor Plan
Each of the different parts are rotated along a 45-degree angle in order to provide an efficient and speedy exit routine for the firetrucks. Because the street in front of the building is one-way, firetrucks must be able to easily merge on the street in times of emergency. The apparatus room holds two fire trucks, and a mid-sized emergency vehicle.
The rotation of each of the different masses creates a jagged perimeter around the whole building, creating small pocket spaces where benches and trees could provide refuge to pedestrians. The rotation also disrupts the banal streetscape that currently exists by introducing a new formal language.
Ground Floor Plan showing detail of double wall system and primary organization
GROUND FLOOR PLAN
The different parts that compose the massing of the fire station are destabilized on the interior of the building through a double wall system. The double wall both preserves the overall form which can be seen on the exterior, while creating new spaces on the interior that provide a circulation system that allows all functions of the building to seamlessly flow through each other. The diagrams above detail the different corners and meeting points between two and three different spaces, and the filleted wall that facilitate a circulation system that allows the different spaces to blend. The worms-eye axonometric illustrates how the double wall system transitions from plan to section. Spaces on different floors flow into each other as they do in plan.
Traverse Section
Longitudinal S
Section
SECTIONS
Massing Diagram
Diagram showing how the different parts are organized and situated on the site. Each of the parts speak a similar language with roofs that either curve in a convex or concave manner. Each of the parts share a wall on the exterior, yet in the interior, the double wall re-organizes the interior spaces. The isometric on the left illustrates how the building is situated on its block. Other Ann Arbor city government buildings surround the fire station.
3D PRINTED MODEL
PUBLIC POOL
PLAN
Rendered 90-90 Axonometric
The design for this public pool depicts a system where a combination of densely packed solids begins to break away into a loosely packed field condition. A grid that expands steadily as it moves across the site regulates the different sized shapes that create the pools and buildings.
Circular forms that generate the shape and size of the different buildings and pools are mirrored on top of the building through a thin strip window that completes any form on the ground level. Parapets continue off the roof and into a bench on the face of several buildings.
Oganization diagram
The public pool complex contains several pools for different use, a women and men’s changing room, a snack bar, an indoor and outdoor event space, a parking lot and a storage unit for pool supplies. The gray shaded area in the organization diagram denotes the buildings.
A dense step system adheres to the grid, while the shapes of the different pools bias the circles that have been superimposed on the grid. Moving across the site, the forms that start of biasing the grid then break away for its rigidity in the lesser dense parts of the field.
Massing Diagram
Massing diagrams of one of the buildings on the site further illustrate how the different features of the building relate to the formal logic of the project. The red lines delineate how each building contains multiple roof heights to match the grid. Red lines represent how a parapet moves from the roof, to the facade of the building and then into a bench that also serves as a frame for the windows. In addition to the building masses themselves, other features of the pool that also stem from the site’s generative geometry include the high walls that extend from many of the buildings and enclose several of the pools to create separate spaces. The 1:25 scale model on the right is built from white museum board, and details a small section of the entire site.
1:25 scale model, Museum Board
SITUATIONS
KIND OF BLUR
Hannah Cane, Daniel VanSchaayk Kind of Blur is a hotel and Music Venue designed to replicate many of the different aspects that also characterize the Blur Pavilion by Diller Scofidio and Renfo. The project focuses on the cultivation of stage effects and various props that suggest both an atmosphere similar to the president while introducing a new theme specific to the Hotel/Music Venue combination. The model is animated through a short video: https://vimeo.com/253980098
The Blur Pavilion was also precedent for a series of models that attempt to re-imagine the stage set for the sitcom Fraiser. Backlit acrylic furniture situated within fog produced from Dry Ice speaks to the jackets visitors of the blur pavilion were asked to wear within the Diller Scofidio and Renfo pavilion. The jackets, like the furniture, would light up as people would approach each other.
BITTERSWEET MOTEL Bittersweet Motel is located in the Warehouse District in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania, and functions as both a hotel and a rock music venue. The name of the hotel comes from the song and documentary about the band, Phish. The atmosphere and asethetics of a Phish concernt served as president for the concert scene illustrated in drawings.
The Warehouse District is an up and coming neighborhood in Pittsburgh, known for its repurposed factories and history as the city’s primary port of industry. The hotel is situated in a current open parking lot, with one facade partially shared with the adjacent building. The proposed hotel is six stories high with the music venue situated on the ground floor.
1:16 MASSING MODEL
The facade, which is composed of three different types of grid systems - in both black and white - derive from the widespread use of grids on many of the prolific towers in other parts of Pittsburgh. The three grids are at different scales, one takes form as part of the building’s massing, the other grid is represented by the pixelated window system.
The third grid is represented by an undulation of the different hotel rooms, as depicted by the black material in the model. The heaviness of the massing, and its overall form that biases rectilinearity is purposed to counter the interior void which all the buildings’ primary functions are situated around.
Fifth Floor Plan depicting typical hotel room layout. The music venue is situated in the building’s core -- all of the rooms surround the building.
Second Floor Plan
Ground Floor Plan
Section
The music venue is located on the ground floor and serves as the central organ for the building. The ticket booth is located by the entrance of the building. Hotel guests have access to an elevator or a separate stair system that avoids the atrium. Music venue guests have access to another stair system that cantilevers into the atrium.
The representation style is inspired by the paintings of Hillary Harkness, particularly her use of episodic lighting. The axonometric cutaway depicts the atmosphere of a rock concert through the crowds of people dancing, the confetti being thrown from one of the stair balconies, and the concert lights that consume the interior void.
COMPUTATIONAL DESIGN
Digital Topiary, Double Desert Mischief and Paired Visions were three projects that focused on digital appropriation and rendering techniques that produced various settings that investigated a particular quality of form and atmosphere. Exposing the representational features of digital tools now available to the architectural discipline was the primary focus of these three projects. In Digital Topiary, the image depicts a ceremonial like setting, with a central sphere composed of a series of smaller cubes. The view also biases the form of the procession itself, providing an additional layer to the object. Double Desert Mischief indulges in a game of fragment assembly, compiling parts of found imagery towards speculative conceptual and spatial possibilities. Paired Visions focuses on the construction of a critical image in which key aspects, attributes or characteristics of the model are made frontal, leaving out less important aspects. The image depicts a desert motel, and only highlights those architectural and atmospheric qualities that are important. Digital Topiary
Paired Visions
Double Desert Mischief
OFFICE SPACE
Daniel Vanschaayk, Lorraine Gemino, Ibiayi Briggs
Silicon Valley’s obsession with meritocracy and productivity often manifests itself in spaces that reflect their goals of a flat organizational structure: the open office plan. However, this idea of a non-hierarchical work space is not new. The mid-20th century saw a movement in office space planning called Burolandschaft, or the office landscape. Rather than the efficiency-centered cold, endless grid of cubicles, offices used new furniture layouts as a way to demonstrate a friendlier, more democratic corporate ethos. Office Space reimagines the Burolandschaft for today’s technology companies. Our script reconfigures sets of furniture into patterns that describe the open floor plan of a new crop of startups. Through pattern generation, we’re exploring existing corporate spatial hierarchies and possibly inventing new ones. At another level of detail, changing the characteristics of the furniture in each office plan further demonstrates the correlation between the formal and experiential qualities of our office spaces.
Gradient
Grid
Raidal
Cluster
Grid
In contrast to the metric-driven approach to office planning used by today’s tech companies (i.e. Facebook demands a specific carpet to desk ratio in its office plan), we aim to invert the idea of an algorithmic space design in a way that foregrounds overall spatial relationships and their resulting experiences.
While the corporate office continues to be the epicenter of experiments in optimizing the open floor plan, these experiments can have further applications to the design of collaborative production spaces like schools, studios, and beyond. The images in this spread depict an uncanny, almost plastic depiction of how the computer-generated plans may look.
Radial
Cluster
SOUTH LAWN DANCE PARTY
SOUTH LAWN DANCE PARTY Rebecca Lesher, Shaobo Niu
South Lawn Dance Party 90 x 36� axonometric drawing that depicts a cacophony of activities, themes and settings in order to produce an illustration that justifies the combination of elements that are typically relegated to separate scenarios. The drawing combines a dance-off protest on the White House South Lawn rendered in the representation style of Hillary Harkness.
The drawing considers relevant political events that unfolded at the time the illustration was rendered. Massive women’s marches and protests were occurring around the globe at this time, and the drawing attempts to reproduce the protest aesthetic typical of many of these marches. The drawing is also a celebration of the important role women play in the resistance to socio-political injustices that are more present now than ever.
MATTHEW H. SHULMAN