Re: Bio

Education

UNIVERSITY OF MICHIGAN - ANN ARBOR

Post-Professional Master of Urban Design, 2022

4.0/4.0 | summa cum laude | MUD student prize nomas, mudsa, graduate student instructor, received the Tinker Field Research Grant for travel to Argentina

Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute

Professional Bachelors of Architecture, 2021

3.7/4.0 | magna cum laude | creative writing minor dean’s student advisory council, aias, nomas, canstruction, study abroad in Argentina for six months at UN-Córdoba

Experience

Extents

Intern | May-August 2022 | Architecure & Urban Design assisted in design research for abandoned detroit schools, primarily in a housing core prototype capable of applying to similar schools; designed campus for community groups; designed Gradient magazine spreads for faculty work.

UNIVERSITY OF MICHIGAN

Graduate Student Instructor | Spring, Fall 2022 | Architecture assisted in teaching two core undergraduate architecture courses in theories and methods. Created syllabi, prepared lesson plans, attended weekly lectures, led weekly classtime discussion sessions, and gave a solo class-wide lecture.

Donate Life New York State

Intern | May-August 2018, 2019 | Graphic Design designed graphics for social media, marketing, events, partnerships, and paper prints to raise awareness and advocate for organ, eye, & tissue donation in New York. Experienced engagement increases during my position.

The Mighty Type

Founder/Owner | August 2017-present | Design & Writing

Began a personal website for writing, photography, and architecture. Expanded to include an online design shop in 2O2O with silk screen prints, apparel, & custom designs.

BUNDY, YOUNG, SIMS & POTTER

Intern | May-August 2017, July 2019 | Architecture

Contributed to projects across scales in visualization, drafting, schematic design, and site visits. Worked on private residences and public buildings, often with co-founder and partner Rick Sims advising.

Hello!

My name is Tanner Vargas and I am a designer trained in architecture and urban design. I come from a small farm town in north Texas, but have become obsessed with urban forms and their role in socio-cultural exchange. I enjoy playing tennis, screenprinting artwork, and writing for my website in my spare time. I’m also a barista, pizza expert and passionate alt-pop music fan. I am a positive, inventive, and linguistic team player with big ideas and a devotion to meaningful work. My design interests include social infrastructure, commoning, and queer archi-urbanisms. Each of these projects imagines the future of architecture and urban design as spatial and social advocates for change, with unique capabilities of enacting tangible justice and cultures of care. Threaded through each is my design purpose. Thank you for your time.

After Effects

museum of media and multiplicity queens, new york | fall 2020 | rensselaer architecture waterfront urbanisms detroit, michigan | fall 2021 | michigan urban design museum of science fiction albany, new york | spring 2020 | rensselaer architecture

Enclavelocity X Continuum Frameworks

social housing for social artists troy, new york | spring 2018 | rensselaer architecture, landscape dignified models for cultural resilience san salvador de jujuy, argentina | spring 2022 | michigan urban design

Culturas Del Cantri The Sanctuary

subversive space in closed contexts jackson, mississippi | spring 2021 | rensselaer architecture, urban design professor MARCUS CARTER collaborator MADISON IRISH urban design studio 1 professor MCLAIN CLUTTER professor GINA REICHERT collaborator DONGDONG SHU collaborator KEJIE WANG integrated design development studio professor JILLIAN CRANDALL collaborator ALANNA DEERY integrated design schematic studio professor YAEL EREL collaborator JULIAN CHOW

Stim (the mixture of program, building, and its support structures) and Dross (the undervalued economic residues of the metropolitan machine) describe the site and studio. The immediate context is industrial, with a history of both creative and commercial trades. The result is a barren context of historic factory remnants and modern creative industries, with plans for a green space network along Newtown Creek. The SDSC inspires new methods of media engagement through a sitedriven series of temporal interactions, where traditional notions of authorship and participation are upended to form new perspectives of past, present, site, & self. Visitors assume unprecedented levels of control over their perception and engagement; artists curate dynamic experiences rather than static pieces, each designed to produce infinite perspectives that lead to reflections beyond the self.

The design originates from an exploratory exercise involving the spatialization of nonlinear film structure through abstract compositions. The film, “Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind,” has a unique structure of looping time jumps to a central spine; as the main character erases his memory in order to move onto the future, both new and past relationships are revisited, exploited, and unexpectedly intertwined. Sequence, framing, and rhythm then become tools for spatial organization.

The larger project’s desire to look backward and forward at cultural patterns (of media innovation) and contextual trends (in site pollution) reflects this research. The film’s strategies of concealing, revealing, and choreographing between varied bodies and pockets of time are explored in order to create a nonlinear and entirely unpredictable method of circulation. As visitors experience each ephemeral exhibit, perceptions of site conditions, self image, and shared community may find new perspective.

Visitors are elevated to the second floor upon entry, and travel from the site’s south end (of existing construction) to the north end (of proposed construction). The proposal can be analyzed using two modes of spatial and circulatory organization: Circuit 1, the “immersive” circuit, and Circuit 2, the “experiential” circuit, aiming to challenge typical museum statics.

Circuit 1 has a strategic, specified path for visitors to follow with brief moments of respite. This choreographed system of elevated bridges takes them to a large “black box” with a dynamic, semi-transparent screen, before dropping them onto the ground for Circuit 2, existing as a flexible field of temporal ground networks. Visitors may then experience grounded perspectives of past exhibits, or explore alternative views on the exhibits they just experienced.

The museum links to a green network along Newton Creek that aims to revitalize the area with social, ethical, and environmental initiatives. Framed perspectives, interactive elements, and temporal installations at the SDSC bring awareness to site histories. Its creative past and industrial present can be engaged, linked, and questioned through exhibits on pollution, progress, and purpose.

The design’s insistence on forming multiple perspectives comes from our approach towards the three silos at the heart of the site. Instead of demolishing them, we use them as industrial remnants, or tools to consider the history of the site and its potential futures.

In the silos, for example, atmospheres between the second level bridges and ground level silos are changed as people move through and interact with them. Only the third and final silo reveals both parties.

In the first silo, bridge visitors unknowingly affect the ground atmosphere with each step. In the second silo, visitors on the ground level interact with an exhibition that affects the bridge atmosphere. In the third silo, the bridge becomes transparent so that both atmospheres can see each other and interact simultaneously, all without having to touch. Each visit, therefore, is anomalous and dependent on the collective as much as the individual. The major variable for repeat visits is no longer what’s “on display,” but the novelty of each new visit’s experience.

How do we know cities? What tools do urban actors use to make a city “knowable,” and how do those constructs and technologies inform our sense of place and purpose in urban life? In an effort to uncover potential futures for Detroit’s beloved riverwalk, local histories and layered studies reveal a dis-aggregated riverfront in transition. Fragmented land ownership, hopes for a continuous riverwalk, industrial pollution and uneven access points make the old Uniroyal tire factory site uniquely capable of holding multiple speeds, vectors, and typologies for a heterogeneous riverfront.

An intimate understanding of urban velocity becomes the critical design factor. How can urban design facilitate a heterotopia of speeds, enclaves, relationships, and moments? Why is it needed?

GIS analysis of the site’s catchment reveals a patchwork composition of splintered zones and spatial types, which reflects an uneven approach toward various urban vectors and bodies engaging the site. The motor city has more speeds in play than just the automobile.

A study on riverfront activity reveals that recreational activities dominate the postindustrial area. The map relates frequencies of jogging, biking and fishing to zones of investment or activity, such as parks and greenways. A study on access reveals how and when these activities are experienced, with emphasis on commute times and corridors of industry or recreation. A study on environments gives specificity to potential activities and user scenarios, layering networks of social infrastructure with tree canopy coverage and demographics.

The mapping exercise provided grounding terms for the eventual design: vectors, enclaves, and moments. Vectors, such as a driver, travel to various urban enclaves in search of distinct moments. Each vector has a set of common types it orients itself towards, such as a car and drive-thru.

In an effort to make room for more moments and balance priority across multiple vector speeds, the site was treated in three major moves. First, the urban grids are extended. Second, the river’s edge is adjusted to disrupt the linearity of the riverwalk and form an island. Third, the existing parks are linked and connect to a planned greenway which connects the river to inland communities.

Mapping spatial conditions with mode of travel allowed various publics and routes to emerge. Enclaves of activity and familiarity point to these publics, their spatial nodes, and the routes tethered to each. The urban fragment and continuity are therefore connected, not opposed, and form the urban fabric through which many distinct vectors—each with their own desires and demands—navigate. This project focuses on three critical vectors: driver, rider, and walker.

The large scale design is therefore built from the smallest of scales—feet on pavement, bell rings on bikes, friendly horn honks— and imagines an urbanism of multiplicity.

After the original study, our team was concerned about how many “stops” the riverfront engenders, but over time we came to value the change of speed; stopping or slowing down pace; redirecting velocity for alternate reflection. The ground floor became a pixelated grid of various vectors and framed moments. Diverse modes of access, enclave, and activity make room for planned and unplanned engagement along the rearticulated street (now kinked to promote speed change) and double canals (intended to form pockets of privacy amid public space). Each vector is carefully considered and in conversation, across multiple levels and programs.

The riverwalk is redirected towards less linear ends, with multiple green avenues made accessible through the new river’s edge. Vectors are given unprecedented care, with cantilevered bike paths and hidden enclaves forming a heterotopia of types and potential interactions. Redirections become highlights; chances to gain new perspective. The island acts as a threshold between urban and natural ecologies, an ecological relief to the urban density which surrounds it.

This project is interested in both enclaves and commons, and how they might be simultaneously stitched together in moments and individualized in others. We believe that access is a relative term, and the most diverse types of urban commons consist of dynamic thresholds in open and closed networks of exchange. By emphasizing the vector, we place value on the ways in which we move through urban spaces.

This project argues that a series of individual moments along continuous vectors might paint a better picture of dynamic collectivity; that overlapping individualities might emphasize the nonlinear, elastic realities of sociality and space.

Science fiction, as a genre and architectural approach, is largely about anthropogenic transition; how civilization progresses, technology expands, or familiar experience warps.

X Continuum, a museum of science fiction for downtown Albany, New York, speculates on a post-digital society by digitally manipulating physical transparency. Exterior forms and projections draw visitors to the interior experience, where virtual distortion leads to inward reflection. Although the focus of the studio was in construction assembly and design development, we aimed to create a building of future-forward introspection that entertains passerby without needing to purchase a ticket.

An inverted circulation drives the carved forms and exhibit experiences. Visitors enter at one of two end cores before meeting in an elevated lobby, where views are warped as they descend to the depths of a domed theatre. Glazed context views are less frequent with each level, and as matter becomes augmented, the line between spatial reality and science fiction blur beyond comprehension.

Immersive gallery spaces wrap around the open atrium as tracked walls and projectors gradually transform the interior from clean canvas to digital dystopia. These fluid walls emphasize horizontality by utilizing running striations to carve space, and as visitors progress down the warped ribbon, factual matter blurs with augmented fiction. Traditional exhibits are traded for theoretical experiences that imagine possible futures beyond known matter.

Though its content excels in closed environments, the project is limited in its ability to operate beyond an autonomous space for individual introspection related to digital futures.

As circulation descends from elevated lobby to subterranean theater, the glazing darkens in favor of digital landscapes. Materiality is key in transitioning visitors through visibility, as glazing cutouts appear less frequently near the bottom of the museum experience.

GFRC panels give carved energy to the otherwise fluid, static form. Roof systems incorporate rain screen elements while maintaining insulatory layers behind jogging exterior panels. By the time each visitor descends to the subterranean theatre level, effectively the last space, physical realities are blurred with virtual conception.

This collective housing complex is designed to challenge typical relationships between public and private, opaque and transparent, prefabricated form and focused frame. Artistry is the central program, with three subsequent major masses reflecting it: housing, museum, and studio. Living and social conditions are suited for artists, with both individual and collaborative work-living spaces nestled throughout the complex. Large museum spaces interject themselves throughout the units and studios, giving non-residents the ability to walk through the collective and observe art as it is made, exhibited, and lived. The housing units also exist as their own art frames, detailing the everyday performances of life. Each artist designs their own space, and the shared kitchen becomes a social stage—their life is as much art as the things they create.

The comedic repetition, like a field of social pixels, considers each box as a canvas. Each unit is visibly and physically part of a larger network, letting each artist design their life around and within social space to their comfort and curiosity. Visitors and residents alike may travel from unit to exhibition to studio with varying modes of transparency, able to experience the complex connections

Focus was placed on theoretical prospects over technical elements, so this design could use structural revision in unit aggregation. This proposal may also be at the mercy of the artists who live there, but such friction could be considered its greatest strength. Each artist exhibits their life as work, and work as life. The cooperation in co-living becomes the main exhibition in spatial organization urban design studio 2

This collective housing is designed to challenge typical social relationships between collective and introspective space, using the concept of “frame” as a tool to observe and inspire with agency.

Artists have varying connections to private and public spaces: at the scale of each unit (shared kitchen, private bedroom) and larger community (studio space, exhibition halls). The social condition of the shared kitchen is most public, near public paths, with operable privacy screens in the bedrooms furthest from the shared kitchen.

The method of assembly reflects the core principles and questions of the project: how do things come together, and how can we define (or possibly redefine) the relationship between materiality and sociality through an architectural concept?

Notions of display, secrecy, exploration and collaboration are explored through the tension between prefabricated living modules and the irregular exhibition spaces that slip between them. The arrangement of (repetitive) living space and (irregular) public space become design tools for the collective and individual identity to be expressed Exhibition spaces and living spaces utilize similar materials toward different ends, with both framed moments and irregular serendipities forming an experience of deep connection and reflection. The spaces slip.

As both viewers and artists circulate, the emphasis on one over the other is lovingly lost. The architecture encourages its inhabitants to form latent connections between the artists’ work, life, and immediate context. Spatial conditions therefore challenge the traditional definition of “art,” and architecture’s place in relation to it.

professor JEN MAIGRET

Alto Comedero, the southernmost neighborhood of Argentina’s northernmost city San Salvador, is home to the indigenous Organización Barrial Túpac Amaru. The OBTA managed to secure government funding to self-build a neighborhood. Their novel approach to political organization and material production allowed cultural structures to emerge from surplus—a swimming pool, dinosaur park, schools and more redefined their sense of place. The group gained power and lost favor with a newly elected government, leading to criminalization and a complete freeze of national support. This project reimagines OBTA’s fate in a speculative Scenario B, beginning when funds were received. How can urban design co-produce resilient fabrics capable of withstanding tense sociopolitical shifts in a long-term project regarding historically marginalized people?

1 Co-Production of Architecture + Culture

2 Role of Labor + Communal Knowledge

3 Natural Buffers + Social Thresholds

Defining Resilience through Design undergraduate design thesis professor CHRISTIANNA professor BENNETT

A close study of indigenous architecture and building practices inform potential translations to modern contexts. Vernacular methods of labor and maintenance, specifically, arose as a common thread between the assigned region of Luapula, Zambia and the eventual site of Jujuy, Argentina.

Three major interests drive the work from Zambian vernaculars to contemporary Argentina: the coproduction of architecture and labor, the role of labor and communal knowledge in that process, and the ways natural buffers can be used to inform social and spatial organization. This project argues that, together, the three encourage more resilient urban fabrics in the face of crisis or outside opposition.

Alto Comedero is San Salvador’s largest and most densely populated neighborhood, primarily by indigenous peoples. To the south is “El Cantri,” a cheeky play on “country club,” founded and developed around 2003 by the Organización Barrial de Tupac Amaru. The OBTA was a direct response to socioeconomic crises (stemming from the military coup, Dirty Wars, and return to democracy) that promoted labor rights activism. Workers unions formed, OBTA branched off as a separate faction, and began organizing for federal funding. Milagro Sala negotiated funds under the Kirchner government, leading to the OBTA adopting a cooperative model in order to receive funding and build the first round of homes quicker and cheaper than expected. This led to increased government support, with savings reinvested back into communal infrastructure and amenities. They became politically active, creating a party and winning seats by 2015, when the political landscape shifted from left to right. Local governors now despised the organization and its power, with a top-to-bottom conservative shift in 2015 enabling the imprisonment of Milagro and criminalization of the entire organization. All funding and developments were halted, leaving the indigenous OBTA unsupported (in some cases demonized). The pool is now dry, with hundreds of homes left half-built.

This proposition takes inspiration in the OBTA’s self-organization and the scope of design they achieved, looking for ways to provide a better outcome for their original goals. The conditions at play aren’t just unique to Argentina; these major shifts and responses often occur in other situations and contexts. Too often, a community or organization’s hope for success rests on single points of failure at the discretion of top-down tethers that are constantly shifting between allies and antagonists. How can this timeline be altered by design advocacy?

This proposition turns back the clock, entering the conversation the moment the first wave of funding was received. It pulls apart priorities forced upon Milagro and the OBTA in Scenario A, the reality, in order to respond differently in a speculative Scenario B, the proposition, where the organization’s original priorities are not weighed down by timelines and short-term economics from outside tethers. Their story reveals how dependent architecture is on politi-economic power structures, and the influence they have over urban spaces and othered populations. It is a fragile balance that can be transformed through design that values more embodied cycles of care and communal maintenance.

An eco-urban network of linked relationships becomes the design element; the agency of the designer meets the goals of the user. Taking aspects from the Zambian studies in natural thresholds and maintenance culture, this plan centers urban logic on the connective system—here an acequia, or social canal—as the driver for spatial organization and cultural resilience.

Scenario B uses the existing canals as acequias—a communally-operated water stream that engenders mutual aid and collaboration, especially in times of crisis—as the guiding design principle. Streetscapes are entirely informed by both acequias, as homes and communal buildings all relate intimately to the running water and all they signify. Housing plots aim to connect as much as possible while retaining the highest degree of design agency possible; they are able to play with different scales and materials coming from the factory campus and labor labs, deploying various typologies across the barrio as they see fit. Homes can be composed at various scales beyond the single type in Scenario A so as to explore different ways of living and laboring with dignity, pride, and care. Social infrastructures are emphasized both as a placemaking tool and source of resilience.

The factories now directly relate to the streetscape and school system no longer a segregated or negative urban zone, but rather a source of pride, prosperity, and knowledge production. Elevated pathways encourage exploration and education, with green space and exhibition parks (light and dark green respectively) becoming part of an encouraging landscape for exchange. The collective makes use of design with their own agency.

Scenario B seeks to diversify the power structures at play in the original scenario so as to instill more balance and voice in the process. Expanded leadership visibility, additional support organizations, and redefined priorities are liberated from time crunches and economic pressures. It instead prioritizes the long-term development of cultures of care that maintain the ideals at the heart of OBTA while simultaneously preparing them to respond to the unpredictability of outside tethers.

Homes essentially attach themselves to the diverse canal systems as they travel downhill from west to east, connecting back to the original existing canals. The urban fabric is informed by pedestrian access along these canals, removing priority from the automobile to pedestrians and ecology. The factory and educational campuses remain at the center, attached to the widest canals and running parallel to the bracketed acequias. Each of the major elements are attached to the three widened acequias.

The labor lab is an incubator makerspace in action, where new tech is pushed to its limits and future factories explored. In Scenario A, the main unit was brick; something common and widely known. Stone laying, for example, can be taught and explored as a specialized skill that would fare much better for those seeking sought-after skill jobs (especially if funding ends and factories are closed).

Urban design has the power to instill resilient fabrics of care and connection. These can be informed by natural buffers (like acequias) that become active thresholds for communal maintenance and the co-production of architecture and culture, which, over time, might instill diverse sources of resilience.

Design has the capability to advocate for daily practices which are slower, sociospatial, and more culturally sustainable due to the reunion of labor and architecture that leads to connective negotiations of space, place, and identity.

This is the value of the acequias; why they became the central component to the urban design. Acequias require responsibility, communication, and understanding; especially in times of crisis. The nature of acequias encourage the maintenance of all those things, leading to a community that is more connected and resilient. Democratic systems emerge and acequia members are responsible for cleaning their portion of the ditch. That’s where social and cultural exchange takes place, often intergenerationally, along the sound of water moving slowly. The acequia system is a mutually managed, meditative, and socially sustainable practice that brings people, resources, and histories together in the name of something much deeper, larger, and meaningful than the canals might first suggest.

This becomes the new network; a cyclical relationship between people and place, where urban design frameworks utilize natural thresholds as social drivers.

This thesis aims to subvert traditionally heteronormative structures of power, formally and sociopolitically, in order to reclaim space for queer people in a stubborn landscape. In subverting the physical and ideological typologies of a catholic church and military armory, the proposal utilizes familiar forms to house unwelcome identities. The adjacency of spirituality and weaponry act as reimagined mechanisms for covert queer protection. Drawing upon decades of queer codes, theories, and forms, the design theorizes ways in which a jeopardized minority population may covertly, then over time overtly, inhabit typologies that are traditionally harmful to them. Queer theories and design thinking guide a reimagined design timeline that liberates architecture to become a conscious force which designs, builds, protects and transforms the proposal during and after construction.

Kate Thomas’ 2021 lecture, “Lesbian Arcadia,” became a foundational source of inspiration for the project, especially in the elastic term “shimmer.” The project began with an exploration of how architecture might be able to encourage and represent shimmers—the interplay between light and shadow, recognizable and unknown, that which is always becoming. These study drawings extrapolate geometry from the enigmatic ‘shimmer’ from the film Annihilation and spatialize the queer sounds of SOPHIE. The value of indeterminate spaces and relations grew from this study, eventually informing the project’s acceptance of inbetweens and instabilities.

The thesis became critical of static linearity, such as in cartography, and aims to uncover the repercussions of their considerations in order to find new ground. A quantitative mapping of the US under the lens of LGBTQ rights and protections, specifically situated in the larger “site” of the bible belt, revealed connections between physical institutions and legislative codes, both of which concern the discipline of architecture. Though lines are clear in maps, the gradients of queer intolerance are not so distinct (like the abstract relationships in early study drawings).

These maps, sourced from the HRC, were made in 2021. As of 2023, the landscape has become even more intolerant towards queer expression and this project demands revisiting with the wave of antiqueer violence and fearmongering we now face.

In a timeline diagram below, construction phases are represented alongside local reactions in order to realistically project a future in which architecture becomes an agent for protection as well as change. Over time, the building may shift its attitudes from covert to overt operation. What may start as two community leaders finding a need may turn into a concerted effort to make tangible change for queer populations. As in any community, rumors are bound to spread. Target populations may begin to take note. As programs get up and running, word is spread and protection must begin. Once the armory is constructed, a larger network may emerge. The landscape becomes its own kind of ally, as well, and all project processes may begin to work holistically.

This timeline is what inspired the start of the final review, in which I “presented,” or “performed,” the project as if I were pitching the proposal to a board as a literal church, using architectural conventions and coded design. Even academic standards are queered.

The three typologies are arranged strategically, phased to grow through the site while creating conversation within and underneath the context of their typological precedents. The typical scale of these typologies—grandiose, intricate, expansive—is, notably, not sacrificed.

The programming of each typology is more fluid than fixed, with abstract definitions relating to larger experiences. They are pointedly divided into three: reclaim, restore, and reform. In the development of the site plan, which took many iterations and continues even today in exploration, I kept exploring the notion of “shimmer.” From the inverted shadows and surface reflections to the relational glow between building and landscape, the notions of color, hue, statics and slippage aim to be played with.

A mechanism of protection is at play in plan. What conventions are typical, and how might an architect insert protective measures of coded legibility to protect the programs and people inside (both during and post-construction)? If the context loathes its contents, who is entering, and how?

In the interior of the armory, light and shadow are explored as filters. An aquatic shimmering is filtered through hover baths, while fortified wall punches add diffuse light. The queer design and community work together to collaboratively enact change in the vein of design and dispersion; there can be traveling events, entertainment, lectures...