Owen Nichols_The GSAPP years 2009-2013. Final Portfolio

Owen Nichols

Owen Nichols Columbia University GSAPP Portfolio Critics: LOT-EK & Thomas DeMonchaux, Monograph Studio Spring 2013 Amale Andraos & Sam Dufaux, Scale Studio Fall 2012 Christoph A. Kumpush, Panorama and Doorknob Ind. Study Fall 2012 Yoshiko Sato (Craig Konyk & Michael Morris), Space Studio Spring 2012 Robert Marino, Housing Fall 2011 Mark Rakatansky, Library (Core II) Spring 2011 Bryan Young, ADR II Spring 2011 Joaquim Moreno, Airlab (Core I) Fall 2010 Veronique Descharrières & Rafael Magrou, Paris Studio Spring 2010 Thomas DeMonchaux, Jane Kim, Babak Bryan, William Feurman, Dalia Roberts, Patrick O’Conner, New York/Paris New York Studio Fall 2009

TEXTS The Scales of Low-Res Architecture

Architectural Drawing and Representation II

Illusion

Analysis of Perspective

Monograph Studio

Monograph Studio

The Production and Exploitation of Tools

Acclimation Chamber Film Transcription

Space Studio

A Tool for Relentless Experimentation Theatre

Monograph Studio

Hotel (monograph) Monograph Studio

Health Club Monograph Studio

Storage

Monograph Studio

Retail

Monograph Studio

Hotel

Amale Andraos

Space Studio Yoshiko Sato

Housing

Robert Marino

Library

Mark Rakatansky

Airlab

Joaquim Moreno

Isometric Sequence Monograph Studio

Theatre Panorama Monograph Studio

Theatre Plan Monograph Studio

Objects and Entrances

Crossing the Threshold: Pursuing the Sublime through the Grotesque. Locating the Sublime

Space Studio

A Comment on Professional Practice: The Wishlist Translations from Drawings to Drawings.

When I realized Drawing Wasn’t Such a Bad Idea Void Manifesto

Housing Studio

PLATES

Theatre (monograph) Hotel (monograph) Health Club (monograph) Storage (monograph) Retail (monograph) Hotel (Amale Andraos) Space Studio (Yoshiko Sato) Housing (with Ayaka Hales) (Robert Marino) Library (Mark Rakatansky) Airlab (Joaquim Moreno) Iterations ADR 2 (Bryan Young) Tech IV (Kevin Lichten) New York/Paris (Thomas Demonchaux, Babak Bryan) Drawing an Inventory Architectural Devices Villa Snellman Guest House Addition

The Scales of Low-Res Architecture

Beyond a certain scale, architecture becomes depressing.

A group of architects can only pay close attention to so many things.

Beyond a manageable scale the roles of the architects are typically marginalized to the designing of a skin and a form.

I'm not sure if architects are forced into this position or if it’s a desired role.

If it’s a choice, I choose to stay a little smaller, at a scale where architectural decisions are made from the body of the user out. Where the interior is explored for its potential in providing a platform for a variety of experiences. Where the exterior is articulated, not according to outside rules, but by the rules that the building makes for itself on the inside.

I don't want to think big because I don't want to lose grasp of one of architecture's greatest powers, the ability to affect a person’s perception and experience through its negotiation of program, boundaries, and thresholds, entrance sequences, and precious objects.

Architecture is in service of both its program and its people.

The bigger a building is, the less it has to do with its people and more to do with an image, a rendering broadcasting to a different audience.

Architecture has become so influenced by its own tools to the extent that the low-res output of tools like blue foam or Photoshop becomes the architecture.

Low-res architecture has grown to be wildly successful, it has become a movement. Its bought and praised and tragically taught in school.

My problem with the movement is its neglect of interiority and the amount of thoughtless, default repetition of elements to achieve a desired scale and resolution.

I suppose the intent behind low-res architecture was to make architecture available for a wider audience, to make it more public in a way.

Anyone can understand low-res architecture and it looks better from farther away anyway.

In the five buildings of the monograph studio and the previous five I'm asking questions to see if the same intention can translate through a different approach.

Hopefully the buildings will enable a conversation about low-res architecture and the possibility for inward looking.

Having analyzed what I believe to be the original intention behind the tragedy of low-res architecture, I don’t think that the intention is achieved with the reductive approach and the problem mainly falls under a problem of scale.

Massive buildings with clean, chamfered corners offer nothing to the body and the perception of the potential user of the building. Unclimbable mountains of slippery, cold glass are impressive in the landscape perhaps, but what about the people? Macchu Picchu is a seemingly unclimbable mountain, yet it is articulated at a scale that is both accommodating of the gods and of man. One could imagine themselves occupying such articulation if it manifests and is presented at a scale that is relatable to human experience.

Can a building still grasp the attention and be legible to a wider public through an articulation of its parts rather than defaulting to a singular derivable form?

If the scale of the articulation was presented both at the scale of furniture (body) and at the scale of a grand public gesture (city), would a person be able to understand the building better?

Can someone learn the different languages of a building weaving through its range of scales?

Architectural Trickery

When looking deeply into the things that catch, grab and hold my attention, I begin to notice some common themes. Ultimately my interests can be drawn back to the pursuit of illusion.

I spent my life playing soccer and drawing almost exclusively. How do those subjects hold my attention and why? I chose to draw using a particular process that involves the hybridization of multiple techniques. I draw in and out of the available tools and have the logics and processes of the tools infect the function or operation of others.

Why do I feel that adding a layer of graphite or ink is absolutely necessary in ‘completing’ a drawing? (I live by the definition that a drawing is never finished). I think of the audience when I draw, and would like to trick them, evoke an emotional response, and bewilder them through the illusion of space on a flat surface.

I’m interested in the threshold between a nonsensical set of lines and tones and a representational image. When do people begin to see things in your drawings, which marks on the paper provide the visual cues necessary in establishing a coherent statement? “Those who look at works of painting and drawing must have the ‘imitative faculty’. No one could understand the painted horse or bull unless he knew what such creatures are like.”

When we say that the blots and brush strokes of the impressionist landscapes “suddenly come to life,” we mean we have been led to project a landscape into these dabs of pigment.” -- Guided projection.

Expectation creates illusion.

My other passion: Soccer, can be thought of in a similar way. What makes Cristiano Ronaldo and Lionel Messi so entertaining and successful?

I have analyzed in several different situations, Messi making a decision to pass the ball and how he pulls it off. I have also looked at Ronaldo in one on one situations. Ronaldo plays a game of balance and structure with his opponent. If you pay attention to where the defender’s weight is placed in relation to the sequence of moves Ronaldo performs, you will notice that the illusion occurs when the defender is out of sync with Ronaldo. He waits for that moment and makes his move away.

In Messi’s case, his penetrating through-balls are difficult to predict. Through analysis, I have found that in goal scoring opportunities, Messi typically has several options to choose from.

Some of these choices are obvious, the defenders expect the ball to be played to the obvious choice. Expectation creates illusion. Messi uses the defender’s awareness of the situation as a weapon against them.

Messi delays, he dismisses clear options in order to play the obscure dagger that eventually ends in a goal.

My interests in Art and Architecture can also be described as conceptual decedents from my interests in illusion. My obsession with the 19th Century Panorama is an obvious relative in its pursuit of maximum illusion and its careful calibration to the scale and perception of its audience. Even Some of the more subtle examples: Adolf Loos’ use of the inglenook in the Shueu House, framing devices in Erik Gunnar Asplund’s Villa Snellman, and the obscurity of Sigurd Lewerentz’s altar at St. Petri.

The Architects are all playing a sleight of hand.

Obscuring, occluding, accentuating in order to produce the illusion that has an effect or affect on the architecture’s inhabitants.

The production and exploitation of tools.

I have a fascination with tools. Tools particularly interest me when they are misused for a particular reason or for experimentation.

My interest in the 19th Century Panorama stems from the techniques used to create the endeavor. In order for the panoramic image to produce maximum illusion, it must be created misusing the rules of perspective: Alberti’s veil.

Tools can be generic and they can do many different things. I’m interested in the possibility for tool calibration toward a desired goal.

Is it possible to rethink our tools so that they work for us?

Can we abuse the tools to the extent to which their production matches our intention?

What are the tools in architecture? What can we learn from them and how can we manipulate them so that they work better for us?

What are the tools of architectural representation? The conventions?

How can we hybridize the representational tools so that one acquires the characteristics of another?

How can we push the representational tools so far that they become design tools?

How can we streamline the production sequence to bring the conception of a project closer to its final realization?

How can we free ourselves from Rhino-lock?

What are the different ways to move in and out of our design tools? How can we move quickly and productively?

How can we use the tools we’re comfortable with to achieve a result that typically comes from a tool we’re not comfortable with?

How can we better identify what attributes our tools have, and use them for what they’re good for?

A Tool for Relentless Experimentation

I draw constantly. I always have. One of the nice thing about being fluent int his language is that drawing for me is no longer a simply a tool for representation.

Drawing is a way of thinking, or a state of mind.

Drawing is officially defined as any work on paper. I will use a painting reference to describe what drawing is to me, drawing is a way of keeping the process of design “wet”.

Its a tool for relentless experimentation. When one draws, he is making decisions, measuring, calculating, editing, omitting, emphasizing.

Drawing can be used to draw (like a drawer) material from one’s imagination and present it in a visual form, or it can be used to draw from the existing, what’s already on the page.

I use drawing and the conventions of architectural representation to explore the design of a building, I also use the design of a building to explore drawing and the conventions of architectural representation.

All of the drawings produced for the monograph studio are one-offs with the exception of a few short editions.

This is intentional. It doesn’t bother me, even though a building is drawn in several different ways throughout a project, there is a line of thinking that can be tracked through the drawings. Each drawing explores something new, more, deeper.

A drawing is never finished. Wait 10 years before you consider throwing a drawing out. How is your drawing working for you? What are you drawing from? Take out the trash. Do your homework.

10 PROJECTS

Theatre My strategy for the Theatre was to figure out the things I want to be better at using the things that I’m already comfortable with.

I was trying to think about and design a sequence of volumes through a mode of representation that is typically used in space making: the plan.

The plan was drawn as a series of enclosed shapes which describe the areas of the different rooms but it is not the way i typically go about it.

Usually plans are drawings that call out solid, structural divisions.

In designing the building through the arrangement of empty volumes, I have a much better understanding of the building volumes and am therefore much more comfortable in section.

The theatre consists of a nested performance theatre inside of a digital, moving panorama.

There are two entrances, one for the performance, one for the projection.

After the initial entrance sequence (the performance entrance sequence is more elaborate) the consumer will begin climbing a stair.

The stair departing from the performance entrance provides access to a private bar and opera booths that plug into the volume of the performance theatre.

The stair departing from the panorama entrance is the main attraction in the sequence, although tucked behind the extended threshold.

The two stairs wind up and almost meet, playing a game of chicken. The performance stair dodges left and empties its inhabitants into the private bar and booths. The panorama stair also dodges left only to circle back on itself and begin its accent up the shell of the performance theatre and into the entrance to the panorama.

As the stair winds up the entrance to the panorama, another stair is winding down, and leading to the panorama viewing platform.

Where did this stair come from? Is it the one we narrowly missed earlier? If that’s the entrance to the panorama, where the hell am I going?

After a few short moments of panic, the small crowd continues up the stair, only to realize the stair comes back down and leads into the panorama, it was not a different stair, it was the one we’ve been on the whole time.

What the hell? Why would someone do that? I walked all the way up just to come back down?

Feels good now doesn’t it?

Hotel

The Hotel has a skin strategy.

This strategy found its way into the interior of the building and organizes the private guest rooms and the public program.

The hotel is made of glass.

It tries to achieve opacity using a transparent material.

Public and private are in one respect completely separated. Layers of glass produce a thickness, refraction, reflection, atmosphere are hidden between layers of glass.

In another respect, public and private are too close for comfort.

There are no walls. With the exception of the channels heat contained in planes of glass, no plane of glass touches both floor and ceiling.

Glass planes are anchored on one edge.

Through trying to achieve something with a tool that seems to be incapable, new evidence was revealed. Atmospheres are produced through the layering of colored, fritt, frosted, transparent, reflective, and mirrored glass. All light is soft and over filtered.

Its a dark glass cave.

Its a furry glass lump.

Hotel rooms coat the outside edges of the hotel.

The rooms live somewhere on a climbing corridor. It seems like a spiral but it is in fact a close loop, I’ve done it.

Inside the private loop is an interior mall. The Gap, Uniqlo, Apple, The 3 Bars organized by color (R, Y, B), 2 Restaurants (the Up and the Down), the kitchen floor (supplies food for room service and both the Up and the Down) and a top of the lump pool occupy the hole left from the loop.

Four elevators serve the hotel in the center. One elevator serves the Up and the Down exclusively, One serves the Mall (stairs included), and two serve the Hotel corridors.

Health Club The health club will take the form of a bathhouse. A bathhouse is a sensitive program, private functions take place on a public stage.

The bathhouse should be a secret. It should be disguised.

Taking into account the weaving of public and private in the bathhouse program, create the context for the bathhouse interior using a grand, external, public gesture.

Can a private program use a grand public gesture to its advantage?

How can you use an exterior strategy to create the context and possibility for a highly articulated interior?

The public gesture will take the form of a grand external stair climbing 21'. The stair will attach to an elevated platform sheltered by a half structured shell. The shell contains open air apertures. This is a smoking pavilion. The building matches the height of its neighbor. The health club is built up with the public gesture in order for the bathhouse to burrow down into it. The bathhouse is accessible from the elevated platform. In the corner opposite the grand stair, a small door leads to a helical stair, with landings and overlooks but is isolated from the ground floor. The stair skips a floor where juice and yoga pants are sold. It leads to the grotto level, where individual changing rooms serve the 7 different baths.

Analyze the E. 10th st. Russian and Turkish Bath's entrance sequence and locker room organization.

Learn from the plan but be critical of it.

Could there be an intervention in the locker room's public/private relationship in bathhouse?

Is the locker room working in sync with the private/public relationship you have already established?

The (mens) locker room of the Russian and Turkish baths is organized in two equally sized rooms. One room contains shower heads lining all four walls. No furniture. This is the shower room. This room is mainly empty partly due to the showers downstairs in the bath level. The other room is lined with lockers. In the center of the room are several long benches. These benches mainly serve the lockers around the edges of the rooms. People who use the benches while also using a locker, only use the tips of the benches. Sometimes the majority of the bench (in between the two tips) is used by a man who wears two towels. One towel covers his groin and the other covers his face. A towel on a man's face is a universal sign of the desire for privacy.

If the bathhouse locker rooms became separate, private changing pods, the man would have to wear no towel.

The changing pods each have a small shower, a small wet area with a tip of a bench, and a larger dry area with a bit more of a bench.

There are two doors in each changing pod. One door connects the dry area to a dry corridor leading to an exit. The other door connects the wet area to the grottoes baths and pools.

The bathhouse continues burrowing after the bottom of the skip-stop stair. The bottom of the stair is the highest point of the bathhouse level, two meters below ground level. The entrances to the changing pods act as stair treads. The seven baths are spread along the terrain and act as landings to the slow stair. Your experience may be different each time you come back depending on which neighborhood your changing room is in.

At the bottom of the bathhouse level there's a long cold pool which is split by a wall. The wall divides the bathhouse proper from the short circuit entrance from ground level. The entrance slips in behind and into the grand external stair which seems to be attached to the main volume but is well integrated as an interior condition.

Section

Storage Your storage will be a permanent exhibition hall for Aby Warburg's atlas of images.

The main exhibition galleries will be located in the middle of the building.

Bring public attention to the gallery by identifying a large main threshold at one extreme of the building. On the other side, don't have an entrance, instead articulate the exterior surfaces at the scale of furniture. Give the corner to the public.

The main door will be an extended threshold opening into a linear lobby.

To access the main galleries, send the consumer through the building first.

Allow the user to experience all the temporary aspects of the building: two rotating exhibition galleries, a cafe, admissions vestibule and the multiple systems of circulation, all leading to more or less the same place.

Once the user has experienced the dynamic aspect of the project, try to keep him there.

The Atlas of images are 62 identical black boards with black and white reproductions adhered to the board. From a distance all of the boards are the same.

The main galleries are organized as nested cylinders in plan with identical doors repeated around the cylinder. The doors mostly lead to small rooms which hold one board each. The room has a step down and two small benches to view the reproductions.

Some of the doors do not belong to a viewing room but can be a short circuit to the other gallery, exit, entrance or back of house where the collector has his studio. Once the user enters the gallery and looks around a bit, he might be disoriented, not know how to get out. He must then use other means of navigation.

In the large gallery, a sculpture of Laocoon and his Sons sits in the ground floor, but the sculpture is too big for the room and emerges through gallery floor above.

The users will most likely use their memory and the orientation of the sculpture to navigate out of the gallery.

Elevation

Retail My retail sells pencils and paper.

It separates the two because one is dirty and the other clean.

The inventory is handled by trained professionals until you buy something.

The inventory, held on shelving that climbs the shell of the building is experienced by many.

It is seemingly infinite due to its ruthless repetition of pencils and paper.

The optical devices and procedural drawing instruments are singular, independent and experienced by one.

Paper buyers like to touch.

Pencil buyers like to test.

10% of the inventory is designated as ‘testers’ and are housed in the central experimental core where customers are allowed to get dirty.

The display of the individual devices climb the building, eventually making its way to the top, where the checkout is.

This sequence teaches its users how to see through the evolution of optics in art.

Section Perspective

Hotel - Bigness Articulated

Bigness, through its proliferation and scale is killing Architecture. Bigness has become Junkspace and has left Architecture and its priority toward its inhabitants behind. In order to use Bigness as a tool to save Architecture, the scale of the body needs to be accommodated through architectural moves.

If Junkspace were turned upside down and shaken, all that would be left is an infrastructural frame. Everything else is additive, cheap and infinitely reconfigurable, paper thin. The only thing that matters is the frame, the city wall. So who or what is Bigness designed for? It doesn’t seem to be the people inside the walls, and it outright rejects the city outside!

If Bigness were to be luxurious and not so efficient, it would be solid, it would have memory and it would pay attention to it’s inhabitants. It would be like Bigness at the scale of Architecture, excessive and still endless.

Intimate can still be infinite, this is a soft manifesto. If Bigness is used at the scale of Architecture and indulges the body and human perception, the Architecture would reveal it’s infinite interior selectively. In Bigness and Junkspace the interior is infinite and experienced at all times. A constant panopticon.

If an intimate space is simply a smaller one, a variety of intimacy can be experienced within an infinite interior while providing views inward to something beyond. With Bigness and certainly Junkspace, the infinite interior can mean one big room and one big ceiling instead of using the potential of the infinite interior to vary the ceiling heights continuously throughout the building, especially between rooms which open into each other so that the relative intimacy can be felt.

The Architecture would create a highly articulated field of objects that are the architecture and can’t be shaken out. The interior surfaces would not be infinitely replaceable and reconfigurable. They would not be paper thin and they would gain a memory. The space of Bigness would gain a sense of place. Standardization doesn’t allow people to make architecture personal. (Out with Sheetrock!)

The Hotel now has a memory, it is finally unlike an airport. The paper thin surfaces of the hotel and it’s movable parts won’t be replaced and upgraded every five years because there are none. The weight and solidity of the Architecture can be felt. Luxury returns to the inhabitant.

If Bigness is the architectural manifestation of globalization, architecture at the scale of the city, I am after smallness, an architecture that emphasizes local, interior conditions. The infrastructural scale of Bigness’ infinite interior will be articulated to accommodate multiple scales. Smallness is particularly invested in the scale of the body and of furniture. Perception and experience of the inhabitant are highly regarded.

Hotels keep getting bigger and more luxurious.

Where is the luxury applied in a hotel? The guest rooms are shrinking in size and luxury in order to make room for food, beverage and public space.

As hotels food, beverage and public space are emphasized, the hotel is becoming dangerously close to bigness, guest rooms are secondary to the public areas. The public areas are not for the guests but for the city as a strategy to acquire new guests.

What about the private? Why isn’t luxury and space applied to the guest room and its local corridor?

Hotel guests essentially pay for privacy and security.

If guests want to dwell I Netherlands public realm, they can do that, in the public realm, not in the hotel.

“Bigness is where architecture becomes both most and least architectural: most because of the enormity of the object; least through the loss of autonomy- it becomes instrument of other forces, it depends.

Bigness is impersonal.” If bigness is impersonal, smallness is personal, it is at the scale of the body and is interested in its own interior. It’s an inward looking architecture.

Now that we can refer to smallness, we no longer have to achieve programmatic innovation through superimposition, we can introduce innerprogrammatic complexity. W don’t have to search for external crutches to make our architecture interesting. Or architecture is interesting because it is concentrated, not diluted with foreign elements.

Yehuda Safran’s professor in the Royal Academy of Art used to say that examples always obscure the point. This is true in architecture as well. A meaningful piece of architecture wouldn’t distract you with all of its extra activities.

Smallness does not superimpose itself in its context, it slips in. In Bigness, the architecture is a servant to the city. In smallness, architecture is served by the city, the environment can inform the architecture by determining height, material and a vernacular.

Smallness is not interested in making the city feel lesser-than or anything for that matter. We like the city, we don’t think that we have the right to say that providing say a hotel for example to a neighborhood we will solve the problems of that neighborhood by building say, a billboard. Bigness gives, smallness takes.

The hotel is located on the waterfront in Williamsburg, Brooklyn. It looks on to Battery Park City, Manhattan and is located in an old low rise industrial neighborhood. A few blocks south of the hotel is bustling Bedford ave. straight out of a 90’s movie.

Williamsburg and Brooklyn in general has a different attitude than the Borough across the bridge especially Battery Park City. There seems to be an increasing interest in the concept of local in Williamsburg. Its a scene of pop-up shops, allowing local artists and designers to sell goods and circulate, flea market style street vending, live music in informal venues, local organic food in restaurants and recycled clothing.

Neighboring the hotel are brand new highrise condominiums in multiples and this is Brooklyn’s worst nightmare.

If the people of Williamsburg wanted to live in Manhattan, I’m sure they would. Williamsburg happens to be one of the higher priced neighborhoods in terms of real estate in NYC. Brooklynites enjoy the alternative urban experience: slower, less competitive, better quality. High-rise projects along the waterfront don’t seem to fit this lifestyle.

Playing the younger, jealous brother to Manhattan doesn’t suit Brooklyn.

Brooklynites enjoy their identity and independence.

My proposal for a hotel at the end of Metropolitan Ave. On the waterfront is a mat building. A building that matches the height of the existing industrial neighborhood.

Food and Beverage have been removed from the program of the hotel. The square footage required to maintain the F&B and its services has been reapplied to the hotel rooms. Each hotel room has a skylight above the bed and a garden in the back with its own skylight.

Functions of the rooms have been separated form one another and given independent treatment.

There are separate rooms for the toilet, bath and shower. The surfaces of the hotel room are articulated at the scale of furniture. The wall meets the floor in the form of a bench and table for instance.

The threshold between the corridor and the private space of the guest room is extended and becomes its own space. The extended threshold is typically placed in the center of the wall and the public gesture of the entrance begins the definition of private space within the room. The toilet room gains its privacy by using the extended threshold as a boundary. Not only does the toilet room simply have a wall that defines privacy, it also takes advantage of the natural progression in and thorough the space and the attention of the user in this process.

Adolf Loos used a similar technique in defining an Inglenook in 1912 for the Scheu House in Vienna.

The inglenook is typically found in Britain. Loos was fascinated with the British way of living and the formal progression sequence in activities such as a dinner party. Loos created spatial effect for social habits. He adopted certain British architectural vernacular such as the inglenook. The inglenook is a space which is carved out of a main hall in a house.

It accommodates seating, typically the seating is arranged not to look onto the main hall but to concentrate on the seats immediately opposite. The inglenook always has a hearth, which is fascinating to me.

The hearth is the main focal point of the public portion of a house, the gathering element. Instead of framing the hearth with the main hall, the inglenook obscures the hearth. It requires the occupant to search for it and to be surprised by it.

The inglenook frames the gathering experience brought on by a hearth in an intimate and cozy place as opposed to an open, public forum. My interests in Loos’ use of the inglenook has much to do with its placement in relation to either the entrance or the stairs. The placement of the inglenook takes advantage of the entrance’s ability to bring attention to itself and imply movement and sequential progression. The inglenook uses the rhythm of the houses progression in order to offset itself from it. The strategy and logic behind the inglenook operates in the Williamsburg hotel at multiple scales. The gardens in each hotel room operate as inglenooks at he scale of the hotel at large.

The inhabitant doesn’t experience the garden until he has progressed through the hotel lobby and corridor and through the room. The gardens operate as a source of calm for the user after a potentially exhausting sequence of events leading up to the arrival into the personal space of the room.

The gardens are a personal touch to the hotel room experience. However, the gardens provide a connection point for the infrastructure and service that make the personal experience possible.

How does one achieve luxury at multiple scales?

If the program is large, the architect has no choice but to address the fact that the building will be visible and the design of the building should visually accommodate a larger public. Visibility of a project due to scale is problematic if the architect pays more attention to achieving a form or developing an envelope that is oriented toward a larger public prior to the accommodation of the building’s program and inhabitant.

The scale of the inhabitant often gets overlooked as the scale of the building increases. However, larger scale architecture, architecture at the scale of infrastructure has the ability to use its infrastructure to accommodate the scale of the body. There is a slight of hand in all of this, a mask. The Brooklyn and Williamsburg culture and attitude can only exist because of the infrastructure of the city. The two are not in opposition, say the suit and the hipster or the LEED skyscraper and the renovated industrial loft, in fact they are mutations of the same specie that feed off of the infrastructure of NYC. The seemingly opposing characters are brothers articulated differently. In the Williamsburg Hotel, the hotel room gardens are perceived by the hotel guests as their own piece of custom-made luxury when in fact, the little private garden is tapped into a massive network of gardens, plumbing, and back-of-house.

All the gardens of the hotel are physically connected while placement of different scale trees and topiary define the boundary between rooms. The gardens are connected to the back of house, the service of the hotel will never enter the public corridor, the service of the hotel is organized as a secondary system of circulation inhabiting the pochĂŠ.

The custom-made is becoming a symbol of luxury. The ambition of modernism to standardize construction has become exhausted. People are beginning to be more interested in place.

Standardization is a symbol for the ready-made, the not-so-special because everyone has one. Perhaps what is needed is a scale shift in standardization and a call for custom standardization for individual projects, architecture could benefit from some efficient individuality.

The hotel room gardens are the primary custommade element of a guests stay. The garden is obscured from the guest’s progression until she reaches the end and seemingly the most private.

Space Studio

The Space Studio was driven by a narrative through several scales. The premise was, ‘The Earth was dying’ and we all have to go to Mars, all of us. The problem was that Mars wouldn’t be ready to support the Earth’s population for hundreds of years.

An initial design was at the scale of the world’s population and cities. Cities would repopulate on an intergalactic urban vehicle in the form of a ring, or to a person in the ring, a linear city.

There are seven sets of rings that hold the entire population of the world. Traveling from city to city is a different experience. An artificial year is assimilated through the regonfiguration of the rings. People travel to a city when two rings align and connect.

This scale of the project was used as a vehicle towards a more familiar scale, the one of the body.

A series of Acclimation Chambers were designed and prototyped at full scale. The acclimation chamber was conceptually and artificial ‘Ma’ space. Ma is the japanese word for ‘space between.’ The helmets, withdrawing rooms and wombs were designed to replace the infinitely reconfigurable non-places that we have here on Earth. Trains, Planes, Automobiles, and all of their ammenities, hotel rooms, public space are all examples of non-places on earth. Spaces of transition, in between here and there.

The acclimation chambers were necessary to design because of the immediate shock one would receive if he were to walk into a microgravity climate from an artificially simulated (through centrifugal force).

The Acclimation chambers also offered a platform for someone to enter the project since it operates at a familiar scle and would evoke an emotive response.

The Space studio was represented mainly as a series of films and animations.

Full scale protoypes were fabricated of the two helmets and withdrawing room.

Film Still Fabricated Helmet Prototype

Housing

with Ayaka Hales

The Housing Studio paired students to design 400 units of residential housing on a full block site at East 125th St. and Lexington Ave. We were asked to consider how the housing strategy could be adapted to a broader urban scale, applying our approach to Park Ave. between East 117th St. and East 125th St. The approach that my parter Ayaka Hales and I took addressed the program for housing in today’s times. Our ‘clients,’ the eventual occupants of the project, are classified as introverts, extroverts, and people who fit in between. We have designed the project for these people’s lifestyle preferences. I wrote a manifesto that describes the dillemas of the occupants and sets the stage for the invitation into the approach to the project. The manifesto addresses not only social issues but also environmental issues, as our project attempts to address the quality of light and air through sensible planning.

Our additional goal in this sudio was to create presentations that were not simply computer plots. The representation involved the active production of ‘originals,’ hand made mixed media that demonstrate our experimentation and analogously, our commitment to creating mass housing that can be personalized. We alwas had our fet in the digital realm, but we amplified, clarified and expanded that information through ‘analog’ media, for example, hand drawing, watercolor, laser etching and silk screening. We wanted to convey a rihness and personalization of representation that reflects the richness of personal living.

In addition I experimented with representational modes that embody simultaneity and the dimensions of time and space. I made many hybrid drawings such as section-perspectives and serial perspectives that capture, in one moment and two-dimensionally, a variety of viewpoints that one might experience in three dimensions.

Library

The SoHo Art Library is a 33,000 sq. ft. NY Public Library on the corner of Centre and Grand st in downtown Manhattan. Neighboring the library is the old police headquarters,a massive diamond amidst a rough, underwhelming environment.

The Library is conflicted. It sits on the line that separates SoHo from Chinatown. The library admires its neighbor’s bravery, although at one point the old police headquarters was the ruling force in the neighborhood.

The police headquarters was a symbol of justice and civil service. The architecture, through its extravagance was making the civil gestures required to represent stability and power. Simply by being different among its context, the old police headquarters became a representation of the order of the city. The reason behind the amended title is the architecture failed, over time to meet the functional requirements of a growing police headquarters. The headquarters relocated and the architecture was forced to invert its civic orientation to accommodate swanky private condominiums. The symbolic meaning behind the design of the building in relationship to what it does (program) remains constant but the power and stability that the building sings is singing at the rich who live there.

The library never wanted to be so overdressed like the headquarters so that when it becomes a hand-me-down one day, the re-adaptation and refitting won’t be so awkward.

As previously mentioned, the SoHoal felt conflicted. In one respect it felt that if it were organized in a similar fashion as the typical building in the neighborhood, a re-adaptation would be simple.

Airlab

The main character in the story of the Airlab is a privately funded climatology research facility caught on the wrong side of the tracks.

The Airlab sits on the southern edge of Manhattan island where an escape from the fortress of Manhattan is potentially foreseeable if only one could see over the city wall: the elevated FDR Drive.

The Airlab is a loner, an island all on its own in a way. It lives on a special freestanding site,it took the place of a parking lot. Just next door is the south street seaport, now bustling with tourists and was heavily influential in the civic orientation of the surrounding reinvigoration of an old seaport and fish market.

The proximity of the south street seaport to the Airlab made the Airlab reasonably uncomfortable.

What was it to do?

Typically, research centers of this nature live in secluded, non-imposing environments. The site chosen for the Airlab was a framed, freestanding site in Manhattan that doesn’t conform to the city grid. Airlab didn’t ask for much, it was comfortable with completing the necessary tasks to maintain accreditation as a research facility.

Airlab did overcome its insecurities and orient its architecture both to the efficient and secluded research, and to the public, even those who won’t be interested in the research that happens in the facility.

It is paramount for research to be done in controlled environments.

The public access in the Airlab must not interfere with the work being completed by the resident scientists.

Consideration of the buildings relationship to the edge of Manhattan and to the public/private dilemma was taken in the design approach to Airlab.

Airlab felt very awkward like it was an introverted scientist, under-dressed at a fancy Manhattan bar and everyone was looking at him funny.

Through the inhabitation of poché, activity in the laboratory were sealed from the public progression.

Panorama - Theatre The entrance sequence into the two theaters are important to you. The sequences were designed to affect the user differently depending on how far along they are.

Your assignment is to cut a section through your two entrance sequences.

Use strategies of cinematography to move the camera and document the building using perspective.

Refer to panoramic techniques of perspectival adherence.

Unroll the section in perspective.

The site for this drawing is a book.

The ideal site would be the theatre that you're drawing.

Don't reveal the drawing on a single page.

Allow the viewer to wander through the drawing.

Panorama

Theatre - plan The ambition of this assignment is to realize and draw the articulated volumes of the theatre. The theatre has nested and attached volumes that range in scale from furniture to the panorama drum.

You are to conceive of the volumes using the wrong drawing tool.

You are to draw them in plan. A convention that typically organizes space not volume.

Using the language of the convention, develop a strategy for identifying the volumetric differences of the theatre.

Instead of drawing the structure first, draw the spaces of the room as closed shapes.

Identify the different volumes using techniques of abstraction.

Try to abstract by simultaneously being literal.

Draw the materials that the plan can show.

Draw every paver.

Isometric sequence The colored contour technique in three dimensional drawing has several strengths in defining surfaces. The technique also has powerful visual effects depending on the relationship between the color of the line and the color of the fill behind.

Isometric

Use the drawing technique along a sequence of isometric drawings describing the shopping circuit throughout the paper store.

Throughout the sequence, stretch the legs of the technique.

Allow the technique to perform without its strongest visual effect for a while.

Isometric

Use color sparingly for you know that it will come soon.

Use color diagrammatically. Identify the elements that you want to call attention to.

Give the audience a chance to learn how to read the drawing, to learn the language.

Begin to introduce the effect by selectively filling the space between contours.

Isometric

Isometric

Choosing a fill color depends on the desired effect.

If you choose a color that isn't quite opposite in the color spectrum but has a higher saturation, assuming that the contour line is reasonably saturated, the combination will favor the fill color but the line will act as an assistant or under glow to the fill.

(This is all dependent on the density of lines, the color from the line will take over especially around a curved surface. If the lines are very dense where the spacing between lines is less than the line weight, the opposite effect will occur because in this case the fill is acting as line.)

Isometric

Begin to color to everything, maintain the visual contrast. Now that the effect is at play, colored lines will fall behind as the grey lines did earlier in the sequence.

Be a fauvist.

Isometric

Isometric

Isometric Isometric

Objects and Entrances The five buildings of the monograph studio were conceived using a strategy of identifying a precious object that the building will protect, hold, display and serve.

The architecture was designed in a few ways. The identification of a front door, the identification of the precious object’s location in the site, and the negotiation of the user with the two elements.

How does the user get to the object?

What along the entrance sequence lets him know that the object exists?

How does the entrance sequence provide for flexibility of experience?

Secondary systems of circulation, short-circuits, exits, layovers, landings?

Architecture is a service profession, when designing buildings abstractly in school, there isn’t much to really serve. In an assimilated situation, this approach provides a platform for the service of something precious.

The entrance or front door play a big role in defining the facade. It’s a tool of communication for architecture. The front door directs attention no matter its form. It tells the man on the street that this is where he should come in if he wants to.

Entrances or thresholds mediate boundaries, they enable architecture to be both inhabitable and sheltering.

An extended threshold can become its own space or it can be a continuation of either connection. My interest in the extended threshold is its ability to organize the room it connects and its programmatic ambiguity. A door is a bridge. Its can be an unpredictable space.

In the five buildings of the studio, the objects and entrances are encased in the goo of the building.

Spatial tangents to offset the rhythm of the sequence, service spaces, secondary systems of circulation inhabiting poche containing exits for the building’s bowel movements, attics, cellars, spaces of fantasy and flexibility. In a way, all the good stuff.

Being aware of the spatial rhythms of the building and the entrance sequence is important.

Architecture moves people, whether we are aware of this fact or not, every architectural decision made has a consequence that results in a dialogue with moving bodies.

A building is a call to action in a way, it communicates through the articulation of solids that relate to the human body. Bodies can only move though voids. The solids that define those voids can act as framing devices for the attention of the user, This is most obvious in the front door.

Architectural Drawing & Representation II Architectural Drawing and Representation II was the sequel to GSAPP’s worst required course: ADR I, the first course in the visual studies sequence an M.Arch. Not only is ADR I an exact replica of FuDD, a class offered to New York/Paris students, but it is a course that gives the impression of a technical or vocational school. Software tutorials are given in lecture format in Wood Auditorium.

No description of Architectural Convention nor qualification of software tricks and gimmicks are provided.

The visual studies sequence in general suffers from a lack of application of the technical skills that are taught. Studio takes priority over everything at GSAPP and in most architectural institutions as it should. Students simply have more time, money, energy and thought invested in studio than anything else in their lives. When learning software in a visual studies course, there is most commonly a sacrificial lamb assignment. An assignment that is fabricated for the course and makes no attempt to connect back to our beloved studio.

Students should be given the time to investigate the tools they have immediately available to them and to discover their shortcomings. Software should be learned on a need to now basis. How can we understand a constant wave of software fashion when we don’t even understand our fundamental tools?

ADR II was an exception to the visual studies sequence rule. I genuinely enjoyed being a student and in the following year, a teaching assistant to Bryan Young in the course. It was a drawing course so I was in familiar territory. However, it was everything I had hoped my dozen or so undergraduate courses would have been. In Art School, I was sometimes classified as a conceptual artist simply because my work contained concepts and were presented during reviews. My ambition was to have a conversation about the work, the development, the idea and not simply judge the work for its compositional and aesthetic value.

ADR II was exactly that. The conversations produced by the drawings were almost more important than the drawings themselves.

The communication of concepts were required weekly in the form of verbal articulation and visual representation manifest in a drawing (work on paper).

The goal of the course was to experiment and explore techniques of representation that were mentioned but not necessarily investigated in ADR I. This course was organized in the same manner as studio. Groups of 9 or 10 were assigned a critic.

Lectures, qualifying techniques and grounding them in history were also offered as a collective class.

My critic was Bryan Young who w interested in the reintroduction of the hand into humanness digital processes of drawing.

Analysis of Perspective The term “perspective” describes a 2-dimensional depiction of a 3-dimensional solid-and-void environment, a reference to the way objects appear to the human eye. It also describes a point of view, a reference to knowledge or experience or possibly just assumptions about the world. Implied in this duality is simultaneity between what you see and what you know or, in other words, what you believe you physically see at any moment and what exists in your mind’s eye. Added to this is the dimension of time, in that what you see in your mind’s eye is where you’ve been, where you might be, and where you are going. We naturally make connections between here and there, then and now. We exist in a fluid environment spatially and temporally, but traditionally, drawing or other forms of representation freeze a moment in space and time.

Since we now have the potential of 3-D and even 4-D modeling, representation and investigation are dynamic. This always requires a creator but sometimes also requires a creative audience.

In this particular drawing exercise, which remains 2-D, I used the eccentricities of Rhino software to manipulate time, space and knowledge in order to explain my project. The project creates housing for diverse personality types: introverts and extroverts and some who vacillate between these two tendencies.

The main character Simon grew up in Seattle, was educated in Chicago, and is moving to New York. He is an introvert and in the market for an apartment in the city. He and his sister have been running around New York since they flew in very early in the morning and now have an evening appointment to see a 400-square-foot apartment in my building. Simon’s sister and the real estate agent are standing behind him, evaluating the bathroom, and Simon is looking at a void that runs vertically through the building and brings in natural light.

In his introvert mind, he puzzles, “What if the only things that exist in the world were the things that you can see? Is the world that we perceive a projection of ourselves?”

That is the moment captured in these two complementary drawings: the perspective, Drawing A, which is Simon’s particular vantage point, and Drawing B, an analysis of (and speculation on) that perspective.

The edge of Simon’s peripheral vision is replaced by a physical boundary (in drawing terms, the picture plane). The peripheral walls create an interior, which is Simon’s perceived space at this very moment, and an exterior, which exists beyond that peripheral boundary. The exterior is thus inaccessible, irrelevant and apparently not part of Simon’s world.

Rhino software does not “comprehend” this duality.

It follows an order of operations and will sacrifice its own wellbeing and accuracy in order to follow those operations. Basically, Rhino attempts to draw everything that exists in the world, even Simon’s sister and the real estate agent who are still behind Simon’s eye. An entire new world of Rhino glitches emerges from Rhino’s “desire” to accomplish this task. The purpose of my drawing exercise was to create an awareness of formal information latent in the environment of Simon’s perspective, but otherwise unavailable to the viewer of the drawing who relies on her eyes and body alone.

A common frustration in Rhino’s ability to output manipulatable information results from the command “Make 2D.” However, Make 2D is actually a fantastic facet of the Rhino tool. From any view, whether orthographic or perspectival, the command allows the user to take a view of an object (most commonly a 3D model made of surfaces and polysurfaces) and convert it into lines that fall on a single plane in space. A political position emerges. The position isn’t entirely new, but tags on to a polemic that some believe is dead: the use of axonometric over perspective.

A

B

The removal of a point of view within an object, “body-without,” has become more of a necessity than a choice. Rhino has a very difficult time outputting line-work from within. Rhino is not human, even though we have a tendency to wish it were. We get confused because it can imitate – or assimilate -- human perspective. Rhino tries to be all knowing when we need it only to be outputting what is humanly perceivable. The problem with outputting line-work from within a 3D model is that Rhino attempts to reveal everything, which includes what is physically behind the camera (Simon’s eye) and not visually accessible to him.

By applying human characteristics to Rhino’s operations, I have produced not only the desired interior perspective, but also, body-without, an analysis of Simon’s perspective in a 0˚90˚ section projection. This analysis not only allows the viewer of the drawings to place himself with new contextual information, but also describes my building design in a way that could not be shown had I obeyed established architectural conventions.

The use of perspective as a means of architectural representation has been debated because of its prescriptive nature. By using perspective, an architect chooses exactly where the viewer is in the world. The architect places a set of eyes in a specific place to convey a specific experience, opening a portal into the work. At the same time, I believe that removal from an object creates space between the viewer and the work, which is most often filled with a critical eye. A dogmatic use of either perspective or parallel projection is limiting. In these drawings, I have used both to compress and convey a single moment in space and time.

The two drawings can be presented separately and read autonomously, each with its own meaning.

The perspective Drawing A is a vertical panorama created by stitching perspectives together. The “stitching” is a result of my own agenda to shortcircuit the parameters of the software. (I use software as a tool or vehicle towards a greater goal beyond the extent of the individual software or software logic.)

I chose the vertical panorama rather than the horizontal in this instance because I thought that the interior of the introvert’s home should be expressed through a perspective. The spectacle of the introvert’s tiny apartment is the central void (the void, as mentioned above, which runs vertically through the building). The perspective depicts views up the void, through the void within the apartment, and down the void.

The spatial hierarchy is expressed in the treatment of the panorama. Graphite was applied to the glass wall of the void to contrast the solid fills applied digitally.

The bright red fill on the underside cap expresses the curvilinear form in contrast to the de-saturated exterior walls.

By drawing the section projection, I was taking advantage of the process in Rhino by which true parallel projections are produced. There is a problem with the majority of the “axons” produced with digital software. They are not true parallel projections and as a result are not measurable (typically one of the analytic advantages of this drawing technique). Rhino and the Autodesk software show three-dimensional objects in perspective only, but have orthographic views: top, bottom, left, right, front and back. Therefore in order to produce a true plan oblique, for instance, one must distort the actual geometry of the architecture through shear and rotation. A 45˚45˚ plan oblique of a building is produced by rotating the building 45˚ from the top or bottom orthographic view and shearing the building from either the front, back, right or left view depending on the desired direction of projection.

In Drawing B, I chose to use a 0˚90˚ elevation oblique and sheared the geometry so that the oblique section cuts remain parallel to the picture plane. Conceptually, the picture plane is the interior surface of Simon’s peripheral boundary. The information gathered through Simon’s experience is being projected onto the plane like a camera obscura. The section projection represents Simon’s perspective removed from the body. Drawing B thus acts as an analysis of Drawing A when the two are paired. When represented on the same page the drawings become coordinated drawings on levels that are not immediately identifiable. This seeming obscurity requires the engagement of the viewer. By a close reading, you can gain a greater awareness of the architecture than a standard drawing convention would allow.

Acclimation Chamber Film Transcription In this dream I can go for miles at top speed, the way you can move where there isn’t any air about and all I can see is gray upon gray.

It used to be that the moon was very close to the earth then the tides gradually pushed her far away.

The tides that the moon herself causes in the earth’s waters, where the earth slowly loses energy.

They told me the earth was dying, that things fall apart.

We went to collect the milk with a big spoon and a bucket. Moon milk was especially thick like a kind of cream cheese.

The earth was... dying, so we left because we could.

Invented a new world in anticipation of another.

I guess I never imagined what life would be Ike without gravity but I never needed to. The tides are gone now and I am pinned down, moving more than ever before I guess. At first it felt like I was choking but now it feels like a pill caught in my throat.

A but monotonous but restful all the same.

Suddenly I don’t know how long its been or where I was born or when I will die. We lost the seasons and the places that cared about them.

Our creation myth is our memory. Our imagination is powerful, we invent the world we want to live in, we create ourselves, this is our second coming.

Ha, second coming, the second coming, I’m tired of hearing about it, we’ve been becoming something forever, a tangent of our past and future, we keep orbiting around nothing between worlds.

So can you blame me? I mean I’m just a product of this world that you created. I’d rather go nowhere, I’m acclimated everywhere. Place is irrelevant, communities? Ha communities well if you’re a person in no place who are you?

I started acclimating when I was young It all started with one trip and now look at me You can’t even see me, I can’t even see myself, I can’t even see you I’ve acclimated myself into exile And here I am, spinning, orbiting, choking on this fucking pill in my throat.

I guess I’m just heading back to where I came from.

Let me tell you something about this world, This is a world that made up its own rhythm, that consumes its own waste, that creates its own gravity, manufactures its own atmosphere, designs its own communities.

We left a planet that is dying to move toward one that hasn’t been born yet.

So, we are acclimating, evolving, anticipating, while we wait...

Crossing the Threshold: Pursuing the Sublime through the Grotesque Locating the Sublime In attempting to understand the conception of the Sublime and it’s reflection; the grotesque, I have located the entangled sensations in both time and space. The sublime is not created independently, but through a sequencing or spatial narrative within the architecture. The architect establishes rhythms in his creation. Rhythms of movement and stasis, rhythms of light and shadow, loud spaces and quiet spaces.

Once a rhythm is established and perceivable to the occupant, an abrupt spatial and environmental contrast is introduced. The threshold between the two dichotomous spaces is where I’ve located the sublime. This threshold has the potential to be a both-and space, where elements on either side of the threshold are constantly redefining the interval. It can also redefine itself and be completely removed from its place in relation to its surroundings. The grotto takes on both of these characteristics. It is both a decontextualizing device and a symbiotic space between the mythical and the actual. I wonder, are we missing the opportunity to create an architecture of affect if we only focus on possible effects? The design of facade systems, fire alarms, and the desire for uniformity in architectural space are leading us away from an affecting architectural experience.

The wonderment of the mythical Icarus as he flies high above the earth, is as boundless as the atmosphere, the awesome and unknowable realm of the sublime. Despite reveling in the freedom of pure space and light (that is, before his demise when flying too close to the sun), Icarus has a keen perspective of the world he has left, which is a messy tangle of tight and complicated and possibly unknowable spaces, misshapen and grotesque in their everyday existence. The labyrinth, constructed by his father, the architect Daedalus, is the realm of the down below, the place from which Icarus has escaped, but clearly views and comprehends from his sublime vantage point. Icarus and Daedalus, with their different physical and maybe generational viewpoints, represent two antithetical ways of seeing and comprehending the world, one representing the sublime and the other the grotesque. They are distinct but essentially intertwined. They each represent ourselves and otherwise.

In the pursuit of the other within ourselves, the sublime and the grotesque are intertwined, embedded but differentiated in perception and memory. Icarus, escaping from the complicated and grotesque world of the labyrinth, a spatially confined infinite corridor without exit, was so infatuated with pursuing the sublime – the infinite air and sun – that he perished in the heat of the sun.

That was his nature. His father, also flying out of the labyrinth, was the opposite. He suffered the vast openness of the sky, but for a short time. He was one who could experience the labyrinth in complete amazement. The labyrinth is his “sublime” in its enclosure, occlusion, interiority, the act of moving toward something but being utterly lost. Unlike his son, he could manage his way out of the labyrinth without being lost to fire so long as he could control the wonderment of spatial contrast.

The contrast of the sublime and the grotesque has fascinated theorists, writers, painters and architects for centuries, and the myth of Icarus and Daedalus has often been cited as the paradigm. One of the most relevant examples to the ideas presented below, is Michael de Certeau’s characterization of everyday life as essentially Daedalian. It is the life of the walkers through the city, the man on the ground, the creators of the messy, labyrinthine character of our everyday existence. In contrast, “Icarus flying above these waters…can ignore the devices of Daedalus in mobile and endless labyrinths far below.

His elevation transforms him into a voyeur…. It transforms the bewitching world by which one was ‘possessed’ into a text that lies before one’s eyes.” (de Certeau, The Practice of Everyday Life, 92). While de Certeau appears to create a juxtaposition of these two points of view, they are intertwined just as the son Icarus is the product of his father.

What’s fascinating is how the two are inextricable, one defining the other from the exterior, and intertwined, deeply connected at the root. The act of moving from one to the other, the transition, has significant consequences and value in architecture.

The words themselves originated in architectural features.

The word grotesque, which has come to mean lumpy, misshapen, not entirely comprehensible in configuration, derives from the Roman (Latin) word grotto, which means crypt. It was a quite an accidental association. In the 15th century, in the rebuilding of Rome after a fire, so the story goes, highly decorated and strangely foreign Roman interiors were uncovered, buried below buildings for centuries and assumed to be a burial ground.

While in all likelihood, the city over time simply built on top of itself, the burrowing of tunnels and caves below the ground were constructed both for practical necessity, for storage, production (of wine for instance) or protection, and for its alliance with the narrative of religion, which allows the grotesque to cross over to the sublime. The narrative of the sublime, the idea of infinite afterlife, became embedded within this architectural type. The replication of the grotto and the narrative of the event (death and afterlife) allows the narrative to maintain its identity while melding with a previous narrative structure of the cave or grotto itself. Like the labyrinth, most subterranean structures or excavations of this sort contain a sensation of the unknown, fear and wonder in the darkness of their often carved- out interiority, which can resemble the burrowing of animals in the earth.

One potent example is the Paris Metro system and the numerous tunnels beneath the city that interconnect with each other and directly and indirectly reflect the city above.

The public architecture and monuments of the city – the structures that create the grand image of the city -- were in fact constructed of stone quarried from the earth below, and many of the tunnels still exist. The buildings are planned to create sensory and spatial relationships, sequences of rooms, between the sometimes grandiose architecture and the people who inhabit it. However, this massing and articulation hides its origins in the below-grade quarries, empty now, crypts for the void of what used to be there and now constitutes the city above.

They twist and turn, sometimes surfacing to trace the streets and monuments, but otherwise, from firsthand experience, are labyrinthine corridors, grotto-esque, seemingly endless and without respite or escape.

“In Republican Italy the grotto, in a natural or man-made form, was included in the architecture of large villas as a place in which the harried aristocrat might escape the pressures of the urbs. Here, in a grotto refreshed by a nymphaem, well-deserved otium could be enjoyed in a setting which was at once rustic and sophisticated in its appointments.

In the early Imperial period grotto-nymphaea were incorporated into the domestic architecture of the middle class, and held a special place in the garden, which itself was enjoying a new prominence. Small nymphaea which imitated grottoes were integrated into outdoor triclinia and combined with decorative and sculptural elements to create an environment which was conductive to relaxation.” (George, 1) “The transgression of the grotesque is inscribed in objects that are transitional.” (Taylor, ) Objects that traverse between two states are inherently liminal. The word derives from the Latin “limen” meaning threshold, which is also the root of the word sublime, passing the threshold and ultimately meaning high, lofty, beyond earthly state. The threshold creates the boundary and the transition from here to there and helps define both states of being. The crypt accommodates the liminal and the grotesque (being innately grotto-esque). The corpse, like the crypt is “neither inside nor outside but outside-in and inside out.” (Taylor) The rotting corpse may be the best example in bi-directional liminality and the grotesque. The body is dead but hosts life by actively rotting. Its decomposition is the result of organisms feeding off the body and its nutrients. Death and life thus occur simultaneously.

Death, often associated with subterranean burial in the crypt, is celebrated in the imagination by ascension to the heavens, to the sublime, lofty and unknowable sky. The sublime came into its own in philosophy and art in the 18th century and beyond and was associated with the pursuit of beauty, the opposite of the grotesque. It is also associated with transcendence from earthly and bodily presence.

The architect Etienne Boullee, for example, invoked the sublime in his cenotaph to Sir Isaac Newton, the discoverer of gravity.

“Boullee is right to invoke the sublime, which has long been linked to a movement of selftranscendence that leaves the body and its bond.”

(Karsten Harries, “Sphere and Cross” 156). Boullee conceived of the cenotaph as a sphere, pure form, which from inside would have been both bounded as an actual structure but seemingly infinite because of its geometry. However, outside the purity of the sphere, Boullee created a grotesque, messy world of plants and rocks rooted in the ground, standing in stark juxtaposition to the sublime beauty of the pure form.

Boulee manages to invoke the sublime and grotesque in a single space, a space that is understood as interior but perceived as exterior (sky). He relates the space to both the human and the heavens: the other. By covering the walking plane with overgrown plant life, which is complex and operates at a much smaller scale than humans do, and covering the unimaginable ceiling with the heavens, Boulee places the human at the experiential threshold between the two scales.

There is no transition between the two: they simply exist as opposites, one ideal and the other a reminder of earthly reality. One is a product of imagination and the other relates more to reason and reality. “Interiority as nothing to do with the inside or the inhabitable space of a building but rather of a condition of being within. However as is the case with the grotesque interiority deals with two factors; the unseen and the hollowed-out.”

Architects seem often to aspire to create sublime spaces that awe and amaze their occupants.

Philosophers such as Jean-Francois Lyotard, while fiercely critical of the Enlightenment’s grasp of the sublime as a grandiose meta-narrative, recognized the sublime in art as an aesthetic experience, the feeling of pleasurable anxiety where reason and imagination clash, a threshold of emotion and understanding. Rather than look at the grand experience, as in some modernist architecture, we should focus instead on the intersection of the two ideas of sublime and grotesque.

The concept of “Ma” in Japanese may be useful here.

Ma, the Japanese word for space, actually denotes an interval, a transitional space that defines both sides.

It is a symbiosis of two dichotomies: inside-outside, public-private, etc. In western architecture, we also have transitional spaces.

Buildings are considered man-like, and they are described in that way in order for the building that man owns to portray the characteristics that man aspires to. Architecture as invented by human society is described in relation to the human body.

Etymology of the word plan, the English word, has a double origin. Although related to the Latin planus, meaning ‘flat’, and referring essentially to the flat diagram, it also goes back through the Italian pianta to the Latin planta or ‘sole of the foot’, the Latin being in turn related to the Greek ichnos, ‘footprint’ or ‘track.’ Icnographia was the word for ground plan used by Vitruvius. Our ancestors evidently found it natural to think of buildings as they thought of themselves. They called the ground plan of a building a footprint because they thought of it as analogous to the mark left on the earth by the human foot. Essentially they thought of buildings as being like people. Terms like front from the Latin frons, ‘forehead’, and facade from face suggest the same correlation. Parts of building were even more likely to be seen in this way, especially columns and their bases, from their Greek baino, ‘I walk’, and their capitals, from the Latin caput, ‘head’.

Most of which are spaces of movement, directional and hierarchical in form and movement. These are the corridors, the airports, train stations, nonplaces but full of space, spaces that are constantly in transition and regeneration, with no embedded identity. They are programmatic separators, superhighways or thoroughfares to the next, the other. An interval space, a Ma space, is necessary in architecture in pursuit of the sublime, because that is where the sublime can be found. It is the crossing of the threshold that allows us to comprehend either side. It brings awareness to our personal experience of the sequencing of architecture. It makes you realize the other, as it allows you to recollect where you’ve been and become exposed to where you are going.

The transition itself is not necessarily a space with direction or hierarchy but rather a static space of Ma. Ma exists somewhere between clarity and obscurity, perhaps between the grotesque and the sublime.

“The cave in Roman literature is the setting for magical events and the home of fantastic mythological creatures. In its chthonic aspect, the cave is the gateway to the Underworld and the home of some of its inhabitants.” (George, 28) The typical grotto was classified as a grotto nymphaea, basically the grotto most commonly contained a source of water, whether the grotto was constructed around a natural stream or an artificial piping system was introduced. Buried underground without any contextual information, the water source is the mystery from the other side. The grotto being the meeting point between the underworld and the world above, is the symbiosis of the two environments. Both people from above and water from below meet at the threshold, the point of both removal and inclusion.

Discourse on the production of architectural projects (academic) is being stunted by a dogmatic approach to architecture that places clarity in a hierarchically dominant position. The production of an architectural project (academic) has been Clarity in architecture should be used as a tool instead of a dogma. “It is one thing to make an idea clear, and another to make it affecting to the imagination...

The proper manner of conveying the affections of the mind from one to another, is by words; there is a great insufficiency in all other methods of communication...In reality a great clearness helps but little toward affecting the passions, as it is in some sort an enemy to all enthusiasms whatsoever.”

(Burke, 60) In architecture, we communicate mainly though drawing. Words are spoken to accompany the drawings and are interpreted in different ways according to the way in which a critic perceives the drawing. The diachronic speech is fleeting, blurry, and to be interpreted. Synchronic text on a static drawing is accepted as stable fact. The power of clarity is undeniable, but its potential is often overlooked.

A calibrated use of clarity in rhythm with a healthy dose of obscurity is arguably more powerful in its selective nature than in its omnipresent one. Within architectural representation, the construction document calls for clarity above all else. Before the final stage of the design process, obscurity needs a place in the process. Within architecture and the sequencing of spaces, clarity and obscurity should also be used as tools that form the experience of the occupant.

A programmatically ambiguous space, one that carries the qualities of multiple spaces, the Ma, can have an affect on the occupant. An obscure transitional space or a meditative threshold allows the occupant to determine the nature of the space, to fill in the missing pieces. In the drawing and design of architecture, obscurity and clarity can be used as calibrated arguments. Within a presentation or series, the use of clarity and obscurity can certainly direct the conversation, offer multiple readings and can be calibrated in a way that uses feedback as a productive tool toward the thinking of certain things. Within an argument, certain things need to be clear and understood as fact. A harmonious balance is needed in architecture: a balance between stasis and movement, light and shadow, labyrinth and sky. Language and speech are the clearest forms of communication. Not everything needs to be communicated clearly, however. On the other hand, any opposition to the inclusion of written language (text) in drawing holds with it a silly, dogmatic view of drawing that is counterproductive. Drawings communicate as text does however, a drawing leaves certain unspoken or unwritten information to be interpreted.

What exactly do we discuss in reviews? Process, form, formation, performance of some kind, operation, aesthetics, and representation. The phenomenological is not a popular topic in reviews but an incredibly rich and productive conversation, since we do design for people, not data. The phenomenological conversation doesn’t happen because there isn’t any room for it with all of the clarity, data, and imperceivable information.

It is pointless to pretend that the language of architecture is complete, that its word is definitive.

Its word is powerless to measure experience, to foresee the future, to represent tone and gesture. All of which is concealed to the utterable in the utopian space of the intérieur. "The head of the household has an entire life ahead," in order to grow within and together with the house, and to put everything pleasing into place for the future. The architect should "make an empty space" within the house, in its interior. There is an article of faith about houses that will never be spoken in architecture, much less "resolved," that composition is powerless and the majesty of the artist is silence. "The bedroom, Lerle, is private and holy - no stranger can defile it." (Cacciari, 78 ). “Space was believed to be fundamentally void. Even solid objects were thought to contain voids capable of receiving the kami that descend at certain moments to fill such spaces with the spiritual force (ki) of the soul (kami).

The representation of this moment of occupation became the subject of many artistic endeavors. Thus, space was perceived as identical with the events or phenomena occurring in it; that is space was recognized only in its relation to time-flow (Isozaki, 26).

The Ma space is the unclear, empty space within the interior. It is the space where one experience becomes another, a static space of reflection; back onto the place where you have just been and into yourself. “Man’s perception of space has developed as a result of his dividing the environment into areas or spaces. And the manner of this dividing is necessarily related to the views of nature and the cosmos that prevail at any particular time in history.” (Kurokawa, 155). This extended threshold is an opportunity to recognize difference within the perception of an architecture. Introduction of a transitional space between, both connecting and disconnected, allows for a certain definition of the different connected places through their spatial and perceptual separation.

“Intermediate space makes a discontinuous continuum possible, so that a plurality of opposing elements can coexist in an ever-changing, dynamic relationship. The nature of intermediate space is its ambiguity and multivalence. It does not force opposing elements into compromise or harmony, but provides the key to their living symbiosis.”

(Kurokawa, 155)

In attempting to locate the sublime and the grotesque in both time and space, I have developed an hypothesis that highlights a correlation between certain structural forces and human perception. Structural forces being pushed to their extent, or perceivable extent emit an anxious energy produced by the location of the force in relation to the member’s structural capability. The force is at the threshold, balancing, experientially understood as being as close as possible to both safety and failure.

Architects have been infatuated with the cantilever and other structural feats such as long spans, tall buildings, horizontal skyscrapers, etc. The infatuation has lasted through the new advancement in technology and into an experiential or aesthetic one. Why would one enjoy being on or under a cantilevered structure? Perhaps the energy emitted in the expression of structure can affect a person’s experience. Perhaps the slight fear of death, or faith in one’s own understanding of gravity affects a person. I wonder what it would feel like to be the one on the plank. To be stuck in the extended threshold momentarily, understanding the consequence of walking in either direction, while on a seemingly unstable cantilever, which at any moment could force you into a decision. In that moment, located in both space and time, the sublime and the grotesque are perceived simultaneously. The intermediate space is an opportunity to acknowledge the distance between those which it separates. It is a fissure in the architecture, a fissure that separates and defines through its separation. Like Lyotard standing in front of a modern painting, the pleasurable anxiety reaches the sublime.

A Comment on Professional Practice: The Wish List.

I recently overheard of an after-work event a young architect held at her office inviting 7 or 8 of her young architect friends, all with their own small architecture practice. The provoking question of the event was, “How do we bring concept back into our practice?

Norman described something that he called a wish list.

The wish list is a list of conceptual projects that will never be investigated because the projects are clientless and no time is allotted to them. The wish list is an incredible shame.

I was hired at Young-Projects not to work on construction documents, model making, or on errands.

I was hired to work exclusively on conceptual sideprojects that had no client but were testing out ideas that could potentially be applied to the ‘real projects’. I met independently with Bryan Young and presented to the whole firm for discussion and critique. My position in the firm was not an inferior on but equally important as the other positions.

I appreciate the manner in which young-projects operates, the event did not occur at young-projects an no one in the firm was associated with it.

The answer to the question of the event seems to be simple. You just do it. Commit time and minds to conceptual projects because it is there where inspiration and new possibilities emerge.

Translations from drawing to drawings.

My investigation consists of the accentuation of information lost or sometimes scrambled in processes of translation between tools and conventions.

The transmutation of visual information in its journey through various modes of thought produces information that was previously occluded behind or in between artifices of architectural representation.

When I realized drawing wasn’t such a bad idea.

I love this school. I can’t imagine myself anywhere else. I fell in love at the introduction to the first assignment: “The Ice Project” This schools isn’t dedicated to the production of ‘good designers,’ GSAPP is more interested in the production of good thinkers. Design can’t really be taught. It’s like drawing in that way, you can beat around the bush, teach history, theory and techniques but the only way to learn to draw is by drawing. You must develop a relationship within yourself through the act of drawing, it is mostly intuitive, as is design.

The ice project was deliberately presented as a ruthless analysis of one of the most boring activities someone could think of: watching a1.5L block of ice melt.

We were to analyze this phenomenon through drawing.

At this moment I realized that the role of drawing in the project s not particular to this assignment. Using drawing to draw (like a drawer) information out of one thing, and translating the information into a communicable language is what architects do. As Robin Evans put it: Architects don’t build. Architects draw.

I always knew that I wanted to go to architecture school, practice and teach architecture. I decided to get a BFA in drawing and everyone thoughts was crazy. I was told to study things like math, physics, industrial design, architecture if I wanted to go to graduate school for architecture.

Even though most of my professors and mentors advised against my academic choice considering my ambition in architecture, My BFA advisors were even urging my to concentrate in other field within the fine arts. Pointing, printmaking, sculpture, ceramics. Anything that would give me a chance in the art world. Drawing is a very rare concentration for a bachelors or masters in fine arts. I have yet to meet someone else who holds the same degree.

Drawing made sense to me. I figured that every field in the fine arts uses drawing. I wanted to deeply understand the basics. I now consider myself somewhat of a color theorist, my dad is, but during my BFA I only explored the space in between black and white. My goal was not to beagle to draw beautifully but to create a vehicle to house and communicate thought.

I learned to draw, over and over again, to learn how to see.

Drawing is a medium with the capability to freeze thought and emotion, to share, and to translate information.

In the ice project, I was not hindered by the task, the relentless documentation that required technical ability to represent not only the data but an argument.

I came into GSAPP having already established a relationship between my hand, mind, and eye.

I was able to get around the 2D representation and investigated multiple representational routes simultaneously. I felt (and still feel) like I have an unfair advantage having the knowledge of drawing and the hunger to draw. It has nothing to do with the technical skills in freehand drawing and constructed perspective. It has all to do with the Wayne think sand sees through drawing.

In Fez I picked up a few grams of dry indigo pigment. I decided to freeze the dry pigment into the block of ice. I boiled the 1.5L of water before introducing the indigo. One the indigo was introduced into then of water, I covered the container and froze it. The indigo became a visual marker to map its trajectory from the interior of the block. I suspended the ice 6� above 300gsm Arches hot press paper. Every 30 minutes I replaced the paper and drew the ice, photographed it every 10 minutes.

It took roughly15 hours for thrice to melt completely. In the melting process, several drawings were being done by the different actors at play. The ice was making its own drawings with indigo wash on paper, the camera was objectively documenting from a fixed position while I was subjectively documenting, investigating different routes, moving between 2D and 3D. All of the bits of information established aground to draw on with the available drawings as tools.

The process of working, thinking, seeing, documenting, and combining was created by this mundane task. I was able to move away from raw numbers and realistic representation and into informative abstraction. Representing a way out of a decaying monolith.

Learn assimilate and forget: a pedagogical approach to architecture taught by Jean Labatut: professor and camofleur.

Void Manifesto We call for a strict demarcation of public and private in cities. No more semi-private/semi-public space.

These in-between spaces create public holes in the fabric of cities, swollen streets and concentrated social activity.

They are not green parks or gardens that capture light and air and breathe organic life into the city like so many sets of lungs.

They are gray areas, gray matter, gatherers of gray dust.

They are not privately owned so they become a tumor of the street, with their own social agenda, offsetting the rhythm of the physical city to create new rhythms of urban public life.

In the most positive way, these semi-places could give us reason to go outside again.

Some of us.

As it is now, we don’t want to go outside. We want to go inside, to the only place that we can be at peace in the city. Where no one can see us, because too many people can and do see us all the time. Our entire semi-private life is documented. We are never alone. Until we go home to our own sanctuary.

The increase of surveillance and security has made certain people afraid and exhausted: these are the introverts. The introverts lose a great deal of energy from being in the presence of other people.

Knowing that someone is watching frustrates them.

More and more introverts are created everyday; they are byproducts of urban change.

In the gray areas outside, the introverts are claustrophobic. They cannot breathe. They are choked by congestion and constipated by constant contact.

To find peace in mind and body, the introverts want to go home to a place that faces inward, that shuts out most of the city, save for glimpses outward as they please.

Views outward in today’s city reveal a curious phenomenon. Are architects ashamed of their own work? Why then do they so often offer glorious views of other architecture? The best view of Paris is from the Montparnasse Tower because it is the only view of the city where you can’t see the Montparnasse Tower.

We don’t want to look outside, because frankly it’s not that nice. Fuck context. Can’t our architecture produce its own context? We want to look inside, into the spaces that we live in, the ones that shelter us. This is a celebration of architecture, a selfappreciation.

We want to create new life inside, which needs space and air to breathe and thrive. The light and air of the external city are polluted. Breathing is compromised. We need to find ways to create healthy internal environments.

Our buildings should have vertical voids that let in light and air, that are regenerative and not just sustainable. Who would want to sustain what we have when it deteriorates our lives?

We need new lungs inside the body of the architecture. Concentrated, local, effective.

The health of the introvert’s home is thus physical as well as social.

Not all people are introverts, however. An entire generation has grown up in the swell of surveillance, media and information transfer. These people are the representations and the representatives of their generation. They are not afraid; they are the people to be afraid of, the people who love to watch and love to be watched. They are the extroverts. You are all victims of their voyeurism.

These people – the extroverts -- need not just to be accommodated but also to be celebrated because there are so many of them and they would be stifled by an introvert’s home.

The displacement and redefinition of the hearth in the traditional home has made the so-called living room obsolete. It is a dead room.

Separating the living room and lining it with furniture is a relic of the way we used to live.

The living room should now be given a new purpose as the programmatic connector, separator and platform for unexpected interaction.

We will no longer cover up walls with furniture; we will use them as circulation and as social activators.

Their lives are open both inside and outside.

Opening up the internal walls re-energizes the introverts and satisfies the social interests of the extrovert. It also allows natural light and air to infuse the interior from the central void of the building, creating a new paradigm for healthy urban living.

The exterior walls that protect the introverts from the fray should swing open for the extroverts, allowing porosity and vision.

The city thus gains a new peaceful breathing organism from within, private and protected from the mania of extroverted street life.

They are the ones that crave social interaction, in the home and in the streets that are burgeoning with their presence. They want to see everything and to be seen by everyone.

But even the extroverts need inside living space that satisfies.

Plates

Theatre

Section

Perspective

Perspective

Section

Plan

Plan

Plan

Plan

Roof Plan

Split Section Isometric

Split Section Plan Oblique

Panorama

Perspective Performance Theatre

Health Club

Plan

Isometric

Plan Oblique Grottoes

Plan Oblique Grotto

Plan Analysis

Plan Locker Room

Cross Section

Long Section

Projected Section Changing Room

Projected Section Stair

Stair Plans

Hotel

Isometric

Plan

Isometric

Isometric

Section Elevation Oblique

Isometric

Isometric

Isometric

Section Elevation Oblique

Section Elevation Oblique

Section Elevation Oblique

Perspective

Perspective

Perspective

Plan Oblique

Plan Oblique

Plan Oblique

Perspective

Perspective

Perspective

Storage

Plan

Plan Oblique

Plan

Main Gallery

Admissions

Model Photo

Model Photo

Model Photo

Model Photo

Model Photo

Front Door

Model Photo

Model Photo

Elevation

Panorama

Retail

Elevation

Isometric

Plan in Perspective

Plan Oblique in Perspective

Isometric Sequence

Isometric

Isometric

Isometric

Isometric

Isometric

Isometric

Perspective

Perspective

Section Perspective

Isometric

Section Elevation Oblique

Panoramic Section Perspective

Worms Eye Panoramic Perspective

Perspective

Hotel

Back Elevation In perspective

Guest Room Floor Plan

Perspective Underbelly Folly

Elevation Oblique Underbelly

0-90 Axonometric Entrance Sequence

Section Mixed Conventions

Model Photograph Hotel Room Inner Solid

Model Photograph Hotel Room Inner Solid

Hotel Room Interior Perspective

Hotel Room Split Section Projection

Hotel Room cut at 4.5’ Perspective

Hotel Room Unfolded Section Perspective

Hotel Room Inner Solid Perspective

Hotel Room Model Photo Cut at 4.5’

Hotel Room Model Photo Cut at 4.5’

Hotel Room Inner Solid Sections Elevation Oblique

Guest Room Floor Without walls Orthographic Projection

Space Studio

Acclimation Chamber Helmet Side Elevation

Film Still Fabricated Helmet Prototype

Acclimation Chamber Helmet Front Elevation

Acclimation Chamber Scale 2 Top Elevations

Acclimation Chamber Scale 2 Side Elevations

2nd Acclimation Helmet Side Elevation

1st Acclimation Helmet Side Elevation

Moon Mapping

Mapping The Gale Crater (Mars)

Helmets

On the Atmosphere Production Ring

Atmosphere Production Ring

January

March

May

July

October

December

Space Studio Animation Film Stills

2nd Space Studio Film Film Stills

Housing

Urban Scale Drawing Conforming the Context to the project’s Concept

Composite Plan-Projection

Reflected Ceiling Plan In Perspective

Conical Section Perspective

Model Photograph Upper Four Floors of Tower

Model Photograph

Interior Perspective

Section of Interior Perspective Empirical Section 0-90 Axonometric

Interior Perspective Analysis

Interior Perspective Analysis

Interior Perspective Analysis

Section Projection Laser Cut Drawing

Panoramic Perspective Silkscreen Print

Perspective Laser Cut Drawing

Model Photograph

Precedent Exercise Model Photograph

Precedent Exercise Plans of Cruciform Towers

Library

Elevations

+16.9

+12.2

+18.6

+20.4

2nd Floor Plan

Perspective

Section Perspective

Worms eye View

Worm’s Eye Axonometrics Inner Library Circuit

Experiential Diagram In Plan

Panoramic Sectional Perspective cutting through the library circuit.

Unrolled Panoramic Section Through Library Circuit

Airlab

Perspective

Perspective Public Progression Diagram

Interior Perspective

Top View showing structural elements and public progression

Perspective Roof

1st Floor Plan

Second Floor Plan The private labs are sealed from the public path but the path forms the boundary of the labs and the path is hung from the labs.

Third Floor Plan Public floor, closes at night Entrances from the public path

Section Perspective

Section Projection

Iterations

HEALTH CLUB

THEATRE

THEATRE

RETAIL

RETAIL

STORAGE

HOTEL

Retail

Retail

Storage

SPACE STUDIO

AIRLAB

HOUSING

‘DRAFT’ - FILM

SPACE STUDIO 2ND FILM

‘PRINT’- FILM

‘A VISITOR WANDERS’- FILM

BACKPACK

Unrolled Backpack Skin

Perspective

Koolhaas Lecture Traffic

Traffic With Installed Backpacks

ICE

Melting Ice Sequence Diagram in Plan

Ice Drawings

Ice Drawings

Plan Oblique Melting Ice Analysis

ADR 2

Initial Bas Relief Drawing

3rd Iteration

5th Iteration

Final Drawing

Plan-Section Coordination

Final Drawing

6ON6 CUP DESIGNS

2012 6on6 Glass

2013 6on6 Glass

2012 6on6 Glass

2013 6on6 Glass

A MEASURING DEVICE FOR THE GROWTH OF A CHILD At YOUNG-PROJECTS

Measuring Device Mop

Measuring Device Mop

Measuring Device Mop

Measuring Device Screw

Measuring Device Tape - Perspective

Measuring Device Mop - Reflected Ceiling Plan

Measuring Device Mop - Reflected Ceiling Plan

TECH IV

Section Perspective Tech 4 - Folk Art Museum

NEW YORK/PARIS

Frontispiece Paris Crypt Project

Highline Sound Diagrams

Highline Sound Diagram Model Photograph

Plan Oblique Experiential Shirt Diagram

Shirt Manipulation Diagram

Film Stills

DRAWING AN INVENTORY

Drawing Instruments Black

Drawing Instruments Black

Drawing Instruments Black

Brushes

Colors

Tools

ARCHITECTURAL DEVICES

Perspective Attached Stair

Plan Attached Stair

Perspective Attached Stair

Perspective Attached Stair

Elevation Attached Stair

Perspective Attached Stair

Perspective Engawa

Perspective Engawa

BOUNDARIES & THRESHOLDS

Guest House Addition to Gunnar Asplund’s Villa Snellman

Villa Snellman Volume 1

Villa Snellman Volume 2

Elevation Snellman Guest House addition

Elevation Snellman Guest House addition

Snellman Section 1

Snellman Section 2

Snellman Guest House addition Plan

Snellman Guest House addition Plan

Owen Nichols Teaching Assistantships: New York/Paris: Fall 2010-Spring 2013 Introduction to Architecture: Summer 2010-Summer 2013 Architectural Drawing and Representation 2: Spring 2011 12 Dialogical and Poetic Strategies: Fall 2012 Building New York: Fall 2010 Architecture, Planning, Preservation New York: Fall 2010

Thank you for your support: Kerri McClain Thomas DeMonchaux Danielle Smoller Fatou Kine Dieye Babak Bryan Jane Kim Patrick O’Conner Brian Smith Mary Vaughn Johnson Veronique Descharrières Rafael Magrou Claude Bouchard Peter O’Brien Michael Graves Karen Nichols John Nichols Enrique Walker Joaquim Moreno Bryan Young Mark Rakatansky Rodrigo Zamora Leigh Salem Bob Marino Douglas Gauthier Amale Andraos Craig Buckley Sam Yoshiko Sato Craig Konyk Michael Morris Giuseppe Lignano Christoph Kumpush Nancy Goldring Caterine Bebout Eileen Foti Jayne Holsinger Yehuda Safran Ted Schmidt Julie Heffernan

Owen Nichols GSAPP Portfolio 2010-2013 o1nichols@gmail.com o1nichols.tumblr.com