Megan Zeien Portfolio 2019 by Megan Zeien

MEGAN ZEIEN

ARCHITECTURE PORTFOLIO

CAPTURING THE ANTHROPOCENE 8 PNEUMATIC ARCHIVES OF SUBJECTIVITIES AND IMAGINARIES 20 NOB HILL HOUSING 38 A MUSEUM FOR THE CULTURES OF BODIES 50 MATERIALITY STUDIES 58 DRAWING PRACTICE 63 SKIN NARRATIVES 67 MASTERCLASS 74

M E G A N Z E I E N

AWARDS

With Project Capturing the Anthropocene: Drawing Featured in Archdaily’s “The 80 Best Architecture Drawings of 2017” Hansen Prize First Place Iowa State University (March 2017) With Project Pneumatic Archives:

H. Kennard Bussard Award Runner Up Iowa State University (Fall 2018)

megzeien52@gmail.com

E D U C AT I O N

Iowa State University, Ames, IA Bachelor of Architecture - May 2019 Magna Cum Lade with Honors Iowa State University Rome Program Study Abroad Spring Semester 2018

SKILLS + Revit modeling and management at various scales of projects, modeling and developing custom objects and design elements

Substance Architecture Forum Finalist Iowa State University (Spring 2019)

+ Detailing and developing wall and ceiling assemblies

Construction Specifications Institute Award Finalist, Iowa State University (Fall 2018)

+ Developing and drawing custom casework and furniture

“Eliminate

+ Preparing and managing drawing sets for construction documentation and in ASI issuances and RFIs

Loneliness Through Design” Competition Honorable Mention Bubble Competitions (Spring 2019)

2019 Alpha Rho Chi Medal National Professional Fraternity for Architecture and the Allied Arts (Spring 2019) CBRE Heery Inc, Scholarship Iowa State University (Fall 2018) Jeffrey Pilling Scholarship Iowa State University (Fall 2017) Leonard Wolf Leadership Award Iowa State University (Spring 2017)

+ Architectural representation and rendering + Skills in hand drafting and graphite drawing + Digital visualization with variety of rendering programs and modeling services + Highly proficient in Adobe Creative Suite programs

The DLR Group Scholarship for Service relating to Architecture, Iowa State University (Fall 2016)

+ Site Analysis and related research; zoning and easement research

Student Award of Distinction American Society of Architectural Illustrators (April 2016)

+ Architecture-based writing; proficient writing experience relating to the field of architecture and design

“Best Student Design-Build Projects in the World 2016”, ArchDaily (2016) for Studio-Constructed Project

Additional Programs : Autodesk Revit, Rhinoceros, Grasshopper, Environmental Plug-ins (i.e. Sefairia and Eve), SketchUp Pro, Corona, Maxwell, V-Ray, AutoCAD, Revit Construction Documentation, Bluebeam PDF

College of Design Dean’s List Iowa State University (Fall 2014-May 2019)

C O N TA C T

EXPERIENCE Olson Kundig Architects (June 2019-December 2019) Seattle, WA

Worked with a variety of project teams in private residential, office space, masterplanning, and hospitality. Primarily worked with a Ski Resort and Hotel Team, Technology Office Team, and Sports Headquarters Team. Developed visualization techniques, site analysis research and site documentation, and developed technical design skills; helping project teams with BIM documentation and design development.

Cuningham Group Architecture : Intern (May 2018 - August 2018) Minneapolis, MN

Worked as a part of the Multi-Family Housing and Urban Living Studio within the firm on several large-scale projects, including different types of multi-family housing and senior living apartments. Developed skills in modeling, detailing, and was mentored in a variety of learning seminars on sustainability, legality, and building construction.

Substance Architecture : Intern

(May 2017 - August 2017) Des Moines, IA

Worked on an in-house office expansion project, marketing efforts, and diagramming higher education projects; developed skills in project management, construction documentation, and project research.

Undergraduate Assistant

(Mar 2017 - present) Ames, IA

Assisted Deborah Hauptmann, Department of Architecture Chair, on Public Programming and Global Image Committees; planned and coordinated events and lectures for the Department and helped with social media presence. Researched material for workshops and Masterclasses.

Design Studies 115 / 131 / 102 Peer Mentor (Fall 2017) (Spring 2016) (Fall 2016) Ames, IA

Employed as a Peer Mentor for Freshmen students; Served as a volunteer teaching assistant to introductory drawing and design studios. Presented and led class, gave desk critiques, served on review boards.

Weisman Art Museum : Intern (June 2016 - August 2016) Minneapolis, MN

Archived exhibit documents digitally and sorted files into a resource blog. Organized summer art and architecture workshops for museum guests.

EXTRACURRICULAR Datum, Student Journal of Architecture

Co-Editor-In-Chief of DATUM No. 9 (Fall 2017), Editorial Board and contributor (Fall 2016-present), Treasurer (Spring 2017); Coordinated and assisted in the production of five issues of Datum, and led silent auction fundraiser for two consecutive years

Participation in OPN Masterclass at Iowa State University (March 2019) With Yoshiharu Tsukamoto of Atelier Bow-Wow

(April 2017) With Daniel Fernรกndez Pascual & Alon Schwabe of Cooking-Sections

Digital Culture & Equity Workshop with Peg Rawes (April 2017) Planned and coordinated workshop with visiting lecturer Peg Rawes; set up discussion and image production sessions examining the practice of economic and gender equity within architectural practice. References available upon request Work Samples from experience above available in print upon request

C A P T U R I N G T H E ANTHROPOCENE Iowa State’s given university vision describes an intention to “lead the world in advancing the land-grant ideals of putting science, technology, and human creativity to work”. However, the ISU Power Plant relies on coal for 40% of the University’s total energy. This is unacceptable. Coal is no longer referred to as the king of energy production - it is (almost) fully recognized to be completely degrading to our environment. The Anthropocene has been named as a new geological epoch, and the irrevocable changes humans have made to the landscape must be acknowledged. In response to the studio’s brief to “connect the individual act of imagining with the collective act of constructing” and to mark the end of coal as a human-used material, the coal pile found on our site found on our given site will be sequestered under a square of fly-ash concrete, making it unusable for future resource storage. In this project proposal, the University will be invited to gradually excavate the coal pile, immortalizing a negative space with the impression of the pile. It will become a memory of progress, and create a future for the site as a space for collective gatherings, art installations, and new growth amongst a new geologic architecture. The series of images and deliverables are drawings and investigations; imaginings of the site’s resource network and cultural systems of the site, as well as projections of the architecture’s excavation.

S T U D I O I N S T R U C T O R : F I R AT E R D I M HANSEN PRIZE - FIRST PLACE

The project begins with the Site. The site is an assemblage of resources, park spaces, and land waiting to be developed by the University. Specifically, this project engages the coal mound of the University. In our studio, we were briefed to engage in a dialogue with the landscape and adjacent constructed site and community. Our aim was to â&#x20AC;&#x153;connect the individual act of imagining with the collective act of constructing with the cityâ&#x20AC;?. The construction process will be formed as an assembly around a series of perforations as diagrammed to allow light to enter the space, but also to provide structural pattern and relief to the fly ash concrete.

Featured in Archdaily’s “The 80 Best Architecture Drawings of 2017” Above, Plan of proposed fly-ash concrete intervention with white poché revealing where the slab connects and goes into the ground. To the left is a hand drawn section study of final intervention

As the ground is cleared and light is cast onto the space, the progression of time through seasons will be marked. Humans will be invited to come inside the now open space and celebrate the end of burning fossil fuels within the existing network of the University. To fully represent this proposal, many drawings were created with manual tools such as graphite, then layered with digital collage and rendering. To model the proposal, techniques of plaster casting, laser cutting, and 3D printing were used to holistically represent the space.

Series of exploratory models with plaster, sand, laser cut chipboard 3D print, and graphite. Models used to explore possibilities of spatial interaction and the multiplicities of pouring fly-ash concrete into an existing topography.

P N E U M AT I C ARCHIVES OF SUBJECTIVITIES AND IMAGINARIES This project is an agglomeration of pneumatic structures that territorially invades the entire city of San Francisco. The architecture parallels perceptual conditions of fog - confusion, spatial disorientation, and blurred boundaries. It instrumentalizes these conditions to spatially confront everyone; impeding all functions in the city and enabling imagination in our current politically and economically oppressive era. Our architecture seeks to provide a space that will allow for and enable new imaginaries to be had; a space not controlled by the current restraints of today’s built environments. Throughout the semester, our research and design goal was to explore how space and atmosphere can be architecturalized and instrumentalized in new exploratory forms of architecture. This has been actualized through our series of pneumatic explorations, atmospheric drawing studies, and research into the economies and counter-culture of San Francisco. Our iterations led to the production of vagueness and softness, originating from our study of the fog, concurrent with our research into the narrative of Lauren Berlant’s Cruel Optimism. In particular, we examined her concept of the “Impasse”. This concept is described as a mental space characterized by a continual search for meaning after the complete loss of what gave stability to the occupant’s life—perhaps affordable housing, the promise of education, or a strong community. We sought to create an architectural intervention confrontation that produced this effect throughout all of San Francisco. PROJECT PARTNERS: KANE HASSEBROCK, NICK RAAP, AND JAKE SPANGLER • STUDIO INSTRUCTOR: MITCHELL SQUIRE KENNETH BUSSARD AWARD - RUNNER UP • C. S. I. AWARD - FINALIST • SUBSTANCE FORUM - FINALIST • “ELIMINATE LONELINESS THROUGH DESIGN” COMPETITION - HONORABLE MENTION

Our architecture begins to invade the city concurrently with the fog following its temporal and atmospheric conditions. Pneumatics are produced by the Factory―a structure located in the Pacific― from plastic ocean waste, transforming the waste into doublewalled membranes which are then embedded with technological and environmental control systems before being super-pressurized and launched into the atmosphere. The pneumatics strategically rearrange their pathways to respond to needs present the systems and occupants within, relying on the technology to carry out its spatial intentions and revolutionary phenomena. The logics that govern our contemporary society embody a singular vision of the world and attempt to stifle all imagination of any alternative. These logics produce systemic violences like total environmental degradation, complete financialization, or the promise of a good life through corporations like AirBnb, Uber, or Amazon. These companies feed and profit on aspects of normal, everyday life, inflating the role of technology and the virtual to monopolize our economies and our politics. We found these practices to be unethical and unsustainable. As someone confronting the architectural cluster, you’d suddenly find yourself surrounded by the pneumatics with no choice but to enter. Stepping in, you’d be hyper-aware and intensely perceptive of the affectual present produced by total confusion and disorientation. With no way out, you are compelled to wander deeper into the labyrinthian assemblage, eventually encountering someone or something totally dissimilar to yourself. The shock this encounter might produce is not at all dissimilar to the shock produced by the first encounter with the agglomeration on whole. To be clear, we created this proposal not to advocate for an insular utopia. Quite the contrary, our project is situated directly in the gaps of the city, affecting all residents and visitors. By totally impeding any activity other than an engagement with the pneumatic structures, we seek to address the inequality of access in remaking and re-imagining worlds and lives.

The spaces created by the pneumatics allow for personal and collective development purely through their presence. As the fog begins to clear, the occupants are guided back into the city. The new awareness and lens developed through encounters inside the pneumatics now is applied to the reality of the city. New ideas about life begin to emerge, revealing the traces of an cultural residue left behind.

NOB HILL HOUSING PROPOSAL Situated in the Nob Hill neighborhood of San Francisco, this project becomes an important research question examining the continuing housing crisis in San Francisco. Currently, the city is at the top of the list for highest average rent in the United States, with the influx of new workers and growing population over the last ten to fifteen years, alongside the growth of the technology industry. Single Room Occupancy apartments - small rooms with shared amenities like kitchens and bathrooms, were historically important to the development of San Francisco and made living viable for minority neighborhoods and those on the border of homelessness through its history. The US Government actually subsidizes the construction or rehabilitation of SRO units under the McKinneyâ&#x20AC;&#x201C;Vento Homeless Assistance Act of 1987. This project begins the examination of this viability. SRO units are becoming more viable not just for the historically SRO neighborhoods, but are becoming a way for incoming workers to live on starting salaries while preserving housing options for existing residents. Many of the historical precedents for affordable housing in San Francisco have been destroyed, leaving many low-income residents of the city without a place to live. Although developers and city officials determine the majority of housing policies, there emerges a possibility to explore a program of architecture that uses the SRO units to re-examine communal living and shared spaces in San Francisco.

In the middle of San Francisco, where affordable housing and homelessness are huge problems, one has to consider the disparities of different user groups in the city. Located at the edge of Chinatown and not far from a series of high-rise residential units, this design proposal seeks to be a residential building that could encompass as diverse a community as possible while harnessing different methods of living, such as SRO units as a testing bed for urban living in this neighborhood.

NOB HILL

The average unit size in San Francisco is currently 792 square feet, with the average rent being $2,979 on average in the neighborhood of Nob Hill. The average size of an SRO bedroom in San Francisco was historically 80 square feet with slightly larger shared spaces and shared amenities. Today, the average is around 300 square feet depending on location and must be a minimum of 150 square feet by code. The bottom floor is open for the construction of a basketball court to replace the existing one on the site. Floors 1-3 are studios and single bedroom apartments, then floors 4-6 are SRO units, fitting 48 residents in 3 floors. Floors 7 and 8 follow the same layout as the first three floors. There are a total of 50 non SRO units. 43

Levels 2-3 Studios and 1 Bedroom Units (Level 1 featured to the right)

Levels 4-6 Single Room Occupancy Units with shared common space and amenities

Levels 7 and 8 Studios and 1 Bedroom Units

Single SRO Unit

One Bedroom Unit

Studio Unit

Shown is a CLT structure with brick paneled system and wood sun screen installed at intersection of sunlight and windows. Wall section below reveals CLT panel assembly with space for moisture barrier and brick tie-ins.

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A NATURAL HISTORY MUSEUM FOR THE CULTURES OF BODIES Violence and restraint have historically been imposed on bodies through institutions and systems of extraction, imperialism, and slavery. The oppression of minority bodies and bodies of inferior classes has been perpetuated by systems that restrain individuality and impropriety to allow the succession of economic systems of competition while perpetuating systematic violence against nature. These mechanisms morphed into a massive misappropriation of wealth and resources and led to a domination of the global environment by carbon emissions in parallel with the control of human bodies through society, culture, and labor. In the context of climate change in the 21st century, as it seems our natural systems and atmospheres are collapsing, what do bodies have to grasp onto in this new state of perpetual crisis? The previous connotations of social structures will be forced to change, as many individuals are already reshaping their psyche in response to prevalent chaos rhetoric in the media and the environment. Bodies must find new ways to exist and to adjust in order to be freed from the previously constricting and terrible notions of behavior, dress, and sterilization of imperialistic societies that instigated the extortion of nature and bodies for capital. This studio seeks to critically position an architecture of a natural history museum in the age of climate change - an age where the definition of the â&#x20AC;&#x2DC;naturalâ&#x20AC;&#x2122; has come into question. The site of the convention center in Miami presents an opportunity for new cultural juxtapositions, while providing the space for the building of an architecture to frame new perceptions of nature and culture. PROJECT PARTNER: JESSICA LAUGHRIDGE STUDIO INSTRUCTOR: ROSS ADAMS

The geologic timeline of North America reveals that Miamiâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;s subsurface is made of a fragile limestone created through the decomposition of coral. This fragile geology is what makes the Miami area so vulnerable to flooding, despite many attempts to fill the land up with material and infrastructure to make it more inhabitable. Our museum will cut into this natural landscape. Because the limestone is porous and the water table lies just six to nine feet below the surface, it will present the systems of nature within the isolated, conditioned environment of the convention center. The water table will rise up to form pools of water within the stepped spaces, providing spaces for people to exist in this created microclimate in the middle of the convention center. This is an embrace of the warming climate, a new space of traditional physicality - a bath - to be claimed by the residents of Miami. Artifacts like paintings, historic clothing, and instruments of bodily restraint will be displayed in various ways throughout the museum. They may reside on walls, podiums, or underwater, and will be exposed to the created microclimate to curate deterioration. These an-artifacts are not an erasure of these histories, but a connection between the destruction of the old societies and the allowance for a new occupation of bodies of an inherently capitalist space. While normally artifacts in the context of a museum are appropriations, these artifacts are from the appropriators of natural bodies, placed into a critical position.

RECIPROCAL MATERIALITY STUDIES Within the context of the materiality of a specific artifact (a log), subjects surrounding void, and excavation are approached in a material project. Beginning with a piece of a site removed, we were tasked to investigate through drawing and through physical implementation how to further study the nature of this material and how to spatially explore its physicality We examined how to map the material and the process of it’s exploration led to a set of drawings used as mapping studies to understand the material as a site in itself. This exploration of material set out to reveal a relationship between one material, wood, with another, a void. To understand this and explore it, this log’s rot hole was filled with a plaster cast, which was then excavated as an artifact of the tree’s decay. The void was excavated to create a new material relationship and a new landscape. In the end, each element anchors to the other in harmony - rather than creating a differentiation of mass and void that destroy each other.

Digital Collages made from interior photographs of the excavated log. On the left is a progression of rot markings through levels of wood removal, demonstrating the timeline of the log being peeled back layer by layer. Below is a piece made from the excavated scrap wood.

INDEPENDENT DRAWING PRACTICE In this drawing practice, there is the attempt to map movement across a field of space. These movements could be violent; such as the movements involved in the industries of fracking, consumption, or material displacement - areas of previous research interest. In this study, the drawing and making of architecture becomes a production of space rather than a description of space. This practice is in part inspired by the writings of Teresa Stoppani, who writes about the relationship between mapping in order to depict and to construct space. The drawing study becomes an experimental practice as such. Rather than depicting an existing case study, the drawing study portrays a speculative set of movements across space to emulate the reciprocity between such extreme gestures in a field of study â&#x20AC;&#x201C; encouraged by the work of Perry Kulper in speculative drawing. The making of space, even in a drawing, becomes a way to make place and to exchange knowledge. The drawings, exploring projected material infrastructures at various scales and different moments of interaction and change, will serve as a framing device for crisis such as extraction, depletion, and pollution that create reciprocal actions across a field of materials. The intention of materiality in this study of drawing is to experiment with medium in drawing (i.e. plaster, graphite, paint) to question the origins of that material. Similar to the work of Susan Collis, who disguises the appearance of one drawing material to create the illusion of another by using a particular technique. On different sizes of wood panels, experiments with architectural drafting in graphite were layered with techniques of plaster application and acrylic paint. The idea with this set of materials was to attempt to question the actual appearance of the material, making it immaterial or by making its materiality even more present through its construction.

PROJECT

ADVISOR:

PETER

GOCHĂ&#x2030;

photograph small drawing from this picture and add in...

INSTALLATION: SKIN NARRATIVES Founded in 1936, Black’s Heritage farm encompasses five generations of history. Based upon explorations of the complex, Skin Narratives serves as an expression of labor within domesticity. The installation, located in the one of the farm’s many abandoned corn bins, utilizes cloth as a medium to display a collection of imprints from human, machinery, and domestic objects to portray the presence of its past. The history of labor on an Iowan farm implies both the history of agricultural production but also the development of a domesticity that still permeates life in Iowa today. This installation seeks to examine these histories within the condensing space to critically question both the macro and micro effects of these histories at the scale of the body and urban patterns. David Heyman describes the Iowan landscape in an article for Iowa Architect as intellectually beautiful rather than just a space with visual since it is physically defined in the political web from the grid, the ongoing changes in economic, social, and political landscapes through the changes that involve erasure and consolidation. This then impacts on the physical world, the Iowan landscape, and its remains by large are hidden. Skin Narratives brings forth this usually unseen layer, the web of connections within the results of agriculture from labor to domesticity. The bin performs as a condenser - it once brought many acres of the farm into one structure: organizing, packing, and processing. It is cold, concrete, metal, and dark. Skin Narratives utilizes this condenser and relates it back to the individual human occupant by archiving new strange bodies with the conceptual skin of canvas and plaster. The installation embraces the material of fabrics as the extended membrane of human body. PROJECT PROJECT

INSTRUCTOR: PAR TNERS:

PETER

GOCHÉ

COLLEEN DE MATTA, TOMI LAJA

P R OJE C T

T IT L E

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The castings of fabric create a false illusion of softness. The material looks tender and seductive, but to the touch it is cold, just like the bin. The installation distorts the ephemeral properties of cloth by allowing it to maintain static conditions. It challenges the definition of gravity by allowing the cloth to preserve distortion without the force of external volumes. Together in the bin, life is vaguely condensed and objectified, to create skewed and questioning familiarity and intimacy. The independence of form within the cloth is achieved through a thin application of plaster on canvas sheets which allows the cloth to retain imprint. With this technique, the canvas ominously displays full scale bodies of the human and machine which once occupied the space. 71

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M A S T E R CL A S S

From the Masterclass Brief: “This years workshop will focus on the actor-network of the rural Midwest. Students will conduct ethnographic research while observing curious industrial hybrids embedded in the Iowa landscape. Throughout the masterclass, groups will reflect upon the modern epic as a form of narrative lens used to frame their research.” For this workshop, we worked in groups of six to construct a largescale drawing documenting a network of environmental systems relating to the local Iowan landscape. Over the course of the four day workshop, we researched different connections between networks of agriculture and the development of tools over time. The drawings became both mappings of a type of geography but also mapping various histories. Yoshiharu Tsukamoto led the workshop and provided guidance and critique through the process. The workshop ended in a final discussion and review of the work. Tsukamoto specializes in ‘Architectural behaviorology’ a science that focuses on human behavior both inside and outside buildings, the behavior of buildings in their surroundings and environmental elements. His research aims to synthesize all these behaviors and foster organic architecture.

HOSTED BY YOSHIHARU AT E L I E R B O W - W O W

TSUKAMOTO