THOMAS FOEDERER 2017-2019
CONTENTS 1
Allentown Contemporary Arts
2
Generous Architecture
3
The Buffalo School of Music
4 Broadway/Fillmore 5
Additional Works
ALLENTOWN CONTEMPORARY ARTS Spring 2018, Comprehensive Studio Instructor: Annette LeCuyer Location: Allen & Delaware, Buffalo, NY The project called for a new contemporary art museum to be built at a major intersection in a culturally significant district of the city. The primary driving force that shaped the project was the desire for a large-scale gallery space that was flexible enough to show a wide range of contemporary art. With this as a fundamental basis, circulation into the gallery spaces became a primary end. It was important to create a strong experience of movement from the street into the building and through into the gallery spaces. By this way, the building’s relationship to the street was intended to offer a degree of transparency, inviting pedestrians to enter and interact with the space. Once in the building, the circulation sequence offers only hints to the nature of the gallery space, before the initial reveal upon entering the industrial scale space. In continuation, the circulation leads patrons up a dramatic stair hanging from the ceiling, to smaller galleries which offers flexibility in the curation of the space and also a range of vantage points into the primary gallery. In order to create the large-scale central gallery, a grid of oversized beam and columns was employed. Though initially conceived as a structural system, the organizing logic was optimized for natural lighting and for spatial organizations in both the gallery and office levels. Furthermore, the system is a visible and honest representation of the structural logic of the building as well as its identifying aesthetic.
North Elevation
West Elevation
Section Perspective
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Ground Floor Plan
+1 Main Gallery
+2 Classroom & Mechanical
+3 Upper Galleries
+4 Offices
Gallery Renderings
East/West Section
North/South Section
Exploded Axonometric
GENEROUS ARCHITECTURE Spring 2017 Instructor: Georg Rafailidis Location: Glen Park, Williamsville, NY The subject of the studio was to explore architecture that is malleable enough to adapt to changing programmatic demands placed upon it. By this way, a precedent study of the Palazzo della Ragione in Padua, Italy offered insights into an intentional ambiguity between interior and exterior space that grew into the driving conceptual foundation for the project. The initial prompt for the design was simply to make a building that consisted of a number of spaces with specified square footages. There were no programmatic requirements initially, in turn the design was driven as an exploration into merging the contrasting contextual conditions to the North and South of the site. In this sense, the architecture aimed to represent the organic nature of Glen Park to the North through curvilinear form and the traditional built environment to the South through angular forms. With this basic scheme established, complexity was injected through the development of a meaningful circulation experience in the architecture, thus further blending the park with the built environment. To this end, intertwining circulation paths, one wholly open air and exterior winding through angular forms, while the other consisting of organic form and entirely enclosed. The intertwining condition thus inverts the paradigm of organic form being representative of nature while furthermore giving a degree of complexity to the experience of the architecture that confuses the senses. Additionally, the injection of natural elements to the interior of the architecture furthered the ambiguity between the organic and the manmade. Late in the semester, a prompt to apply an art gallery program to the design without any spatial changes, lead to the development of interior spaces to serve a traditional gallery and the exterior spaces to enable public art expression with the architecture as canvas.
Site Model
Top Level Plan
Intermediate Level Plan
Street Level Plan
Park Level Plan
North Elevation
This circulation diagram represents the interwoven exterior and interior circulation routes on the West side of the building. The circulation paths lead occupants through spaces that project into larger enclosures, giving glimpses into the variety of spatial conditions that comprise the design and furthermore creating a sense of ambiguity and curiosity while moving from floor to floor.
Inhabited Axonometric
THE BUFFALO SCHOOL OF MUSIC Fall 2017 Instructor: Brian Carter Location: University at Buffalo, Buffalo, NY Performance space was the primary focus of the fall 2017 studio as the prompt was for a new school of music at the University of Buffalo South campus. A portion of the studio was dedicated to researching and visiting precedent buildings in Toronto, Rochester and New York City in order to acclimate to the complexity of the program of similar buildings. Through these studies and visits, the notion of a school of music as an institution emerged and became a recurring theme in the development of the design. In this sense, the design was conceived as a series of separate rectilinear bars each designed for a specific function, linked by two continuous corridors that serve as central intersections and public spaces. Between each enclosed volume are open air courtyards that flood the interior space with natural light and create a spatial and visual connection with the interior. In this sense, from the outside the building is an imposing large-scale singular volume, yet upon entering the interior, the building is porous and intimately connected to the outdoors. Each courtyard is designed to have a unique character through its organization, vegetation and materiality. This allows for a degree of wayfinding within the building and gives a unique experience from one side of the building versus the other, despite the largely symmetrical plan. The location of the building, at the epicenter of a historic university, led to the largely minimalist form to best negotiate between the neoclassical and contemporary aesthetic of neighboring buildings. With its organization on site, the building defines the edge of the lawn in the middle of campus while simultaneously offering a seamless connection between the school of music and the rest of the university.
Program Diagram
Floor Plan
Longitudinal Section
Exterior courtyard provides link for foot traffic through the building
Courtyards between volumes provide spatial and visual connections with the exterior
BROADWAY/FILLMORE Fall 2018, Urban Design Studio Instructor: Erkin Özay Location: 998 Broadway, Buffalo, NY The Fall 2018 urban design research studio entitled ‘Unoriginal Things’ began with an analysis of the built forms that comprise Buffalo’s urban landscape, eventually leading into a design intervention for medium density residential housing in East Buffalo. The design grew directly out of concepts uncovered in the research and through analysis of the surrounding context of the site and other ‘weak market cities’. The Built environment of East Buffalo is characterized by and large for the systematic purchasing of unoccupied houses by the City of Buffalo, and the subsequent demolition of them when they are not able to be auctioned off. This process, which was established as the typical paradigm after the year 2000, has led to the deterioration of what was once a healthy middle class neighborhood into one now characterized by large swaths of vacant city owned land. My proposal argued against a return to the preexisting housing fabric, and instead advocated for an embrace of a new, unintended fabric that resulted out of the voids created through the process of demolition. In this sense, the newly created green spaces would be repurposed, forming a web of pedestrian linkages against the grain of the North/South road grid. In order to encourage healthy urban growth in the area, a housing module that was adaptive enough to bend to different housing and mixed-use demands was developed. This resulted in a reworking of the typical gable vernacular that comprises the neighborhood, by aggregating two volumes into one. This allowed for a range of housing layouts and a relative ease of construction and reorganization, thus resigning a large degree of design agency to the residents of the area.
2019
2000
Typical Neighborhood Block
Section Perspective
Exploded Unit Axonometric
Unit Expansion Diagrams
Roof Plan
Site Oblique
Fall 2018 Ethnographic Study of East Buffalo’s Telescope Houses Elevation Study #1 & #2
ADDITIONAL WORKS
Elevation Study #3
January 2019 In collaboration with Erkin Özay, for submission to The Journal of Architectural Education ‘Buffalo Capriccio’
Menefee Cabin Clark & Menefee Architects
Spring 2018 Construction Technology Drafted Works
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5’
10’
KITSAP COUNTY ADMINISTRATION BUILDING
MILLER-HULL PARTNERSHIP TOM FOEDERER MICHAEL GAC FRANK KRAEMER JELANI LOWE
20’
THOMAS FOEDERER Phone: (315)209-7873 Location: Buffalo, NY 14216 Email: tfoederer34@gmail.com LinkedIn: www.linkedin.com/in/thomasfoederer Instagram: www.instagram.com/tom_foe91 Online Portfolio: www.issuu.com/tom_foederer
EDUCATION M.Arch University at Buffalo, Buffalo, NY Expected Completion May 2019, GPA 3.8 2017 Academic Excellence Award for GPA Study abroad Madrid, Spain, June-July 2018 B.A. Philosophy SUNY Oneonta, Oneonta, NY Completed with Honors December 2014 Thesis: A Study of the Ethics and Aesthetics of Architecture A.A.S. Architectural Technology Onondaga Community College, Syracuse, NY Completed May 2013
PROFESSIONAL Student Assistant University at Buffalo, Buffalo, NY January 2019-May 2019 Responsibilities Include: Collaborate in co-authorship of proposed publication ‘Incongruous Capriccio: Grounds for Weak Market Practice’, production of drawings and diagrams for proposed publication, assist in course organization and documentation through drawings and research Freshman Studio Teaching Assistant University at Buffalo, Buffalo, NY August 2018-May 2019 Responsibilities Include: Directly oversee group of freshman students for the course of the semester, provide design and representation critique on a class by class basis, provide design and representation critique in a review setting, assist program coordinators in the organization and implementation of course objectives, facilitate the design and construction of full-scale student projects Intern MPD Architecture, Newfane, NY June 2015-September 2016, May 2017-August 2017, August 2018 Responsibilities Include: Prepare construction documents for residential and commercial projects using AutoCAD, interact with clients to refine designs, interact with contractors and building inspectors to discuss drawings, assist in field measuring, use field measurements to draft existing structures, prepare renderings for proposed commercial projects
SKILLS AutoCAD, Photoshop, InDesign, Illustrator, Rhinoceros, Grasshopper, VRAY, SketchUp, Revit
THANK YOU!