Stim: as in stimulation
Stimme: voice
Stimmung: ambience
Dross: ignored, undervalued and unfortunate economic residues of the metropolitan machine
from Lars Lerup, One Million Acres & No Zoning
Stimmy Hardy envisions a post-petrochemical future where Houston faces the need to repurpose abandoned oil silos and manage its industrial and infrastructural waste. The project recycles concrete freeway columns and industrial silos to create a flood retention cistern and a transit-oriented community infrastructure packed with vital social programming and commercial activities.
The site, Hardy Yards, is a decommissioned railyard built in the 1800s. It is currently a space of industrial dross surrounded by a low-income neighborhood where 20% of the residents do not own a car.
Stimmy Hardy replaces this dross-scape with a community center that stimulates a culture of congestion that is unusual to Houston’s material and commercial culture. It is directly connected to a light-rail metro station and offers public amenities to the community in close proximity: an athletic recreation center, a swimming pool, a community kitchen, an entertainment space and night club, a bazaar for small businesses, food vendors, and an assembly hall.
Rice School of Architecture
Core Studio III • Fall 2022
Instructor: Christopher Hight
Site: Burnett Transit Center Houston
4 foot wide concrete freeway columns are recycled from the Texas Department of Transportation’s North Houston Highway Improvement Project (NHHIP), which will demolish and reroute part of Interstate 45 near downtown Houston.
The spolia of freeway columns is installed in a massive 60 foot deep flood retention cistern that is deeper than the adjacent White Oak Bayou.
Repurposed oil silos
On the first and second floors, oil silos from the city’s petrochemical industry are repurposed and adapted to fit the building’s three public master programs:
PHYSICAL MODEL. scale 1/16” = 1’
1. Community center / public programming
2. Athletic center / basketball gymnasium
3. Aquatic center / swimming pool
The cistern serves as a parking lot and has a dedicated space for cultural events and a night club.
The aquatic center and a cafe occupy two silos on the ground floor. They are separated by a covered open air bazaar space for small businesses and food and fresh produce vendors.
An open floor plan punctured by three silos on the second floor combine an eclectic mix of programs in close proximity and minimal separation: an athletic recreation center with training rooms and circular running track; a community fridge and kitchen; an art gallery; a food court; and a public hall.
BOTTOM SKETCHES: massing the master program through infrastructural vernaculars.
TOP PLANS: F1, F2
BOTTOM SECTION: Stimmy Hardy relative to the adjacent White Oak Bayou
PHYSICAL MODEL. scale 1/16” = 1’
D.I.T.C.H. is a climate justice online story map and a community advocacy toolkit that visualizes the problematic of Houston’s precarious water infrastructure quality through GIS data analyses. The story map investigates the relationship between high social vulnerability and dilapidated open drainage ditches that bring toxic runoff to communities of color during floods.
Rice University
Spatial Studies Lab / Diluvial Houston
Internship • Summer 2022
collaborators: Gulf Scholars Program and Bayou City Waterkeeper
TOP open drainage ditches and sewer overflow events in low-income areas
BOTTOM water contaminants, industrial areas, and toxic runoff
MAP: open drainage ditches, floodplains, and impervious surfaces
series of repetitions
repetitions of series
a whole felt in parts
expands the social project of the contemporary public library.
This project studies Le Corbusier’s Curutchet House (1955) as a type and develops a new typology for a mixed-use compound that includes residential, retail, commercial, and small-batch manufacturing programs.
Curutchet House (1955) in La Plata, Argentina, served both as a residence and a doctor’s office. Choreographed with a careful adjacency that separates the living area with the workspace, the house maintains the sense of privacy offered by single-family home living while holding the potential for mixed-use programming.
A new building type is developed by aggregating the Curutchet concept in series. Programmatic relationships are maintained to accommodate various public and private uses. In this compound, retail and commercial uses face the street, and are separated from apartment units at the back of the lot by an inner courtyard. The residential units are built on top of a slab that has an electric bike studio and a communal fabrication space.
Rice School of Architecture
Core Studio II • Spring 2022
Instructor: Mark Wamble
Site: Bissonnet Street, Houston
RENDERS. isometric view and facade at dusk
LEFT RENDERS: communal courtyard, communal makerspace, and electric bike studio
RIGHT DIAGRAM: Curutchet concept transforms into mixed-use compound typologies
continuity, and discontinuities that frame communal spaces while maintaining residential privacy both in plan and in elevation.
programs with retail and commercial activities, this compound building proposes an ideal typology for a commune. Residents live and work in the same lot, but are not closed off from the local economy and logics of the city.
TOP DIAGRAM: an array of three Curutchets create axes of continuity and separation to calibrate private residential spaces from public facing programs
BOTTOM SECTION: program distribution from retail/commercial to industrial and residential
TOP SITE: Bissonnet Street in a residential neighborhood
BOTTOM PLAN: F1 shows retail and small-batch manufacturing programs
TOP PLAN: F3 shows residential units and a communal roof terrace
BOTTOM PLAN: F2 shows commercial and residential programs
cast awareness
cast collectives
cast essentials
Houston’s sprawl poses a serious challenge to create urban amenities for everyone in an increasingly fragmented public. The East End is critical to the Houston’s Hispanic heritage and history. Yet, it has been subjected to the discriminatory spatial practices of redlining. Its landscape has been disrupted with industrial dross, and left with no sheltered civic space to pull the community together.
This project casts a collective space in the heart of the East End by employing and interrogating the role the public library.
As a typology, the library is in crisis. Beyond the inventorying and dissemination or knowledge, the library is recast with the agora in mind: public gatherings and temporary markets are accommodated in the first two floors; the library’s collection, places of exchange, and offices occupy the third and fourth floors; the first floor is programmed to facilitate mutual aid efforts; finally, a set of public restrooms are directly accessible from the street as an urban gesture asserting that essential amenities should be public.
Core Studio I • Fall 2021
Instructor: Dawn Finley
Site: East End Houston
Beyond the purposes of circulation, the stair is treated as a space for social interaction. The solidity of its components is put in question. A transparent rise provides visual continuity between interior and city. During the day, the library casts natural light and shadows inwards through the stairs. At night, the library lightens up the streetscape.
The library’s architectural gestures towards the city are highlighted with two instrumental stairscapes. The first, transparent stairscape is embedded in the heart of the library ‘s study spaces and stacks. The second assumes a monumentality on the street level to invite the public to an assembly hall, and provides shelter and seating that orients people towards a public space across the street.
LEFT STUDY MODEL: social and functional potentials in a stairscape. scale 1/8” = 1’
LEFT PHYSICAL MODEL: stair detail in F2 café. scale 1/16” = 1’
RIGHT PHYSICAL MODEL: F3. scale 1/16” = 1’
PLANS:
RENDERS:
TOP
F1, F2, F3
BOTTOM
F1, F2, F3
Found fabrics are recycled into suits that elevate self-consciousness by impairing other senses. The field condition intrinsic to the subject-object relationship is extended and scaled to the architectural realm.
The first translation takes place in a room at the Brooklyn Museum to create a show (and experience) room where visitors see and wear the prosthetic suits and the suits of the Pierre Cardin: Future Fashion exhibition. Here, the wearers and visitors’ senses are put to test.
The second translation pulls the exploded lines of the former together into ‘the wire’: a singular, linear, non-planar surface that compresses and dilates itself. This surface inhabits a room at Metropolitan Museum of Art of New York City. It wraps around a wall delicately to connect two floors, and divides the first floor with a mezzanine. The mezzanine serves as a theater when the wall is used as a screen, or as an observation deck to see the spectacles of the exterior.
an artificial device to replace or augment a missing or impaired part of the body
PLAN + ELEVATION: first prosthetic (constrictor). hand drawn at scale 1:1
This experiment starts at the scale of the body with the premise that clothing and architecture share a close affinity. Both are artifices within which we inhabit and with which our understanding or relationship with the environment is reconfigured.
Two pieces of garment, or prosthetics, are designed to temper with human senses and spatial instincts.
The first is a constrictor that chokes its subject when his arms are extended into a power pose. The second prosthetic blinds the subject with similar bodily movements. In these instances, the subject is made spatially self-conscious when he occupies a lot of space or moves aggressively.
LEFT Two prosthetics affect the human senses and augment self-spatial awareness
RIGHT ELEVATION: second prosthetic (blinder). hand drawn at scale 1:1
The prosthetic devices’ propensity to retaliate create a relationship of alternating action and reaction between prosthetic and subject. This suggests a tension between the two: a tensility that can be abstracted into a field condition now unbounded by the physicality of its parts. This field condition of tension lines is exploded to the scale of a room.
LEFT PHYSICAL MODEL: transhumanic and prosthetic qualities in fashion are exploded to the scale of a room
RIGHT AXONOMETRIC: prosthetic explosion. hand drawn at scale 1/4” = 1’
LEFT MODEL: the exploded field condition is now pulled together into ‘the wire’
RIGHT AXONOMETRIC: the wire wrapping around a room in the Met, connecting together two floors and creating an interior-exterior relationship. hand drawn at scale 1/4” = 1’
player of words and member of Oulipo Georges Perec used a rigorous method: self-imposed constraint.
libératrices.
In the 1960s, the Oulipo group experimented with ways that constraints, self-imposed or otherwise, could liberate literature and the arts. The prosthetic wire is translocated from New York to Paris’ Place Saint Sulpice in this spirit.
It is now situated in a corner of Place Saint-Sulpice across where Charlotte Perriand’s studio used to be in the 1920s. The wire’s new program is to be a public pavilion exhibiting the work of Perriand, including a full-scale reconstruction of her studio, which assumed a floor plan shaped as an ‘E’.
E was the missing letter in A Void (1969), a novel written entirely without using ‘E’ by Georges Perec, who wrote in a café on this very site.
Columbia GSAPP
New York / Paris • Spring 2020
Instructors: Thomas de Monchaux + Tom McKeogh
Site: Place Saint Sulpice, Paris
TEMPORAL-TOPOGRAPHIC DIAGRAM: tensility in three scarf variations
Disparities are weaved by preserving the wire’s formal logic within the constraints of the site and the reproduction of Charlotte Perriand’s modernist studio. In the process, the trees of the site are preserved, and new open space is elevated on the wire to compensate for the one lost with the building’s footprint. The tensile field condition is recalibrated to be in direct conversation with the public square and the site of Perriand’s former studio. It maintains its unity while simultaneously creating different operations: floor, canopy, wall, ramp, or urban furniture.
LEFT SITE + PHYSICAL MODEL: showing the wire’s dialogue with what was Charlotte Perriand’s studio at Place Saint-Sulpice, Paris
RIGHT PLANS + SECTION: revealing the missing letter E. hand drawn at scale 1/8” = 1’
LEFT PHYSICAL MODEL: captured with a document scanner, collaged. scale 1/8” = 1’
“ I have several times tried to think of an apartment in which there would be a useless room, absolutely and intentionally useless. It would be a functionless space. It would serve for nothing, relate to nothing.
For all my efforts, I found it impossible to follow this idea through to the end. Language itself, seemingly, proved unsuited to describing this nothing, this void, as if we could only speak of what is full, useful and functional. ”
sets the wire free. It knows no politics, no center, no margin.
This project has been about calibrating the seemingly irrational to suit different contexts. The wire was stretched and pulled conceptually always to favor a certain functionality. But what if it is left to simply be? To be indifferent and to assume forms it desires.
Georges Perec struggled to conceptualize an absolutely useless room serving nothing, and relating to nothing. He was an artist limited by his own language, prejudices, and instincts. To be free, the narrative should not be authored by the artist, nor the subjects, but by the object itself.
In this final stage, the wire is mashed up with Bernard Tschumi’s Folie P6 from Parc de la Villette and the neoclassical Rotonde Ledoux. Rather than rationalizing form, the design was undertaken by experimental exercises that let the string assume positions, magnitudes, and directions of its own will.
Columbia GSAPP
New York / Paris • Spring 2020
Instructors: Thomas de Monchaux + Tom McKeogh
Site: Parc de la Villette
FORM-FINDING IN SUPERIMPOSITION: model scans with photos of Parc de la Villette’s Folie P6
There is something uncanny in translocating the wire from site to site while it learns from each previous site. This absurdity is preconditioned by a mental construction of the normal and the different. This exercise acknowledges difference to find indifference, or it finds indifference within difference.
How does one weave into an other with indifference? How can the city be read with indifference? The wire’s tension is released and left without direction. In its useless randomness, it knows no politics, no center, and margin.
LEFT AXONOMETRIC: mashup of design with Folie P6. hand-drawn at scale 1/4” = 1’ RIGHT EXPERIMENTS: misconceptualizing form and the city through the string’s tensility
LEFT/TOP AXONOMETRIC + PLAN + ELEVATION: with text from George Perec’s Espèces d’espaces (1975). hand-drawn at scale 1/8” = 1’
RIGHT DIAGRAM: three minds riddled by the strings of unreason. with scenes from Bernard Tschumi’s Manhattan Transcripts (1981)
AN ORGANIZED WHOLE that is perceived as a tangle of dysfunctional parts
