Nina Koscica, B.Arch ‘21 Portfolio

Cornell University Architecture Art & Planning

Architectural Designer

Selected Works: Multidimensional Analysis & Synthesis in the Built Environment

Nina Koscicia, B.Arch ‘21

See the entire thesis at:

Always somewhere between utopia and dystopia, suburbia has occupied the American cultural mythology for over 80 years. This thesis is a reactionary tale tracing the origins of a place, an experimental sandbox for American ingenuity and cultural identity, whose influence has had legendary side effects on the way we live and consume. Through an in-depth analysis of charged iconic events that contribute to the American mythological narrative, several strategies of urbanism are proposed for a shifting political and cultural landscape in the iconic postwar suburb, Levittown.

The seeds of modern suburbia were planted in an unlikely place, the anomalous company town of Richmond, WA during WWII. Here, hundreds of American scientists and blue collar workers lived in satiating upper middle class comfort for years, heavily subsidized by the government in an ironically socialist manner. Unbeknownst to them was the dreadfully carcinogenic, environmentally polluting, and morally questionable nature of the work they were conducting – refining plutonium for the atom bombs that were dropped on Hiroshima and Nagasaki in 1945. This town went on to inspire William Levitt to found what is commonly known to be the first suburb, Levittown, in Long Island, NY.

https://issuu.com/ninakoscica/docs/suburban_ennui_nina_koscica

Left: Analytical Photoshop collage interpreting satellite GIS topographical & infrared data via QGIS, processed through Rhinoceros & Illustrator, Hanford site wartime archival footage via Finding Aids Archival Collections at Hagely Museum & Library and Modular housing advertisements from the Hanford History Project at Washington State University Tri-Cities

A brief collage illustrating moments in the American pop cultural mythology’s path through 20th and 21st century modernity, up until the COVID-19 pandemic. Thematic elements explored include domesticity, ecological and consumer culture, politics and social anxieties, predictive moments in science fiction, arts and entertainment, and technological advancements.

1933-1945 FDR

1933 GRAND COULEE DAM

1941 PERAL HARBOR

1941-1942 WWII

1942 ELECTRICITY SENT TO HANFORDSITE

1943 HANFORD CAMP SET UP

1944 PROMISE TO DELIVER PLUTONIUM

1945-1953 TRUMAN

1945 HIROSHIMA & NAGASAKI BOMBED

1945 HANFORD CAMP DECOMMISSIONED

1946 POST WAR HOUSING SHORTAGE

1947 MIRACLE ON 34TH STREET

1947-1991 COLD WAR

1984 BY GEORGE ORWELL

1949

1950S TELEVISION & PLASTICS POPULARIZED DAWN OF CONSUMER CULTURE & MASS PRODUCTION SCI-FI IDOLIZES CAPITALISM & PROGRESS

1950-1953 KOREAN WAR

1951 L EVITTOWN BECOMES LARGEST DETATCHED HOUSING SETTLEMENT IN THE WORLD

1953-1961 EISNHOWER

451 RAY BRADBURY

1953 FAHRENHEIT

1954-1968 CIVIL RIGHTS MOVEMENT

1954 BROWN V. BOARD OF EDUCATION

1955-1975 SPACE RACE

1955-1975 VIETNAM WAR

1956 NATIONAL INTERSTATE & DEFENSE HIGHWAYS ACT

1961-1963 JFK

1961 BAY OF PIGS

1962 SILENT SPRING RACHEL CARSON

1963 THE FEMININE MYSTIQUE

1963-1969 LBJ

1965 INVASION OF GRENADA

1965 WATTS RIOTS

2001 SPACE ODYSSEY

1968

1969-1974 NIXON

1969 STONEWALL RIOTS

1969 MOON LANDING

1984 VENTURI KNOLL COLLECTION

1986 DECLASSIFICATION OF HANFORD DOCU MENTS

1989-1993 GEORGE HW BUSH

1989 PANAMA INVASION

1990S DIGITAL AGE BEGINS

SCI FI WONDERS ABOUT NETWORKS , DEMOCRATIZATION & SURVEILLANCE

1991 INTERNET GOES PUBLIC

1993-2001 CLINTON

1994 AMAZON FOUNDED

1997-2018 FALLOUT GAMES : A REIMAGINATION OF COLD

WAR FANTASIES

2000S GPS BECOMES POPULAR

2000-2021 SIMS : A SATRIRICAL POKE AT AMERICAN DOMESTIC LIFE

2001 SEPTEMBER 11TH , WAR ON TERROR BEGINS

2001-PRESENT AFGANISTAN OCCUPATION

2003-2010 IRAQ WAR

2008 HOUSIN MARKET CRASHES

2009-2017 OBAMA

2011 LIBYA

2012-2019 WAR WITH ISIL

2015 GAY MARRAIGE LEGALIZED

Existing condition: Amenities are concentrated along a dangerous unwalkable “strode” forcing residents to drive in order to survive.

Proposed Condition: Slowly reorganize & subvert restrictive zoning law for a more heterogeneous, walkable, & communal future.

Amenities are currently located along an isolated commercial strip, and are almost completely absent from the fabric of the town otherwise, where the only common public spaces are mostly dedicated to or appropriated by children, such as the streets, playgrounds, and schools, which are still few and far between. Restrictive zoning law forces suburbanites to travel relatively far distances by car in order to survive, such as to buy food or commute to work. Yet what if the fabric were inundated with common spaces, turning the suburb into a heterogenous town, allowing for a proliferation of decentralized, localized uses other than single family living?

Photoshop collages with linework parametrically generated by city data from Urbano for Rhinoceros & Grasshopper.

Instead of fences separating architecture, the architecture becomes a sort of inhabitable fence, demarcating the extents of an assemblage of privately owned public spaces, in the spirit of communitarianism, but catering to a culture obsessed with personalization and identity. Murky sumps become nodes to ecological corridors, and sensitivity to pedestrian life is accentuated via raised crosswalks.

Building codes morph from restrictive setbacks and allowances picturesque for the patriarchal heteronormative lifestyle they were founded upon, to ones more sensitive to a wider spectrum of social and economic conditions. The homogenous sea of single family homes may become, through subversive strategies, a highly curated consumer housing experience, rooted in mass customization, chock full of accidentally sustainable pastimes catering to all passions and earthly delights.

Right: Mixed media Photoshop collages of hand drafted architectural elements derived from a Rhino 3D model parametrically generated by city data from Urbano for Grasshopper.

1 : Existing

Properties that were once unfenced in the heyday of Levittown, are now starkly divided.

Sumps, aka water collection ditches, are now polluted trash collectors.

The current streetscape is still inhospitably unwalkable due to impenetrable blocks and a lack of sidewalks which make foot travel inefficient.

Separation & Shared Space

2 : Transition

Merging lots for communal living reduces fenced boundaries, creating privately owned public spaces.

This allows for internal greenspaces to serve as pedestrian trails, some of which already exist today.

Porosity between sumps opens up ecological corridors for animals.

3 : Synthesis

Members of the community & ecosystem may enjoy more town-like communal spaces with foot traffic.

Raised sidewalks paved differently from the road create safer walking conditions for pedestrians in the street.

Sumps & Ecological Corridors

Roads & Walkways

Maps with linework parametrically generated by city data from Urbano for Rhinoceros & Grasshopper. Formatted in Illustrator & Photoshop.

Longing for a nostalgic sense of colonial community, the first Levittowners colonized sparse potato fields that once stretched across the Long Island landscape, searching for picturesque vistas through large windows they circled in magazines. The Suburbia now faces a demographic quagmire amid new cultural and economic forces, leading to an exodus of an age group necessary to its survival.

What if the fabric behaved somewhat more like a town, or village? What if amenities and the commons were decentralized? In response, this thesis proposes an adaptive reuse of the sprawl’s mosaic that cultivates a post-internet pop culture where personalization as a commodity— and lifestyle— acts as an incentive reversing the exodus of suburban descendants.

Artist’s

Residence at Can Ricart: Barcelona, Spain

Nestled within Barcelona’s historic Poblenou district, the artists’ residence finds itself in a state of continuity with Can Ricart, a former textile factory turned industrial urban artifact.

The site’s existing features compose a field condition of idiosyncratic fragments where shifting ruins generate interior courtyards and streets; a microcosm of a neighborhood.

The intervention creates a cloistered mat building condition secluded from the city within a series of walled gardens, striking a balance between solid and void.

1

Archeological plan of the site’s ruins in the existing condition. Derived from records of Anuari d’Arqueologia i Patrimoni 2011 for Barcelona. Structures that no longer exist are depicted in red.

2

Concrete scale model of the site & intervention. Scale of building elements derived from a body of forensic research of Can Ricart.

2

Covered walkways link the studios by way of liminal or transitory moments, casually defining the limits of courtyards and perimeters of the block while providing ample shade in the warm Spanish climate. A dialogue of materiality takes place between cracked stucco of the ruin and oxidized concrete of the intervention.

Photoshop renderings cross referenced with 3D Rhino geometry & Google Street View photography

Artist’s Residence at Can Ricart: Barcelona, Spain

A village for making and learning, the programs of the complex are organized as follows: Public spaces such as educational facilities reside within existing refurbished structures, whereas artist’s studios are housed by newly built elements.

Above: Existing structures indicated by shaded cut line.

Drawings created via Rhino 3D model coupled with facade information forensically gathered from current & historic site records. Lineweighted with Illustrator & collaged in photoshop. Surrounding context derived from CAD Mapper.

Section Elevation

Plan

Artist’s Residence at Can Ricart: Barcelona, Spain

Solids

Public vs Private

Intervention

Med Spa: Flatiron District, New York, NY

Collaboration with CU A

This design serves a medical spa where urbanites seek out cosmetic procedures in a sophisticated and serene environment. They are welcomed through a modern vestibule in conversation with the proportions of the classical facade, into a warm wooden atmosphere illuminated by the sun through a series of louvers.

Natural materials such as marble and stone clad the walls, evoking a cave-like feeling as one travels through the space.

A 3D model of the interior and exterior was constructed in Rhino from architectural drawings, Cadmapper and site photography. A combination of Blender, Enscape and Photoshop was used to create a series of photomontages and renderings to visualize the space before it was built.

Physical Site Model

Imagined within the inevitable gentrification and commodification of real estate in Smithfield, London, this two-faced project takes advantage of the “useful” site above ground for a rationally planned commercial building which acts to subsidize a subcultural appropriation of “useless” subterranean spaces below.

1

Archeological

2

Gordon

plan reconstructed from historical records of subterranean Smithfield Market’s labyrinth. Site of intervention highlighted in red.

Bunshaft’s Pepsi-Cola Building [Top] & Basement Techno Club [Bottom] in New York, serve as programmatic precedents.

The Intervention touches upon a forgotten ruin that was once the entrance tunnel to the bustling Metropolitan Underground line, which shipped meat to cellar stores of the Smithfield market from the late 19th to late 20th century. Today, the tunnels that were once economically viable are now vastly dormant. Here, a small yet distinctive fraction of this subterranean labyrinth is transformed into a cultural nightlife venue.

The interstitial space, animated with light, shadow, and the sound of passing trains, will act as a medium between pragmatic, urban commercial forces and alternative subcultures. This dual relationship is posited to not only manifest itself spatially, but also economically, where the practical surface level funds and supports its creative counterpart below.

Hand Helds “Soft” : A Stop Motion Film Collage

This stop motion short film for the experimental music project Hand Helds features 684 photos, documenting thousands of slight movements to an assemblage of selectively cut paper materials, including Architectural Digests from the early aughts, & vintage Radio building manuals, Playboys, and lifestyle magazines from the 1960’s. The raw photos were compiled and edited into video form with slight undulating effects in Premiere Pro.

Watch the project on YouTube at: https://youtu.be/qDFQtnWnVbY?si=a0iPGH3x-mOWlrkc

HoloWall: A Study in Mixed Reality Construction Techniques

Collaboration with RUBI LAB at Cornell School of Architecture, Art, & Planning

This year-long research project aimed to merge prototypical material exploration & mixed reality construction techniques to convert irregularly shaped scrap wood into an architecturally expressive building material.

Heaps of abandoned barn wood from outside of Ithaca were salvaged, processed, and scanned by LIDAR, input to Rhino & optimized by size via digital scripting into specifically shaped cuts that were incorporated into the design.

Using the augmented reality software Fologram in conjunction with Microsoft’s HoloLens, we designed guiding holograms to project instructions onto the work space on how to cut, assemble & install the hundreds of individual irregularly shaped pieces into the final wall design.

Read more at:

https://news.cornell.edu/stories/2021/12/artsquad-installation-upcycles-wood-mixed-reality

I led a team of architecture students on this project, including Sahil Adnan, M.Arch ’24; Bushra Aumir ’22; Jiyoon Bae, M.S. ’22; Sahir Choudhary ’21; and Asbiel Samaniego, M.S. ’22. Special thanks to AAP’s wood shop staff.

West, South & East Design Elevations

Raw

Wood

Miniature Fologram proof of concept test

salvaged

Holographic cut guide system for irregular wood pieces

Dynamic holographic pattern guide for assembly

LaminaScape: Emergent Technology for Building Rural-Urban Incubators

Collaboration with Michael Xiong

Population Clusters

Cultivated Fields

Nature Preserve

Water

In the urban-rural context of Huanguashan Mountain in Yongchuan, Chongqing, China, there is increased demand for allocating resources to communities on the periphery of the city via a process of townification.

This process may invest in diversifying economies of these areas by supporting budding industries and the infrastructures that come with them, along with other endeavors such as housing. In the advent of new building techniques aided by digital technologies, mass customization has also become more and more accessible.

1 Site map of Huanguashan Village

2 Conceptual rendering of proposed mass produced customizable housing

LaminaScape: Emergent Technology for Building Rural-Urban Incubators

Collaboration with Michael Xiong

Manufacturing

Material

Consrtuction Process

In response to these changing technological and urban planning climates, Laminascape is a conceptual paper project that takes a prototypical engineered wood material hybridizing Cross Laminated Timber (CLT) with GluLam and applies it to the needs of the village it incorporates with.

LaminaScape: Emergent Technology for Building Rural-Urban Incubators

Collaboration with Michael Xiong

High density urban scenario

Low density rural scenario

At the cluster scale, two types were explored, one being a dense, urban condition that fosters apartment living closer to the existing town, and the other a smaller scaled rural type that suits multigenerational families while touching the ground lightly to free more ground space for farming.

Renderings were collaged in photoshop from textures, linework processed through Illustrator & VRay Shadows from Rhino Model.

Modular Living Unit

Construction Detail Oblique Section Theater

Just as how the hall’s circulation path funnels people, its wrapping facade skin of twisting louvers funnels light in during the day, and funnels light out by night. The skin continues from the exterior and sweeps inward, expanding and contracting from the walls to create interior public programs such as a cafe, restrooms, and ticket counter. Additional educational practice rooms, recording studios, changing rooms, and office spaces are contained in the top floor of the hall suspended over the open lobby by a Vierendeel truss system.

Entrance lobby render photoshop collage, made with VRay for Rhino

Front elevation photoshop collage with Rhino linework from 3D model processed through

Second Floor Plan

Analytical works interpreting satellite GIS topographic data via QGIS & chemical contamination maps from the Department of Energy Office of River Protection.

1

Acrylic, Iron oxide pigment, Canvas, 30” x 12”

Cross section of the site’s atmospheric & ground strata diagramming radioactive & chemical particle contamination moving through layers of varying density through the site.

2

Acrylic, Iron oxide pigment, Canvas 30” x 30”

Top down view of the site’s lateral atmospheric contamination with radiating isolines

3

Iron oxide pigment, Graphite, Canvas, 32” x 30”

A study of lesions created on the surface of the desert landscape by the circulation infrastructure of the site. Pigment is coaxed out from underneath the canvas by applying water, a process alluding to the contaminated hydrology of the near vicinity.