Margit Applegate Selected Works 2019-2021
P O R T F O L I O
CONTENT S
01
Urban Arena
02
Ordered Delirium
03
Stacked Hotel
04
Dwelling for the Urban Nomad
05
Timber Origami
06
Island Shelter
01.1 URBAN ARENA The Urban Arena transforms the iconic Ringstraße in Vienna into a reconfigurable network of infrastructure, furniture, equipment and energy, for rapid change between civic occupation and transportation. The Urban Arena proposes an elevated pedestrian bridge that hovers above a landscape of pixelated modules. The conglomeration of modules oscillates between a pop-up park and an arena for extreme sports. The modules host sports such as skateboarding, BMX, skiing, snowboarding, and rock climbing, and offer public spaces for dining, leisure, and play. The trams are suspended from the underside of the pedestrian bridge, which engages spectators directly with the movement of the athletes, and defines the Ring as a pedestrian-first street. Collaborator: Anahita Dehlavi
01.2 URBAN ARENA
Winter 2021
01.2 URBAN ARENA
02.2 URBAN ARENA
The Urban Arena revitalizes the Ringstrasse as a people-first public realm and transforms the pedestrian experience into a promenade of spontaneous and unexpected experiences. Each pixel has its own independent function, but the conglomeration of pixels results in a playful multifunctional public space. The metamorphosis of the pixels from a park landscape to an arena for extreme sports merges performance and architecture and serves as an exploration of temporal interventions at a spectacular scale.
PLAY EXPLORE
RELAX
GATHER SKATE
NAVIGATE
Winter 2021
02.1 ORDERED DELIRIUM The Last Frontier: Ordered Delirium investigates how architecture can prevent human extinction. Architecture as it is currently practiced cannot adapt to the increasingly difficult circumstances framed by climate change, disease, war, and political instability. The climate crisis we are facing is due to our genius, not our powerlessness, and the future of humanity depends on design to innovate our path forward. The proposal is a refugee for climate induced migrants located on the Moon. It is a manifesto for collective living that abandons the ideas of consumption, greed and corruption that created the very crisis we are facing. The Last Frontier seeks to redefine the narrative of architecture as static objects with forces perpendicular to the ground, and instead engages differential gravities and multiplicitous and inorganic bodies. The Last Frontier reimagines migration as a solution rather than a disaster.
02.2 ORDERED DELIRIUM
median ratio of local to global temperature change
3.5°C
3
2.5
1.5
1.25
1
.8
.4
.29
Fall 2020 - Spring 2021
02.3 ORDERED DELIRIUM
Etymological origin of ‘waste’ refers to a residual substance that emerges in transitional material phases. Through the misuse of language, ‘waste’ has come to signify any incongruous accumulation of disparate elements. Waste depicts material derailment and production of displaced matter. It is a product of social reality; its properties are a medium for the comprehension of a cultural phenomenom of incidentally displaced matter that is automatically rendered useless. What if there is no distinction between waste and supply? Ordered Delirium flips society sideways so as to reaggregate the living, working and making sectors of the urban city into one vertical cohabitation. It envisions highly flexible, durable, and adaptable structures that stimulate the disappearance of sprawling, disaggregated cities and the development of more, smaller reaggregated towers; the abandonment of large-scale mass production in favor of small-scale local fabrication of goods and materials; a circular economy with no distinction between waste and supply. It envisions a community that governs autonomously, generates its own energy, sustains itself by selfdefined urban quality and self-sufficiency, and educates as practice and laboratory.
02.4 ORDERED DELIRIUM
Fall 2020 - Spring 2021
02.5 ORDERED DELIRIUM The spatial forms of the proposal will serve as background for our collective existence. It engages spatial paradigms for experience and navigation that rely on alternative forms of gravity and creates a formwork for flexibility of movement. The interplay of vertical and horizontal stratification creates a three-dimensional web of spiralling circulation and public programs, intertwined to support education, community and regenerative legacy.
02.6 ORDERED DELIRIUM
Fall 2020 - Spring 2021
02.7 ORDERED DELIRIUM
Healthy and resilient spaces negotiate the delicate coexistence among intertwined, oscillating intergenerational groups, defining and engaging the issues upon which our collective future depends. Architecture becomes a proactive participant by making space for reflection and discovery, while fostering new venues and affirmations of social and environmental integrity, within an environment that is both foreign and unnatural to our being. The Last Frontier is a synthesis of dystopia and utopia. It is a desperate remedy for displacement, instability and destruction. It is also a refugee for hope, adaptation, resilience and opportunity.
02.8 ORDERED DELIRIUM
Fall 2020 - Spring 2021
03.1 STACKED HOTEL The Stacked Hotel is situated on a narrow site in downtown Blacksburg, Virginia. A secondary skin of ETFE envelops the glulam framework which supports a system of recycled shipping containers. The shipping containers are arranged into two vertical towers, with a glass atrium in between, serving as a central nucleus of the hotel. The intervention juxtaposes the historic vernacular of Downtown and animates the existing town fabric.
Summer 2020 • 8 weeks • Blacksburg, VA
04.1 TIMBER ORIGAMI The Timber Origami pavilion uses two cross laminated timber panels to create an unexpected promenade from a mundane parking lot to the entrance of a restaurant. The CLT panels are maximized in such a way that the pavilion will result in zero waste.
1
2
Two standard size CLT panels (40’ x 10.5’) are delivered by flatbed truck to the Research + Demonstration Facility. A total of 26 cuts are completed at RDF.
3
The cut panels are arranged to fit on the RDF flatbed truck (30’ x 8.5’) and transported to the site at the Corporate Research Center.
4
A mobile crane lifts the indivual panels into place after the joints are secured into the ground.
Spring 2019 • 6 weeks • Blacksburg, VA
05.1 DWELLING FOR THE URBAN NOMAD
The dwelling for the urban nomad is a refuge from the chaos of everyday life. Urban nomads reject the ideals of capitalist society and choose instead to live a more deliberate lifestyle, simultaneously shifting the dominant paradigms of hyperconsumerism, overwork, and enviromental waste. The dwelling can exist in isolation or within a larger framework of dwellings that embody a collective living. Each individual dwelling is completely off-the-grid and selfsufficient, but within the context of the framework, the inhabitants can rely on the community for stability.
The inhabitant’s overall wellbeing is optimized through use of biophilic materials, natural light, and ample space for free movement. Apertures in the walls create unexpected moments when sun beams bounce off water particles in the shower and light filters into the sleeping loft. Each dwelling is equipped with an amorphous silicon photovoltaic facade glass panel, a laterally running gutter for the communal collection of graywater, and a microfarming wall.
05.2 DWELLING FOR THE URBAN NOMAD
Spring 2019 • 6 weeks
06.1 ISLAND DESIGN ASSEMBLY
For eight days, a team of architecture students and architects worked to design, build, and install a shelter for a recreational field on Isleboro Island, Maine. The project was completed on nearby Hurricane Island: an offshore, offline, offthe-grid environment. The project was dictated by the limited resources availble on the island and the design process was stripped down to the basics: pencil and paper, and hammer and nail. The result was a reflection of the vernacular architecture present on the coast of Maine. A simple gable rood, sheathed in cedar shingles; wood strapping on the facades; two skylights that illuminate the interior. My role in the project was contributions to the design, drafting of the construction documents, and constructing the final structure. This project is a precedent for how architecture as simple as a small shelter on a recreational field can have a profound impact on a small-island community.
Summer 2018 • 8 days • Hurricane Island, Maine