Raquel S Kalil Architectural Works
The day became white and everything in town separated. Houses sailed off like ships onto unknown seas. The people had new hope to discover freedom on their voyage. -Daisuke Ueno
Raquel S Kalil
Architectural Works
University of Florida
SPATIAL ANALYSIS
PLACEMENT
ENGAGED LANDSCAPES
DOOR WINDOW STAIR VERTICAL CONSTRUCT
GARAGE SKIN TREE HOUSE TEA HOUSE
WATERFLOW PROMENADE GOBI DESERT : THE HORIZON
kalil.raquel@gmail.com
http://raquelkalil.com
URBAN SCRIPTS
INDEPENDENT STUDIO
VENICE : CINEGRAPHIC SPACE BERLIN : KINETIC CITY WU HAN : DISTRICT 824
EAST ASIA 2010 GALLERY VERNACULAR DWELLINGSDESIGN MONTAGE
Door Stair Window
Inspired by the film Memento, disjointed spaces construct vague memo
ories
Vertical Construct
An armature inspired by Fritz Lang’s film Metropolis supports clusters of social nests by which humans can enjoy frivolity.
Garage Skin
A spatial intervention on Norman Hall Garage reinterprets the engagement between the ground and the foot of the building. Lines generated by sound recordings from the site are used to diagram both the ground and a new skin that grapples onto the surface of the garage.
Tree House Tea House
Nested on cypress trees found on site these minimal spaces are designed for meetings with guests over a cup of tea. The tea house is thought of as a retreat from the chaos of everyday life. On the ground level resides the Tea House. Emphasis is placed on the relationship between the host-making and servingand the guest-drinking tea.
Tree House
Tea House
Waterflow Promenade | Sink Studies
A series of analytical diagrams of a sink from Marjorie Rawling’s house. These diagrams begin to generate spatial constructs for the waterflow promenade design shown in the following page:
Waterflow Promenade
Changing Rooms
Changing Rooms
Gallery Habitual Edge
Gallery
Carving into the Florida landscape, Waterflow is a constructed edge that extends into Newnan’s Lake. Waterflow functions as a promenade guiding the visitors to new programs: a habitual edge along the canal ; to a private gallery space; a changing room and three floating barges that allow guests to enjoy a fun and safe water environment. The promenade is a poetic relationship between water and man.
Gobi Desert The Horizon
Using the map of Gobi Desert as a template for construction, the project realizes the expanse of the horizontal edge. The program is seen as travelers sanctum from the extremities of heat and wind. The design is inspired from the life cycle and its axial relationships found in persian texts. Arrival and departure = birth and death. The program is a constrcuted oasis which sits at the origin of the axis. The program is a moment of pause for salvation / refuge / and celebration of life amidst the chaos of the land.
Gobi Desert | The Horizon
Section 1/16”
Section 1/16”
The program is constructed as a carved rune cantilevering over the oasis. The rune exposes a decaying auditorium space which faces the axis of departure. To the east of the auditorium is a passage that allows access into the rune/ oasis. The axis of departure is a constructed barrier that protects the rune/oasis from the harsh weather. The axis stretches out into the landscape as an extended skeletal wall.
Plan 1:36
Venice | Cinegraphic Space The Venice Film Festival is one of the world’s leading premier cultural and filmic events. Dozens of films both mainstream and independent, are publicly viewed during the couse of this event. This design projects a series of viewing venues and associated cultural spaces
Berlin | Kinetic City
A discussion about spatial identity through maps & film
“We understand so quickly that we forget to imagine.” As the locus of desire, anxiety, modernity, Berlin proliferates energy, motion, and memory. The very essence of Berlin transcends linear narratives because it is not a cohesively constructed city. If space is defined by boundaries or edges, then Berlin is a city that is defined by the rearrangement of these boundaries. Built from wasteland, neglect and heritage, the urban image stimulates a sense of disorientation and interconnectedness that which concurrently deconstructs the city’s history and identity. Since the reunification of Berlin in 1990, the fate of the shape of the city has been bestowed upon its citizens to determine which memories are to be preserved, forgotten and reconstructed. Berlin is a haunted city, however it is also an opportunistic city. Oscillating between memory and hope for the future, Berlin’s bygone days has fueled interest in metropolitan transmutation: what can the city become? What can be created, destroyed and reconstructed? The reality of Berlin does not lend itself to permanence, therefore its situational geometry stimulates memory and debate. Memories can be a potent force, and it is because of this force that Berlin, since the fall of the Wall, has donned the model for the perfect architectural design question: where do we go from here? My interest in Berlin lies in the flexibility of its formless state: the fragmentary deposits of history yield the city as an incomplete body of networks. There is no other city like Berlin that must appropriate memory into the urban fabric. Using Berlin as a model for the blurred relationship between memory/fact and real/mythical topographies, I will interpret Berlin as a projection of progress and transition as if it were a film that could reinterpret the state of things. If we regard Berlin as a space of transition, we can compare it with film as experiential flux. What makes shooting a film in/of/about Berlin so paramount are the elements borrowed from reality to construct a new, visually aesthetic one . By way of architecture our collective understanding of space in a city is interrelated to the production of images, especially. It is through film that Berlin’s architecture becomes the backdrop to the representation of the condition and state of the city. As a spectator, you are the everyday flaneur and the voyeur of the screen. Walking, running, or through whatever means of transportation, the experience of Berlin is driven by the contextual fabric that surrounds the moving object. As a witness to the event, film motivates the materialization of the city space For example, in Walter Ruttmann’s 1927 documentary, die Sinfonie der Großstadt, the film montages the urban fabric with the dynamism of everyday citizen
life. The film suggests that the metropolis embodies the role of a porous cell, allowing pockets of social phenomena to proliferate city life. Umbilically linked to the images of urbanity the development of the film suggestively stylizes the dynamic of the everyday life by visually stimulating collages between street edges, masses, and technology. Georg Simmel describes Ruttmann’s Berlin as,
“ONE [THAT] IS EXPOSED TO A FAST TELESCOPING LENS OF CHANGING IMAGES AND SENSATIONS” In this continuous shift of interior/exterior space, the space itself is constantly being composed and recomposed by the field of single-glance perception and the unexpected juxtaposition of violent stimuli. The montage produces an illusion of spatio-temporal continuity from discontinuous fragments. As a response to the malleability of the city projected on film, I find myself botanizing a memory map of my adventure through the city. Using a scroll to document a collage of itineraries, textures and maps, the drawing construes a mythical topography of the city, making perception personal and volatile. When space is forced to comprise multiple spatial components, (using transposition, morphology, transparency, translucency, and layering) the projection of a new reality emerges. Mapping texturizes /dis/continued relationships. Mapping authorizes the existence and identity of a place. Wall or no wall, the voids are the ghosts of Berlin. They are ingrained into the dynamic of the city and its history. Berlin is a city scripted to permanent transformation: it will never settle or rest. Its shape is formless regardless of the existence or presence of things.The uniqueness of history in Berlin is neither abstract nor theoretical, but rather an integration of haptic geographies, voids and memory. Berlin was idealized for permanence, yet it is a city that is in infinite flux. Its history is not limited to an end, but a dimension that thrives in a space-time continuum moving in all directions; asserting, commanding, understanding. Berlin is a model, for the derivation of hope in the metropolis.
Berlin | Kinetic City
Wu Han | District 824 EAST ASIA ARCHITECTURE University of Florida School of Architecture Huazhong University of Science and Technology
Formally an artillery factory, the proposal for District 824 challenged the notion of transforming the site into an artist colony. By incorporating urban and rural edges into two paths we offer a multiplicity of trajectories onto the revived site.
Wu Han | District 824
The juncture between the urban and garden paths creates a new dialogue between the factory ruins and the developing art scene. Paths flow and weave into dichotomies on site, unveiling new views and systems of “go�
Wu Han | District 824
East Asia 2010 Gallery
An exhibition of works for all students attending UF’s 2010 summer studio in East Asia was held in November at the School of Architecture. The gallery was treated as a replication of the theatrical space[s] the students experienced in China. Photography and critical and theoretical essays were suspended as banners, creating a dramatic hall of superfluous imagery.
East Asia 2010 Gallery
Scripture
Art Production
Sketchbook Table
Studio Production
Visual Media
Hall of Scrolls
Visual Media
Sketchbook Table and Scripture
Studio Production
Art Production
Hall of Scrolls
Hall of Scrolls
The Drama of Vernacular Dwellings A Design Montage University of Florida Journal of Undergraduate Research Volume 13, Issue 1
The conflict between cities and countryside is a social and environmental phenomenon in Chinese history. Shanghai, a city in flux, attracts people’s dreams but destroys their memory of home. My comparative study of Zhang Yimou’s films and my mnemonic documentation of China focus on the vernacular enclaves within Shanghai to explore the architectural design approach that intertwines memory and theatricality, tradition and modernity, and landscape and urbanity into a montage-like urban fabric.
INTRODUCTION In the summer of 2010, I traveled to China with the University of Florida School of Architecture in order to study East Asian architecture. From the beginning, I had anticipated I would document interesting places that exceeded my Western imagination. Upon arrival, I was immediately seduced by the magnitude of the urban development in Shanghai. Modeled as an aesthetic objet and a symbol of great economic power, Shanghai’s urban skyline demanded attention; however, my point of interest shifted to the unique and endangered community of Lilong-Longtang dwellings. Through photography and on-site sketching, I attempted to catalogue the Lilong-Longtang neighborhoods, which invited new ideas about presenting and representing the image of Shanghai. In order to understand the character of Chinese dwelling and prepare my documentation of them, I studied Zhang Yimou’s film Raise the Red Lantern. My documentation produced a visual hybridization of Shanghai as a transitional city. The images produced have become ambiguous and reflect the personal and impersonal state of Shanghai’s urban development and its unique residential communities and ends with a strategic production of images that thematically collage the reality of Shanghai’s high-density living. MEMORY + THEATRICALITY Shanghai’s spaces bear a powerful association with history and memory: they are formed through a continual process of preservation, destruction, and reconstruction. As a cultural constellation, memory is neither precise nor continuous. It transposes. To some degree, history and memory can be interchangeable. Our access to memory is through language, both audio and visual.* Through the use of language, memory can be translated and amplified; however, the translation is never accurate and is instead an interpretation of the real thing. Film has become a powerful mode of visual representation of history and memory. Film’s visual production of space mediates between the shifting layers of our personal experience and the story within the film. Therefore, by using film as a projection for our understanding of historic dwelling, we as designers might comprehend the mystic dwelling of Chinese infrastructure.
DESIGN MONTAGE Heidegger asks, “...Space—does it remain the same?”* According to Heidegger, the clearing of space is the release of place. His optimism for harmonization of space and place, however, conflicts with the realization of such phenomenon. When the vernacular Lilong-Longtang neighborhoods are cleared away, its memory becomes consigned to oblivion. The memory does not become phenomenological. Upon arrival, one enters the Longtang through an archway off a major lane. From its entry axis, the threshold confines the occupant into a narrow lane, establishing the autonomous formation of the neighborhood. In its current condition, the once lavish and sanitary dwellings have become wretched enclaves. Still, these dwellings remain calm and tranquil as opposed to the exciting kinesis of Shanghai’s famed urbanity. Low, dense and intimate, the Lilong dwellings are rare, yet once found its space revives the human scale that had been lost in modern Shanghai. For designers, the role of the vernacular dwellings is not a matter of preservation but acceptance of an unrepeatable environment. As designers, we can learn from the characteristics of the dwellings in hopes of proposing more sustainable forms of dwelling. Although political and economic infrastructure plays a heavy hand in the fate of residential living, Shanghai’s historic past continues to inspire and shape the image of the city. In favor of producing an outstanding city image, Shanghai has become geomantic. Yet its paradox remains. Using traditional scrolls, I have attempted to document Shanghai as an unforgiving, mutating global city growing devoid of human dimension as it devours the core residential villages that once defined the city. Oscillating between filmic projection and personal documentation, the production of work attempts to harmonize the reality of high-density living within vernacular enclaves. NOTES *Iain Chambers, “Maps, Movies, Musics and Memory,” in The Cinematic City, ed. David B. Clarke (London and New York: Routledge, 1997), 231–240. ** Martin Heigeger, Der Kunst und Raum (St Gallen: Erker Verlag, 1969), 2.
Design Montage
Gorges Sumi Ink on 4 wood panels East Asia Exhibit 2010
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