Architecture Portfolio

Vivian Gruendel

Vivian Gruendel

Skills

Digital Literacy

AutoCAD

Rhino 6 + Grasshopper

SketchUp

Revit

Bluebeam

Representation

Adobe Suite (Photoshop, Illustrator, InDesign, Lightroom & Premiere)

Enscape

Digital Fabrication (LaserCAMM, 3D

Printing & CNC)

Manual Model-Making

Photography

Sketching

Other

Post-Occupancy Evaluations

Written & Verbal Communication

Python & Java (Introductory)

Microsoft 365

Experience

Email vivian.gruendel@gmail.com

Phone (703) 980 - 1204

Languages

English (Fluent, native bilingual)

Spanish (Fluent, native bilingual)

French (Proficient)

Clubs + Activities

Honors College Student Council

Phi Kappa Phi Honor Society

VT AIAS

Ceramics Independent Study`

LinkedIn www.linkedin.com/in/vivian-gruendel/ Portfolios https://issuu.com/vgruendel

Summer Intern - Perkins&Will, Washington, D.C.

Jun 2023 - Aug 2023

Developed materials for SD & DD packages for a multi-story, two-tenant lab/office space. Assisted development & delivery of presentation materials for weekly client & consultant meetings. (10 weeks)

• Collected & organized data for NIH Sustainability & Resilience Assessment publication. Designed graphic content & coordinated feedback & contributions from Perkins&Will, CFR Engineering & Client. Assisted on-site POE & resilience workshops with NIH employees. (4 weeks)

Contributed to punch visits, model-making, design studies & community-engagement documentation for multiple projects. Facilitated office-wide transition of digital content alongside marketing team.

Service Desk Associate - The Home Depot

May 2021 - Aug 2021

Quickly & accurately answered customer questions, suggested effective solutions & resolved conflicts to increase customer satisfaction.

• Enhanced team’s productivity by anticipating coworkers’ needs & delivering support.

• Organized & developed retrieval processes for large-format online-order inventory & reduced order retrieval time by 50%.

Tiny House Build - Gap Year Experience

Aug 2018 - Jul 2019

• Crowdfunded, designed, built & donated a grid-connected mobile tiny house.

• Managed a $20,000 budget, developed materials lists & coordinated special orders.

• Coordinated consultations with industry professionals including contractors, plumbers & electricians.

• Learned & applied relevant skills & codes online using YouTube, Google & Reddit.

Education

Virginia Polytechnic Institute & State University

Aug 2019 - May 2024

Bachelor of Architecture; Minors in Sociology & Landscape Architecture; GPA: 3.86

• Awards Harold Hill Memorial Award (1st Year Competition), Deans List (2019 - Pres.)

• Published Works ‘Breaks: A Post-Colonial Mural’ (in collaboration with Room One Thousand, Cruz Garcia, Nathalie Frankowski & 10 students at Virginia Tech); ‘How Will We Live Together,’ 17th Venice Architecture Biennale Italian Virtual Pavilion Sezione del Padiglione Italia (15 teams including Workshops for Other Worlds at VT)

• Research & Thesis Architecture of a Stitch: Sewing & embroidery as lens & rehabilitative design tool for Virginia’s fading rail towns.

Europe Travel

Program

Aug 2022 - Oct 2022

Architecture; Fall Semester, Western Europe

• Collected photographs, sketches & notes to include in research papers & graphic materials

• Assisted organization of lobby exhibitions & student publications

• Research ‘Empathetic Functionalism: A Study of Alvar Aalto’s House & Studio’ analyzed how light, material simplicity & spatial organization reinforce relationships with nature & improve quality of life

Design Studies of the Built Environment

May 2022 - Jul 2022

Landscape Architecture + Industrial Design; Summer Semester, Western Europe

Research ‘Fragmentation, Layering & Weaving: A Study of Organizational Design Methods at Three Scales (Urban Fabric, Building & Material)’

Thomas Jefferson High School for Science & Technology

2014 - 2018

Prototyping Research Laboratory Graduate; GPA: 4.2

Research ‘Hybrid Production & Construction of an Electric Ukulele’ year-long thesis employing manual woodworking & digital fabrication techniques

1 Hart Island Project: Into The Wild

A Two-person Project Rehabilitating New York City’s Only Public Cemetery

Project Type

Studio Date Location

New Skills

Public Architecture + Landscape Architecture

Shugars’ 4th Year Integrative Lab, Virginia Tech

Spring 2023 - Ongoing

Hart Island, New York

Building Codes, Passive House Design, Historic Site Rehabilitation, ClimateConsultant, Large-scale Site Model-making + Group Organization

Hart Island is New York’s only public cemetery. Buried are the city’s indigent and unclaimed, as well as victims of our worst pandemics throughout history -- most notably, COVID-19. For a time, the 130-acre island housed boys’ and girls’ reformatories, tuberculosis hospitals, insane asylums, rehabilitation centers, and a rotating cohort of inmates from nearby Rikers Island who were charged with burying the dead.

In recent years, stewardship of the island has transitioned from the Department of Corrections to the New York City Department of Parks and Recreation. In an effort to reincorporate this long-stigmatized island into modern day New York, students were tasked with developing an island-wide site strategy and four off-grid buildings (a museum, memorial, ferry terminal, and visitor center -- one of which is presented here), and proposing through those interventions what role the island should play within the urban fabric of New York.

Jennifer To and I developed a site strategy that aims to serve two groups -the families of the dead and the general public -- in a way that respects the island’s humble and complicated history and allows the island to continue to serve as an ecological haven for various wildlife.

Vivian Gruendel

Vivian Gruendel

Left Page Site Plan including Museum (Vivian) & Memorial (Jennifer); Site plan developed by Vivian

Right Page

Top and Right Series of Island Perspectives

Middle Left Island-wide Parti Diagram

Middle Right Critical Interventions

Bottom Landscape Intervention Idea

Walking to the Museum

The Museum

Mission Statement

Our design revolves around the relationship between the dynamic forces of nature (i.e., rising sea levels), and the built environment, which we have interwoven with the rich history of Hart Island: a resting place for the outcast and the unclaimed. By embracing the inevitability and unpredictability of natural change, we seek to create a space that resonates with the human experience, namely the transience of life. Rather than resisting the inevitable impacts of climate change and Hart Island’s thriving ecologies, we have sought to integrate these factors into the site’s design. To achieve this, we have chosen to purposefully encourage the infiltration of Hart Island’s vegetation and wildlife, while supplementing it with flood-mitigating plants and other ecologically beneficial species.

We aim to strengthen the connection between the island’s natural landscape and the built environment by designing for flooding and overgrowth, allowing the buildings to adapt to the needs of visitors and employees while celebrating the island’s evolution over time. We hope that blurring the boundaries between the wild and built environment will create immersive, reflective, and harmonious spaces and allow us to engage with nature on tactile, visual, and acoustic scales.

Vivian Gruendel

Ideation Sketch of Ferry Terminal Arrival

Crossroads

Historic + Nature Path

Wood

Concrete

Roads + Walking Paths

Phoenix House Material Reuse

Phoenix House Ruins

Former Foundation - Removed

Former Foundation - Reused

Existing Vegetation

Added Vegetation

The Museum is a hybrid between new construction and adaptive reuse. Because of the original building’s extensive collapse, only the remaining usable brick walls of the middle wing have been integrated into the new design.

Much like the multi-layered and ambiguous history of Hart Island, the building employs the layering of materials and light to create different conditions of transparency and blur the lines between the interior and exterior.

The use of concrete slabs, open-web steel joists, steel girders, and columns allows for an open floor plan than can be adjusted by visiting artists using temporary hanging partitions to best suit their exhibits.

Vivian Gruendel

The new museum’s massing was informed by the old middle wing of the Phoenix House, which at one point housed a very successful rehabilitation program for addicts. The new construction is modeled after the exact proportions and dimensions of the Phoenix House, with some perimeter adjustments to retain the overgrowth of vegetation that developed after it’s abandonment. A handful of other House ruins will remain lining the perimeter of the building as part of a history and nature walking path connecting the island.

The orientation (East-West elongation) and overall dimensions of the building lend themselves to the use of photovoltaics for power generation and roof catchment for rainwater collection. Because the entire island is off-grid, both the water and power systems have to be addressed on a building-to-building basis. The museum uses constructed wetlands for black and greywater treatment, which will visually blend in to the re-vegetated natural wetlands surrounding the site. To conserve energy, the museum employs Passive House standards both in the schematic design and MEP design (continuing this semester). Strategies include thermal massing in the walls and floors, as well as optimallyplaced windows and skylights for daylight and ventilation.

Vivian Gruendel

Vivian Gruendel

Left Photo of Site Model Assembly; Organized & led by myself & executed by studio (Photo Credits: Gray Kutrieb)

Right Perspective Collage of Museum & Ruins from Walking Path

Bottom (Left to Right) West, South, East & North Museum Elevations

2a Reference-Making: Polyforms

Found Objects: Analyses, Collages, Hand-Made Models

Project Type

Studio

Date Location

New Skills

Research

Garcia-Frankowski 2nd Year Studio, Virginia Tech Fall 2020 N/A

Architecture Model-Making, Rhino 6, Photoshop, InDesign, Illustrator

This exploration of pure forms culminated in a series of multi-media case studies and re-imaginations of existing works of art and architecture. ‘Polyform’ was chosen out of a list including ‘Mat-building’, ‘Organs without a Body’, ‘Architecton’, and ‘Loop’, among others. Through a series of workshops and personal research, I developed a collection of polyformal samples and conveyed their qualities through line-drawings, collages, and physical models.

Polyforms were of particular interest to me because of their complex geometries, which I eagerly combined with my Rhino and Grasshopper skills to develop unfolding templates for a hybrid model-making process.

Vivian Gruendel

Polyform (n.) A solid or planar structure comprised of multiple, identical, geometric components, which may themselves be polyforms. A structure whose components are dissimilar but join or intersect in a loosely geometric or tessellated way such that the structure achieves a geometric or rigid appearance.

Studying and breaking these reference polyforms down into their geometric units allowed me to reverse-engineer and later redesign some of those forms. These case studies allowed students to become class experts in their respective forms and share their research and processes with each other, further developing their presentational skills.

Left Page (Top to Bottom)

Iterations of truncated & stellated icosahedron design

Grasshopper-generated unfolded templates for icosahedron physical model assembly

Modeled & Photographed GIF stages for additional polyform case studies

Right Page (Top to Bottom)

Left Synagogue in the Negev Desert, Zvi Hecker

Line Drawing

Collage

Physical Model Replica

Right ‘Heart of Gold’, HYBYCOZO

Line Drawing

Collage

Modified Physical Model

Vivian Gruendel

2b WOWWAI Campus at Virginia Tech

Workshops for Other Worlds Architecture & Urban Planning Project

Project Type

Studio Date Location

New Skills

Commercial Architecture, Landscape Architecture, Urban Planning

Garcia-Frankowski 2nd Year Studio, Virginia Tech Spring 2021

N/A

Landscape Arch., Model-Making, Premiere Pro, AutoCAD, Grasshopper

One of the six polyform case studies, the stellated and truncated icosahedron, became the massing inspiration for an artists’ workshop and teaching studio. The workshop and neighboring urban park area in the Education District are located on a hypothetical campus alongside other students’ works.

Students were each given three plots of land to design -- one for their building and two for outdoor development -- and worked together to integrate their plots into a cohesive urban scheme.

Vivian Gruendel

Left Page (Top to Bottom)

Section Axon

Right Page (Top to Bottom)

Left Floor Plans

Right Perspective Collages Art Studio & Student Lounge Exhibit & Lobby Area

Before beginning the design process, students were tasked with choosing a contemporary artist to design for. I chose Mark Bradford, whose work using everyday materials and collage as social commentary seemed well-suited to the intentions of our campus.

Employing the iterations of HYBYCOZO’s original ‘Heart of Gold,’ I developed a studio, teaching spaces, student lounge, and exhibition space for Bradford and his hypothetical students. The palette of Bradford’s works inspired the material selection for the building, and the large open spaces for production and exhibition lend themselves to Bradford’s large-scale works and process.

Vivian Gruendel

Left Group Campus Urban Model

Right Shared Plot Close-Up

Background Education Sector Line Drawing

Architecture Portfolio

The landscape strategy for the Workshop was divided into three zones: Group, Individual, and Play. The Play zone included an outdoor playground and interactive water feature, which were shared with my neighbor (the white building in the image above), and centrally located between both buildings. The Group zone featured group seating elements and extended from the Workshop to the street, with the Individual zone located alongside it past an acoustically and visually insulating shared green space. The entry stair leading up into the lobby serves as shaded seating for performances in front of the building and also serves as the nexus for these three zones.

3 Tiny House Build

Self-Directed Gap Year Experience

Project Type

Studio Date Location

New Skills

Residential Design + Build N/A

2018-2019

Falls Church, Virginia

Small-Scale Construction, Budgeting, Fundraising, Plan-Drawing

I took a gap year after graduating high school to crowdfund, research, design, build, and donate a grid-connectible mobile tiny house. This project gave me the opportunity to explore my budding architectural interests before committing to architecture school and I developed some invaluable skills in the process.

I managed a $20,000 budget, developed materials lists, and sourced and coordinated special orders (most notably, a composting toilet). I sought advice from local industry professionals including contractors, plumbers, and electricians, but otherwise taught myself.

Vivian Gruendel

Roof

Aluminum Shed-Style

Loft Bedroom

Storage Space

Main Floor

Bathroom

Kitchen

Living Area

Trailer Bed

Hitch

Insulation Gapping

Wheel Wells

Top Left Section Facing Kitchen

Top Right Section Facing Living Area

Bottom Main Floor Plan

The tiny house proposed a shed-style roof structure sloping away from the trailer hitch to concentrate the load at the front of the trailer bed. The wood-stud structure was designed to withstand high winds using Simpson Strong-Ties at critical stud and joist connections, while the loft on the tall end of the house maximizes usable space and provides lateral bracing.

Vivian Gruendel

Left Page Exploded Floor Plans

Right Page Plan & Sections

8’5” 7’6”

Vivian Gruendel

Left Page

Build Stages

Right Page

In-Progress Interior

Vivian Gruendel

Vivian Gruendel

Left Completed Loft & Kitchen Area, Interior View

Vivian Gruendel

Right Completed Living Area, Interior View

Vivian Gruendel

Left Finished Exterior

Right Patches & Copper

4 Hybrid Production: Electric Ukulele

Prototyping Research Thesis

Project Type

Studio

Date Location

New Skills

Industrial Design; Prototyping Prototyping Research Lab 2017-2018

Thomas Jefferson High School for Science and Technology Woodworking, CNC Machining, Metalworking, Fusion360, Electronics

This year-long senior research project explored and tested the balance between manual craft and digital fabrication at the scale of a tenor electric ukulele. The findings of the project concluded that digital fabrication was best suited for largeformat operations like cutting and boring, while sanding, finishing, and carving were best executed manually.

This ukulele played as accurately as a mid-range tenor electric ukulele, though it weighed considerably more due to its solid body (made of black walnut).

Architecture Portfolio

Bridge, Strings & Tuning Pegs

Manually Installed

Acrylic Electrical Cover Plate Laser-cut

Manually Installed

Fretboard CNC Routed

Hand Carved - Frets

Hand Sanded

Manually Installed

Pickups, Dials & Plug-Ins

Manually Installed

Neck CNC Routed

Hand Sanded

Manually Installed

Left

Vivian Gruendel

Vivian

Vivian Gruendel