After my final model from last summer was somehow misplaced in the trash, then the compactor where it was crushed into a little cube before being placed in a trash barge a mere 36 hours before the final review, five months later the lazy days of winter break seemed like a good time to rebuild. One of the benefits of digital fabrication is you just have to re-lasercut all the files, though there is a certain level of zen like calm in folding and gluing 300 panels. The modular panels and truss were created in grasshopper, then scripted in rhino to unroll onto sheets.
Quick Project Description: In America, the most active civic space is no longer public plazas or parks, but rather a new typology—“town centers”—Mall/Promenade hybrids of housing, public space, and shopping. This is where people gather, and into each of these places a civic function is inserted—political debate arenas where the viewer is no longer passive but takes an active role in the decision process, and is loudly confronted with a newfound political reality.
The project becomes a version of American Flag 2.0, something that doesn’t only wave from above in the wind, but rather demands work, a back and forth engagement between voter and candidate. The goal is that these can be sold to these town centers and through their sheer ubiquity and the rise of spectacle as a means of increasing shopping revenue, these proposals become the new American generic space.
Moving forward from midterm, I began identifying eight specific sites in the six battleground states that will have the most impact on the 2008 election. Two sites were explored further, specifically the purplest county – Franklin – in the purplest state – Ohio – located in the Columbus metroplex area. The Easton Town Center in Ohio displays a number of contradictions, home to the largest university in the country, but also numerous military contracting connections, including North American Aviation which manufactured components for the B-1 bomber in addition to missiles and guidance systems.
Each site was chosen not only for its status as a battleground state, but also as the 21st century incarnation of what constitutes public and civic space in America today, the outdoor shopping, dining, living spaces that are labeled as the new urban Town Centers, evolutions of the 1970s covered mall. If the goal is to affect and inform the greatest number of voters/shoppers, this is where the project would have to go, a placeless place lacking any form of civic engagement
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We had free range of the lab last summer, and tried to use as many of the machines as possible: waterjet aluminum, foam milling with plaster casting, and metal cnc milling of a 1″ thick slab of aluminum (inaugural use!) for the joint capsules. It all came together in five minutes, ten minutes before the presentation.
The project team also included Brad Engelsman and James O’Meara
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image credit: piratedesign and Randall Stout Architects.
I was the part of the design team for this invited competition project and represented Randall Stout Architects among competitors Zaha Hadid Architects, Morphosis and Coop Himmelb[l]au. The museum, on the Michigan State University campus, will become the new location for the Broad art collection and will mark the northern entry point of the campus as the college’s most iconic building. I worked closely with the principal-in-charge Randall Stout to manifest the design ideas into physical form, and led a group of four designers.
The building design respects the site and campus history by providing a place of solace, a clearing in the woods, in recognition of a campus ground plane surrounded by wilderness. This project sets out to define a new sense of place by giving over the ground plane to gardens, art and community gathering and events spaces. The building touches the ground in a minimal manner and reads as an extension of the sculpture garden. The site becomes a permeable space allowing accessibility through the building for students and visitors as the building forms hover above the tree canopies.
The building forms are influenced by the scientific principles of emergence, which recognizes the ability of individual cells to respond to stimuli and influence the behavior of the whole organism. Here, the relationship between the functional gallery boxes and celebratory public spaces becomes the agent of form, resulting in a new museum language that yields a seamless convergence between domains of art and community. It expresses the needs of artist and curator as fluently as the iconic presence of a cultural arts center for the community.
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Whenever you have a computer course at a university, there’s always a struggle to make it more than just about being a software jockey. The ultrareal course did a good job straddling the line of teaching us to use the program, 3ds max, but also thinking about different techniques of representation. I used my studio project from the summer as a testing base, both because I wanted some new images and it was convenient.
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This was an attempt to use an excel file to control the openings of a number of powercopies in catia. There is a lot of potential in creating a hive of components that can be individually optimized through excel and modeFrontier. If I get some time, I want to come back to this.
This was an initial experiment setting up a parametric model in catia that could be tested and optimized in modeFrontier. The goal of the test was to (1) determine the shape of a base surface and (2) calculate the optimal circle radius, that would create an optimal component suface with a minimal amount of circles that maximized the total area. The results produced both a flat surface with a few large circles and a more highly deformed surface that included more tightly packed circles.
image copyright randall stout architects
This was one of the first projects I worked on after getting out of the University of Texas, and I was lucky it was an exciting one. I followed this project from its inception as a winning competition entry up through the completion of the construction documents phase. I specialized in design, 3D modeling, drawing production and enclosure details on the 80,000sf museum. Main responsibility included the precise design of curvilinear geometry elements while generating ideas and coordination with DeSimone Structural Engineers and A.Zahner metal cladding to ensure integrity of design and fabrication aspects of the project. The project built in January 2010.
images copyright Randall Stout Architects unless otherwise noted.
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car/truck shape study model 14.5”x7”x5.5”
layers of bondo molded over a rectangular metal base
The perception of color is relative. The interaction of multiple colors creates a new relationship that alters the nature of the individual shades. The light quality in the project is important to the reading of the building shape, therefore, stable colors were chosen that are also dull, cool and light. The value of the red/blue colors were the same, creating an underlying unity while also influencing the perception of the forms reflecting in sunlight – and hidden in shadow. The colors reinforce the overall formal gesture while maintaining the indivual integrity of the facets. This was the third component of the Shape Studio, the first component can be viewed here.
Far too often the ones advocating increased public transportation are absent when it came to riding public buses. The capital metro brand has become too associated with a misrepresentation of resources and nondescript buses. We proposed to do away with the old name and replace it with ‘Capital Area Transit.’ Much of the imagery for the logo and design of the bus stop came from ‘CAT,’ the idea of nimbleness and sharp vision. This also created something inclusive, bringing more people together by a shared name that allowed the riders to give the transit system their own slang term, not an official nickname.
I wanted to simplify the contradictory organization method, and replace it with a more universal color-coding system: each route will be color-coded and each bus stop will correspond with the color of the bus. With television screens commonplace in automobiles and advertising becoming increasingly obtrusive, we sought to take this one step further: starting with the idea of the eye, I proposed fitting the buses with image protectors. Passing cars, buildings and people all become part of the image. Changing projection and led screens on the bus help target specific audiences. They can be programmed to display different images to specifically target economic and ethnic parts of the city. Also, the coveted rush hour times could bring in increased revenue.
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Since its creation as a defensive fortification during the war of 1812, Castle Clinton has undergone a series of reinventions. While the inner activities have changed, the solid masonry walls have withstood, providing a blank slate – or bowl – for new programmatic activities, from an immigration processing station to an aquarium to its latest iteration as a performance space for lower Manhattan and the centerpiece of a renovated Battery Park.
The challenge became how to maintain the ring shaped exterior walls, while creating a welcoming and inviting space for artistic expression. To both emphasize the existing historic walls and the new intervention, the differences between the two were played for maximum effect – avoiding any attempts at a formal or historic similarly. In stark contrast, each could maintain their individual sense of integrity: new vs. old, light vs. heavy, closed vs. open, solid construction vs. modern building techniques all became overriding principles. In addition, because the intervention is without enclosed volume, the relationship between sharp-inside and curved-outside corners were emphasized. Thomas Phifer was the studio critic for this project.
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The Challenge: 1) Analyze and choose a site along the 10.1 mile stretch of park along the Colorado River, which winds through Austin, creating Town Lake. 2) Design a space for artistic performances that is movable, able to transform into an “on” and “off” position.
The Solution: 1) A site was chosen in East Austin, near a rundown park in a neighborhood struggling with a lack of facilities for local children. This is in sharp contrast to other parts of Town Lake that are primarily used as walking and jogging trails for more affluent visitors. The site is also geographically unique, having an insular quality – surrounded by water on three sides – making possible a significant, central entry point. 2) A design was chosen that would still provide a functional purpose when the container was in its “off” position. With the rapidly declining public opportunities for skateboarding, the Performance Container was designed to transform into a skate park, providing a recreation center for the neighborhood. This was accomplished by creating three ribbons that lightly touch the ground and actively engage with the natural landscape of the site to create space. Like a roll of paper, each ribbon could be retracted or unfurled based on necessity.
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Part of the Adaptive Formulations visual studies course taught in conjunction with structural engineers from Buro Happold. We were designing parametric skin components in catia then using optimization software modeFrontier to generate a large design space of high performing designs. The size of the apertures of this system are dependent on the surface deformation of the underlying base surface, and I’m testing for a base surface with a maximum deflection that results in the largest aperture size.
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The program called for a combination of leisure activities that any college student is well acquainted with: bowling, drinking and washing laundry. The design reflects some of these playful qualities while also creating a ground, a city within a city. The building is meant to provide a strong presence in an area where the inhabitants are recycled every four years – perpetually created anew.
The design is separated along program and wraps itself protectively around a central sunken courtyard that provides shade and solace. The line between inside and outside is blurred through the use of roof gardens, cantilevered overhang spaces and the absence of a traditional central front door to the business. As opposed to one central building, the programmatic elements are separated into a collection of buildings, meant to evoke the layout of a college campus. Inhabitable outside void spaces were key and provide open areas for outside cafes and meeting spaces. Also, each program is expressed separately to accommodate differing hours of operation. The space is unified by a consistent structural grid of 20 x 45 feet.
The mechanical and support areas are articulated in a grouping of vertical towers. The towers reference both the separate programs as well as reinforce the idea of a place in and of itself. The building’s service areas contain vertical circulation, and the roof-packaged air conditioning units are localized in these towers. The collision of the service towers and program areas creates areas of complexity and spatial interest, while referencing the transient nature of the patrons and the interstitial urban gridwork of the University corridor.
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Increasingly, architecture is seen as an extension of the consumer culture, subjugated to the needs of the marketplace. Architecture becomes the physical manifestation of the brand, sharing common visual and ideological cues, as evidenced in fashion houses Prada and Hermes. The studio was tasked with designing a brand and then creating the architecture.
Not only is Austin the self-proclaimed “live music capital of the world,” but the site was located at the western edge of Sixth Street – the epicenter of the music/bar scene in Austin. With this in mind, the brand “LOT49” was born, with the intent of creating a symbiotic relationship with the music culture of Austin by selling fashion influenced by the music scene, as well as targeting musicians and aficionados with high-end speaker systems. The third element became the underground bar, a staple music lore.
The branding exercise became an exploration of coolness and authenticity through design – a natural hybridization when Marc Jacobs outfits Karen O and American Apparel supercedes The Gap. The project uses visual architectural cues/metaphors to tie into the world of music and fashion. Architecture can both reinforce – stay “on brand” – but can always transcend marketing, through the physical, reality of light, form and color.
This was also the first paperless studio project I worked on. I was fumbling around with lightwave 6.0 all semester. It’s incredible how far technology has come in four years.
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