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Columbia University GSAPP Master of Science In Advanced Architectural Design MSAAD 2016-2017 Academic Year Michelle Lozano michelle.lozano009@gmail.com www.elledomain.com 786 355 8893
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~ GSAPP MSAAD 2016 ~
FOREWORD book hard smear
animation shifting operations
animation altes shift
animation monstrous lust
In any city, it has an inscribed construction and destruction, it speaks to a past but deals with the present. The notion of time and how you move through it initiates a sense of derailment and creates a narrative. The three studio projects presented are on three different stages, three different locations, and contain separate objectives. Their identities are not reflected by the end product. Each of their paces vary, external factors shape the process and refrains it from being based on linear configurations; a drawing, a model, a render, an animation, a process does not follow a conventional order. The first setting comprises of a manifold of approaches to the site. It begins with the manipulation of pure geometries, yet through process it loses it’s explicit references. The second setting is positioned between a juxtaposition of the contemporary and historic built form, and the third adjusts to conditions while leaving traces of it’s path. In his book, “Gyroscopic Horizons”, Neil Denari sets a mood of impermanence. He deals with movement and the issue of where we are, how you move from location to location, and if there is a necessity of locating oneself. “A map does that. A building does that.” Referring to issues of identity and separation. He explores at different scales, ways that a person tries to deal with passage, and movement, and stasis. The projects illustrated here follow this notion.
The logo of EllE DOMAIN represents a link to my website. Throughout the portfolio the logo is shown with a image underneath it indicating an animation is a part of the production and process of a project. Please view it along with the printed version. The title beneath the image corresponds to it’s name on the website. I founded EllE DOMAIN in 2015 to continue experimentation focused on computational representation, and render generative process. The relation of design and media, and the result use of animation is enhanced reality that helps convey ideas.
animation monstrous lust
www.elledomain.com
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02
FOREWORD
03
INDEX
04
STILLS
ACADEMIA 06
HARD SMEAR
08
ALTES SHIFT
22
ANOMALOUS LUST
38
HIDDEN SPACES
PRACTICE 56
OUT OF VALLEY CENTRAL ATRIUM
ESSAY 60
REBOOTING FROM GENRES
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~ GSAPP MSAAD 2016 ~
A Night’s Dream: A Skeleton with a Heart
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Animation Stills
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~ GSAPP MSAAD 2016 ~
studio THESIS PREP advisor DEVYN WEISER theory advisor DORA EPSTEIN
HARD SMEAR VISUAL NARRATIVE OF MOVEMENT AND URBAN BLUR
research MUSEUM TYPOLOGY
book hard smear
Hard smear is an architectural thesis exploration based on figure, urban blur, and movement. Movement relates to circulation implications of a museum’s typology. The plans and diagrams below are an analysis that relates the site and circulation with it’s surrounding city context. From left to right, the Ibere Camargo Museum by Alvaro Siza is elevated on a mountain side where winding vertical movement dictates the gallery spaces and viewing of the art. Rohe’s Neue Nationalgalerie has a lollipop strategy and the enclosing glass walls bring the city back into the museum, expanding the space. Staatsgalerie by Stirling has several paths to circulate, however each one is directed with certain intentions to frame a space or transition. The second set of analysis redraws plans that illustrate exaggerated obscurity of the conditions of each project. The existing plan is altered to emphasize the relation of edges as the building is blurred within it’s context.
Ibere Camargo, Siza, 2007
Neue Nationalgalerie, Rohe, 1968
Neue Staatsgalerie, Stirling, 1984
Blur, Diller and Scofidio, 2002
Perot, Morphosis, 2012
Shanghai Expo, Heatherwick, 2010
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book excerpts
right page Berlin City Blocks is an art piece that unpieces blocks from the city grid. The individual components emphasize on figure or elevation, rather than on location, and their relation to the city becomes unclear.
left page Movement in the city; meander, flaneur, and parkour deal with how you experience architecture. The movements are interpreted and used as organizational strategies of moving through context and building.
left page The painting and art references create auras that exacerbate desire, or create urge to exhaust it. Techniques using soft brushes or tools for scraping and smearing are dependant on the medium to achieve desired result.
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~ GSAPP MSAAD 2016 ~
studio THESIS advisor DEVYN WEISER theory advisor DORA EPSTEIN location BERLIN GERMANY 52.5167° N, 13.3833° E program ART MUSEUM public areas galleries archive offices installations hardscape circulation systems
ALTES SHIFT A technique such as shifting, can offer ways in which pure geometries lose their explicit references. This thesis reconsiders the museum, from Schinkel’s Altes Museum to Mies’ Neue Nationalgalerie in Berlin. An Art Museum will explore the role of the plinth and the relationship with the ground, defining the location of the gallery spaces in position to the ground line. The pure form of city blocks has historically translated into specific formal typologies, reinforcing their conformity. This thesis seeks to overcome the homogeneity by introducing a heterogeneous set of formal relations. A strategy is to manipulate the uniform geometry of the blocks into single and discrete parts, detaching them from the city, and relating individual components to underline a hard figure. The thesis explores part-to-whole relationships at both typological and spatial scales, shifted through orientation, creating an outward form. Placing blocks within a triangular site challenges tension between figure and ground; while the manifold of approaches, and a constant social experience feed a need for an urban-oriented shift. Alt Shift is tested as means of breaking the ground. Ramps become the primary means of circulation, promoting how visitors see each other and come off the ground, coordinating movement to the experience. In turn of the technique, the interior responds to moments of tension, erasure, and instability while leaving discernible indications of an initial state
animation shifting operations
SITE PLAN/ BERLIN GERMANY/ N.52.E.013
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~ GSAPP MSAAD 2016 ~
SHIFTING OPERATIONS How do you create destabilization of spaces through hard geometry? Shift is referred to as morphological transformations of geometric form that disrupts a figure or object, creating multiplicity of form, or irrational form that protests dominant organization. The drawings and models are a result of multiplicities of interior operations such as rotation, intersection, and boolean. The interstitial spaces speaks to both the past and present of the city and its inscribed reconstruction.
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Section elevation model through main spine. The strategy is to manipulate the uniform geometry of the bar and cube, symbolic of the city blocks, into single and discrete parts, detaching them, and relating individual components.
Elevation of process model depicting hierarchy of geometry and scale.
Plan view of process model depicting axis, datum, and figure.
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~ GSAPP MSAAD 2016 ~
R°:1
Circulation Diagram
Altes Shift is tested as means of breaking the ground. Ramps become the primary means of circulation, promoting how visitors see each other and come off the ground, coordinating movement to the experience. The sub galleries and other program hang off the spine, it becomes the anchor to the context, and main axis of circulation. When you enter the building you immediately descend. There are routes to the galleries, upper levels, and going straight across using three systems, or types of movement.; a vertical narrative, the meander, and the procession.
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Altes, Schinkel / Neue Nationalgalerie, Rohe
The circulation diagrams analyze the internal logic of museums in Berlin, from Schinkels Altes museum to Mies’ Neue Nationalgalerie. It explores their movement and how they coordinate the relationship of circulation to the experience of the city. Primarily, it emphasizes their relationship with the ground, either sitting on the ground, above it, or in it.
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~ GSAPP MSAAD 2016 ~
R °:2
The museum has a direct visual connection to the Nationalgalerie and defines the location of the gallery spaces in position to the ground line. View from Neue Nationalgalerie animation altes shift
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Render
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~ GSAPP MSAAD 2016 ~
R°:3
Ground Manipulation
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Section
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~ GSAPP MSAAD 2016 ~
R°:4
Ground Plan
Positioning blocks within a triangular site challenges a tension between figure and ground. The plans show the irregularity of the fitting of geometry into a series of conventional galleries, underlining a shifting of the blocks. The geometries that are produced within and from this tension appear destabilized, however, all of the geometries, like the city itself, is arranged from a single axis. The “shift” resonates through the irregular appearance of their relationships.
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Plan Level 2
Views from the internal movement that bring the city back into it, provide the visitor with a sense of expectation. Altes Shift responds to moments of tension, erasure, and instability while leaving discernible indications of an initial state. Berlin itself is not important, it is not specifically about the city. The thesis is a form of reckoning, taking the ground, the form of the blocks, and the formal typology of the program that is strong within the city, and it produces specific geometric relationships. It responds to strong formal typologies.
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~ GSAPP MSAAD 2016 ~
R°:5
Site render with canal and entry to tunnel.
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Interior Render
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~ GSAPP MSAAD 2016 ~
design studio 4B XLAB instructor HERNAN DIAZ ALONSO at IVAN BERNAL collaborator RICARDO LLEDO location BARCELONA, SPAIN 41.3833° N, 2.1833° E program MUSEUM interior based function transitional space artifact galleries anomalies
ANOMALOUS LUST MUSEUM OF ANOMALIES The location of the museum is in a transitional space between two existing museums; one is of contemporary exhibitions while the other is based on the historic cultural of the city. The MACBA, Barcelona Museum of Contemporary Art, and the Contemporary Cultural Center CCCB. The juxtaposition of both styles drives the project in becoming a gateway, where it uses existing rustification as well as creating new moments. The museum is meant to exhibit artifacts only created by architects that do not pertain to any architectural formality.
animation monstrous lust
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~ GSAPP MSAAD 2016 ~
OBJECT CREATION: TEXTURE, BUTCHERING, AND STITCHING Object creation is a series of objects stitched together to form, in essence, a hybrid. The series experiments with density and disparity that formulates a whole from distinct elements. Hybrids patch or regenerate decaying material, leaving design scars and tracing voids. The objects intentionally do not depict a sense of scale, their nuances and articulation can hold any interpretation and any orientation. The Frankenstein concept creates something not recognizable, but with recognizable parts, it refrains from looking like something pre-determined.
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Optional Caption
Hybrid Object
The arrangement of surface conditions focuses on seams and ratios of smooth surfaces to textured. The hybrid is an anomaly with normalcy, it contains a degree of monstrosity and deformation in combination with part-to-whole relationships. The hybrid object above begins to explore an internal mechanism more so than external form. It expands or breaks apart it’s shell and creates a tension of containment as it spills apart and eats away onto the surface.
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~ GSAPP MSAAD 2016 ~
R°:7
R °:8
Circulation Wall R °:9
Apertures
3d Print
Proposal
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Section
Site Render
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~ GSAPP MSAAD 2016 ~
R°:10
Superimposition from different angles R°:11
Cut away superimposition
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Longitudinal Section
Cross Section
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~ GSAPP MSAAD 2016 ~
R °:12
Galleries are raised above the ground to peak curiosity as well as force vertical movement. The museum proposal not only exhibits anomalies but becomes a display of its own in the transitional space and interior of existing buildings. Facing CCCB from Alley way R °:13
A main circulation wall dictates the movement throughout the galleries. The aggregation is contained, but some augments and disperses to the existing load bearing walls, taking over parts of the adjacent museums. animation monstrous lust
Inside MACBA Facing Circulation Wall
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Exterior Elevation
Interior Elevation
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~ GSAPP MSAAD 2016 ~
R°:14
3-Layered Membrane
Exterior Render
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Exterior Circulation
Exterior Render
The membrane consists of three layers of skin that envelop the aggregated galleries. The scale of each layer is different, as it transitions into the interior, the membrane becomes denser. The apertures widen and expand on the exterior, where the skin serves as a structural element that sustains the protruding spaces. Entry to the museum of anomalies is via the existing buildings. Instead of designing a museum that occupies the footprint of the alley way, the existing walls thicken toward their interior in order to circulate and inhabit.
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~ GSAPP MSAAD 2016 ~
R°:16
Circulation Wall, Protuding Spaces
Interior Render
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Circulation Wall, Offset Levels
Interior Render
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Detail
~ GSAPP MSAAD 2016 ~
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Render
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~ GSAPP MSAAD 2016 ~
design studio 4A CITY OPS instructor DWAYNE OYLER location LOS ANGELES, CA 34.0500° N, 118.2500° W program JEWELRY MUSEUM public areas galleries archive offices installations hardscape circulation systems
HIDDEN SPACES Hidden spaces refers to the forgotten city within a city. A map of spaces that are not penetrated. Alleys in downtown Los Angeles occupy hundreds of linear miles that are unused and avoided, affected by the current environment of the location. The city analysis uses surface and line, or model and drawing, to denote the hidden spaces of alleys and emphasizes their intersections. Movement around these spaces is exagerated, where traveling a longer distance is preferred and shorter distances negated. The site chosen for the project is in the jewelry district, a jewelry museum between high-rise buildings that is constrained to its footprint but not its elevation. It is hidden in a narrow space that only gives clues to the city of its existence. Through the analysis drawings, I break down the cartisian system and derive from the city grid into meandering paths that begin to fluidly shape the museum.
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~ GSAPP MSAAD 2016 ~
R°:19
Connecting Alleys R°:20
One Alley/ Many Approaches
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Site & Context Analysis Drawing
Site Analysis Drawing
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~ GSAPP MSAAD 2016 ~
CITY AS LINE/ CITY AS SURFACE The role of line is to contribute to a seamless integration between the city and pedestrian scale. Line inhabits and adjusts to conditions as it moves through openings and voids while leaving traces of it’s path. In psychogeography, an unplanned journey through an urban context is subconsciously directed by the aesthetic contours of the surrounding architecture and geography. The goal is to encounter a place previously unseen.
Map of Alleys
Sectional City
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Digital process model revealing the implications of a narrow footprint.
Process styrene model uses linear elements to anticipate spaces and trace geometry. Surface intersections, surface density, and overall height are factors that are beginning to get introduced.
The model investigates how surfaces treat the corner, and how they turn and overlap with one another. The elongated striations disrupt the regularity of the ground in order to maintain a fluidity.
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~ GSAPP MSAAD 2016 ~
R°:21
Line as Structure
Styrene Model
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Process styrene model illustrating intersecting conditions and void penetrations. Lines adjust and react to empty spaces.
Lines condense in an open space where they move vertically without surface interference, yet to derail again when presented with the ground.
The adjacent buildings to the alley are represented in clear acrylic. The transparent material allows for a sectional reading in elevation.
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~ GSAPP MSAAD 2016 ~
R °:22
The sectional attributes of the model refrains from exterior walls. The surface edges attach alongside the adjacent buildings so the creation of an enclosure is unnecessary. Detail Capture of Interlocking Systems
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Styrene Model
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~ GSAPP MSAAD 2016 ~
R°:23
Program Massing
The digital model above denotes where program is situated within the voids of the striations. The massing illustrates a nestled approach, leaving the entrance at both street fronts with a gap, preseving it’s original draw. The highest point on the massing is located on the inside corner, reciprocating the monumentality of the downtown high rises. From there, the elevation begins to decrease and reach a scale that is relatable to pedestrians and storefronts, however it does not excede the footprints extent.
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TOP CANOPY VIEW
CONECTING PATH VIEW Views Standing in the model.
In the top view, a surface is split into separate directions. Layers peel off, then reconvene, framing spaces or building ramps. The next view sits underneath a canopy. This perspective is unrealistic in the sense that the framing beyond is never visible. Any moment turning the corner, or further in front or behind is imperceptible to the spectator due to the limited visibility of a narrow alley.
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~ GSAPP MSAAD 2016 ~
Alleys can be perceived as both surface and volume, from one perspective can register as volume and from another as surface edge. Edges are then translated into lines, they reveal and resolve directional expectations, behave as structure, and disrupt continuous navigations. They aid in providing a sense of expectancy and your position in the alley, yet lost from the city grid.
3d Map of Alleys
Density in Alley
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Jewelry Museum
Mix-media Model 2’ x 4’ base
The physical model contain a set of relationships that is evident among the iterations. A line never pierces through a surface, it always remains in connection with another line, and their is no stand-alone element. Lines are also a structural system or an extension of a surface edge, however it also exposes it’s individual system. A surface striation can act as floor, that becomes a wall, then levels again into a ceiling. It can continuously fold and bend, allowing for pockets of light to reach the lower levels, or cover the extent of the alley to formulate shade.
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Optional Caption
~ GSAPP MSAAD 2016 ~
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Date / Location
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Optional Caption
~ GSAPP MSAAD 2016 ~
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Date / Location
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~ GSAPP MSAAD 2016 ~
design DONGFENG MALL professional amphibianArc location ZHENGZHOU, CHINA 34.7667° N, 113.6500° E program SHOPPING MALL lifestyle retail food & beverage entertainment residential towers roof gardens objective shopping mall interior atrium spaces circulation
CENTRAL ATRIUM My task on this project was to design, 3d model, and produce the shopping mall interior. The design included the atrium spaces, escalators and elevators, storefront glazing layout, and ceiling lighting pattern. The visualizations on the right were not produced by me, however the perspectives, their layout, and the plans and sections were. The main atrium tapers to allow light to travel and disperse on the main floor. The wide span at the bottom gives visitors a greater sense of space when entering through the main courtyard. The spiral configuration appears in movement, parallels the flow of the mall circulation, and frames and provides views throughout the retail levels. The scissor escalators instead of acting as a gap or barrier between the curved panels, are positioned to visually continue and carry forward the spiral progression.
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~ GSAPP MSAAD 2016 ~
The mall has six stories, including programs for retail, dining, and entertainment. The layout achieved integrates good visibility for both the shopping mall and the surrounding lifestyle retail. To the south of the central atrium is a smaller, full-height opening that is treated with the same concept and technique. The design of the panels evident on the high rises and exterior of the mall, contain a similar expression of aesthetic. Curved openings are offset throughout the span, seams are located at level heights, and the geometry on the ends is tapered or setback. The atrium panels undulate, only connecting to the slab at floor heights. The handrails are glass, offering unobscured views through the openings. The idea of the interior design is to maintain a continuation of space, of movement, and to harmoniously transition between the exterior and adjacent programs.
Ground Plan & Plan Overlays
Section through Central Atrium
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Atriums, Storefront Glazing, & Columns
Diagrammatic Render
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~ GSAPP MSAAD 2016 ~
REBOOTING GENRES
THE LANDSCAPES OF THE PICTURESQUE INTERIOR Architecture’s tendencies in intertextuality lead to borrow metaphors from painting, or inspires “painterly ambitions.” However, it is not the techniques a painting entails to achieve its a effect, but something that is apparently seen, or sensed that initiates a sense of sublime. The inspiring awe, or veneration is an aesthetic quality that characterizes the Picturesque. “We never look for the sublime; it comes to us,” Burke states in his article The Sublime and the Beautiful. Pictorial values of architecture and landscape in combination with each other is understood as the conventional ideal of framing vistas. The relationship between buildings and their surroundings, containing qualities of irregularity, asymmetry, and texture in its visual compositions are qualities relocated in the interior picturesque. It is not specifically the composition of the natural, or garden to buildings, or inside buildings, but the reversed polarity of the pictorial frame, valorizing an artificial capture. Sylvia Lavin cited irregularity and promenade as two different aspects of the picturesque in her text Sacrifice and the Garden. Alongside is an image of the Moulin Joli, the first picturesque garden built in France in 1754, with clear substance on geometrical order, vistas, and composition. A tamed garden created for pleasure, combining the promenade with an artificial landscape setting. Imagining a diagrammatic map of genre, titled Promenade, entails subcategories of the values or elements that identify these aspects. Irregularity, asymmetry, and texture derive from pictorial values while beautiful, sublime, and setting define picturesque aesthetic ideals. Setting however, has two notations, the natural and the artificial, both relating the relationship of a building to its surroundings, not its close reading as an isolated object. Todd Gannon states in Raspberries, Rawhide, and Rhetoric “Payne’s decision to valorize an artificial composition over natural process is laudable.” Accelerating the weathering process of the shingles allowed for seamless cohesion between the built and the setting, thus emphasizing an aspiration for the ideal frame. Le Corbusier’s Villa Savoye begins its promenade procession with the villa framed between tree canopies and ending with trees framed in the opening of a wall on the roof. The visual composition, or framed capture, is relocated to the interior. On the other hand, Morphosis’ Perot Museum’s interior reads as the exterior. In the plan, the artificial setting of the hardscape focuses on the association between interior and exterior in the entry to the building; there is no hard line cementing the separation of spaces. In the section, the exterior ground begins to flatten, while the ceiling begins to imitate its undulated appeal. These intentions of relocation or interior rustication, all delineate from the Picturesque, where material properties and captures, extend and blur boundaries.
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A question is then surfaced, how do you separate aspects, whether intentional or pending time lapse, between being romantic or sublime? Romanticism is an era that validated intense emotion as an authentic source of aesthetic experience, placing emphasis on emotions and wonder, especially that which experienced in confronting the sublimity of untamed nature and its picturesque qualities. Burke believed that the sublime, a quality of greatness and not measureable, was something that could provoke emotions in the audience.. However, he also believed there was an inherent “pleasure” in this emotion. As humans, we incline toward natural desires in settings; airy open spaces, well lit rooms, windows, translucency in partitions, water features, and greenery. These specific characteristics can create a series of stage sets or architectural settings that loosen boundaries between a building and its surroundings. “The Picturesque; found to be emphasizing the pleasure of the eye, rather than the rational existence of the object. It had aimed to produce ‘effect,’ and, if by means of certain visual stimuli, it had induced an atmosphere in which certain states of mind were possible.” Colin Rowe “Rowe elucidates between a classically inspired line of thinking and more painterly ambitions, which pits geometrical order against compositional play, academic convention against individual license, and determinate objects against atmospheric effects.” Todd Gannon
Atmospheric effects can be induced by sublime breaks in the city, but what specifically are the things that allow them to surface? The Barcelona Pavilion by Mies Van Der Rohe, rich with natural material presents itself in the city as modern containing ideals of both picturesque and of landscapes of the interior picturesque. Its use of materiality and transparency, framing of vistas, multiple ground levels, and architectural promenade, culminates an ideal cohesion of the pictorial frame expanded to reveal an unfold of the interior. Inducing movement along with emotion, the process of discovery and rediscovery during ones experience, is essential for a conventional exterior tendency to be reproduced. Burke’s list of properties on which beauty depends, is hence a render. Elements comparatively small; smooth;, variety in direction of parts;, not angular, melted into each other; a delicate frame, no remarkable appearance of strength; colors clear and bright, not strong and glaring; and if any glaring color, diversified with another. “Picturesque is a period that has been almost wholly absent from contemporary and modernist discourse.” Gannon’s intention to re-emerge a genre or topic to contemporary pedagogy parallels with this institutions prominence on a render. As students, we formulate specific views and frame them in a printed medium. This specific render is intended to be venerate, a sell worthy shot including all aspects of quintessential; emotion, setting, quality of materiality, and provocation in composition.