ROSENLIEB PORTFOLIO WORK 2018 2019
“There are lots of ways to be superhuman. You can trick others into thinking that unless they do what you tell them, they won’t eat. You can cajole people into doing what you want by making them fear god or the cops, or making them feel guilty or angry. The best way to be superhuman is to do things that you love with other people who love them, too. The only way to do that is to admit you’re doing it because you love it and if you do more than everyone, you’re still only doing that because that’s what you choose.” - Cory Doctorow // Walkaway
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OROBOROS RIOT MACHINE DISGUISERY _ THREAD ENGINE LEWITT
_01 OROBOROS Site: 16, NW Quarter Objective: Isolate a moment of peace and sky. Material: Rammed Earth w/ some Steel Cladding
M1 FAULT
Site: 16, Central Ridge Objective: Naked artifice for storm watching. Material: Steel, Treated Wood Decking
M2 PROW
Site: 16, NW Quarter Objective: Offer the act of Transgressio Material: Steel & Concrete Piles
//Project: Design a pavilion-scale experience in a section of Tempe’s Papago Park //The first week of ASU’s 3+ MArch program. First week of my education as an architect. I produced a set of narrative design memos in an effort to situate myself both in the site and my new educational context.
Sacred canyon, shield from the pounding surf of passing cars and jetliners overhead. Rammed earth deposited on sediment of steel upthrust from the bed of the wash. Walk the walls for a moment of respite from the sound and the heat. Cradled by Earth and Sky.
An unexpected irregularity in the scree arose apace with my rising unease at the fat thunderheads darkening the eastern sky. Oxidized flanks promised respite from the oncoming monsoon, or at the very least an ideal perch from which one could shout.
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M3 SPAN
here was no path leading o it or away from it. The gully it crossed could be avoided in a minutes worth of walking. It was bridge for its own sake. The act of transgression writ in steel, inviting me to play along with its moment. See Limit; Cross, Bridge: Be Changed.
Site: 16, SW Quarter Objective: Explore decay, planned ruin. Material: Packed Earth over Gabion
M4 DECAY
I remember how it had been just a year before, a jetty of smooth earth sitting proud at the mouth of the wash. Monsoons had been unkind to it. Time was eating the pride of its walls. There was a lesson here, about intransigence, and the elegance of scars.
Site: 16, NE Quarter Objective: Juxtapose nature/artifice, old/new. Material: Weathered Steel, Gabion
M5 MONOLITH
The Cairn stood alone in the scrub. Stacked stones and worn steel, alien to the breccia and creosote clinging to bitter life in the heat. The outcrop of ancient continental bedrock twinned it a few hundred feet away. The Cairn framed it if you stood just right.
Site: 16, NW Quarter Objective: Reify meditative process. Material: Steel, Rammed Earth
M6 OROBOROS
The route was the whole of the thing. A span crossed the wash, leading down a dirt track to the walls thrown high against the noise. There a ribbon of metal perched led pilgrims on to the place they had begun. Cross the bridge, walk the path.
The first weeks were spent adjusting to my new tools. I was gripped by the tactility of the site and had unfettered access to a fat stack of Calatrava texts. There was a blessing in my ignorance: I only had the slightest idea of what I was doing: there was no room for cynicism, no sense of impossibility. The result was a walking meditation buried in the wash: A bridge to nowhere joined at each end by a wound path seemingly uncovered by the rains. As above, so below.
_02 RIOT MACHINE
//Project: Design a student space within the confines of an ASU transit corridor using 3 prescribed volumes. //Second half of summer ‘18. My take on the brief was to design a residency+exhibition space where students could take over and modify a section of campus in 3-month rotations. I envisioned a building which contained the tools of its own transgression: a Riot Machine.
The student pavilion centered on a small covered plaza flanked by a maker space and a restroom. Tree-shaded seating areas were raised slightly to give them a temperament distinct from the rush of students along the paths on either side. Above was a flex space for the display of gallery work or rehearsal of live performance. One professor, a Corbusier scholar, called it “an Italian Futurist Tank Trap.� As a cohort we were moving quickly from neophytic fumbling to eager enthusiasm to flex our newfound skills. Here I found important lessons. A building can instantiate a set of values. The architect can attempt to arbitrate use, or they can create the set in which the conditions for the making of meaning are allowed to flourish. I strive for a life of the latter.
_03 DISGUISERY //Project: Design a small-scale tailor’s shop within the footprint of Rick Joy’s original Tucson studio. //”Disguisery” is the plural noun for a group of tailors. The Disguisery, then, would be a haven for the practice and transmission of this vital craft. Here I looked to combine an eye towards social consciousness and an iterative design process in order to accomplish an ambitious dual program within a compressed footprint. Materiality and adaptive reuse were the core architectural themes of the project. These concerns were balanced with community engagement and programmatic flexibility.
The footprint demanded that a square foot of atmosphere and purpose be spoken with only a square inch of space. Similarly, the mixed use and focus on community engagement required careful programmatic triage. The teaching space is given primacy in the floor plan. Integrated shelving maximizes freedom of movement through the space. A single fulllength skylight brings in the day and bathes the volume in Tucson’s warm hinterlight during the evening. The sales space is comprised by a bespoke fitting room oriented towards a one-on-one conversation between client and tailor, emphasizing the intimacy and trust of the custom suiting/dressing experience.
_04 THREAD ENGINE //Project: Create a branch of Tempe’s FABRIC fashion design collective in Tucson’s historic Barrio district. Accommodate a number of design and manufacture disciplines in a program which activates local partners and doubles as a sales and event space. //FABRIC Tucson introduced me to the possibilities that exist when there is philosophical alignment between architect and client. Their mission is to bring together designers in an environment which lowers the barrier to creation to near-zero. This compelling goal, in combination with the challenging program, proved tremendously invigorating.
As Cedric Price put it, “Architecture is slow and therefore requires anticipatory design.” The Thread Engine project required a clash of two very different time scales: that of the epochal march of architecture and the seasonal sprint of fashion. In particular, FABRIC’s social mission demanded tremendous programmatic flexability. My proposed solution was a dynamic layout aided by a large gantry crane. This crane solved tow demands in one move: unbroken space for runway and gala events, and a dedicated manufacturing and design environment during the remainder of the month. Simply: architecture at the speed of fashion.
_05 LEWITT
//Project: Starting from the rigid instructions of a Sol LeWitt-style drawing, derive a structure and explore novel methods of diagram. //This was an exciting opportunity to explore styles and methods of ideation uncoupled from the traditional program driven approach. Here I decided to rigorously follow an arbitrary procedural ruleset of the same sort which created the original drawing. As rules and results sedimented, program and meaning emerged. Noise gave way to sound.
INDETERMINATE LAYER : HEAT MAP
EXTERIOR LAYER : SHADE / HAMMOCK
INTERIOR LAYER : FOLD + SEATING DIAGRAMMATIC LAYER : LEWITT
STRUCTURAL LAYER : COLUMNS
A heat map was superimposed over the drawing, designating the height of columns placed at the vertices of the various lines. Arbitrary folds in the paper of the drawing demanded a raised area which, when superimposed on the columns, resulted in steps and seating. The heat map itself was then instantiated as shading elements in the derived pavilion. The end result is a kind of thesis on meaning-making and play. Architecture, I think, is not the vision of the architect realized and delivered to the client. Rather it is the intermixing of the built space and its inhabitants. A space erected purely through procedural generation can still be suffused with beauty and purpose when it is filled with human beings. The built environment is the syntax of contemporaneity. From the juxtaposition of the built environment and its inhabitants comes the semantic content of our lives. The duty of the architect is to deploy that syntax in a framework which allows for the creation of beauty and meaning.
TRAVIS ROSENLIEB / 2624 S Azalea Dr / 1-661-873-5566 / TravisRosenlieb@gmail.com EDUCATION 2011 Bakersfield College 2016 B.A., Graduate Track, California State University Bakersfield 2019 M.A., Philosophy, Arizona State University 2020 M.Arch., Arizona State University (In Progress)
EXTRACURRICULAR FAA SUAS Remote-Pilot License 1st Place at the California Regional Intercollegiate Ethics Bowl Semi-Finalist at National Intercollegiate Ethics Bowl Ethics Consultation Internship at Kern Medical Center Presented on Meta-Ethics at CSUB Philosophy Colloquium
AREAS OF INTEREST Open Source Architecture Public Architecture Virtue Ethics Meta-Ethics Political Philosophy
Nigel Henderson, Unidentified Children Playing on Chisendale Road London, c.1953