Portfolio by Thomas McCormick

thomas mccormick

Thomas McCormick University of Illinois - Bachelor of Science in Architecture 2013 - 2017 University of Michigan - Master of Architecture 2019 - 2021

Ed Education

fuji television

Winter 2021 - Tokyo, JP (Architectural Thesis)

city + farm

Fall 2020 - Detroit, MI

theater as factory

Fall 2019 - Ann Arbor, MI

inflato box kit

Winter 2020 - Ann Arbor, MI

powerhouse playground

Winter 2020 - Plymouth, MI

anarcho-urban handbook Winter 2020 - Ursula K. Le Guin’s The Dispossessed

start-up offices

Winter 2017 - Gracia, Barcelona, ES

Study Abroad 2016

Professional Experience 2017

2018

Ws Workshops

carr center exhibition

Summer 2020 - Detroit, MI

cabin in the woods

Summer 2016 - Perrysburg, NY

inflated canopy

Summer 2017 - Brooklyn, NY

play school

Fall 2016 - Amsterdam, NL

Tr Travel

2019

photography

Fall 2016 and Winter 2017 - Barcelona, Berlin, Copenhagen, Paris, Athens, London

2020

2021

Ed Education

The following are projects completed at the School of Architecture at the University of Illinois and the Taubman College of the University of Michigan. These projects explore alternative housing strategies, historic preservation, subversion of typology and the use of ﬁctional narratives across six years of study from Barcelona to Detroit.

ARCH 662 - Keith Mitnick and Mireille Roddier Winter 2021 - Tokyo, JP

fuji television This architectural thesis explores the inner workings of Haruki Murakami’s novel 1Q84 through the architectural shell of Kenzo Tange’s Fuji Television Building. The short story architectural zine follows the daily routine of two of Murakami’s characters, Tengo and Aomame, as they navigate the altered states of Tange’s 1996 office and broadcasting center. The Tokyo of 2024, finds the iconic office building colonized by its opposite program, the bathhouse or sentō. Tengo, as a script writer for Fuji Television, operates as another office employee spending time at his desk, in long meetings or as an observer peering down into the parallel world of the bathhouse. Aomame, as a freelance physical therapist, spends her day off enjoying the six separate bathhouse spaces incised into the 90’s office building, moving from washroom to pool, cold chamber, saunas, baths and solaria. As an indictment of Tokyo’s relationship to work, this reuse project explores the absurd and redeemable qualities of the ever-expanding megalopolis by contrasting modern quirks of work culture with older cultural practices that have persisted to balance them. Pushing existing programs into surreal and contradictory realms, architecture becomes embodied experience presaging anxieties about professional practice along side hope for self-care. If you are interested in reading the story in its entirety, please scan the QR code in the table of contents of this portfolio and view the digital format or request a physical copy.

fuji television

ARCH 672 - Kathy Velikov and Jonathan Rule Winter 2020 - Detroit, MI

city + farm Team Members: Cynthia Castro, Chun Lam, Thomas McCormick The Agricultural City orders the Old Sears Site through a series of civic centers out of which extend agricultural production zones framed by the communal residential neighborhood. We felt that the reuse of the site, near Barton - McFarland, as a production network for agriculture and learning might be an appropriate antithesis to the site’s history as a zone of consumption and corporate presence on Oakman Boulevard and Grand River Avenue. Four main CLT constructed civic buildings house a central market, performance spaces and a communal learning center. Public parks surround these civic buildings and align with the planned Joe Louis Greenway forming a public perimeter of access. Agricultural structures such as greenhouses and hoop houses aggregate near the public buildings while light frame linear garden-houses branch east towards the greenway. 12

city + farm

SUMMER

WINTER

OAKMAN BOULEVARD ELEVATION

city + farm

350 - 400 RESIDENTS

These garden-houses, while narrow, allow for cross ventilation, while stacking and terracing allow for shared roof gardens above and access to sunlight. Shared outdoor communal gardens recess into the ﬁeld creating common microclimates for shared use adjacent to each housing block. The mix of unit types articulated across the site house a potentially diverse set of occupants and demographics forming smaller communities within the larger microcosm of the site. Additional units stack above the civic buildings creating the four towers along Oakman creating social rooftop units with access to shared and private balconies as well as large integrated greenhouse structures, continuing Detroit’s legacy of agricultural production within these higher density buildings.

city + farm

ROOFTOP UNIT BUILDING D

STUDIO UNIT GARDEN-HOUSE 17

city + farm

ARCH 556 - Eduardo Mediero Winter 2019 - Ann Arbor, MI

theater as factory While the market is a space for communal experience and exchange, the factory, or the distribution center, is a machine for production and dispersal. Both types were devised out of economic necessity brought about by industrialization and war. Andreas Gursky captures the schizophrenia of these two spaces and the culture of capital that they birthed in one image with “99 Cent”. Taken in a 99 Cent shop in Hollywood, Gursky plays with our perception and collective memory of the big box experience with its tight regimented parallel rows of saturated objects within the pristine ﬂuorescent container; structure exposed, much like the factories of the past that made possible such a building. Gursky’s photos focus on the noise of contemporary life and the sprawling and overwhelming spaces it produces following the legacy of Bernd and Hilla Becher’s systematic process of imagemaking in the mid to late 20th century. 20

theater as factory

With regards to the architecture resulting from the social exchange and consumption of goods, Barcelona’s markets and London’s Crystal Palace have paralleled the development of their respective cities and their expansion for, in the case of Spain, ten centuries, while playing a role in the introduction of iron structural logics and the various subsets of the modern movement. The distribution center, on the other hand, reflects the contemporary late capitalist condition of the digital marketplace through an architecture of total efficiency and storage more influenced by the operations of machines then the values or emotions of people.

theater as factory

By co-opting the aspirations of the traditional community market and the structural logic of the factory, the new theater performs as a socially oriented and efficient space where the formerly arbitrary image of the building can start to respond and become independent from its history of industrialization. Through deformation and erosion of the recognizable saw-tooth form, the factory can begin to perform more like a market of theaters as the roof structure expands and subtracts. The ground plane of the site outside of the Power Center is made flat and the boxes of the three theaters are distributed across it and minimally separated by the light-filled courtyards and the curtains encircling each. All other program, such as the workshop, rehearsal space, office and control rooms are pushed to the perimeter while a subterranean system provides back of house access from below, all resulting in an accessible columnated ground floor. The building is meant to provide an open and free flux of interaction and production as the audience members move in and out of the submerged performance spaces and the set-builders and production staff work within the same spaces. Much like the big box before it, the structural logic of the building is obvious and repetitive, offering a container for ever-changing experiences.

theater as factory

ARCH 537 - Laida Aguirre Winter 2020 - Ann Arbor, MI

inflatothermo box kit The Inflato-Thermo-Box Kit is a hyper-performance shipment container with a convoluted construction logic. Nylon bungee cords secure four PLA plastic corner pieces, each protected by rubber caps, to six anodized aluminum frames which encapsulate removable inflated panels. The box measures 12 inches on each edge and can be produced in several different color combinations reminiscent of the color ways of athletic sneakers. The InflatoThermo-Box uses a combination of inflation, tension and compression to provide a complete and safe shipping experience. 28

inflato box kit

ARCH 562 - Anca Trandafirescu and Steven Lauritano Winter 2020 - Plymouth, MI

powerhouse playground a

powerhouse playground

3&4

Boiler #1

5 Smoke Stack

Ash Bin

Coal Bunker

Loading Bay #1

Loading Bay #2

c b a

The Burroughs Adding Machine Company factory in Plymouth, Michigan is an exemplary artifact of Albert Kahn’s post war industrial architecture, over built and classically ornamented. The adjacent power house with its clerestory windows and cacophonous space is the site of this intervention. The derelict coal fired power plant functions today as a garage, its bays filled with trucks and tools, pipes weaving through the space carry hot water to the factory several hundred feet away. While one boiler remains functioning, the rest of the obscure machinery hulks in the shadowy corners of the building, steel gangways climb amongst the mottled steel and filter light down to the floor below. With the likes of Alois Riegl, Gordon Matta-Clark, Lucia Alais, Jorge Otero-Pailos, Ilanna HarrisBabou and Aldo van Eyck as inspirational preservationists, the intervention performs as a parasitic playground, activating the multileveled space with steel and foam insertions that allow participants to climb, jump and recline within a cast of structural characters.

powerhouse playground

The structures incise into the existing derelict machines and ﬁll the two open bays where the turbines were once housed. While the historical function of these machines and the power house itself remain nebulous, the activation of the space and its playful use are the true purpose of these parasitic creations. While preservation was once conceived of as solely a restorative task, we can now perceive acts of preservation in which architectural supplements also participate in a site’s destruction as well as its continued use and appreciation.

Loading Bay #1

“Wooahh...!”

“Aaaah, chill vibes...”

powerhouse playground

“Aaaah, chill vibes...”

Loading Bay #2

“There’s so much to see in here! Phew, I’m winded...”

“Safe and sound...”

“Woo Hooo...!”

Boiler #1

Boiler #12

“I feel reified! I wonder what it was like to work in this place way back in the day...”

1 Ash Bin

“History a future collide. is kind of dang hu “Wow, I didn’t even know Plymouth had an old power house like this!”

powerhouse playground

5 Smoke Stack “History and the future collide...this is kind of dangerous, huh...?” “Wow, I didn’t even know Plymouth had an old power house like this!”

“I think we’re in the ash bin...cool!”

“Good thing this smoke stack doesn’t operate anymore!”

ARCH 562 - Kathy Velikov Winter 2020 - Ursula K. Le Guin’s The Dispossessed

anarchourban handbook Team Members: Alex Chueng, Thomas McCormck The Anarcho-Ethical-Urban Handbook is a pictorial manifesto of the people of Anarres, a desert planet in Ursula K. Le Guin’s The Dispossessed (1974), documenting the ways in which people can cooperatively live together on a changing and brutal planet. With Urras as Anarres’ prosperous planetary antithesis, this handbook attempts to represent an ideology and way of living that can be translated and adopted on the sister planet to help its people transcend their oppressive hierarchical institutions. With limited access to water in an environment with minimal biodiversity, the people of Anarres must live without notions of ego in order to sustain society. While there is a growing movement on Urras to promote alternatives to the systems in place, this egalitarian guide allows the people of Urras to truly realize the widespread change that can and must take place in a wasteful society much like our own. The handbook begins by documenting the human scale and its relationship to the larger urban development that takes place on the planet. The handbook concludes by including a daily schedule of typical activities on Anarres, expressing the values in place that allow people to live in harmony together. 40

anarcho-urban handbook

STASIS

keng

Terran ambassador on Urras. Sympathetic of Shevek’s cause

A-LO

atro

Most prosperous region of Urras

Physicist in Benbuli. Respected. Elderly

tuio maedda

CAPITALISM

Anarchist leader in A-lo who Shevek seeks out

THU

Socioeconomic structure of Urras

Home to people of Earth on Urras. Rivals of A-lo.

sabul

Physicist in Abbenay. Mentor to Shevek.

DIVISION OF LABOR

rulag

Mother of Shevek. Archivist. Uncompromising.

Anarresti system for egalitarian/anarchist distribution of labor, naming and census

ANARCHY

ABBENAY

Primary inﬂuence of Odonian idealism

Largest city on Anarres

TEXTILE DISTRICT

Industry and living commingle in cellular organization

TRANSPORTATION

ODONIANISM

pallat

Father of Shevek. Engineer. Compassionate. Deceased gvarab

Scientist and mentor of Shevek. Developed theories of time and simultaneity

mitis

Senior physicist at the Institute. Compassionate. Mentor of Shevek

takver

Marine biologist. Partners with Shevek. Practical. Empathetic. Enduring.

shevek

sadik

Anarresti ideology of anarchy and collectivism devised by Odo during her time in prison on Urras 200 years before Shevek’s time

pilun

PRAVIC Trains, trucks, cargo dirigibles, electric tram

Constructed language of Anarres. Reﬂects anarchic ideas such as the lack of a possessive case

SOLAR

odo

Founder of Odonianism. Started separatist movement for Urras’ moon.

Physicist. Partners with Takver. Idealist. Reconciliation. Critical.

Main source of energy

bedap

Close friend of Shevek. Questions Anarresti systems of control.

SIMULTANEITY

Theory of time evolved from Sequential thought

tirin

Childhood friend of Bedap and Shevek. Creative, honest, unpredictable. Writes a controversial play that questions Anarresti/Urrasti dialectic beshun

SYNDICATE OF INITIATIVE

Collective dedicated to reconnecting the people of Anarres and Urras

ANSIBLE

Invention that allows interstellar instantaneous communication

THE INSTITUTE

Academic locus out of which Sabul enacts his control of Anarresti physics

kadagv

CHANGE

gibesh

beshun

PLANETARY DEFENSE FEDERATIVE Primary Anarresti interface for interaction with Urras

WATER

HOLUM TREE

Substance in short supply. Drought causes widespread famine

Ubiquitous source of ﬁber and building materials

FOAMSTONE

Typical building material

GEOTHERMAL

Main source of energy

TIME

anarcho-urban handbook

ARCH 475 - Carles Marcos Winter 2017 - Gracia, Barcelona, ESP

start-up offices Constricted on three sides by Avinguda de Vallcarca, Carrer de Ballester and Carrer de Bolivar, the site consists of a narrow urban plot in the valley of Vallcarca, Barcelona, Spain. The building addresses its intrusion into the quiet and cloistered residential fabric of Gracia through mimesis with the neighboring architecture. The four office tours orient themselves to the existing residential blocks while matching their scale, allowing for negative space at street level for a cafe and outdoor roof access for employees above. The ground floor is occupied by a small publishing operation that rises with the site and opens up at the bases of the towers to provide spaces for an open gallery, public cafe and performance theater for poetry readings and film showings. The building addresses the needs of the community by maintaining public exterior space and providing accessible amenities at ground level while creating private office space above connected via an elevated exterior roof-scape. The four towers are each hermetically contained within a double glazed system of insulated partitions, glazing and channel glass allowing for climate control within these upper floors and views down the valley corridor. 46

start-up offices

CARRER DE BOLIVAR ELEVATION

Avinguda de Vallcar

PRIVATE RESTROOMS COMMON WORKSPACE PUBLIC RESTROOMS

GALLERLY+STORE PUBLIC THEATER

PRIVATE KITCHEN

PUBLIC CAFE

PRIVATE OFFICE SPACE

Carrer de Bolívar Carrer

start-up offices

lester

de Bal

AVINGUDA DE VALLCARCA ELEVATION

KITCHEN KITCHEN

OFFICE

OFFICE OFFICE

OFFICE

The people of the Vallcarca neighborhood and Barcelona are protective of their open public space, making the insertion of this new building a delicate procedure. The building contorts and compresses at ground level to provide a natural and usable interface with the existing street-scape while the four tower blocks above rise and twist to conform to the alignment of the neighborhood. The building seeks to provide commercial space within a predominately residential area by becoming a central node of public interaction within a bustling Spanish community. 49

start-up offices

Transparent and U-Channel Glazing

Office Towers

Egress Circulation

Performance Space Cafe

Ws Workshops

The following are projects completed outside of academic studies and range from a stick-built cabin in Upstate New York to a virtual art exhibition for The Carr Center gallery in Detroit. These extracurricular endeavors present intensive environments in which collaboration and ﬂexibility are essential to the success of the project. While timeframe and budget is generally restrictive for such projects, the process from schematic design to ﬁnal construction was completed for many of these works resulting in a deeper understanding of the challenges and joys inherent in architectural design and construction.

Virtual Platform - The Carr Center and Taubman Public Design Corps. Summer 2020 - Detroit, MI

carr center exhibition Taubman Public Design Corps. Team Members: Ishan Pal Singh, Linda Lee, Jacob Comerci, Fangtian Ni, Harsheen Kaur, Karina Tirado, Thomas McCormick Carr Center Team Members: Erin Falkner, Chelsea Flowers, Oliver Ragsdale During the summer of world-wide pandemic and social unrest, The Carr Center for Contemporary Art and the Taubman Public Design Corps. sought to host an online, social art exhibit within which participants could peruse a digital simulacrum of the museum’s permanent and past exhibits. The Carr Center is a small independent contemporary art museum which showcases the visual and auditory art forms of contemporary Detroit and its long legacy of art making. The Taubman Public Design Corps. was formed during the summer of 2020 to provide pro-bono services to local communities of Ann Arbor and Detroit and to offer opportunities to Taubman students to work directly with interested parties and clients to develop meaningful planning and schematic work for future builds or, in this case, digital events. 54

carr center exhibition

The website functions as a series of rooms in which different strategies for online engagement are used. Each team member took responsibility for designing and implementing different rooms within the larger digital museum, while Carr Center team members curated the digital spaces, pasting in artworks and providing a recorded audio guide for The Carr Center’s Rock My Soul exhibition. Throughout the site, fragments and details from The Carr Center’s physical site at 15 East Kirby Street, including the old hotel’s stone facade as well as ornamentation from the recovered ballroom, are included. By using mostly point and click navigation, we hoped that the site would be easily accessible, however, the use of 3D navigation and AR were implemented and introduced into the physical portion of the exhibition during the one-day opening event. Once visitors enter into the world through the lobby, they may choose to explore the galleries as a curated and guided experience or jump into rooms such as the cafe in which participants can socialize or the Launch Pad which takes one to the only gallery navigable in 3D space. Also included are an unfolded isometric timeline, a video performance room and a French baroque enﬁlade.

carr center exhibition

Design / Build - plusFARM Summer 2016 - Perrysburg, NY

cabin in the woods Team Members: Guiga, Zach, Myah, Aditi, JJ, Matei, William, Alex, Val, Natasha, Lucien, Thomas During a two week long design build workshop in Perrysburg, New York, 12 students and practitioners of architecture set out to build a cabin shelter placed in the crook of a small creek, hidden away in the woods. The ﬁrst phase of design involved a thorough study of the surrounding landscape with its dense woods, rolling shepherd’s ﬁelds and vineyards. The cabin’s parametric shape is directed by the surrounding views along the creek and across the windswept hills. The walls embrace the dwelling using birch ply and house wrap like a scavenged nest.

cabin in the woods

The construction phase first involved the framing of a raised deck anchored to the ground by small concrete pylons. Next, the amorphous parametric envelope, sensitive to human scale and the surrounding landscape, was framed out over the course of several grueling days. House wrap mummified the cabin and linseed oil applied birch veneer planks were carefully bent to line the cave-like interior. Doors and windows seal out the elements. A lift in the wrap allows for the escape of smoke from the submerged fire place.

63 52

The design studio and workshop was located in an old abandoned farmhouse near the site where an iterative process of model making and critique took place. The plusFARM community provided an open-minded and collaborative setting for students from Parson’s School of Design and the University of Illinois to struggle together and challenge each other. What resulted from this two week intensive workshop was a distillation of the bucolic and rural elements of Upstate New York into a resonant shelter informed by its site and the naiveté of its builders.

cabin in the woods

Design / Build - plusFARM Summer 2017 - Brooklyn, NY

inflated canopy Team Members: Alejandra Depetta, Ernesto Frías, Prasertsri Pitchayasukarn, Alex Guzman, Natasha Tsikuonova, William Haskas, Matei Denes, Thomas McCormick This project was the product of two strenuous weeks and resulted in a one night stand of music, beer and a canopy of tethered, neon light drenched, heliated tetrahedra laced across a triangular site in Brooklyn. The site is host to a reclaimed shipping container out of which is piped live DJ sets and fresh coffee with the rest of the site open for seating. The Lot Radio collaborated with plusFARM studio to create a late night, ephemeral and interactive installation. Mylar and translucent sheet plastic were heat sealed together, filled with helium and improvisationally tethered to the site to create an ever-changing, reflective surface for a synchronized light show. Still more inflated shapes were strewn across the ground and lit from within the translucent plastic, lighting the seating areas. 66

inflated canopy

Over the course of the two weeks, team members chose a palette of materials, design intent and production method. The sheet plastic tetrahedra were cut and heat sealed while the mylar was slightly melted and applied to provide a more varied, reﬂective surface. Finally, helium was pumped into the shapes through an integral nozzle and tethered to the surrounding gate. Over the course of the night, drinks were imbibed and music played to a densely packed lot while the gently bobbing, pulsating canopy ﬂoated overhead.

inflated canopy

Student Competition - ArchMedium Fall 2016 - Amsterdam, NL

play school Team Members: Rebecca Vahldick, John Schoonmaker, Rob Corpus, Thomas McCormick Being one quarter below sea level and geographically dynamic, the nation of the Netherlands has a history of managing and living in proximity to water. In Amsterdam, after the destruction of World War II, empty sites were reclaimed to provide playgrounds for local children, many of which were designed by Aldo Van Eyck. These playgrounds provided a playful alternative to the post-war international style and established a Dutch proclivity for creating public and collective urban spaces. Organized along the piers’ main axis, this play school attempts to preserve the previous public use of the site by preserving views across the canal and providing a close interaction with interior and exterior spaces for the students and public.

play school

HET STENEN HOOFD (The Stone Head Pier)

HOUTHAVENS

BUITEN-IJ BAY

AMSTERDAM 71

By interweaving the school and park, a new intersection of play can occur. The blocks of class rooms are broken up and displaced by outdoor play space while at the building’s intersection, a large interior communal room is located. Above, a swerving bike and pedestrian path ﬂies through the roof-scape, connecting the public to the waterfront and views across the city via a look out point at the curve’s terminus. The protrusions and declivities of the roof provide an unexpected space for play above the pier and combine the elements of vernacular domicile form with the controlled risk of a jungle gym for a challenging and playful space for students. Playgrounds are some of the ﬁrst intentional spaces children experience. Through interaction with the site and combination with new forms, a past-time of reclaiming and building collective space in Amsterdam is maintained.

play school

Completion of the project took place over the course of a week of intense iterative design discussion and final representation by all team members. I managed the digital model and helped produce the drawings and diagrams. Rebecca created the presentation sections and elevations while Rob produced the final jungle gym diagram. John edited the renderings and made the final form progression and circulation diagrams.

Tr Travel

The following are highlights and documentation of travels and studies abroad in Western Europe. Through sketching and photography, a journal of travel was established and a new analytical way of experiencing the urban environment was learned. Protracted sketching and photography workshops were hosted by professionals across Spain and Portugal. Time was also set aside for independent travels across the continent during which travel journals were kept and two documentary videos were produced.

Barcelona Pavilion - September 2016

Barcelona

Mercado de Santa Caterina - October 2016

Park Güell - October 2016

Igualada Cemetery - April 2017

Jewish Museum - December 2016

Bauhaus Archive - November 2016

Berlin, Copenhagen, Paris, Athens

Centre Georges Pompidou - October 2016

Amsterdam Public Library - March 2017

Acropolis Museum - April 2017

Erechtheion - April 2017

Whirlpool Aquarium - November 2016

8-House - November 2016

Copenhagen, London

The Danish Jewish Museum - November 2016

Lloyd’s Tower - December 2016

London Design Museum - December 2016

British Museum - December 2016

Gemini Residence - November 2016

Tate Modern - December 2016

+1 815 440 1109 tmcc@umich.edu 120 E Summit Street Ann Arbor, MI 48104