Alexandra Karlsson Napp Portfolio
Project
Pita and Bloom Advanced Studio Easy Office
Instructor
Florencia Pita and Jackilin Hah Bloom with Miroslava Brooks
Description
When Roger Evans describes the shift from hierarchical space to space of heterogenous hemogeneity in eighteenth century English interiors, he describes an unnerving stylistic unity in the set-up of domestic scenes insisting on the “homogenisation of appearances” between body, dress, furniture, and architecture. As furniture moves away from either the edge or the center, varied elements are “distributed picturesquely across the floor, without evident formality” creating a subdivided room of complex and diverse geography.
The set-up can be seen as a series of spheres made small enough and complete enough to function as complete and intimate wholes. Translated to today’s office space an analogy can be made with tech offices, in which food is never more than 100 feet away and any of multiple contained spaces within the open office can function as ‘complete’. In this office multiple similar and easily accessed set-ups give an illusion of choice within a comfortable range of diversity.
In reaction to this, the project seeks to create a montage of distinct parts first combined into a whole and then cut up from that artificial completeness. The parts are shifted to create a series of incomplete wholes in tension with one another. The intent is to make worlds that are resist being spherical, that is closed and hermetic, but which are incomplete and dependent on one another. The forms are bounded and seemingly able to close, but leak into, cut into, or open up onto one another. Pattern and color are used to define regions as well as to denote their influence on other regions. This creates a tenuous and balanced composition.
Pictured
Object collection. Scenarios are created and formal relationships explored.
Project
Pita and Bloom Advanced Studio Easy Office
Instructor
Florencia Pita and Jackilin Hah Bloom with Miroslava Brooks
Description
When Roger Evans describes the shift from hierarchical space to space of heterogenous hemogeneity in eighteenth century English interiors, he describes an unnerving stylistic unity in the set-up of domestic scenes insisting on the “homogenisation of appearances” between body, dress, furniture, and architecture. As furniture moves away from either the edge or the center, varied elements are “distributed picturesquely across the floor, without evident formality” creating a subdivided room of complex and diverse geography.
The set-up can be seen as a series of spheres made small enough and complete enough to function as complete and intimate wholes. Translated to today’s office space an analogy can be made with tech offices, in which food is never more than 100 feet away and any of multiple contained spaces within the open office can function as ‘complete’. In this office multiple similar and easily accessed set-ups give an illusion of choice within a comfortable range of diversity.
In reaction to this, the project seeks to create a montage of distinct parts first combined into a whole and then cut up from that artificial completeness. The parts are shifted to create a series of incomplete wholes in tension with one another. The intent is to make worlds that are resist being spherical, that is closed and hermetic, but which are incomplete and dependent on one another. The forms are bounded and seemingly able to close, but leak into, cut into, or open up onto one another. Pattern and color are used to define regions as well as to denote their influence on other regions. This creates a tenuous and balanced composition.
Pictured
Object collages and vacuforms create new forms and relationships. They explore scale, color, pattern, and the space between two-dimensionality and three-dimensionality.'
Project
Pita and Bloom Advanced Studio Easy Office
Instructor
Florencia Pita and Jackilin Hah Bloom with Miroslava Brooks
Description
When Roger Evans describes the shift from hierarchical space to space of heterogenous hemogeneity in eighteenth century English interiors, he describes an unnerving stylistic unity in the set-up of domestic scenes insisting on the “homogenisation of appearances” between body, dress, furniture, and architecture. As furniture moves away from either the edge or the center, varied elements are “distributed picturesquely across the floor, without evident formality” creating a subdivided room of complex and diverse geography.
The set-up can be seen as a series of spheres made small enough and complete enough to function as complete and intimate wholes. Translated to today’s office space an analogy can be made with tech offices, in which food is never more than 100 feet away and any of multiple contained spaces within the open office can function as ‘complete’. In this office multiple similar and easily accessed set-ups give an illusion of choice within a comfortable range of diversity.
In reaction to this, the project seeks to create a montage of distinct parts first combined into a whole and then cut up from that artificial completeness. The parts are shifted to create a series of incomplete wholes in tension with one another. The intent is to make worlds that are resist being spherical, that is closed and hermetic, but which are incomplete and dependent on one another. The forms are bounded and seemingly able to close, but leak into, cut into, or open up onto one another. Pattern and color are used to define regions as well as to denote their influence on other regions. This creates a tenuous and balanced composition.
Pictured
The collages are made into a drawing which then becomes the basis for the plan of easy office.
Project
Pita and Bloom Advanced Studio Easy Office
Instructor
Florencia Pita and Jackilin Hah Bloom with Miroslava Brooks
Description
When Roger Evans describes the shift from hierarchical space to space of heterogenous hemogeneity in eighteenth century English interiors, he describes an unnerving stylistic unity in the set-up of domestic scenes insisting on the “homogenisation of appearances” between body, dress, furniture, and architecture. As furniture moves away from either the edge or the center, varied elements are “distributed picturesquely across the floor, without evident formality” creating a subdivided room of complex and diverse geography.
The set-up can be seen as a series of spheres made small enough and complete enough to function as complete and intimate wholes. Translated to today’s office space an analogy can be made with tech offices, in which food is never more than 100 feet away and any of multiple contained spaces within the open office can function as ‘complete’. In this office multiple similar and easily accessed set-ups give an illusion of choice within a comfortable range of diversity.
In reaction to this, the project seeks to create a montage of distinct parts first combined into a whole and then cut up from that artificial completeness. The parts are shifted to create a series of incomplete wholes in tension with one another. The intent is to make worlds that are resist being spherical, that is closed and hermetic, but which are incomplete and dependent on one another. The forms are bounded and seemingly able to close, but leak into, cut into, or open up onto one another. Pattern and color are used to define regions as well as to denote their influence on other regions. This creates a tenuous and balanced composition.
Pictured
Plan close-up
Project
Pita and Bloom Advanced Studio Easy Office
Instructor
Florencia Pita and Jackilin Hah Bloom with Miroslava Brooks
Description
When Roger Evans describes the shift from hierarchical space to space of heterogenous hemogeneity in eighteenth century English interiors, he describes an unnerving stylistic unity in the set-up of domestic scenes insisting on the “homogenisation of appearances” between body, dress, furniture, and architecture. As furniture moves away from either the edge or the center, varied elements are “distributed picturesquely across the floor, without evident formality” creating a subdivided room of complex and diverse geography.
The set-up can be seen as a series of spheres made small enough and complete enough to function as complete and intimate wholes. Translated to today’s office space an analogy can be made with tech offices, in which food is never more than 100 feet away and any of multiple contained spaces within the open office can function as ‘complete’. In this office multiple similar and easily accessed set-ups give an illusion of choice within a comfortable range of diversity.
In reaction to this, the project seeks to create a montage of distinct parts first combined into a whole and then cut up from that artificial completeness. The parts are shifted to create a series of incomplete wholes in tension with one another. The intent is to make worlds that are resist being spherical, that is closed and hermetic, but which are incomplete and dependent on one another. The forms are bounded and seemingly able to close, but leak into, cut into, or open up onto one another. Pattern and color are used to define regions as well as to denote their influence on other regions. This creates a tenuous and balanced composition.
Pictured
Plan close-up
Project
Pita and Bloom Advanced Studio Easy Office
Instructor
Florencia Pita and Jackilin Hah Bloom with Miroslava Brooks
Description
When Roger Evans describes the shift from hierarchical space to space of heterogenous hemogeneity in eighteenth century English interiors, he describes an unnerving stylistic unity in the set-up of domestic scenes insisting on the “homogenisation of appearances” between body, dress, furniture, and architecture. As furniture moves away from either the edge or the center, varied elements are “distributed picturesquely across the floor, without evident formality” creating a subdivided room of complex and diverse geography.
The set-up can be seen as a series of spheres made small enough and complete enough to function as complete and intimate wholes. Translated to today’s office space an analogy can be made with tech offices, in which food is never more than 100 feet away and any of multiple contained spaces within the open office can function as ‘complete’. In this office multiple similar and easily accessed set-ups give an illusion of choice within a comfortable range of diversity.
In reaction to this, the project seeks to create a montage of distinct parts first combined into a whole and then cut up from that artificial completeness. The parts are shifted to create a series of incomplete wholes in tension with one another. The intent is to make worlds that are resist being spherical, that is closed and hermetic, but which are incomplete and dependent on one another. The forms are bounded and seemingly able to close, but leak into, cut into, or open up onto one another. Pattern and color are used to define regions as well as to denote their influence on other regions. This creates a tenuous and balanced composition.
Pictured
Model view
Project
Pita and Bloom Advanced Studio Easy Office
Instructor
Florencia Pita and Jackilin Hah Bloom with Miroslava Brooks
Description
When Roger Evans describes the shift from hierarchical space to space of heterogenous hemogeneity in eighteenth century English interiors, he describes an unnerving stylistic unity in the set-up of domestic scenes insisting on the “homogenisation of appearances” between body, dress, furniture, and architecture. As furniture moves away from either the edge or the center, varied elements are “distributed picturesquely across the floor, without evident formality” creating a subdivided room of complex and diverse geography.
The set-up can be seen as a series of spheres made small enough and complete enough to function as complete and intimate wholes. Translated to today’s office space an analogy can be made with tech offices, in which food is never more than 100 feet away and any of multiple contained spaces within the open office can function as ‘complete’. In this office multiple similar and easily accessed set-ups give an illusion of choice within a comfortable range of diversity.
In reaction to this, the project seeks to create a montage of distinct parts first combined into a whole and then cut up from that artificial completeness. The parts are shifted to create a series of incomplete wholes in tension with one another. The intent is to make worlds that are resist being spherical, that is closed and hermetic, but which are incomplete and dependent on one another. The forms are bounded and seemingly able to close, but leak into, cut into, or open up onto one another. Pattern and color are used to define regions as well as to denote their influence on other regions. This creates a tenuous and balanced composition.
Pictured
Model View
Project
Pita and Bloom Advanced Studio Easy Office
Instructor
Florencia Pita and Jackilin Hah Bloom with Miroslava Brooks
Description
When Roger Evans describes the shift from hierarchical space to space of heterogenous hemogeneity in eighteenth century English interiors, he describes an unnerving stylistic unity in the set-up of domestic scenes insisting on the “homogenisation of appearances” between body, dress, furniture, and architecture. As furniture moves away from either the edge or the center, varied elements are “distributed picturesquely across the floor, without evident formality” creating a subdivided room of complex and diverse geography.
The set-up can be seen as a series of spheres made small enough and complete enough to function as complete and intimate wholes. Translated to today’s office space an analogy can be made with tech offices, in which food is never more than 100 feet away and any of multiple contained spaces within the open office can function as ‘complete’. In this office multiple similar and easily accessed set-ups give an illusion of choice within a comfortable range of diversity.
In reaction to this, the project seeks to create a montage of distinct parts first combined into a whole and then cut up from that artificial completeness. The parts are shifted to create a series of incomplete wholes in tension with one another. The intent is to make worlds that are resist being spherical, that is closed and hermetic, but which are incomplete and dependent on one another. The forms are bounded and seemingly able to close, but leak into, cut into, or open up onto one another. Pattern and color are used to define regions as well as to denote their influence on other regions. This creates a tenuous and balanced composition.
Pictured
Model View
Project
Pita and Bloom Advanced Studio Easy Office
Instructor
Florencia Pita and Jackilin Hah Bloom with Miroslava Brooks
Description
When Roger Evans describes the shift from hierarchical space to space of heterogenous hemogeneity in eighteenth century English interiors, he describes an unnerving stylistic unity in the set-up of domestic scenes insisting on the “homogenisation of appearances” between body, dress, furniture, and architecture. As furniture moves away from either the edge or the center, varied elements are “distributed picturesquely across the floor, without evident formality” creating a subdivided room of complex and diverse geography.
The set-up can be seen as a series of spheres made small enough and complete enough to function as complete and intimate wholes. Translated to today’s office space an analogy can be made with tech offices, in which food is never more than 100 feet away and any of multiple contained spaces within the open office can function as ‘complete’. In this office multiple similar and easily accessed set-ups give an illusion of choice within a comfortable range of diversity.
In reaction to this, the project seeks to create a montage of distinct parts first combined into a whole and then cut up from that artificial completeness. The parts are shifted to create a series of incomplete wholes in tension with one another. The intent is to make worlds that are resist being spherical, that is closed and hermetic, but which are incomplete and dependent on one another. The forms are bounded and seemingly able to close, but leak into, cut into, or open up onto one another. Pattern and color are used to define regions as well as to denote their influence on other regions. This creates a tenuous and balanced composition.
Pictured
Model View
Project
Pita and Bloom Advanced Studio Easy Office
Instructor
Florencia Pita and Jackilin Hah Bloom with Miroslava Brooks
Description
When Roger Evans describes the shift from hierarchical space to space of heterogenous hemogeneity in eighteenth century English interiors, he describes an unnerving stylistic unity in the set-up of domestic scenes insisting on the “homogenisation of appearances” between body, dress, furniture, and architecture. As furniture moves away from either the edge or the center, varied elements are “distributed picturesquely across the floor, without evident formality” creating a subdivided room of complex and diverse geography.
The set-up can be seen as a series of spheres made small enough and complete enough to function as complete and intimate wholes. Translated to today’s office space an analogy can be made with tech offices, in which food is never more than 100 feet away and any of multiple contained spaces within the open office can function as ‘complete’. In this office multiple similar and easily accessed set-ups give an illusion of choice within a comfortable range of diversity.
In reaction to this, the project seeks to create a montage of distinct parts first combined into a whole and then cut up from that artificial completeness. The parts are shifted to create a series of incomplete wholes in tension with one another. The intent is to make worlds that are resist being spherical, that is closed and hermetic, but which are incomplete and dependent on one another. The forms are bounded and seemingly able to close, but leak into, cut into, or open up onto one another. Pattern and color are used to define regions as well as to denote their influence on other regions. This creates a tenuous and balanced composition.
Pictured
Model View
Project
Pita and Bloom Advanced Studio Easy Office
Instructor
Florencia Pita and Jackilin Hah Bloom with Miroslava Brooks
Description
When Roger Evans describes the shift from hierarchical space to space of heterogenous hemogeneity in eighteenth century English interiors, he describes an unnerving stylistic unity in the set-up of domestic scenes insisting on the “homogenisation of appearances” between body, dress, furniture, and architecture. As furniture moves away from either the edge or the center, varied elements are “distributed picturesquely across the floor, without evident formality” creating a subdivided room of complex and diverse geography.
The set-up can be seen as a series of spheres made small enough and complete enough to function as complete and intimate wholes. Translated to today’s office space an analogy can be made with tech offices, in which food is never more than 100 feet away and any of multiple contained spaces within the open office can function as ‘complete’. In this office multiple similar and easily accessed set-ups give an illusion of choice within a comfortable range of diversity.
In reaction to this, the project seeks to create a montage of distinct parts first combined into a whole and then cut up from that artificial completeness. The parts are shifted to create a series of incomplete wholes in tension with one another. The intent is to make worlds that are resist being spherical, that is closed and hermetic, but which are incomplete and dependent on one another. The forms are bounded and seemingly able to close, but leak into, cut into, or open up onto one another. Pattern and color are used to define regions as well as to denote their influence on other regions. This creates a tenuous and balanced composition.
Pictured
Rendered office situations
Project
Pita and Bloom Advanced Studio Easy Office
Instructor
Florencia Pita and Jackilin Hah Bloom with Miroslava Brooks
Description
When Roger Evans describes the shift from hierarchical space to space of heterogenous hemogeneity in eighteenth century English interiors, he describes an unnerving stylistic unity in the set-up of domestic scenes insisting on the “homogenisation of appearances” between body, dress, furniture, and architecture. As furniture moves away from either the edge or the center, varied elements are “distributed picturesquely across the floor, without evident formality” creating a subdivided room of complex and diverse geography.
The set-up can be seen as a series of spheres made small enough and complete enough to function as complete and intimate wholes. Translated to today’s office space an analogy can be made with tech offices, in which food is never more than 100 feet away and any of multiple contained spaces within the open office can function as ‘complete’. In this office multiple similar and easily accessed set-ups give an illusion of choice within a comfortable range of diversity.
In reaction to this, the project seeks to create a montage of distinct parts first combined into a whole and then cut up from that artificial completeness. The parts are shifted to create a series of incomplete wholes in tension with one another. The intent is to make worlds that are resist being spherical, that is closed and hermetic, but which are incomplete and dependent on one another. The forms are bounded and seemingly able to close, but leak into, cut into, or open up onto one another. Pattern and color are used to define regions as well as to denote their influence on other regions. This creates a tenuous and balanced composition.
Project
A building that interrogates the idea of lateness
Instructor
Peter Eisenman with Elisa Iturbe
Collaborators
Ian Donaldson
Description
The avant-garde is linear. Adorno’s conception of Lateness, on the other hand, rejects ideological progress and Hegelian notions of time.
This project attempted to construct a problematic relationship between the operational methodology of the deconstructivists, the root of the digital in architecture today, and at the other hand contemporary fluid parametricized systems. Our site, adjacent to the center of New Haven’s Nine-Square Grid and along the axis of Sterling Memorial Library and Cross-Campus, led to a prioritization of the imaginary or virtual conditions of the site to challenge the intense linear axis and physical presence of Sterling Memorial Library. The collision of the linear grid, from Sterling, and virtual radial grid from the center of the 9-squares attempt to challenge the fascination in contemporary discourse of presence, iconicity and the physical properties of architectural objects.
Pictured
Initial (individual) study of Oswald Mathias Unger’s German Architecture Museum. We started the semester drawing and analyzing what we deemed the ‘late’ works of Rossi, Stirling, and Ungers. Also pictured is a Thursday morning critique. Ian and I are standing in front of our models and sketches.
Project
A building that interrogates the idea of lateness
Instructor
Peter Eisenman with Elisa Iturbe
Collaborators
Ian Donaldson
Description
The avant-garde is linear. Adorno’s conception of Lateness, on the other hand, rejects ideological progress and Hegelian notions of time.
This project attempted to construct a problematic relationship between the operational methodology of the deconstructivists, the root of the digital in architecture today, and at the other hand contemporary fluid parametricized systems. Our site, adjacent to the center of New Haven’s Nine-Square Grid and along the axis of Sterling Memorial Library and Cross-Campus, led to a prioritization of the imaginary or virtual conditions of the site to challenge the intense linear axis and physical presence of Sterling Memorial Library. The collision of the linear grid, from Sterling, and virtual radial grid from the center of the 9-squares attempt to challenge the fascination in contemporary discourse of presence, iconicity and the physical properties of architectural objects.
Pictured
Building aperture diagram and site strategy diagram.
Project
A building that interrogates the idea of lateness
Instructor
Peter Eisenman with Elisa Iturbe
Collaborators
Ian Donaldson
Description
The avant-garde is linear. Adorno’s conception of Lateness, on the other hand, rejects ideological progress and Hegelian notions of time.
This project attempted to construct a problematic relationship between the operational methodology of the deconstructivists, the root of the digital in architecture today, and at the other hand contemporary fluid parametricized systems. Our site, adjacent to the center of New Haven’s Nine-Square Grid and along the axis of Sterling Memorial Library and Cross-Campus, led to a prioritization of the imaginary or virtual conditions of the site to challenge the intense linear axis and physical presence of Sterling Memorial Library. The collision of the linear grid, from Sterling, and virtual radial grid from the center of the 9-squares attempt to challenge the fascination in contemporary discourse of presence, iconicity and the physical properties of architectural objects.
Pictured
Final Model and Site Model
Project
A building that interrogates the idea of lateness
Instructor
Peter Eisenman with Elisa Iturbe
Collaborators
Ian Donaldson
Description
The avant-garde is linear. Adorno’s conception of Lateness, on the other hand, rejects ideological progress and Hegelian notions of time.
This project attempted to construct a problematic relationship between the operational methodology of the deconstructivists, the root of the digital in architecture today, and at the other hand contemporary fluid parametricized systems. Our site, adjacent to the center of New Haven’s Nine-Square Grid and along the axis of Sterling Memorial Library and Cross-Campus, led to a prioritization of the imaginary or virtual conditions of the site to challenge the intense linear axis and physical presence of Sterling Memorial Library. The collision of the linear grid, from Sterling, and virtual radial grid from the center of the 9-squares attempt to challenge the fascination in contemporary discourse of presence, iconicity and the physical properties of architectural objects.
Pictured
Model close-up
Project
A building that interrogates the idea of lateness
Instructor
Peter Eisenman with Elisa Iturbe
Collaborators
Ian Donaldson
Description
The avant-garde is linear. Adorno’s conception of Lateness, on the other hand, rejects ideological progress and Hegelian notions of time.
This project attempted to construct a problematic relationship between the operational methodology of the deconstructivists, the root of the digital in architecture today, and at the other hand contemporary fluid parametricized systems. Our site, adjacent to the center of New Haven’s Nine-Square Grid and along the axis of Sterling Memorial Library and Cross-Campus, led to a prioritization of the imaginary or virtual conditions of the site to challenge the intense linear axis and physical presence of Sterling Memorial Library. The collision of the linear grid, from Sterling, and virtual radial grid from the center of the 9-squares attempt to challenge the fascination in contemporary discourse of presence, iconicity and the physical properties of architectural objects.
Pictured
Wormseye view.
Project
A building that interrogates the idea of lateness
Instructor
Peter Eisenman with Elisa Iturbe
Collaborators
Ian Donaldson
Description
The avant-garde is linear. Adorno’s conception of Lateness, on the other hand, rejects ideological progress and Hegelian notions of time.
This project attempted to construct a problematic relationship between the operational methodology of the deconstructivists, the root of the digital in architecture today, and at the other hand contemporary fluid parametricized systems. Our site, adjacent to the center of New Haven’s Nine-Square Grid and along the axis of Sterling Memorial Library and Cross-Campus, led to a prioritization of the imaginary or virtual conditions of the site to challenge the intense linear axis and physical presence of Sterling Memorial Library. The collision of the linear grid, from Sterling, and virtual radial grid from the center of the 9-squares attempt to challenge the fascination in contemporary discourse of presence, iconicity and the physical properties of architectural objects.
Pictured
Plan drawing.
Project
A building that interrogates the idea of lateness
Instructor
Peter Eisenman with Elisa Iturbe
Collaborators
Ian Donaldson
Description
The avant-garde is linear. Adorno’s conception of Lateness, on the other hand, rejects ideological progress and Hegelian notions of time.
This project attempted to construct a problematic relationship between the operational methodology of the deconstructivists, the root of the digital in architecture today, and at the other hand contemporary fluid parametricized systems. Our site, adjacent to the center of New Haven’s Nine-Square Grid and along the axis of Sterling Memorial Library and Cross-Campus, led to a prioritization of the imaginary or virtual conditions of the site to challenge the intense linear axis and physical presence of Sterling Memorial Library. The collision of the linear grid, from Sterling, and virtual radial grid from the center of the 9-squares attempt to challenge the fascination in contemporary discourse of presence, iconicity and the physical properties of architectural objects.
Casting experiments have centered around the distribution of color through exploration of different means of hybrid manual and digital 3D printing.
with Jack Lipson and James Coleman
The loop is part existing and part invention. It affects and is affected by urban space-time. They can work at various scales and through different means to mitigate the multiplicities of ever-changing inputs. The city can through loops be understood via play, engagement, estrangement and association-as a story infinitely reread and continuously misunderstood.
Every day you must relearn the world. The loop is an open system. It’s about experiencing the same view, thought, or event again and discovering that nothing is ever the same.
Usually the state of being on loop becomes apparent through the experience of a knot of loops, a kind of materialization of friction. The loops themselves contain no friction, rather present themselves through it. The loops do not necessarily contain or intersect, but mutate and overlap. They are reentrant. The acts of wandering and discovery become nested in this idea. The city can thus grow through reinterpretation, governed by the frictions and flows of particular desires. This isn’t so much a new frontier. The frontier doesn’t so much exist anymore. Everything has been claimed. Instead it’s about the elimination of structures that existed before that opens things up to the possibility of making new ones. It’s about the strength of your connections, not their organization. This is what helps you move from one point to the next.
Project
Second year fall semester-long project
Instructor
Emily Abruzzo
Location
165 Cadman Plaza East, just off the Brooklyn Bridge
Description
The project uses the two themes bend and pattern to create a seamless formal language that is expressed at multiple scales in the project from the landscape to the walls to the furniture design and layout. This allows for a civic building that retains its primacy as an office space while integrating the large built mass and neighboring smaller public outreach building to the proposed site within a prominent public park in Brooklyn.
The patterned tile blocks delineate pocketed hardscape areas within the park and circulation patterns within the building. Patterns are used as graphic elements that are suggestive of defined movements throughout the built environment, not acting as overtly or prescriptively as signage or physical barriers. These ‘half-coded’ areas denote zones that define spaces or areas of operation while still allowing for a seamless and continuous total experience.
The bend reinforces this experience by erasing hard edges and corners expressed for instance as panoramic walls or desk spaces made out of systems of aggregate circles and filleted corners. The result is spaces that are neutral enough to feel a bit disorienting. You’re not quite sure how to use it, but more importantly you see potential in it. Herein inhabitation patterns are adaptable as the building’s programatic needs shift from day-to-day operations to states of emergency.
Project
Individual proposal for subsequent built project
Instructor
Andrew Benner, Alan Organschi, Adam Hopfner
Location
180 Winthrop Ave. in New Haven, CT
Description
The project looks at the home as a series of shells taking aesthetic and functional cues from veins of thought circulating and formulating the American home. The house references Reyner Banham’s ‘The house is not a home’ with ideas about thin walls enclosing the mechanised reality of modern living. It also takes the ideo of the ubiquitous balloon frame and uses this in a way not limited to the exterior enclosure, but as a way to create freely articulated interior walls to interrorgate possible views and relationships within the home.
Layers of varying transparency modulate the residential space from thick concrete blocks creating highly private thermally and visually enclosed sleeping spaces to open, glazed walls making for sunlit and airy walkways. By creating these varied shells and employing simple means of aperture between them, new ways of living can be discovered. For instance, bedroom shutters can be open or closed onto communal space creating an audio corridor onto familial spaces and a visual corridor out onto the streetscape. Liberal use of curtains allow for easy closing off or opening up of the communal space.
This project was a month-long investigation which was later one of a series of proposals selected for further inquiry in the group phase of the Yale 2016 building project resulting in a built two family house on the proposed site.
Project
First year M. Arch I three week long project to create a seed vault and surrounding program
Instructor
Joyce Hsiang
Location
Yale University Science Hill
Description
The project seeks to to find a way that agriculture and food production can be brought closer to the public sphere. It takes the urban residents’ separation from the production of their food as alarming and unnecessary.
By de-optomizing the techniques of industrial farming and traditional rows of irrigated crops, several advantages are made apparant. Creating small crop-circles around an automized sprinkler system creates a park/farm and a watering system/public fountain show. Uninterrupted meandering paths are possible between these circular patches cultivating for instance eggplant, radishes, potatoes, or lettuce. Small plots of land make for better crop rotation and technological measures making possible precisely managed soil and water levels allow for improved research funtions. Gastronomic and research facilities share space taking advatage of the project’s location at an instution of higher learning as well as nearby farming and urban food initiatives.
The public is invited to view and walk through the growing produce and visit an on-site greenhouse/research facility/cafe. The project thus encompasses the full cycle of food production from seed germination and cultivation, to processing and cooking, to finally consumption and composting.
Work Experience
SOFTlab is a firm based in New York City founded and led by Michael Szivos. During my time there the office varied in size from three to eight full-time employees.
My experience at SOFTlab consisted of working on small design teams or medium-sized install teams, leading projects, or working solo on smaller installations or fabrication projects. I worked on all phases of design and fabrication including grasshopper scripting, 3d modeling, logistical tasks, materials sourcing, managing interns, making drawing sets, and communicating with outside fabricators and clients.
Most projects were designed and pre-fabricated in house and installed in galleries, shops, or event and hospitality spaces. The projects were technically instensive with a heavy focus on detailing.
3D printing as distribution method opens up for pattern-making and localized color variation integral to the built form. Pictured distribution methods propose both a designed method, where prescribed instructions can be designed or premediated by the architect, as well as a time-based deployment where the final color scheme is a result of the building process. Instead of merely applied, color becomes algorithmic, descriptive of instructions performed in a prescribed sequence and deviation there from.In this continuous flow of material, color is capable of showing differences. Whether a visual cue or manifestation of spatial reasoning, color maintains a clear parallel to the empirical providing a bridge from the digital or premediated, where colors exist as numbers, to the material as light interactions making differences intelligible to human vision.
Project
First year M. Arch I five week long project
Instructor
Joyce Hsiang
Location
Bushwick, Brooklyn, New York
Description
The proposed library seeks to create a curated path through a crafted landscape. Dispersed clouds transmit images, sounds, video, and text locally to personal devices. In this way the project seeks to give digital media a location in space, with different stimuli only accessible through travel. The concept allows a curatorial approach to the distribution of information. The ordering of images and sounds must be crafted first by a curator or artist. The user then chooses a path through causing a mingling of impressions.
Inside the library, catladders allow entrance into the artificial clouds. On the interior all external signals are blocked, creating dead zones. These are places meant to provide contrast and accommodate focused thought. The ground floor is littered with impressions of the clouds up above, here forming soft indents, a kind of watering hole to facilitate a small group of people within a communal space.
WORK