Susana Chinchilla 2020 Architecture Portfolio
Susana Chinchilla Susana.chx@gmail.com // Brooklyn, Ny
Education Pratt Institute, Brooklyn, Ny
Skills 2015-2020
B. Arch 2020, with Honors
American Heritage School, Plantation, Fl
2015
Academic Work & Honors Presidential Merit Scholarship Latin American Architects (L.A.A.B) Vice President
Teaching Assistant Design 300 - Gonzalo Carbajo Design 200 - Eva Perez de Vega Design 300 - Eva Perez de Vega
Moderator/Researcher
2015 20172020 20172020
2017
2018- 2019
Design development, technical drawing, and presentations for an installation in a Brooklyn Elementary School
LED- Lynch Eisinger Architects, New York, Ny 2019
2018- 2019
Design development, drawing, and model making for various residential and commerical projects and competitions.
2020
Venice Biennale 2020: Designer/Research Assistant
2020
Research and design development for e+i studio exhibition at the 2020 Venice Biennale.
Post- Normative Suburbia: A Codex for Levittown
Published: Trans-Journal
Saladino Design Studios, Miami, Fl Design scheduling, concept development, project illustrations. Ref. Michael Saladino (michael@saladinodesignstudios.com)
Letha Wilson, Brooklyn, Ny
“A Conversation on the Post-Natural and Xenofeminism with Professors Eva Perez de Vega and Cathryn Dwyre”
Degree Project: Top Honors
Speak fluent English, Spanish, conversational French
Professional Experience
Pratt Institute
Helped organize student-lead lecture (Sp 2020) “Female Latin American Architects in the United States”
Rhinoceros, Vray, Autocad, Revit, Vectorworks, Sketch-up, Adobe Illustrator, Adobe Photoshop, Adobe InDesign, Grasshopper, Maxwell Rendering, 3d Printing, Laser Cutting, CNC Milling
2019- 2020
Post- Normative Suburbia: A Codex for Levittown
References www.susanachx.com
Eva Perez de Vega
Adam Elstein
Eunjeong Seong
Principal, e+i Studio, Associate Professor at Pratt Institute eperezde@pratt.edu
Associate Professor at Pratt Institute adam.elstein@gmail.com
Principal at Visible Weather, Associate Professor at Pratt Institute ejseong@visibleweather.com
Location: Long Island City, Queens
Timber In The City: Housing For The Impermanent Millenial This new typology for shared rental housing uses a high density of temporary units to lower the rent of long term residents. Negotiating both types of residents, this project explores and addresses the economic and cultural circumstances of the shared economy in a contemporary society. This typology creates a sustainable economic model, and a spatial and social conflict between the temporary and long term residents, and the public community. Located adjacent to Queensborough Bridge in Long Island City, the project contains 450 housing units above ground, and a pulic wellness center and early childhood education center.
Critic: Eunjeong Seong, Frederick Biehle
*Selected to be exhibited as part of a travelling exhibition among participating universities. Fall 2020
Partner: Yeshu Tan Date: Spring 2019
Typical Residential Floor Plan
This project considers the contemporary circumstances of Queens and New York City as part of a larger cultural and economic shift towards carreer mobility and the ‘liberated individual’. With platforms such as Uber, WeWork, and Airbnb, housing, working, traveling, and even eating, have become trust-based and shared activities. Using this as a conceptual framework, we established two types of residents, long term and short term. Long term is characterized by a couple, or family, who is seeking to sign a lease for at least a year. Short term units are micro or one bedroom spaces, and can be occupied for just a few days or up to six months. By cutting (out of) the housing block, and allowing sunlight and ventilation (in to) pass, we were able to increase the density of units and create a proportionally stronger economic model. Five central buffer zones localize and adress the tension between the residents at its maximum and create a higher degree of interaction between residents.
25 feet below the housing block, an articulated and localized structure brings down the residential vertical cores. Because of the strategic placement of the vertical cores, the rest of the ground is left open for the public programs and circulation. The design of the ground floor must both privatize and publicize space in order to maintain an open circulation for the public entering the wellness and education center. While the short term residents have more interaction to the wellness center, the long term residents, who are characterized as possibly having children, are parallel to the education center. Therefore, though the ground floor may appear different, it negotiates space and program functioning more in comparison than in contrast to the housing block.
Location: Levittown, Ny
Liquid Levittown: Codex for a Post-Normative Suburbia
This project is a visual polemic that posits alternative forms of living in a Suburban world made strange. We deploy techniques inspired by surrealist juxtaposition and reframing to create an alternative archival “codex� that critiques the normative conditions of Suburbia as typified in Levitttown NY. By both inverting and subverting the banal, globalized objects of materialist desire, we aim to advance a post-capitalist imaginary that can potentiate a freer and more equitable suburban existence.
Critic: Michele Groman, Adam Elstein, Jeffrey Hogrefe
*Recieved Top Honors by Pratt Institute School of Architecture. * Published in Trans-Journal Magazine July volume.
Partner: Alejandra Sanchez Date: Fa 2019- Sp 2020
Global capitalism strips architecture of its local specificity and uniqueness, investing everywhere with a uniform sense of nowhere. From the inception of the Levittown model in the 1950’s, the single family suburban home was created as a commodity to be endlessly reproduced. Suburbia was sold on the promise of a packaged lifestyle that would relieve housewives of the burdensome aspects of domestic feminine labor and thus give“every man his castle”. Of course, instead of producing a perfect world of consumerist satisfaction, the suburban “dream house” model of the 1950’s inevitably negated the very image of domestic bliss it sought to promote by reinforcing repressive gender roles, heteronormative family structures, and racial biases. This project surrealistically utilizes the relics of capitalist development of single family homes and globally branded commercial sellers, to criticize the banal redundancy of domestic architecture that promotes classist, racist and sexist homogeneity. We are challenging aging notions of
Portrait of a Liquid Curtain
domestic normativity to propose a Surrealistic dreamscape that will allow for differences to be expressed among the users and heighten personal and individual desire. Surrealism is recuperated as an aesthetic as well as a political world changing and world making proposition.
Portrait of a Shaved Couch
Portrait of a Spoon
By exploiting these different forms of identification through surrealist practices, strange, yet productive and compelling object relationships emerge within domestic life, forming New Global Objects. This is our Codex for Levittown.
Encyclopedia of Homely Objects About Solitude Dark(ness) Ornamental For a Continued Existence About Consumption That Which Transports You Of Gathering Those that Alter Not Belonging Outward Looking
Suburban practices and capitalist economy create absurd juxtapositions at urban and architectural scales that have become normalized. A catholic church sharing a wall with Carpet Depot for example. Relationships between pastoral dreamscapes, fences, department stores, sidewalks, churches, and single family homes create programmatic and organizational combinations that test new surreal architectural thresholds. Our proposal allows for individuals to excavate their personal pasts and desires to locate their own topological landscape in imaginative collectives. The individual and the collective is blurred in a surrealism of defamiliarizing recombination of programs and objects.
Gathering of Sleepy Activities
The Persistence of Consumption
Location: Inwood, Ny
Underbelly: Boathouse for Columbia University A boathouse proposal for Columbia University, the proposal weaves together the programmatic andfunctional necessities of the competetive rowers and the visiting recreational users. The site, justunder a hill surrounded by Columbia sports complexes and a public park, plays a large role inestablishing key connection points for rowing and visiting circulation as well as leisure spots and viewpoints. The structural underbelly and articulated fenestrations sculpturally negotiate shared activities between the community and the university.
Critic: Zehra Kuz Partner: Alejandra Sanchez
Date: Spring 2018
The program for the Columbia Rowing Complex consists of competetion-based spaces and activities for the university as well as recreational and leisure spots for visitors. The site, just under a hill surrounded by Columbia sports complexes and a public park, plays a large role in establishing key caonnection points for rowing and visiting circulation as well as leisure spots and viewpoints. Through an abstraction of a site analysis, an initial form finding study began to integrate, elongate, and distribute these key points as part of the architectural fabric. The form reveals two architectural bodies, one for the Columbia rowers, and the other for recreational users. Shared programs sucah as the central cafe and rowboat exchange allow for communal interaction between the two communities. Wet-foot and dry-foot conditions are also distinguished through the formal openings and apertures. Large scale apertures on all sides of the facade merge different levels and programs by widening the key points of interest. The skin is made of zinc panels overlaid on a long spanning glulam wood structure.
1’ x 2’ x 1” aluminum panels
Lobby
steel frame
MultiPurpose
z clip
6” foamed in place insulation Admin 2” water and vapor barrier
6” purlins spaced at 8’ o/c Community Facilities
furring
12” glualm beam
14” steel plate
Training
1 1/2” bolts
University Facilities
concrete footing
Lobby
Concept Sketches
The apertures of the facade and plan of the overall, are derived from an abstracted context analysis of the area. Mechanical circles and tangents are guided in elevation by program and in plan by access points to the site. The structure of the building is formed by long-spanning 12� glulam beams.
Context Analysis
Location: Teshima, Japan
Bring on the Heat: A Cultural Triptych (travel studio) A series of three museums in Teshima, Japan exhibit various collections of culturally significant Japanese ceramics, while engaging the conceptual history as well as pottery’s relationship to landsape, while investigating the representation of traditional artifacts as figure and field conditions in contemporary Japan and Taiwan.
Critic: Richard Sirrach, Eric Wong
Date: Summer 2018
As part of a two month institutional trip to Taiwan and Japan, the studio began with site, cultural, and traditional analyses to begin to understand and curate meaningful collections. Through the lens of architectural facade, this abstract analysis takes a closer look at the Taiwanese and Japanese representation of cultural artifacts, and how that tendency has changed over time from figure to field. Located in Teshima, Japan, Bring On the Heat is a tryptic series of museums exhibiting the historical, the present, and the future conditions of Japanese ceramics.
600° Oribe Pottery Originating from a movement into modernity through the creative innovation of the tea ceremony, each piece was designed exculsively from the tea ceremony. 600° carries varrying amounts of ceramics per exhibition. As pieces are aquired, a wood plane is added to the wireframe display case, creating an interplay between views, ceramics, and facade.
1120° Jun Kaneko Modern Japanese artist, Jun Kaneko, designs and fabricates massive monolithic ceramic sculptures using the advanced technology of today. Pieces echibited as are big as 13’ tall and 6’ wide. The sculptures are exhibited outdoors and are framed through the architecture itself. Changes in the ground condition alter perception of scale.
Physical Model
1650° Emerging Objects
The design and architecture firm “Emerging Objects” is a pioneer in the development of new fabrication methods, motsly 3D printing ceramics. In 1650°, the 3D printed ceramics and tiles (16”h x 8”D) plaster the facade and exhibit as part of a vast architectural field that layers of the landscape.
Physical Model
The names for the museums 600°, 1120°, and 1650° represent ceramic firing temperatures, and emerge as a narrative that engages time, technology, scale, and tradition. 600°, 1120°, and 1650° display ceramics as embedded into the Teshima landscape through architectural frameworks that engage scale, figure, and field.
Location: Offshore
Shiphab: Research campus for Global OceansTM Sponsored by Global Oceans, this proposal attempts to solve the issues faced by scientific researchers on off-shore fleets. With no definite site, no definitve user, and no program, this project challenges the architects to design for adaptive reuse as well as for a high degree of functional specificity, while maintaining key concepts focused in structural efficiency, ephemerality, and adaptability.
Critic: Christian Lynch, Reese Campbell
*Selected to be exhibited in Museum Without Building: A Project by Yona Friedman Organized by Sylvie Boulanger, Nicholas Vargelis, Dylan Gauthier August-September 2019
Partner: AdrianaHinojosa Date: Fall 2018
A rigorous analysis of current conditions on off-shore vessels, revealed complicated circulation between the laboratories and a lack of program for the researchers. An abstraction of the woven circulation through models and drawings, created the idea of the possibility of a more continuous and integrated system of research, leisure, and crew work through vertical and horizontal space. Through differently deployed airlock systems and organizational strategies, space and form are woven into the programmatic oblique, an in between space that represents the functionalities and performances of the researchers and crew members on board through vertical nodes and horizontal circuits. The programmatic oblique provides researchers with a high degree of spatial specificity in regards to different institutionalized research topics, as well as leisure and recreational spaces for an improved quality of life on board.