Cat Wilmes by cwilmes

CATHERINE WILMES

PORTFOLIO

EMAIL, INSTAGRAM,

WILMESCAT@GMAIL.COM @CATWILMES

PAGE 04

DESERT OBJECTS

PAGE 30

STATIC SPEED

PAGE 42

HYPERLOOP DESERT CAMPUS

PAGE 56

SEEING DOUBLE

PAGE 72

FILM SCHOOL TOWER

PAGE 86

CENOTAPH FOR PAUL VIRILIO

PAGE 90

DIDEROT ASSEMBLAGE

DESERT OBJECTS - ARCH 704 Cairo, Egypt Critic: Erich Schoenenberger, collaboration with Amir Ashtiani The immediete culture and context was a critical influence for how the design emerged. Surrounding urban conditions dictated how connections were able to be laid out into the city and engage the circulation of the proposed design. This identified the design organization by laying out connections into the broader city and encouraging movement through the building, and into important contextual points. The main design strategy is understanding a bazaar and how it functions as a horizontal element, rotating this plan vertically, and defining a vertical bazaar. The program is a waste-to-energy power plant and bazaar. Sited in the city of Zabaleen- a community that is known for collecting trash and repurposingthe building brings space to an already existing way of life. The spaces within the design act as nestled layers; with the bazaar markets being at the center, workshops in the middle, and the trash collection at the edges. All of this has a direct connection to the incinerator, located in the largest volume, where the waste-to-energy process is held. A critical component of the design organization are the drastic internal variations in scale. These size fluctuations are capable of both applying and alleviating a pressure on occupants, creating a dynamic spatial experience. The largest of these spatial fluctuations are the interior courtyards that function as makets. Entire voids are nested at the center of these courtyards that fully open up the space and connect the levels through circular ramps and walkways. The series of five architectural “charachters” challenge notions of conventional design and function without abandoning vernacular architecture strategies. Vernacular design was investigated to progress the project in both systems and design. The passive system of the wind-catcher was implemented in three of the five characters, allowing relief on mechanical system operations and providing light and air penetration into the interior. This was achieved through elevating the bases of the building so that air could move through and cool down the interiors through a misting system. The facade graphics reference the local caligraffiti- a hybrid art form of graffiti and calligraphyapplied to buildings in Zabaleen.

SECTIONAL CHUNK

PERSPECTIVE

BOTTOM VIEW

UPSIDE DOWN, PASSIVE COOLING WIND-CATCHER DIAGRAM

INTERIOR, PHYSICAL MODEL

GROUND FLOOR PLAN

MASSING, PHYSICAL MODEL

PRINTED GLASS

TRANSPARENT, PRINTED CONCRETE

PRINTED CONCRETE

VARIATION 01

VARIATION 02

VARIATION 03 FACADE DIAGRAM

WORM’S EYE VIEW

STRUCTURAL AND VOLUMETRIC DIAGRAM

T.O.SLAB 230.00

1 A-100

T.O.SLAB 190.00

T.O.SLAB 170.00

2 A-100

T.O.SLAB 150.00

T.O.SLAB 110.00

3 A-100

T.O.SLAB 50.00

4 A-100

T.O.SLAB 0.00

PRECAST PARAPET CAP PRECAST CONCRETE BOLTED CONNECTION INSULATION VAPOR BARRIER PEDESTAL PAVING ADJUSTABLE PEDESTAL

LIGHT WEIGHT CONCRETE

FIRE PROTECTION SEAL STEEL CONNECTION BRACKET

SUSPENDED CEILING STUD

DETAIL 1

FRAEMLESS MULLION DOUBLE LAYER GLAZING

PRECAST CONCRETE INSULATION FIRE PROTECTION SEAL

VAPOR BARRIER STEEL CONNECTION BRACKET

SUSPENDED CEILING STUD

FIRE PROTECTED GYPSUM BOARD

DETAIL 2 28

FRAME LESS MULLION DOUBLE LAYER GLAZING

PRECAST CONCRETE INSULATION FIRE PROTECTION SEAL STEEL CONNECTION BRACKET CONCRETE BEAM

SUSPENDED CEILING STUD FIRE PROTECTED GYPSUM BOARD PRECAST GYPSUM

DETAIL 3

FRAMELESS MULLION

DOUBLE LAYER GLAZING

PRECAST CONCRETE INSULATION FIRE PROTECTED GYPSUM BOARD STUD RUNNER FIRE PROTECTION SEAL CONCRETE BEAM

DETAIL 4

STATIC SPEED - ARCH 806 New York City, New York Critic: Phil Parker “The studio program hybridizes two institutional forms towards complicating the set of object, viewer, and participant relations. It proposes additions to the New Museum in New York City where novel building form, material, terms of engagement accelerate and slow, and thicken and thin the alleged transparency of the architectural work. Questions in architecture shift emphasis from the apparent smoothing of an object, to calibrating the multiple diverse passages mediated, accelerated, toward disappearing and slowing toward solidification. The studio experiments with producing variable speeds across multiple trajectories and propose possible spaces, materials and performance. The explicit ambition is to stress architecture’s reliance on its internalized and conventionalized set of media actions and to open other forms of awareness. Several stories of modernity trace the events of a protagonist moving at high speed, in state of ecstasy, blinded to their surroundings, unaware of a future or past, intensely keyed in to the present moment so that speed itself becomes transformative, producing new forms of perception, a new state of being in the world, a new propensity for accidents and their consequences. Speed is the calibration of material change in time; distance, position, and form are wrapped up in its measure. In human action it becomes a measure of perceptual intensity, it marks a forgetting, a move away from the stable and memorable image toward a blur of variation. In practice the acceleration of the body formed in the early twentieth century is extended across the full range of media to the lightest bits of information. Increasing speed produces a compression of events and spaces and slowness attenuates, it opens, provides a gap between one event and the next, it projects a form of discreteness, one thing after another. The slow does not pursue the accidental, instead it attempts to form an ongoing memory, a consistent repetition.”* *excerpt from the design brief

SITE MASSING, PHYSICAL MODEL

GROUND FLOOR & SITE PLAN

MATERIAL STUDY DIAGRAMS; BLOOD, OIL, AND WATER

SECTIONAL CHUNK MODEL

ELEVATION

SITE MASSING, PHYSICAL MODEL

HYPERLOOP DESERT CAMPUS Las Vegas, Nevada Collaboration with Alican Taylan Deep within the Nevada desert, a few kilometers away from Las Vegas, the first test center of Hyperloop- a proposed passenger and freight train that will unite cities and nations at a much-higher speed than planes- has been created. This project proposes bringing together the scientists of Hyperloop to the public domain by displaying the process of creation to the public. Laboratories and the testing center are sunken below grade and are encased by glazing, allowing visual access to observers above. A spokless Ferris wheel composed of trams is a major component of the design that allows passengers to travel up into a viewing deck where they can observe the facility and its vast, desert landscape. The interior and exterior are blurred through layers of interiority. Spaces within the ground level are covered, but only some are conditioned allowing for different modes of activity. The architecture mimics and responds to the sandy context and offers a formal harmony with the surrounding dunes. Punctures on the building allow daylight to penetrate the interiors and expose desert views. These voids offer multilevel balconies at their perimeters. The majority of the program is elevated 70 meters above grade in the tower portion, while both glazed edges of the building are flanked by vertical walking gardens that act both as a strategy for air quality improvement and a place to enjoy nature for visitors and residents alike. The circulation is sensitive to the development of the technology and the researchers by physically separating visitor tours, but allowing visual access to the components of production. The design proposes a new tower typology that acts as a blend between the horizontal and vertical building elements through its peeling facade that functions also as a roof. The main elevations of the building’s facade are opaque, an unusual materiality for towers, but are interrupted with negative spaces, assuring that daylighting will fill the interiors.

GROUND FLOOR PLAN

LOWER LEVEL PLAN

SECTION

SECTIONAL CHUNK MODEL

PERSPECTIVE

RENDERED OBLIQUE PLAN

SEEING DOUBLE Undefined Site Critic: Thomas Leeser & Alican Taylan Our societies are saturated with imagery. This imagery often is our form of visually engaging individuals, as well as a method of communication. This immersion in visual stimulation is seemingly constant and is inarguably shaping and reshaping our understanding of our world. When these images are generated in unfamiliar ways and apparatuses of seeing, new realities begin to emerge. This begins to allow the promotion of a progressively homogenized understanding of our environments. There is a multiplicity of strategies for seeing, both in reality as well as artificially constructed. The task of the studio is not necessarily to perform a trick of the eyes, but to instead make people aware of their environment in a new way. People often make assumptions of how space behaves and is visually organized. The intention of these following projects is to develop schemes of representation that radicalize the perception of space, achieved through the exploration of various strategies of visual culture throughout history. This marries references from the past and speculates on the constructs and potentials of the future. Study 01 exhibits the reverse perspective. The confusion of the view is realized by integrating in with normal conditions. There are moments when the object appears to be going away from the gaze, when it is actually coming towards the spectator, vice versa. Study 02 implements the excessiveness of a familiar component, the window. Through variations in offsets, scales, alignments, and elongations, this strategy is executed in 2D and 3D. This produces an unclear depth and reference in size for the adjacencies. Study 03 analyzes disguising true depth and quantity. Depending on the vantage point, it can be read as very flat, frontal, homogeneous, and non-hierarchical. The legibility can also display a distorted pattern projection with geometry now as separate parts. Study 04 specifically examined anamorphic precedents and the way this technique could be applied to misalign reality and image. This exercise displays different portions of the facade in shifting locations. In one facade shadows protrude forward, in another everything is completely flat, etc. They do, however, all appear the same in elevation.

STUDY 01 REVERSE PERSPECTIVE, AXONOMETRIC

STUDY 02 OFFSET, DIMENSION, & SCALE, SECTIONAL ELEVATIONS

STUDY 02 OFFSET, DIMENSION, & SCALE, PHYSICAL MODEL

STUDY 03 RAZZLE DAZZLE ARCHITECTURE, PHYSICAL MODELS

STUDY 03 RAZZLE DAZZLE ARCHITECTURE

STUDY 04 ANAMORPHIC STUDIES

STUDY 04 ANAMORPHIC STUDIES, PHYSICAL MODEL

FILM SCHOOL TOWER - ARCH 703 Brooklyn, New York Critic: Kutan Ayata This projects seeks to reject the accepted notion of what housing is by analyzing the distribution of shared living spaces. This translates into reorganizing what we expect opposing private and public modes of living to be. This idea of shared living generates new potentials within these adjacencies for housing. The focus is to obtain a responsive, urban housing condition that illustrates a hybridization of live/work configurations. The design consists of two skyscrapers that conceptualize the slippage of residential segments into the larger community, blurring what is typically understood as opposite spatial functions. The larger tower of the two is for long-term residents, such as students and professionals within the film industry. The smaller is for transient residents and conceptualizes a housing model similar to a hostel where strangers are able to sleep in the same room. The hostel integrates successfully into the film school program by providing additional support for external visitors for film screenings, auditions, guest lecturers, etc. Both towers house alternating double-height living room areas that are only accessible to two levels and are located at the corners of each floor. This space is a result of the hallway peeling back and exposing this area, a consistent method in plan and section of how shared spaces emerge. There are portions of each level for film screenings, pre/post production, green rooms, and a series of spaces that filter into multi-level theaters. There is an intentional tension between the architecture and where it is sited, caused by a controlled and linear transition for an individual as they enter. Typical access to get inside is only through cantilevered bridges that extend over a deeply sunken site. The form was developed through the exploration of surface conditions. The surface conditions were generated through iterations of how a line turns into a curve, deviating from its origin, and generating both a planar and curved surface as one. Spatial interactions are interplays of isolation and exposition. The extension of the floor plate and ceiling puncture the facade, generating apertures and balconies, while walls peel back on themselves and create dropped ceilings. Each element is nestled within one another, making the constituents dependent on one another.

PLANS

75 SECTION 685070

685070

MASSING, PHYSICAL MODEL

SITE MASSING, PHYSICAL MODEL

PERSPECTIVE

SECTIONAL CHUNK MODEL

SECTIONAL CHUNK, PHYSICAL MODEL

CENOTAPH FOR PAUL VIRILIO Normandy, France Collaboration with Can Imamoglu & Alican Taylan “One day the day will come when the day will not come.” -Paul Virlio, 1995 Presented at the Aesthetics of Prosthetics exhibition in Fall 2019, this project is a homage to one of the most revolutionary architectural thinkers of the 20th century- Paul Virilio. For us, the writings he produced are complex, idiosyncratic, and crucial to understanding contemporary society. Virilio’s lifelong work theorized technology in relation to speed and its consequential correspondence to architecture. We are invested in his ideas related to radical architecture of the oblique. The concept of this project stems from two main concepts. The first is the infinite display of a video. Virilio writes about the disregard of the floor in terms of architectural application; most architect’s choosing to emphasize elements such as the wall, the roof, etc. After shifting the floor plates into an oblique angle, the video consumes the ground. A two-way mirror allows the imagery to come through and infinitely reflect on the ceiling mirror. The shift into an architecture of the oblique is the second idea this project handles. There are ramps circulating up throughout the building, however, they are flat on two sides. Although this is the component that takes you up, half of the time one is walking flat on what would typically be considered a floor. This is a direct reaction to the conception of the architectural oblique and produces an inversion of what we typically expect when occupying space. The design is derived and influenced by Paul Virilio’s assessment of “archaeological bunkers”. He speaks about these “altars erected as a concrete face with the emptiness of the ocean sea”, as seen in funerary architecture of mastabas and Etruscan tombs. His philosophies and own designs were heavily influenced by the typology and he establishes a critique on the monolithic, concrete structures that mark the architecture of that war era.

TWO-WAY MIRRORS, PHYSICAL MODEL

PERSPECTIVE

DIDEROT ASSEMBLAGE Brooklyn, New York Critic: Hart Marlow & Brian Ringley This project was completed during a summer workshop in which modes of representation using various mediums were explored. The Diderot Encyclopedia is a precedent for how this object was assembled and developed. Elements were derived from the encyclopedia, 3D modeled in both Rhinoceros and Maya, and laid out in a booklet to resemble the precedent. This particular object was designed by conceiving new parts, reconfiguring existing components, blending them together through similar geometrical adjacencies, and using hybridization to generate a new object and purpose. In this proposal, the object is a wall graffiti cleaner that is integral into its existing ornamentation, allowing it to maintain disguise. A sample model of the prototype was modeled, rendered, and collaged onto a photograph from the Manhattan Bridge pedestrian walkway.

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Fig . 1 . Fig. Pratt Institute. gaud

Nettoyant Pour Mur, dispositif d’enlèvement de graffiti.

PARTS DRAWING

Cat Wilmes

Pratt Institute. gaud

Nettoyant

dispositif d’enl

Pl. VII 6 . Fig. 6

Fig . 4 .

Fig. 5

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Fig. 4

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Fig. 3

Fig . 1 . Fig. 1

Pour Mur,

èvement de graffiti.

Cat Wilmes

Pratt Institute. gaud

Nettoyant Pour Mur ,

Fig. 2 Cat Wilmes

dispositif d’enlèvement de graffiti.

PARTS DRAWING

CUT-OUT DIAGRAMS

CHARGE STATION ATTACHMENT

CLEANER STORAGE

EXPANDABLE VACUUM HEAD CONDUIT

EXPANDABLE ELECTRICAL CONDUIT

VACUUM WASTE STORAGE

BRUSH HEAD RECEPTACLE

OBJECT COMPONENT DIAGRAM

CIAO