Stephanie Hamilton Selected Works
Columbia GSAPP 2017
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(617) 894-8201
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seh2185@columbia.edu
TWO CITIES: SHARED GROUND Instructors: Stephen Cassell and Annie Barrett Spring 2017 This studio imagines a government building for the strange urban environment developed in the novel The City in the City by China Miéville. The book is set in a distopic world where two dueling communities occupy two distinct cities crosshatched into the same geographical location. It considers the stakes involved in this extreme coexistence, and poses a speculative critique that can be applied to many scenarios of the realities of urbanity and the shared human experience.
THE CITY IN THE CITY
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SPRING 2017
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1/10
My exploration of the novel builds a world from the standpoint of the detail. In illustrating scenarios of the mundane ways in which this strange society functions, I was able to move past the plot of the novel and speculate on the implications of these ideas in action. The collages question the conformity of nature into these contrived boundaries at unseen scales and across unseen mediums: in rainwater, in plants and animals, in shadows behind a wall, and mechanical systems underground. My design for the bureaucratic government office building aligns itself with the existing surroundings but allows for moments of disruption. The carved voids illuminate the interaction and interdependency between the two cities who occupy this shared environment. Government workers from each city are interspersed in the banal fabric of the office building, where the hierarchy of their bureaucracies are understood to the workers themselves, but like the city itself, this organizational system would be largely impenetrable to an outsider.
THE CITY IN THE CITY
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SPRING 2017
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2/10
ADVANCED CURTAIN WALL
Instructor: Bob Heintges and Dan Vos Spring 2017 This curtain wall assembly for a Manhattan library is inspired by the painting Grigiore by Piero Dorazio, 1958. It attempts to disguise the unitized grid system with a brush-stroke like fluidity. Outriggers protrude from the vertical mullions and are notched to hold the crumpled copper fins. The fins gain an additional natural texture over time through oxidation. Together, the screen system provides shading and filtered lighting affects to interior.
exploded fin clip detail
roof parapet and decking
typical anchor and vertical mullion
typical stack joint
ADVANCED CURTAIN WALL
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SPRING 2017
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3/10
INTERIM URBANISM: VOIDS OF STAY In Collaboration with Mandy Han Instructors: Nahyun Hwang and David Moon Fall 2016 The studio builds a body of research reconceptualizing architecture and urbanism typologies that surround a spectrum of temporal habitation, both formal and informal. We considered models of ‘stay’ that range from refugee housing to Airbnb and co-op living, to the historic evolution of the hotel. “The stay is interior urbanism and state monumentalism. The stay is ‘in the meantime.’”
INTERIM URBANISM
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FALL 2016
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4/10
This vacant courthouse in the Bronx has vast ornate rooms and high ceilings, and tightly compact service rooms, the building presents an interesting juxtaposition to the human scale. We propose a type of public-stay fun house, which aims to distort our usual relationship with daily ritual, presenting these daily necessities as something to be monumentalized. The intervention plays with spatial proximities and anonymity to others, exploring the extent to which private moments or moments of solitude can be had in the presence of others. The building also re-explores the theme of pace and progression through the space, giving varying levels of emphasis to ‘program-less tasks:’ contemplation and relaxation (‘just being’), showering, washing hands, and storing belongings. The intervention exists as a thickened surface which protrudes from the existing as something distinctly new, but becomes part of the building’s lifespan and continued identity.
INTERIM URBANISM
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FALL 2016
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5/10
AFTER NATURE: THE UNSEEN CENTER Instructor: Tei Carpenter Spring 2016 This studio is based on a body of research on the authenticity of classifications and labels we use to distinguish between the natural and synthetic. The program proposes a nature institute for Brown University, RISD, and the Providence community. The site is in a highly porous zone in the Northern part of Narragansett Bay in Providence, Rhode Island. The site is in many ways cut off from the city of providence by a series of raised highways, and belongs instead to a marginalized industrial ring that wraps the harbor and looks outward to the sea. I propose to change our perception of this space, which is in fact a lifeline of the city, by removing the imagined threshold between land and water and converting it to a second city center for the city of Providence. The project takes cues from the casual, humanistic grids of stacked industrial equipment on neighboring sites. It reads the industrial zone as one of multiple cadences of scales, where large expanses are understood through marks of the human scale.
AFTER NATURE
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SPRING 2016
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6/10
At both the scale of the master plan and the individual interventions, I question the ways in which we experience our natural surroundings. While being critical of simple acts of framing and contrived proximity, my proposal looks to emulate feelings of the experience of ‘nature’ in this industrial environment. Each outpost: visitor center, pavilion, and lookout tower, etc. presents a different experience of proximity to its surroundings. These architectural objects are visually connected, and act both as a frame for the immediate environment, but also as a tool to understand space remotely from across the bay, promoting a broader sense of interconnectivity.
AFTER NATURE
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SPRING 2016
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7/10
HOUSING THINGS
In Collaboration with Andrew Luy Instructor: Hilary Sample Fall 2015 This studio proposes multiuse housing for a diverse user group near the Grand Concourse in the South Bronx. In our proposal, the targeted population includes existing community members and extended families, students and visitors of Hostos Community College, and outpatients and their families from Lincoln Medical Center, and a layover population from La Guardia Airport. While the diversity of user’s schedules was a strong force of our project, the movement and storage of belongings was also a primary stakeholder in our ‘jet-lagged’ urban development.
HOUSING STUDIO
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FALL 2015
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8/10
The project reconsiders the temporality of residential leasing and looks towards a restructuring of permanency, addressing residential needs based on length of occupation ranging from hours or days to months and years. The scheme sets up social and spatial proximities between user groups through examining key criteria that differentiate housing for permanent and temporary users concerning movement and storage. The breakdown of user populations is specific to the existing neighborhood but can be applied to many urban environments which are increasingly breaking from conventional schedules. We question the proximity of storage to living space, and considers the logistics of our ‘things’ as a defining stakeholder of the design. While short-term units, which share the eastern block with a commercial zone, is designed for the movement of people with small luggage. The middle block houses seasonal users such as students, as well as a community center. These units are defined by mobile storage system which can easily move between private units and shared storage spaces. The long term apartments are designed to accommodate the movement of people as well as large personal items; the ebbs and flows of daily life.
HOUSING STUDIO
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FALL 2015
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9/10
HOUSING STUDIO
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short-term
dec 9 1:00 pm
dec 9 5:15 pm
seasonal
sept 27 9:30 am
sept 27 11:30 pm
long-term
dec 9 10:30 pm
sept 4 11:30 am
FALL 2015
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10/10