SELWYN BACHUS HARVARD GSD 1ST YEAR PORTFOLIO
A HOUSE OF OUR TIME FALL 2020 OPTION STUDIO WITH TOSHIKO MORI [M1] CAMBRIDGE, MASSACHUSETTS Cornell West asks us, if death is “the only Black space (home), place (roots), and face (name) safe from a pervasive white supremacy?” In response to the murder of George Floyd and the summer of protests for racial justice that ensued, Toshiko Mori asked the question what a “House of Our Time” could be. My project responds to the prompt by positioning the space of “home” (family + lineage) as that safe space for the living. The project re-envision’s the site of Philip Johnson’s thesis house.
This house is the Home of a Black man and a Black woman, living a Black experience in the year 2020. They live in an accumulated and sedimented experience of time, a now containing multiple moments and eras, a durée unregulated by discrete and homogenized units of time, imposed periodization, and hierarchical and linear plots of history. As Saidiya Hartman says: “It is all now.” As Henry Gates stated, “My grandfather was colored, my father was negro, and I am Black.” Shared experiences, under different names, collapsing the experience of time.
She lives with the pain of Anarcha, Betsy, and Lucy, the unwilling victims of early gynecological surgical experimentation, who were never put under anesthesia. She carries with her the voyeuristic humiliation of Sara Baarthman. He lives with the deceit of the Tuskegee experiment. Black privacy devalued on a governmental scale. They carry with them the shadow of surveillance from the plantation owners and overseers, stationed in their high horse-back positioning. As well as the surveillance of Black leaders from Martin and Malcom to Huey Newton and Fred Hampton Their spirit bears the tradition of Hush Harbors. Where slaves would sneak away in the midnight hour, to gather under the cloak of night for worship services and to dwell with the holy spirit. In spaces carved into deep thickets, this space under the stars is where negro spirituals were created. This history necessitates privacy.
As an extension of this spiritual music, they carry with them the expressive seedlings of blues music, and the shout-like improvisations of jazz. Sometimes, he wants to scream, like the spontaneous field hollers of Black men forced into in chain gangs. As reflexive, extemporaneous, and unscripted as it may seem, it is this lack of order and reason that mimics the rhythm of the Black experience. They carry with them the tradition of making the most with disparate materials. They can feel the buzz that surrounded Kool Herc when he mixed James Brown’s Give it up or Turn It a Loose, with Bongo Rock by The incredible Bongo Band. Birthing a culture predicated on hope, despite the urban decay that was the Bronx in 1973. This history necessitates dynamism
They carry with them the pain of having a family ripped apart at the seams. A mother or father being pulled from the front door of their slave quarters, shipped to an unknown location, never to be seen again. They carry with them a largely unknown ancestry. A mysterious lineage blurred by the sexual violence of population control through slave-breeding. This ancestry is even more blurred by the children planted into slave women by their masters, who were then cast aside to their Black families. They carry an unknown lineage from Africa. Untraceable through name changes and disregard for individual identity other than price. This history necessitates kindred connection.
The site and interior plan should focus on free-flowing extensions of living, interior blurring with exterior, fully flexible and programmed for inevitable change. Embracing the swept earth tradition transposed from West Africa to America’s rural south.
As a Black person in America, heightened moments of civil and social unrest are experienced with an immeasurable added weight. People come to you to be educated on an experience you live, and the issues of a nation can seem to be bearing down on you personally. Time and space for isolated introspection become extremely important. The thesis house shows a formal emphasis on separation, exclusion, and inaccessibility. I want to encourage a procession through levels of intimacy and privacy, culminating with a central courtyard space for introspection. I would like to follow an example set by a museum that stands in direct opposition not only formally, but ideologically to the Thesis House. The Topography of Terror museum by Peter Zumthor, an open-air museum on the site of the former SS and Gestapo offices. The former Reich main office, similar to Philip Johnson’s thesis house, projected directly to the street and presented as impenetrable, purposefully so. The topography of terror museum shows a formal intent of perceived transparency and offers a purposeful space for introspection after remembering the horrors of the Nazi regime.
Materially, the project experiments with fabric as three different edge conditions, and to emphasize levels of privacy. These three materials are recycled vinyl fabric, shou sugi ban shingles, and cotton cast into epoxy resin. The transition occurs from a formally abstracted aesthetic based on Black textile work (quilting) to the bare textile fiber that caused some of the greatest atrocities in the subjugation of Black Americans, cotton. The cotton cast in resin is a symbol for the country’s relationship with slavery and the black subject. The cotton, like slavery in America, is trapped in its existence, an inseparable part of its basic make up.
On the Black expereience: “This tragicomic sense - tragicomic rather than simply “tragic” because even ultimate purpose and objective order are called into question – propels us towards suicide or madness unless we are buffered by ritual, cushioned by community, or sustained by art.” - Cornel West I will argue that the Home is that space for the living: the community cushion, the ritual buffering space, and gallery for sustenance through art (architecture).
SOCIAL V PRIVATE MASSING + CENTRAL REFLECTION SPACE
SOCIA L
PRIVA TE YA RD SE
REFLE
CALM PRIVA T E
LOUN G
E
T
WORK
CT
EAT
SOCIA L
YARD
ENTER
GREE
REPO
REST
PARTI + PROMENADE
PLAN AXON
CLOSED CONFIGURATION
MODULAR COOKING + DINING
CLOSED - HOSTING
PARTIALLY OPEN - HOSTING
MODULAR LOUNGING
COMPLETELY OPEN
ASH ST. ELEVATION
ACACIA ST. ELEVATION
PUBLIC PROMENADE + REVELATION
TRANSMISSION OF ORAL + FAMILIAL HISTORY
CANCEL ARCHITECTURE FALL 2020 OPTION STUDIO WITH SCOTT COHEN [M2] FAYETTEVILLE, ARKANSAS “Reconstructing History” is placed in the confederate cemetery and aims to highlight and sift through the oppositions between the constructed narrative of the confederacy and the reality of it’s defeat, while foregrounding black heritage. The form and program surround and belittle the monument by referencing the major battles in Arkansas’ civil war history (all Union victories) and the history of Black Arkansans since their liberation in 1865.
MARIA PLANTATION, ARKANSAS
FALSE NARRATIVES - FALSE PROSPERITY
REAL DESTRUCTION
NECESSARY REPAIR
POST-WAR REALITY
ATTACKING THE GROUND
INDUSTRIAL FORM
BATTLE OF PEA RIDGE
UNION HEADQUARTERS
BATTLE OF PRAIRIE GROVE
CEMETERY ENTRANCE CONTEXTUAL RESPONSE
UNDERGROUND ARCHIVE
STATUE LEVEL
PROJECTION GALLERY - LEVEL 1
PROJECTION GALLERY - LEVEL 2
VIEW TERRACE
KNOCK DOWN TO SIZE + DESECRATE
ARKANSAS - 111
PROJECTION GALLERY ELEVATIONS
LOUISIANA - 331
MISSOURI - 115
TEXAS - 225
ILLUSTRATE AMOUNT OF SLAVES FREED IN 1865
PROJECT NEW CONSTELLATIONS
PROJECTION GALLERY
THE BLACK NEW DEAL SPRING 2021 OPTION STUDIO WITH BRYAN C. LEE JR. [M1] TRENTON, NEW JERSEY Black Sovereignty as a Framework of Poetics Spaces for Black Liberation are considered war zones, as the MOVE bombings of 1985, and the political imprisonment of the MOVE 9 in 1978 so apparently illustrate. But the struggle towards Black Liberation cannot be contained. It cannot be constrained by violence, or squelched by prison walls. It is radically expressive. Radicalism is multifaceted. Joy is Revolutionary, Resistant, and Radical. This project sits catty-corner from the New Jersey State prison, across the interstate, and stands in direct opposition to its history of oppressing Black Political Ideology and Black Expression. In my research into Trenton one video and one statement stood out from everything. A neighborhood interview of Drizzy 3X. Throughout the video, he and his crew repeatedly stated, “we have nowhere to go.” Alluding to the lack of career options, economic opportunity, and physical space available, as he and his associates were pushed from site to site by the police. As the program for the site developed it began as a site for radical artistic freedom, as the city had set the goal to become an arts and culture destination, and Drizzy 3X had so well expressed that music and creation is therapeutic later in the interview. As the semester progressed, I was asked to be MORE radical. So I asked “What if Black political prisoners and Black radicals had an embassy?” Therefore, the project goal became: After centuries of systemic oppression, The Freed People’s Bureau works to facilitate and enable RADICALLY LIBERATED EXPRESSION. Culture is reparative, and culture is contagious. The project appropriates the former industrial site of the Roebling Wire Company (Builders of the Brooklyn Bridge) and uses it as the base for the Freed People’s Embassy. As Black Radical Liberation and Expression is exercised on the site, lighted wires and speakers restitch the disparate building forms on the block, then proliferate throughout the city and extend the roots of Liberation and Expression out from the main site. Allowing the unabated dissemination of Black Liberation ideology. The wires then attach to buildings in the city creating satellite spaces for healing through dance, poetry, teaching, dissent, demonstration, joy, and even block parties. Connecting the closet mixtape rapper, and basement visual artist to the wider network of Black Liberation throughout the city and eventually the world. No longer, “We have nowhere to go.” Now, “We have somewhere to BE!”
STRUGGLE FOR LIBERATION
RADICAL EXPRESSION
HISTORICAL IMAGES OF PLANTATION HOUSING THROUGHOUT THE MISSISSIPPI DELTA. THESE IMAGES ILLUSTRATE A TRULY REGIONAL AND ECONOMICAL RESPONSE TO PLACE AND TIME THROUGH THE BUILT ENVIRONMENT. THE NEXT SPREADS WILL EXAMINE CONTEMPORARY EXAMPLES OF RESPONSE.
S
RES
EXP
SS
OPRE
THORNHILL PLANTATION - GREENE COUNTY, ALABAMA
OPPOSE
MARIA PLANTATION, ARKANSAS
HERMITAGE PLANTATION - CHATHAM COUNTY, GEORGIA
INGRAIN
EVERGREEN PLANTATION - NEW ORLEANS, LOUISIANA
STITCH + CARVE OUT COMMUNITY ORIENTED EMBASSY
CONNECT WITH RAIL + EXPAND THE MISSION
FREE PUBLICS
COLLECTIVISM
SATELLITE EXAMPLE ONE
SATELLITE EXAMPLE TWO
SATELLITE EXAMPLE THREE
SATELLITE EXAMPLE FOUR
RESTRUCTURING ENVIRONMENTAL SOCIAL DETERMINANTS
GHOST NARRATIVES FLOATING THROUGH THE CITY
UNDERGROUND
SPRING 2021 OPTION STUDIO WITH MIRA HENRY + MATTHEW AU[M2] LOS ANGELES, CALIFORNIA The project is my dedication to Nipsey Hussle and the languorous unwinding that follows hard work; a tribute to g-funk, west coast hip-hop, and it’s opulence by appropriating tenets of the baroque and rococo; reverence for the low and slow precepts of the promenade from Mexican and low-rider social culture; and an exploration of magnifying minority representation beyond the painted 2D surfaces of mural making to a three dimensionalized veneration of community icons. The procession through the space is a reference to Nipsey’s motto “The Marathon Continues”, a continuous promenade party which mediates three different party spaces and L.A.’s two primary colors, Red and Blue. The project is titled “Oppositions: A Rose That Grew from Concrete”.
ARRANGEMENTS - EARLY STUDIES WITH MATERIAL AND LIGHT
ARRANGEMENTS - EARLY STUDIES WITH MATERIAL AND LIGHT
SUNRISE
CRENSHAW STREET ELEVATION - “FACING THE WORLD”
SUNSET (THE PARTY BEGINS)- FRONT ELEVATION
SUNSET (THE PARTY BEGINS)- BACK ELEVATION
BASEMENT
GROUND LEVEL
GROUND LEVEL RCP
UPPER LOUNGE
UPPER LOUNGE RECEPTION
BASEMENT LOUNGE RECEPTION
UPPER LOUNGE PROMENADE
BASEMENT LOUNGE PROMENADE
STRUCTURE
BUILDING PROMENADE - “THE MARATHON CONTINUES”
REGARDING AN ARCHIVE SPRING 2021 OPTION STUDIO WITH MIRA HENRY + MATTHEW AU[M2] CAMBRIDGE, MASSACHUSETTS A proposal for the extension of the Harvard GSD special collections archive with a new exhibition space.
DIAGRAMS
DISTANCE FROM, THEN REFLECT GUND HALL
BASEMENT
GROUND
SHORT
LONGITUDINAL
EAST ELEVATION
WEST ELEVATION
NORTH ELEVATION
GUND HALL ALEE
ARCHIVE LIGHTING ELEMENT
FORMAL REFLECTION
APPROACH
SELWYN BACHUS HARVARD GSD 1ST YEAR PORTFOLIO