Kaitlin Miciunas Education 2006 - 2011
Fall 2010 Experience
Summer 2010
Spring 2010
Summer 2008
t| 1 630 901 3514 e| kaitlin.miciunas@gmail.com
Carnegie Mellon University, Pittsburgh |Bachelors of Architecture Thesis: Why is Architecture Becoming Obsolete University of Technology, Sydney | Study Abroad Urban Projection Masters Studio
Index 1. Light Museum [2007] 2. Epic Metals Competition [2009] with Matthew Huber 3. Urban Projection [2010] with Jessica Patterson 4. Urban Design Build Studio [2010] Roof Design: with Joshua Marshman 5. Thesis: [2011] Why is Architecture Becoming Obsolete? 6. Path Project [2006] 7. Unhealthy for Sensitive People [2010] with Ellen Garrett, Doug Farrell 8. Material and Assembly Studio [2008] 9. Gindroz Prize Exhibition [2009]
Carnegie Mellon University Urban Design Build Studio | CAFE 524 | Pittsburgh, PA Design and construction documents for Pittsburgh URA at 524 N Homewood Avenue. The project is scheduled for construction by 2013 Foundry Shop Monitor | Carnegie Mellon University | Pittsburgh, PA Welding monitor for steel sculpture projects using arc or stick welding, metal intert gas welding, tungsten inert gas welding, and oxyacetylene welding Cody Design Group | Naperville, IL Worked as an intern architect following my second year of undergraduate architecture school , on residential and commercial projects in the Chicago suburbs.
Exhibitions
April 2011
December 2010
June 2010
April 2010
April 2010 November 2009
March 2009 Awards
2011
2010
2010
2009
2008
2008
2008
2007 References
Skills
EDitIBLE | the FRAME | Pittsburgh, PA installation using the medium of dessert, creating the event of a temporal landscape INDEX 2010: End of Year Exhibition UTS | Kensington Street | Sydney, Australia Urban Projection Masters Architecture Studio project chosen for display and discussion Unhealthy for Sensitive People | UnSmoke Systems | Braddock, PA Welded installation of steel pipe components, constructed for an interactive experience 4th year design awards exhibition | CMU CFA 214 | Pittsburgh, PA One of 15 chosen students to display collection of work completed while at Carnegie Mellon Welding Exhibition | UnSmoke Systems | Braddock, PA Collaborative exhibit of student work completed in welding class taught by Dee Briggs E.Lines Exhibition | EDGE Studio | Pittsburgh, PA Independent installation of sound, drawings and models of embodied travel experience Inhabitable Network | the FRAME | Pittsburgh, PA Independent temporary show creating a field of surfaces described by hung phone book pages SURG Grant | collaboration with Alise Kuwahara Student Undergraduate Research Grant for art installation involving constructed edible event SEED Competition | First Prize National Winner | CMU Urban Design Build Studio | led by John Folan Project CAFE524, collaboration with ten other students for adaptive reuse community design SURG Grant | collaboration: Ellen Garrett and Doug Farrell Student Undergraduate Research Grant for welded steel installation occupying series of spaces Gindroz Prize | Travelling Scholarship Summer travel in Europe for two months researching public spaces and sounds Epic Metals Competition | Recipient: 2nd Prize | collaboration: Matthew Huber Proposal for water filtration research center along Pittsburgh bridge to commercial center NCMA Competition | Honorable Mention | Fire Tower Drawings for proposal using innovative masonry as main material NCMA Competition | Recipient: 2nd prize| Block System | collaboration: Liz Duray and Giacomo Tinari Milled block system using white foam and CNC, the block has variable use due to its form VELUX Light Competition | Honorable Mention | Light Museum Drawings for Museum Annex, using structural skin to create a gradient experience of daylit spaces Pablo Garcia Dee Briggs Kai Gutschow
pgarcia@cmu.edu dee@deebriggsstudio.com gutschow@andrew.cmu.edu
Adobe, Rhinocerous, VRay, Maya, Revit, ArchiCad, AutoCad, Grasshopper, Digital Fabrication Analogue Modeling, Analogue Drafting
9 4 1
8
6
2 7
Light Museum In response to the project brief for a museum annex accross the street from the Carnegie Art Museum. The museum is to provide space for works about or using light, with separate galleries for daylit, difused or artificially lit and art made for the dark. The project became about taking a position on the function of today’s museum; it’s egress, organization, identity, form. Museums are traditionally experienced as a series of void spaces, generally white rectangular prisms compiled and joined by a separate system of circulation. Artwork is viewed individually and sequentially, by each individual. The proposal inverts the separation of empty spaces to an integral whole, defined by the gradient change in light. The circulation is integrated into the gallery, however without a centralized cored. The layout and labrinth of path provides pockets of space for social interaction due to ambiguity in an undefined beginning and end of spaces. The structural skin system functions to control the amount of light entering the interior, so that the enveloping system becomes integral in structure, as well as the organizing system, as well as visual ornament. The museum then becomes a peice of work.
Epic Metals Competition The proposal for a water sanitation and research center along the bridge connecting the Waterfront big-box and shopping mall commercial center to the center city may seem arbitrary. Yet, as a submission for a three day charette competition for the sponsor of Epic Metals Inc., the integration between commercialization and desired function of the architecture works to develop the project in response to it’s site and required method and material for construction. the site at the waterfront provides inspiration of post-industrial pittsburgh, while using the versatile material of epic metals almost exclusively to create systems in response to and benefitting from the capitalist environment of the present-day waterfront. The bridge itself acts as a host to the research center, and in order to take full advantage, the potential for collecting rain and river water from above and below the bridge give purpose to encompassing the bridge in its entirety. Furthermore, the research center is to act as advertisment for water quality, providing sanitized water through a filtration system incorporated over the length of the bridge, powered by the river itself. The Epic Metals component of metal decking is used to construct the water collecting canopy over the bridge as well as a conveyor belt of production beneath it, leading consumers to the spectacle of the research center and integral to the production line of the sanitization process. People and product are moved by the gear incorporated decking system, providing commercial exchange with the connecting sites as well as service of pedestrian connection and knowledge of sustainable practice.
Urban Projection: Tunis, Tunisia A high speed rail line is proposed to connect the mediterranean loop, giving new context relationship to north african cities along the line. Using the urban representation of Piranesi’s Campo Marzio etching as precedent, and as response to the impact of an hsr line through Tunis, Tunisia, the proposal for the station and surrounding empty context recognizes existing potential of the city as a link along the mediterranean loop. Piranesi’s drawing can be understood as a series of clusters grown from existing buildings of Rome, to exand and fill the space in between with imaginary context, where the clusters are defined geometries, but make up a whole that is excessive in context and irreducible to a strategy in terms of urban organization.
The Tunis site is made up of three clusters, each with identity of differing spatial conditions. The station also acts as a connective link between the mediterranean and the city, as well as the city center to the proposed loop around the Tunis Lake, as well as pedestrian link under the existing highways and proposed rail line that is cutting the city off from the lake. The stations around the lake, then act as connective links along the transit line, as a public clip along the loop. Furthermore, empty sites existing along the loop of the lake are speculated as additional clusters, each with distinct and disparate identity, connected by the common line passing through all.
Viewing the spatial pattern of the city as a mirror of social contradictions and conflicts Manuel Castells writes:
“The result is not the coherent spatial logic, be it the capitalist city, the pre-industrial city or the ahistorical utopia, but the tortured and disorderly, yet beautiful patchwork of human creation and suffering.�
UBDS Studio: Roof Design The Urban Design Build Studio at Carnegie Mellon University, run by Professor John Folan, is a collaborative design studio with the intention of designing, and constructing a project for a Pittsburgh community in need. The studio was made up of eleven students, and went through an entire year of study from urban research and proposals to site and building design and construction documents for the neighborhood of North Homewood. The community is directly north from Point Breeze, one of the wealthy residential areas of Pittsburgh, while Homewood suffers from being disconnected by the busway overpass, and a surprisingly great number of abandonned houses and lots. Businesses run in Homewood are for the most part, mom-and-pop shops and barbeques, and many commercial attempts have been ill-received, bankrupt or suffered from the result of crime. The neighborhood in the 1970’s was a completely different environment - desired as for residential living. As people moved out to the suburbs, what has become of Homewood is largely unmaintained and forgotten. The UDBS studio recognizes the need in the community for a third place, a place other than work or home or school, for the people to feel welcome, comfortable, promoting a pride that the community does have. The project became an adaptive reuse of an existing abandonned building, originally built as a post office, later used as a church, and currently vacant, for the use of this third space. The client is from the community and plans to open a business incubator as well as the third space run as a coffee shop. The project has had many iterations based on client input, has been seen in Architecture Record, received national first prize from the SEED competiton, and is scheduled to be built in 2013. Due to there being eleven students working collaboratively on design, my efforts were given focus to the design of the roof of the additional second storey. The idea was to provide passive strategies as well as sustainable systems in order to provide a net-zero energy building, one that would not take a lot of funds to run or high maintenance, for the ease of the client to continue success in the future of the site.
Thesis Why is Architecture Becoming Obsolete? “The current hyperbol-ization of mere image-form… has given place to an unbelievably powerful renewed intuition that is already sweeping the playboys into oblivion and undoubtedly will continue to do so in the years to come. That intuition, whose first version marked the dawn of this century has taken a century to grasp: that form and architecture as such is no longer interesting, indeed can no longer make the slightest historical claim on our attention” Sanford Kwinter In a society obsessed with the living in the moment, we are without universal identity. the architecture practice is struggling to make.... architecture. Buildings constructed today are evaluated in terms of economic restraint, timely schedules, and provided services.
Architecture is not essential, threatened to the point of extinction, to be buried in self-indulgence and artistic expression. In the consumer driven society we call culture, the market values prioritize money and sex as commodity, unfortunately I’m not sure where that leaves the discourse of architecture.
While I am not interested in the idealization of architecture, the intent becomes that of a glorified billboard, as a feeble attempt of promoting the interests of the intellectual discourse that is, Architecture. The utility becomes an argument for experience rather than some utopian attempt for the ideal. Program in fact, then is not rigorous in terms of utility of space, however; in terms of experience required to fulfill its purpose, it becomes prescriptive in the way that advertisement is articulate and thoughtfully composed. The objective becomes a problem of translation as well as interpretation
Path Project The first year design project for a foot bridge in shenley park was done through an obsession of analogue iterations of modeling and drafting, The act of making helps to inform the geometry in a non-pre-determined system of relationships of parts, forming a cohesive whole. Design by the study of making and iterative critique allows for decisions to be made relative to parts, and within the duration of design, integrated with design, rather than prescribing it. Predetermined parameters of site and scale still enable a multiplicity of results.
Unhealthy for Sensitive People: Mock-up The United States Air Quality Index rates heavy industrial areas as “Unhealthy for Sensitive People�. Reinterpreting the harsh and unforgiving remains of post-industrial decay inspired by Braddock, this project heightens public awareness of the human condition yielded due to dependence on extinct industry. Sinuous joints between steel components establish a seamless network of volumes establishing complex relationships between space and occupant. The way in which one engages the work is rather physical in order to get through the space, drawn through by the promise of a lit stairway at the opposite end that leads no where, promotes a struggling experience through this heavy industrial material render here light and beautifully aggressive. The images are of the mock-up which is half scale and six components welded together. The final show included 36 components responding to the context of a cellar stairway down to an old mechanical room in what used to be a catholic school in Braddock, and is now run as an artists studio by the owner. The idea was also that choosing the site in Braddock would aid to bring activity to the community for the opening to a struggling post-industrial area, just outside of Pittsburgh.
Materials and Assembly Studio The second year brief for the material and assembly course is for the design of a library within an existing warehouse shed in Pittsburgh’s Southside. Upon entering the warehouse, the context is removed completely and the fact that one is in Pittsburgh is irrelevant - it is without view, without any distinct daylight, without connection to the outside. This is rarity in siting a library, usually easily identified by the public. The warehouse site allows for an emergence of program, a container host for the building parasite to consume. The library then, is allowed to form without reference to an urban context, dislocated from the exterior of the shed, it remains within. The project becomes a translation of geometries - parametrically restricted by the existing structure, the geometry becomes that of the warehouse upon contact. Yet, within the void, the dark volume the function inhabits, the geometry forms as an evolution of the simple shapes to more complex volumous forms in order to incorporate utility such as bookshelves. The space becomes a non-site, in its dislocation as it pulls away from its surrounding context that contains it. The structure incorporates layered steel gridded rods, assembled flat and then lifted and placed in foundation points to hold its complex form. The surface is then attached as a series of folded steel plate components distributed by geometry type depending on location within the space and surface use.
Original proposal was to travel to Paris, Berlin, and Vilnius for study. Ease of International public transportation makes it possible for impromptu travelling. As you can see, my proposal was editted.
Gindroz Prize Exhibition After travelling as the 2009 Gindroz Prize recipient, funded by the Marilyn and Ray Gindroz Foundation, the resulting flood of experiences led to an exhibition representing a personal comprehension of the places traversed. Eight European cities were chosen to further investigate through modes of visual representation and captured sound from public spaces, in order to express each as an identity through a translation of experience rather than image. Maurice Blanchot says, “Not only is the image of an object not the meaning of that object and of no help in comprehending it, but it tends to withdraw it from its meaning by maintaining it in the immobility of a resemblance that has nothing to resemble” (85). He goes on to say, “…once [object] has become an image; it instantly becomes ungraspable, non-contemporary, impassive, not the same thing distance, but that thing as distancing, the present thing in its absence, the thing graspable becomes ungraspable, appearing as something that has disappeared, the return of what does not come back, the strange heart of the distance as the life and unique heart of the thing” Cities Berlin, Dresden, Munich, Vilnius, Prague, Paris, Barcelona, and Lyon are captured as cognitive reinterpretations for display to then be reinterpreted by the viewer while listening to recorded found sound of each place. The resulting effect is a way of expressing a place without verbal explanation and without photograph or replication, but instead via communication through a recreated experience dislocated from its origin. For example, Berlin is perceived as a nodal network with a central cord running down Unter den Linten from river to garden. Sound and space alike are harsh, strong, distinctly identified. The reaction after walking and recording Berlin for 6 days is on the following spread.