Tanner Valachovic - B.Arch Portfolio

TANNER VALACHOVIC architecture + design portfolio

3rd year B.Arch @ Virginia Tech selected works: 2020 - 2022

trvalachovic@vt.edu 1 (412) 956-2885

TANNER VALACHOVIC trvalachovic@vt.edu 1 (412) 956-2885

EDUCATION Virginia Tech School of Architecture + Design - Blacksburg, VA Bachelor of Architecture: 2019 - Present

AWARDS 2020 Archasm Competition: Home - Design Your Dream Honorable Mention

SKILLS Photoshop Illustrator Rhino AutoCAD Premiere Pro After Effects Blender Social Media

Architectural Works

1

Alternative Design Works

Workshop for Other Worlds

2

3

2nd Year Studio Projects

Arrow House 3rd Year Competition

Blacksburg Preschool

5

3rd Year Project

4

Post Colonial Mural Published Group Collage

6

DOP Visual Media Chair Student Hip Hop Organization Position

ApARTment Exhibitions Personal Project

Polyform Research

Workshops for Other Worlds Studio with Nathalie Frankowski + Cruz García

Skate Studio

Pavilion for Other Species

Shaped by research into the archetype of polyforms, the Skate Studio aims to rework how architecture can foster leisure. With an indoor skate ramp that leads into a hardscape of faceted concrete and copper clad polyhedrons, the barrier between the inside and outside rolls away. The exterior cladding is also a warm, reflective copper, so the crystal-like structure becomes a beacon for a community of young skaters, artists, and creatives. Inspired by works of Raphael Zarka, hopefully the architecture is able to liberate art by providing dynamic planes and surfaces for both displays and freedom of movement.

Animals have always had a playground in nature, but finding one in architecture is difficult, as it often only caters to the human scale. The Pavilion for Other Species aims to explore how animals could interact with a designed environment. Two sculptures, one designed by a fellow peer, Jazlynn Castro, are placed within a maze that only small creatures can navigate. My red organs without a body playground includes rope swings, rotating wheels and coves for animals to explore. The program does not lose value for catering to other species, as it allows art to become functional, even if only to extend the idea of leisure to animals.

Website: https://wowwai.cargo.site/

Campus Model The Workshop for other Worlds studio had the mission of creating a collective campus from the onset. It was to be occupied by plots for our buildings, surrounding landscape, and pavilions for other species, with each plot modeled on a 2’ x 2’ foam panel. This meant that the model would become 20’x 20’ feet and had to include a cohesive circulation and vision. Placed within a zoom year, collaborating with peers to construct a collective narrative was difficult. Through group chats and break out rooms, we were all able to showcase our personal representation skills with animations of our projects, which reflected and extended upon the structures in the final campus model. Our campus was divided into horizontal program strips, which included leisure, discussion, education, and work. We envisioned a carless road system to allow for safe and free transit from one building to the next. The studio became an exercise in imagining what our college campuses could be like and how architecture, landscape, and collective thought could achieve that.

Animalian Siege of Leisure With a studio focus on digital collages, a video utilizing this representation mode became the final narrative for our architectures. I had been focused on concepts of leisure and other species, so it seemed natural that flipping the program of human leisure within the Skate Studio would tell its story.

The video portrays the normal atmosphere of play and relaxation, all the while a coup is performed that retells who architecture is for.

Ridge Cap Optional Solar Panels

Vinyl Siding Rigid Insulation Batt Isulation/Rafters Vapor Barrier Furring Drywall

Anchor Bolt Gutter

Vinyl Siding Rigid Insulation Lintel

Wood Flooring Plywood Isolation Joint Concrete Slab Vapor Barrier

Section A-A

Arrow House

3rd Year School-Wide Competition

Rigid Insulation Capillary Break

Drywall Furring

Double-Pane Window Aluminum Casement Window Sill Flashing 8” CMU Blocks Vertical Reinforcment as Required Footing Reinforcment as Required Footing Frostline

Site Plan

Out to View

Shared Garden Geometry

Single View

N

Three Houses

Eat

Gather

Sleep Cook Sleep

Wash

A

The arrow house is a residence responding to prompts of a hilltop outlook, inexpensive cmu construction, and the ability to multiply the structure to make a modular neighborhood. The form points out to the view, a sloped field in rural Virginia. Its program is split on the arrow’s bend, with the private spaces falling on the right and more open spaces on the left. To accommodate a growing family, the car port’s extension could easily be converted into more square footage. As shown by the detail section drawing, the focus of the project was to appeal to cheap construction methods. Since the brief mentioned Habitat for Humanity, delving into the details of how a CMU structure would be put together deepened my understanding of the house. My creative flare showed itself in circular windows and skylights, but the arrow house was not interested in expressive sensibilities. Instead it chooses a humble footprint that could act as a module for an inexpensive housing community built by volunteers and students.

A

The Competition

Study - Clean

Store

Park - Expand

Plan

North Elevation

South Elevation

site plan

N blacksburg’s 16 plots

Blacksburg Preschool Studio with Margarita McGrath

Site Analysis With a cabinet full of site specific curiosities, as I took photos of nature I encountered in the town of Blacksburg, the architecture had a desire to respond to the context. The town was originally a 16 by 16 grid of square land plots. This grid had its own urban condition, with plots merging programs into one square to allow for merchant families. A defining feature of the grid is its 45 degree rotation, projecting a solar geometry based orientation onto the future of the lively town. I imagined the grid’s confident lines to extend forever and intersect with the preschool’s four exterior wall lines. If placed to keep these intersections perpendicular, the preschool finds its own affirming orientation, as it connects to Blacksburg’s history and invites the northern sun into its iconic skylight.

Cabinet of Curiosities A collection of images of nature, split between sky and flora, is collated into a “cabinet of curiosities” in the hopes of activating an architecture for a preschool. These natural elements inspire four emblematic interpretations or simply put, icons.

The flower and clover icons are below while the star and atmosphere (shown as a circle) are above, splitting our natural world into two.

The icons become a driving force for the design process and intent. The molding of nature into rigid, but visually playful transliterations of itself lends to the structure and fun found in preschool.

The split between sky and flora tells a story book tale of the earth and cosmos, as each is the other’s witness. From this, architectural form aims to capture this narrative and the tectonics of a feigned nature.

cabinet of sky

blacksburg preschool

cabinet of flora

Sky + Flora Under the framework of two natural realms, above and below, the preschool’s form seeks to capture the space between. To manifest the sky, the roof and ceiling become an arching plane, as if a piece of the atmosphere has dropped to protect the life below. A massive circular punctures the blue ceiling, recreating the sun or the moon and appealing to the efficacious properties of natural daylighting in a space for education. As a final nod to the sky, a window in the icon of a star is placed above the non-gendered bathroom, creating a north star within the preschool for the kids to follow. The idea of flora is captured on the ground level through the use of soft furniture. Carpets and seating areas utilizing the flower and clover icons dot the open floor plan and act as literal beds of flowers for the students and their parents. These icons also act as windows to frame views of the natural world, reminding us of the true environment. To bridge the two levels of nature and hold up the arched roof, structure becomes symbolic as well. Massive timber columns rise up to hold large span steel trusses, with column acting as tree and truss as branch. The sky is held up by this tree-like structural system, finally connecting what seems so far apart.

BEDS OF PLUSH FLOWERS ARE FOUND AT GROUND LEVEL AS A REMINDER OF THE SOFT EARTH, MOTHER TO FLORA, THEATER OF SKY. ALL THIS WALLED INTO A GRID, AN ARCHITECT WAS HERE.

LOOK UP TO A FAKE SKY, DOES THE STAR GUIDE? IS THE SUN AS BRIGHT AND WARM? TREES + BRANCHES BRIDGE THE SPACE BETWEEN, SUPPORTING A ROUNDED PLANE OF ATMOSPHERE. YET, THE CHASM BETWEEN ARCHITECTURE + NATURE REMAINS

Preschool The process between rhino and collage making was also vital to represent this work. It proved how much life is needed to design a preschool. The rhino model was activated by the texturing and populating nature of collages.

Although the human cut-outs were the last steps in this representation mode, they reminded me of how architecture is a container for the human spirit, especially one of a child.

A Room for All The collective collage shows an endless room of erased histories. It focuses on stories of people that have been underrepresented and have had their culture taken away from them in the wake of colonialism. Now published in Room 1000’s issue 09: “breaks,” the mural was a collaboration between students from UC Berkeley, University of Illinois, and Virginia Tech. This produced the largest collage or file I have ever opened on my computer, with its length extending for 20 students worth of room. I was happy to be invited onto the project

by Nathalie and Cruz, as their mode of work always expands my outlook on design. I felt I could tell the story of the present, where the internet can easily be misused as a platform to either erase identities or celebrate them in a performative manner. Artifacts found in my corner of the room highlight aspects found in the LGBTQ+ and black community which have been widely heralded as “internet culture,” when in reality have belonged to these communities before the internet’s inception. I included works from my favorite designers of today, including Sophie Colle, a Virginia Tech Alum who handmakes colorful furniture, and Lalese Stamps, a ceramicist who is based out of Milwaukee and founded Lolly Lolly Ceramics. The beauty in the room gives me hope and serves as a reminder to the present’s truth. I was able to put together the final video of a pan through the room, which included student’s voice overs of explanations and poems, with my own going:

All identities are welcome here The ones stolen left at the door All identities are welcome here But do not take the room’s time for granted All identities are welcome here Stay and reclaim knowledge so that it can withstand generations

A Post-Colonial Mural

POST-NOVIS MEMBERS Cruz Garcia & Nathalie Frankowski / Wai Architecture Think Tank ROOM ONE THOUSAND Yasmine Kahsai, Samantha Miller, Claire Jang, Adam Cutts, Lily Oyler, Ari Bible, Collin Bampton, Lucy Wang, Alicia Moreira, Matthias Arauco-Shapiro, Elena Bouton, Marta Elliott VIRGINIA TECH Vivian Gruendel, Jazlynn Castro, Jeremy Sloane, Jack Shields, Jennie Wells, Zixi Li, Diana Fernandez, Yuxiang Cao, Tanner Valachovic, Zhipeng Zhang Post-Colonial Murals are a series of narrative architecture compositions exploring colonial footprints of architectural history.

Produced through collaboration, these compositions establish networks of solidarity between students and practitioners across Land-Grab Universities and historical figures working under and against colonial regimes. A Post-Colonial Mural is one of the fragments of the epilogue in the post-colonial play ‘Worldmakers Unite!’ first presented in the Moss Center for Arts in Virginia Tech. The mural is part of a series of compositions included in publications at the University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign, and Cornell University.

13 WAI - Post Colonial Mural

Excerpt from UC Berkeley’s Publication

Post-Novis Mural

Collective Collage Hosted by Cruz + Nathalie

In Collaboration with: Room 1000, University of Illinois Students

Family Videos Dance has always been a core activity and mode of mine. Finding a college team was necessary and I was lucky enough to join one of Virginia Tech’s hip hop team. DOP or Dancing’s Our Poison has allowed me to grow as a person, dancer, and funnily enough as a designer. Running for the executive position of Visual Media chair, I was able to further explore my affinity for video storytelling. Within the position, I rent out equipment, shoot and edit videos for the team, and run the youtube channel for us.

Where I get to explore the most is creating motion graphics within after effects or blender. These allow me to capture a tone for a dance or a team bonding video. Without being VM, I would still love my team, as we truly view each other as family. However, I get to give back to them in a creative way, and they always appreciate my sensibilities. I look forward to working with motion graphics that organically grew out of my other passion of dance.

DOP VM Chair

Videography + Editing Work for Hip Hop Crew

Youtube: https://www.youtube.com/channel/ UCrM_DVtiyP6G4BzE-2CrCzQ

DOP

Out of TOUCH Formed out of the isolation of quarantine, apARTment exhibitions is an initiative that is in progress this Spring 2022 semester. It is a way for students to reconnect with their perhaps lost relationship with art and feel empowered to display work amongst their peers. The establishment of the theme of TOUCH responds to how out of touch we have been recently and hopefully guides a collective display with diverse perspectives.

It responds to exhibition spaces by stripping it of a set gallery location and simply placing it on our turf, a student apartment. I started building on the initiative with an instagram account to make the event official and from there, I began to interact with students to make it a reality. I look forward to how the event turns out as the artists reach out and we establish connections with a local student run magazine. The initiative asks to be reused for later creative students who would rather rely on their close knit network to create opportunities for either simple indulgence in art or to boost their exposure to our hungry eyes.

2/21/22, 3:07 PM

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trvalachovic@vt.edu 1 (412) 956-2885