ARCH, portfolio by Protik Choudhuri

A R C H

Architecture and Architect

The craftsman, author, statesman, painter, sculptor, philosopher, engineer. The visionary.

Architecture- the act of imagining and creating- predates humanity. Like fire, architecture destroys and creates, at times establishing hierarchies and other times balance. The architect assumes a primordial force- and simultaneously inherits the responsibilities of bearing the ability to mark the earth.

And for whom does the architect assume his role? For nature? For people? For the state? For the institution? For the person?

In contemporary architectural practice, the boundaries of our role as architects ebb and flow. Architecture must express and communicate, must resolve and make visible. Architecture must be personal and social, closed and open.

Architecture must have ambition.

INDIVIDUAL | ACADEMIC COMPOSITE COMMONS : THE SU STUDENT VILLAGE pg.

Program: Residential, Community Center, Mixed Use

Location: Syracuse, NY

Urbanism | Student Housing | Community

COLLABORATIVE | ACADEMIC 11 MUSEUM OF THE AMERICAN QUILT pg.

Program: Musuem

Location: Seneca Falls, NY

Quilt Musuem | Historical Urbanism | Materiality

COLLABORATIVE | PROFESSIONAL 20 LAKE WACCAMAW RV AND CAMP PARK pg.

Program: RV and Camp Park

Location: Lake Waccamaw, NC

Multi-Purpose Park | Ecological Site | Landscape

COLLABORATIVE | ACADEMIC 24 URBAN SYMBIOSIS : AN ARTIST CO-OP VILLAGE IN NYC pg.

Program: Residential, Commercial, etc.

Location: SoHo, NYC

Urbanism | Zoning | Community

COLLABORATIVE | PROFESSIONAL

PINEHURST RESIDENCE pg.

Program: Private Residence

Location: Raleigh, NC

Light | Tectonics | Roof Form

INDIVIDUAL | ACADEMIC 42 THOMAS MERTON ABBY pg.

Program: Monastery and Constitutional Library

Location: Washington DC

Philosophy of Form | Urbanism

COMPOSITE COMMONS: THE SU STUDENT VILLAGE

ACADEMIC + INDIVIDUALLY COMPLETED

This project emerges from the reading of the site as significant visible and invisible thresholds between the campus and the neighborhood of Westcott. The transition from small communities in the independent housing units to the more complex social and formal dynamism in the campus is negotiated through the creation of a new commons by compositing the formal, spatial, social, and material DNA of the campus and neighborhood. At the urban scale, the building grid of the residential neighborhood takes over and bleeds into the territory of the campus, establishing a decentralized scheme- a series of fragmented forms scaled to the fabric of the neighborhood and establishes the Village.

PROGRAM: Student Housing, Mixed-use Residential, Community Center

LOCATION: Syracuse University, Syracuse, NY.

MEDIUMS: Illustrator, Photoshop, V-RAY

DESIGN SOFTWARE: Rhino + Revit for Architecture

THE VILLAGE Street Communal Gathering Dwelling

The scheme revolves around this idea of the commons as the activator- as the means to facilitate a dense social fabric in not only the project but also uniting the community of the university with that of the neighborhood. These ideas manifest spatially in the two cross-axial pedestrian streets carved from fabric of the project. One is created from projecting Clarendon street through the block- dissolving a significant physical threshold separating the campus and the neighborhood. This new corridor is activated by a formal market and a farmer’s market instigating the coming together of the two distinct communities of the campus and neighborhood by serving the acute lack of produce available in the campus and near the site. The other street, running along the length of the project, manifests as central spine (a promenade) forming an irregular and informal street within the village, bringing all the communities in it together.

Conceptually, these atria are hearths- articulating the most public zones inside the buildings through light and facilitating social interaction between the members of the same dwelling fragment. The atria adapt to the conditions of size and shape of the common spaces, at times enlarging to form occupiable spaces of leisure, meeting, and entertainment. Other times, the atria are minimal, serving utilitarian functions as message boards or celebrating circulation. Meanwhile, transparency in the facades locate the major communal spaces in the buildings, extending the experience of the street into the buildings while simultaneously exposing the social activity inside.

UPPER LEVEL MASTERPLAN

The dwelling units are fragments imagined as independent communities, with all plan layouts concentric to a community hub. These hubs manifest as atria- allowing light to penetrate deep into the dwellings and defining the experience of commons inside the building.

The units become the smallest scale of commons between the roommates. They are characterized by the adaptable partition wall, removable to create a smaller common space between the two roommates.

MUSEUM OF THE AMERICAN QUILT COLLABORATIVE (All drawings shown by PROTIK CHOUDHURI) | ACADEMIC

Our site is located in the incredibly significant cultural, historical, and public fabric of the small city of Seneca Falls, NY, presenting a valuable opportunity to establish a dialogue between the project’s internal program as the Museum of the American Quilt and the site’s external artifacts alluding to the rich history of the city. Our intent is to establish an anchor that assemblages the historical and cultural context of the city- providing a means through which to understand and interpret. Our project emerges from appropriating the parti wall system present in the dense urban fabric of the downtown area, significant for its history and cultural value to the city. Some walls become aggressively thickened in order to become the significant structural and environmental control infrastructure and secondary program elements, while the thinner walls may be understood as modulators of program and screen conditions for gallery spaces.

LOCATION: Seneca Falls, NY.

MEDIUMS: Illustrator, Photoshop, Rhino, Enscape

The project’s circulatory experience thus translates the layering of the quilt- the beautiful quilt front, structural batting, and the exposed and raw backing into a spatial sequence. As such, circulation through the project can be imagined as encounters with a series of formal programmed spaces clad in the beautiful white brick contextual to the site, and raw, unfinished breton brut-like informally programmed spaces.The brick wall here becomes simultaneously a threshold condition and an interface to read the container (the brick walls “containing the quilts”) in much the same way as the contained (the quilts).

Circulation through the exhibition spaces always engage visitors to view important cultural, historical, and public artifacts in the near context. In this way, the context not only becomes content for exhibition but also establishs relations between the history of quilt-making and the artifacts in the site.

LAKE WACCAMAW RV AND CAMP PARK COLLABORATIVE | PROFESSIONAL (Katherine Hogan Architects)

One of the most unique natural geographical features in the state of North Carolina, the NC Parks and Recreation department and KHA viewed the potential project at this site as the opportunity to reclaim the lake as a public amenity to state. Increasing privatization of the lake shore gradually endangered the incredibly unique geographical formation of the Eolian Ridge lake shore where the project was chosen to take place. Our team’s scheme, through research and analysis of the site’s significance, convinced client to pull the park further inland to protect the ridge and develop additional program elements to improve the experience of public visitors. My role include schematic design and master-planning of the park alongside the landscape architecture firm while simultaneously contributing concept ideas for the visitor cabins. My master planning efforts included the development of RV sites, Camp sites, cabins, and the communal bathhouse while placing infrastructural elements such as roads, water and power access, and sewage removal.

PROGRAM: RV and Camp Park

LOCATION: Lake Waccamaw, NC.

MEDIUMS: Illustrator, Rhino, Enscape

PLAN - CABIN

A1 SECTION - CABIN

Schematic Plan 1A

Schematic Section 1A

URBAN SYMBIOSIS : AN ARTIST CO-OP VILLAGE IN NYC

COLLABORATORS: Aqila Bakri, Ellie Derwenskus

This project was conceived as a process and materialized as a village. Fundamentally, we were interested in the nature of the street and the lived experience of urban environments. How do the spatial and aesthetic qualities of streets alter the experience of the culture and spirit of our neighborhoods, of our cities? How do we preserve this culture and spirit? The project took root in NYC, in the SoHo and NoHo neighborhoods. Historically, these neigborhoods have been characterized by evolution and change- from aristocratic estate to redlight district, from residential neighborhood to commerical hub, from abandoned manufacturing to artists’ refuge. In the 1970s, poor artists began to informally occupy the historic buildings in SoHo abandoned by manufacturers. Although their occupation was illegal, the artists revitalized the neighborhood- so much so that real estate value returned, only to displace the impoverished artists. Today, SoHo and NoHo are in the midst of a rezoning process in which two key proposals, one by the city to drastically upzone the neighborhood and another by the community to preserve its historical fabric. It is in these complex conditions the project manifests- sidling in-between the old and new, between preservation and evolution, between the physical and the spiritual. Our project proposes an entirely new zoning scheme- one which simultaneously allows for preservation and evolution.

PROGRAM: Mixed-use Residential, Retail, Exhibition, Manufacturing, and the Street.

LOCATION: SoHo/NoHo, NYC.

SPIRIT PHYSICAL

CAN WE SIMULTANEOUSLY PRESERVE THE RICH HISTORICAL FABRIC

OF SOHO AND RE-ESTABLISH THE SPIRIT OF AN CREATIVE HUB?

Meeting of SoHo Artists Association Planning Committee. 1968. Smithsonian James Mellon, Dorothy and Chaim Koppelman at 498 Broome Steet in 1974.

SoHo’s material fabric- an amalmagation of historic cast iron facades. Protik C. Medium: Photoshop

SoHo and NoHo Historic Districts. Downtown Manhattan.

The Artist CO-OP Village

Our zoning and policy proposals reconcile material preservation with the necessity for growth and evolution. We propose a new urban village in SoHo- a refuge for the city’s disenfranchised artists created by partnering with the government and for-profit developers’.

Our proposal will reintegrate the arts culture more deeply within the social and cultural fabric of SoHo and NoHo, by dispersing fragments of program throughout the neighborhoods, creating 5 Co-op artist communities that together form a village.

Our zoning proposal creates a new architectural typology in which preservation and evolution are simultaneously in dialogue and in friction. Through conservation of the physical, we preserve material identity. Through evolution, we find opportunities to preserve culture and spirit.

Credit: Drawings by Protik Choudhuri | Medium: Rhino + Photoshop and Illustrator

The Logistics of a Urban Village

To resolve the financial needs of this village, we propose a new artist village community organization- which will partner with developers, giving significant FAR bonuses in exchange for contributing percentages of their developed FAR towards the artist village. Each speculative development thus contributes a non-speculative fragment of program toward our overall vision of SoHo.

The ACVO will take ownership of non-speculative fragments and establish them as part of the Artist co-op Village communities.

Artists will be able to purchase a share of a Co-op community, acquiring ownership of non-speculative housing units and access to community facilities of production, exhibition, and commission.

The facilities in these communities will be congregated into cores, while the housing units will be dispersed throughout the periphery.

Credit: Protik Choudhuri | Medium: Rhino + Illustrator

SOHO WEST

Our Site selection encompassed all buildings in SoHo with less than 3 FAR developed. We evaluated them for their architectural significance, transformation and usage, as well as size and location. This allowed us to categorize the sites based on priority, their mediocrity and their excellence. However, the mediocre and the exceptional, we believe must be equally preserved.

We plan to develop our ideas in SoHo west as proof of concept. Our scheme selectively resets developed FAR in these sites. Developers build atop existing, contributing 30% towards the artist village, which allows us to establish the supporting program for the artists.

Credit: Protik Choudhuri | Medium: Rhino + Illustrator + Photoshop

Through a series of fragmented interventions we call: the artist village kit of parts, we aim to provide a more intertwined community between art and the artist and the urban environment. We intend to rigorously integrate art and culture with daily life, directly in response to SoHo’s heritage- by democratize art, make it accessible, and bring it to the public realm.

The Artist Kit of Parts consist of different fragments of programs that will be dispersed throughout the developments. We determined programs that both support the artists’ living styles and needs for art creation, but also rethinking and designing ways of informal occupation through adaptations and flexibility of space. The street becomes a “flagship gallery” where artists as, “local manufacturers” can interact with the community bridging their work to not just the people walking on the streets, but also connecting with other artists and possible future investors who may be interested in their work. The artist co-op village proposal allows reintegration of everyday artist culture and community, into its rich history and contemporary market trends and settings.

By Ellie Derwenskus By Ellie Derwenskus By Aqila Bakri

FACADE

- DAY FACADE - NIGHT

ARIST HOUSING SHARED STUDIOS

By Aqila Bakri

By Ellie Derwenskus

STREET LIFE

GALLERY ROOF THEATRE

Pinehurst Residence

COLLABORATIVE | PROFESSIONAL (Katherine Hogan Architects - All drawings shown are by Protik Choudhuri)

Located in a quiet suburban neighborhood next to a scenic golf course, the project opens outwards to both exterior nature and abundant light. The plan is organized through several distinct islands for the client and each of the her children. The first floor shifts delicately between private and communal spaces, which is articulated by light from an formally complex light well. On the mezzanine, a more introverted space allows the client a space of refuge amidst her collection of artwork and books. In section, the complex geometry of the roof require careful management of structural members, which was my task. I developed digital models of project using existing architectural model and redesigned the roof, plan, and section too allow for a complete structural integration as proposed by the structural engineers while improving the circulation and spatial experience in the project.

PROGRAM: Single-Family Residential

LOCATION: Raleigh, NC.

MEDIUMS: Illustrator, Rhino

Hybrid Worm’s Eye

Delaminated Roof Structure

SRIMA Exploded Axon

SCALE: 1/16” = 1’

Form-Program Relationship

Lightwell

Intraverted Refuge Space

Extraverted Social Space

Additional Media

SPATIALIZED FIGURE-GROUND MODEL

project: COMPOSITE COMMONS: SU STUDENT VILLAGE materials: PLASTIC FILAMENT, WOOD DOWELS, PAPER, ACRYLIC techniques: 3D PRINTING, WOODSHOP MACHINES

SECTIONAL DETAIL: COMPOSITE COMMONS

project: COMPOSITE COMMONS: SU STUDENT VILLAGE materials: PLASTIC FILAMENT, MUSEUM BOARD, ACRYLIC techniques: 3D PRINTING, LASER CUTTING

CONCEPT MODEL: SACRED MANUSCRIPTS MUSEUM

project: MANUSCRIPTS MUSEUM materials: ROCKITE (CEMENT), MUSUEM BOARD (MOLD)

techniques: ROCKITE POURED IN MOLD , LASER CUTTING (MOLD)

Concept Study : Assemblage Dwelling

project: Thesis materials: WOOD, ACRYLIC, PLASTIC techniques: HAND CUT, LASER CUT, 3D PRINTED

THE THOMAS MERTON CONSTITUTIONAL ABBY

Completed INDIVIDUALLY

Program: Monastery and Library

Location: Washington DC

The Trappist monastic order first emerged in about 1664, with proposed reforms to exisiting monastic regulations with intentions to create a more acetic monastic lifestyle. The reforms prescribed manual labor, a limited diet, silence and contemplation, isolation, and the renunciation of all but religious study.

Thomas Merton is best known as a trappist monk and writer – a monk who wrote or a writer who happened to be a monk and was an influential pacifist and activist, a scholar, a poet and a self proclaimed anarchist. He was also a man of dialogue, a promoter of peace between peoples and religions. His faith called him to engage in debate on many of the most important issues of his time. His life as a monk removed from society was incongruous with his life as a public figure.

Mediums: Photoshop + Illustrator

URBAN SECTION

Mediums: Rhino + Illustrator

DORM SECOND FLOOR PLAN

DORM THIRD FLOOR PLAN

LIBRARY LEVEL -2

LIBRARY LEVEL -4