Nohar Zask Agadi - Work Sample

2013 - 2023

ACADEMIC & PROFESSIONAL WORK

NOHAR ZASK-AGADI YALE SCHOOL OF ARCHITECTURE // PRATT INSTITUTE // HANDEL ARCHITECTS // LIMON LAB

THE SET // HUDSON YARDS

Nohar Zask Agadi and Team // Handel Architects Project Manager // Elga Killinger Location // Manhattan, NY

The design of a New York high rise requires a full understanding of an intricate context, local building codes and the latest social climate. As a part of the greater Hudson Yards complex, with the important role of defining Manhattan’s future skyline, The Set is a Mixed use 46 story, 510,000 SF tower offering a home for different programs such as assisted living, residential and retail. With respect to the ethos of Handel Architects, our team advocated for a cutting-edge, sustainable and environmentally responsible high rise design.

With an understanding of the client’s needs, the building is divided into 2 major volumes. The twelve-storey podium, hosts the senior living component with designated units, amenity floors and all assisted living supporting programs. The building base also includes a ground level restaurant, a gym and separated lobbies for the senior living floors as well as the residential units located in the tower floors. The tower volume contains residential units of different layouts and sizes, units of affordable designations, a variety of amenity spaces, outdoor recreational sun decks and a rooftop swimming pool.

From early design stages and throughout construction documentation, we shaped the facade system to meet exceptional energy efficiency standards, while celebrating the district’s vivid aesthetic present and future. The ongoing schematic studies included pier profile modulations, material studies and elevational composition analysis. The result is a Bronze toned metal and terracotta vertical piers, embracing window-wall and curtain wall glazing systems. With a comprehensive exterior wall consultation, the complex facade detail designs turned feasible.

SITE // HUDSON YARDS

The final design consists of six pier types varying in material, profile identity and width, to enhance the aesthetic complexity of the building, while masking columns and heating pumps situated at the floor’s perimeter. Bronze terracotta piers define the lower volume of the building and bronze metal piers envelop the upper tower volume. Joint spacing varies as well. ground level Storefront had to account for the changing elevation of the street’s grading. The design includes Limestone piers and curtain wall glazing with dark jet mist stone base. black mechanical louvers at the storefront’s perimeter, the canopy at residential lobby entrance and loading dock rolling gate were all designed to complement the tower’s typical dark metal slab cover amid windows.

BUILDING SECTIONS // PROGRAM

TOP // BRONZE SCHEME

10TH AVE. VIEW // FACADE DESIGN

BOTTOM // WHITE & SILVER SCHEME

STUDY MODEL // TYPICAL TERRACOTTA BAY

STUDY MODEL // SCALE 1/64” = 1’-0”

TRICKLE VENT // SHOP DWGS.

INTERIOR VIEW // UNIT @ WINDOW

35TH ST. // SENIOR LOBBY ENTRANCE

10TH AVE. // RESIDENTIAL LOBBY ENTRANCE

TYP. PIER // MODULATION AND SIZING

METAL PIER // SHOP DWGS.

METAL PIER // FULL SCALE MOCKUP IN SITE

TWO BANGKOKS

Nohar Zask Agadi // YSoA, Fall 22 Crits // R. Choochuey & S. Schlabs Location // Bangkok, Thailand

Contemporary urban forces are often a testament to post-industrial patterns. Native design strategies and languages of pre-industrial craftsmanship have gradually faded to comply with the functional identity of the grid. The evolution of basketry dates back to the early Neolithic eras and has since been a part of human practices. From early twined Weaving work through the standard plating and the more contemporary caning methodologies, Weaving represents the social adaptation to political dynamics, climate, and cultural shifts. The reading of the urban grid suggests an array of fluctuating spatial dialogues we live by. The project studies the overlay of two parallel urban dynamics in Bangkok: a grid-compliant life and life off the grid.

STUDY MODEL // CANING & WEAVING

“Informal” - Urbanization has over the years generated new civic margins, disrupting native social structures and redefining traditional publics. In response to an increasing urban rigidity, local communities have constituted informal politics to subvert the imposed lattice.

LEFT // LANG SUAN ROAD

FIG. 2 // PHOTOGRAMMETRIC SURVEY B

FIG. 1 // AYUTTHAYA ORDINATION HALL

FIG. 2 // LUMPHINI-BENCHAKITTI PARK

Bangkok presents an urban grid with multiple layers to support the confluence of contradictory social dynamics. Within our site, high end real estate projects such as One-Bangkok and dynamic low income residential projects co-exist, framing the ironic discrepancy in making spatial policy. In the past years authorized civic establishments have gradually globalized the city of Bangkok redefining social hierarchies and spatial management. While Top-Down constructions increasingly trigger marginalization, Bottom-Up community-making complies with contradictory principles of unofficial space making.

TOP // ONE BANGKOK

Informal politics within low income communities have transformed spatial logic of various scales, introducing a “slippery” layer to a rigid grid, and a unique reality of spatial negotiation. Thus, public hallways and courtyards are often reimagined as living rooms or laundry facilities, while parking lots and sidewalks are transformed to accommodate food stalls and temporary retail.

Infrastructure plays an important role in understanding this political dichotomy, as power connectivity, light and shelter from heavy rains constitute a map for nomadic urban navigation.

A // FLEXIBLE LEASING

B // STORAGE INFRASTRUCTURE

C // LAUNDRY FACILITY

RIGHT // PUBLIC LIVING

D // RESTING AREA

E // FOOD STALL INFRASTRUCTURE

F // KITCHEN UTILIZATION

LEFT // LEGITIMIZED COMMERCE

2 Bangkoks: This proposal offers a continuous utility network and a shared resource to practice unauthorized policy throughout a rigid urban grid offering consent for a versatile use of space while framing new domestic relationships. In the reality of a global pandemic, digital communication and information sharing turned critical in forming publics, and temporary contracts are regularly proposed to pursue domestic trade and exchange. In Bangkok, space is a primary commodity due to the nature of the crowded metropolis and contemporary gentrifying forces result in justified yet unauthorized disorganization. 2 Bangkoks conceptualize virtual and physical interdependence as a soft public infrastructure to regulate unofficial protocols by forming domestic relationships to maximize the use of official spaces.

MODEL A // 1/4" = 1'-0"

Data and power access are provided along a virtual grid to structure a new community by which urban nomads and dwellers are given the opportunity to connect, trade space and serve public, commercial and personal needs. Negotiation between public authority and individuals thus turns simple with an ephemeral light structure to support displaced programs and form new access to the concrete block. While offering solutions for nomadic civic activity, the system introduces an array of public benefits, frees the streets for recreational use and supports urban expansion. This new approach to understanding Bangkok’s domestic fabric transforms the spatial logic of a conventional unit. With ephemeral intervention, housing units are transformed to double occupancy and determine new circulation to allow for temporary transformation of program and space.

THIRD NATURE

Nohar Zask Agadi // Pratt Institute Crits // C. Dwyre & L. Blough Location // Saratoga Springs, NY

The project tests the feasibility of addressing deep geological and environmental sections using ideas from the third and second natures as an analog to the first nature of the underworld. The term Third nature follows the understanding of first nature (complete wilderness) and second nature (the dialog of landscape and infrastructure) by branding an environment that merges nature and cultural concepts. Such narrative pictures a fictional environment that manifests seasonal crossbreeding to support year-round millennial naturist tourism by reinventing indigenous performance and aesthetics.

Saratoga Springs, first established as a water-therapeutic naturists pilgrimage destination, has experienced a severe decline in tourism flux over the past two decades.

Today the horse racing annual events and a several golfing tournaments are the still somewhat relevant remains of a long-standing cultural pleasure landscape heritage.

These platforms, however, attract visitors to Saratoga Springs only over a short lunar span during the summer months. Meanwhile the potential of making saratoga springs a year round resort is rooted in its ground and history in a form of curative water sources, deep effervescent spring that depending on their depth, are geologically heated. As elaborated in the research, both the fairgrounds and the golf courses were trans-contextually introduced as an attempt to maintain Saratoga Springs a fine resort. The legacy of activity suggested by the relationship of the user groups to the site is bound to a particular season, creating intermittent use over the years. The resultant available city-centered spaces, territorializing these seasonal, intermittent programs can be used to manifest the city’s buried trademarks, but now with a distinctly 21st century quality.

These spaces I have identified provide a hosting platform for a speculative vernacular propagation within a supersite that possess a variety of geological and geographical features and inspired by a rich history of fabricated landscape. This tectonic addresses the modern periodic abnature by revealing the native figuration of Saratoga Springs.

COIL B // THERMAL DISTRIBUTION

COIL B // TRANSPORTATIONAL

COIL A // WATER DISTRIBUTION

SECOND NATURE // TECHNICAL FUNCTION

PLAN A // CABANA

DRUMLIN - a site-found condition consisting of low oval mounds entombed within the domestic layers of geology.

To manifest an offseason use of large spaces, vernacular contours will obey a theoretical migration, to fabricate a new synthetic ecology by hybridizing concepts from 2nd nature (agriculture, roads, infrastructure, piping, etc) with those from 3rd nature,(merge of culture and nature, pleasure/concept garden) to radically picture a 1st nature realm. The new “landscape machine” supports the distribution of underground heat in soil wrapped vessels used as a building technology to form an artificial environment that symbolises subterranean domains promoting a dynamic tension of hyper artificiality and pure wilderness.

The scale of my new landscape interventions mediates between the micro urban scale, and the adjacency of the horse tracks themselves with the more dense and granular city center.

Within the complex itself, the scale graduates from accommodating many users to the single human.

LEFT // MAIN BUILDING PLAN

SECTION A // CABANA

SECTION B // CABANA

By mediating the hidden site-found language to the upper world, new seasonal relationship with the site reforms its relevance to the user groups. This new fashion of discontinuous geology opens a projective way of re-imagining a city currently running on the fumes of 19th century nostalgic triggers, establishing a new architectural regime that didn't exist before. The aim is to more creatively exploit the characteristics of the site which made it a high end resort in the 19th and early 20th century; it’s distinct waters, geology, topography, and aesthetic history, but in a distinctly 21st century fashion, using a combination of technology (or infrastructure) and aesthetics to produce a new hybrid of performance and pleasure, a machined pleasure landscape for the 21st century.

RIGHT // SITE PLAN

MODEL // SITE

MODEL // CABANA

THE NEPAL PROJECT

Nohar Zask Agadi and Team // LIMON LAB NY Project Manager // Enrique Limon Location // Tokha, Nepal

A community oriented pilot addresses sustainable housing solutions with the understanding of climate change patterns. Due to the nature of the site and momentum, post earthquake Nepal, disaster risk management and sustainable development goals were the core features for the evolution of the project. The result is a topographical framework to support substantial ideas such as profitability and sustainability, as well as holistic and spiritual heritage, forming a vernacular master plan that manifests local cultures and supports the regional lifestyle.

TERRACES CURVES

TERRACES ANALYSIS

TERRACES ANALYSIS

URBAN BLOCKS MASTERPLAN

RUN-OFF ANALYSIS

HOUSING MASTERPLAN

WATERWAYS AND CIRCULATION

OPTIONAL HOUSING STRATEGY

TOP // VALLEY HOUSING & APARTMENTS

BOTTOM // SPIRITUAL CENTER

TOP // VALLEY HOUSING & TOWNHOUSES

MASTERPLAN

TOP // HILLTOP HOUSING

BOTTOM // OUTDOORS

BLUE ZONE - CONTACT ZONE Nohar Zask Agadi // YSoA, Spring 23 Instructor // A. M. Duran Calisto Location // Vilcabamba, Ecuador

COMMUNITY - In Vilcabamba, lifestyle migrants choose to design permanent residences, of indigenous territorial styles.

Pre-colonial Andean societies used abstract ceramic vessels and Yupanas as an architectural representation convention.

In 2004 the concept of "Blue Zones" was coined - regions in which communities share lifestyle schemes and where outstanding longevity has been consecutively reported. According to contemporary studies, three main factors constitute Blue Zones: diet, community structures, and ceremonial traditions. A geographic link to longevity was first discussed in the National Geographic January 1973, naming Vilcabamba, Ecuador, the home for an impressive number of centenarians. The town has since fostered a self-sustaining migration stream of curious individuals seeking spiritual rebirth. Rather than being politically extractive, foreign residents in Vilcabamba have integrated with the local community via Contact Zones - rituals or places where expatriates and local populations converge while ecologies co-exist. Such confluences or cultural exchange junctions in Vilcabamba are aligned with the societal practices of community-making, nutrition, and rituals, manifesting a contemporary reflection on sacred traditions. The project unfolds Andean landscapes to discover the sources for reemerging cultural mythologies.

FIG. 1 // ADOBE HOUSE

FIG. 2 // WATTLE AND DAUB

In order to understand the cross-cultural exchange, the project presents a contact zone of scholarships to draw the cartographic encounters of technocratic chorography and native communicentric intelligence. This documentarian analysis of territorial relationships along the Andean mountain range sets Vilcabamba as a model for community resilience and a testament to cultural genealogy. Traditions are reimagined here by lifestyle migrants who perform a symbiotic integration with the local community and wish to understand and implement the Andean way of life.

I will argue that it is the migrant's ability to use communicentric languages while engaging with foreign communities that keeps legacies alive and shapes a profound definition to the concept of longevity. The technocratic definition of Blue Zones is thus challenged by understanding cross-cultural communication as a threshold to admit both Eurocentric and indigenous ideas of well-being, building on the binary of nature and culture to propose an alternative public connection with territorial essence.

FIG. 3 // AMAZONIAN HOUSE

These Contact Zones in Vilcabamba are explained here via chronological periodization, tracing the transformation of geographic, social, political, and cultural landscapes of the Andes during colonization and industrialization. Pre Colonial societies such as the Quichua, or the Amazonian Shuars, and empires such as the expansive Inca, have dominated and shaped the South American landscapes. The symbolic ideology of symmetrical equilibrium begins with a native understanding of the Andean terrain through the ecological binary of valleys and plains. The concept of the Vertical Archipelago, coined by Ukrainian anthropologist John Murra describes the pre-colonial symmetrical exchange principle communalizing family clans along the different ecozones of this diverse terrain by redistributing resources and lineages between the Pacific coast,

TOP // AGRI-INDUSTRIAL TRANSECT. WESTERN SLOPES

the highlands, and to the Amazonian basin.1492, and the Spanish conquest of Latin America marks a significant and abrupt transformation of political and social balances in the region. The Colonial Spanish empire promoted a Eurocentric economic and religious mentality, propagating imported tools and styles throughout Latin America. The informal exchange was widely replaced with a central systemization, and eclectic urbs were constructed radially around the central plaza. Under the service of viceroy Toledo, churches replaced the sacred Huaca, and the native social and agrarian infrastructure was rapidly eradicated. The inaccessible Amazonian basin of present-day southeast Ecuador and northeast Peru, a territory predominantly populated by the Shuar society, was mainly penetrated by a softer missionary representation of the church.

G // CMU - PITCHER

RIGHT // GUAGUAS DE PAN RECIPE

As a result of colonial domination, native and foreign populations had amalgamated, and a Mestizo society was built upon the implementation of foreign concepts that shaped South American geopolitics and the Ecuadorian nation. In recent decades, Ecuador has undergone a significant transformation with the rise of Agri-industrialization and the political ambition to align with the American economy. The Green and White revolutions greatly impacted national agrarian schemes while standardized planning practices redefined cities and countrysides. Thus Cold War outcomes led to the eradication of indigenous societal concepts while advertising global north technocratic administration. Over 500 years of cartographic encounters attest to an excessive cross-cultural exchange throughout the continent. In order to understand and represent the concept -

TOP // AGRI-INDUSTRIAL TRANSECT. EASTERN SLOPES

of contact zones in Vilcabamba, where global north lifestyle migrants and native societies converge, awareness to indigenous theorization and visualization of this conceptual apparatus is critical. In his book Urban Images of the Hispanic World: 1493-1793, Richard Kagan explores the cross-cultural representation of the New World upon Spanish conquest by emphasizing the critical distinction between the chorographic and communicentric views. Chorography, the scientific study of places, emerged alongside geography and cosmography as a colonial method to advance understanding of the natural world and expand mapping objectives. The communicentric view refers to communal outlooks and emphasizes the human element in space tracing. In recent decades, lifestyle migration inspired alternative wellness and diet patterns. Global north -

expats in rural communities, such as Vilcabamba, often dwell with the hope of accessing a healthier lifestyle and avoiding the industrial food system. During 500 years of conversion, Andean society transformed, and culinary practices adjusted to accommodate foreign ideologies and auxiliary policies. As a result, the Andean landscape underwent a radical transformation as modern agricultural systems reestablished the essence of the land. While Ecuador had predominantly aligned with the conventional food system following the Green Revolution, culturally resilient communities were able to conserve indigenous agricultural techniques and traditional cooking practices dating to pre-industrial and pre-colonial eras.

DIET // RECIPE - A COMMUNICENTRIC MEDIUM

RIGHT // MONOCULTURE IN SHUSHUFINDI

Terranean periodization is explored here by tracing the evolution of Andean nutrition, using fundamental territorial recipes as communicentric conventions to navigate the geopolitical shift of a quincentenary.

The understanding of Urbs and Civitas as the two categories by which cities have been depicted and the ability to recognize the importance of cross-cultural intelligence when pursuing access to indigenous philosophies is the backbone of the project and what makes it a scholastic contact zone. This is also the unique common denominator of residential tourists in Vilcabamba, who embody communicentric textures and create a symbiotic society so antithetical to gentrified Tulum. The dialogue of nature and culture is communicated with a set of transacts to contextualize the vast terrain and recognize biodiversity along the Ecuadorian cross-section. By collapsing scales, implementing a deep cultural section, and reinventing graphic conventions, this is an attempt to document and share the story of a symbiotic societal hybrid and recognize the generative incentive to depart from colonial orders.

TOP // PERIODIZED YUPANAS RIGHT // A COMMUNICENTRIC MODEL OF VILCABAMBA

CEREMONY // THE COMMUNING ACT OF CHICHA RITUALS

ROADSIDE GEOLOGY, MT Nohar Zask Agadi // YSoA, Fall 21 Crits // T. Saunders & T. Newton Location // Tippet Rise, MT

“If we cannot go to the earth, let the earth come to us, or more accurately let us all go to many places on the earth and come back with the same, but different homogeneous pictures, that can be gathered, compared, superimposed and redrawn in a few places” B. Latour

The proposal for an art residency in the heart of Tippet Rise Art Center celebrates the rise of photorealistic technology as a platform for visual recovery and art production.

This project questions Imagery as a tool to implement ideas of Archaeology in Architecture, to reimagine the secret language of geologic history. Over the past decades, Imagery has established its dominance as a visual recovery tool in various scientific fields - Archaeology, for instance, rendering hidden stratigraphic languages to visually reconstitute the past. Photogrammetry is among a set of new-media, photo-conceptual forms of art with the potential to capture contextual qualities of given environments and transform them into a spatial product.

In her essay, “Riegl, Archeology and the Periodization of Culture,” historian Erika Naginski investigates the emergence of photography and Imagery as an artistic application in Archaeological sciences. Aside from contributing to the objective validity of geologic strata, incorporating photography and photorealistic strategies as tools to register unearthed findings changed humanity’s relationship with archaeology and challenged conservative policies. Photography in geographic contexts has primarily made hidden fragments widely available for all to grasp. The function of photography and its testimonial nature may extract a substance of its literal context to construct an archival index and narratives of discovery, competent for further virtual transformation.

TIPPET RISE // GEOLOGY, ARCHAEOLOGY

FIG. 1 // PHOTOGRAMMETRIC SURVEY A

RED LODGE // URBANISM, COMMUNITY

FIG. 2 // PHOTOGRAMMETRIC SURVEY B

FIG. 3 // PHOTOGRAMMETRIC SURVEY C

Once evidence is realized in a virtual dimension, it could be systematically modified and reproduced to become an attainable installment. Simple commands such as scaling, stretching, or unfolding will transform surveyed data and the history buried in its status into an artistic yet scholastic representation of its bio.

The lust to represent and recontextualize geographic aesthetics is yet elemental in twentieth-century culture. In her book “Hide and Seek,” Hanna Rose Shell unfolds the history of camouflage to understand the evolution of mixed-media craftsmanship as the trickery of subjective audits. Such trans-disciplinary propagations open a door for further exploration, turning every excavated pattern into a representation of geologic buildup and history as well as a descriptive document of cultural relationships to scientific disciplines.

BOTTOM // SECTION

Artists who carry a passion for photography, sculpturing, and modeling will be given an opportunity to discover the historic stratum in one of the world’s richest geological archives and, through a process of analysis, visualization, and synthesis of ideas, transform it into a tangible analogy of buried aesthetics, reimagined elsewhere. The dynamic tension between geographic realism and visual effects has guided the design objectives of this complex. Visiting artists are similarly asked to picture reimagined geology of Tippet Rise in the adjacent town of Red Lodge to maintain reciprocal relationships and a sense of community year-round.

Text was developed with the mentorship of professor A. Acciavatti, ARCH 3072.

STRUCTURE - Site found tree segments decompose slowly due to dry climate and are widely available on site to serve as building structures. Roofs are printed with surveyed stratigraphic patterns calling out geologic sections to maintain aesthetic sequence and inspire visiting artists.

RESOURCES - Artists will be challenged to craft a physical analogy to the abstract qualities of the regional terranean heritage.

Technological resources such as darkrooms, fabrication facilities, photography equipment, etc., are available throughout the residency.

Spaces are designed as freestanding pavilions to encourage frequent meditation hikes and promote connection with nature.

LEFT // RESIDENCE LEVEL FLOORPLAN

MODEL B // 1/8" = 1'-0"

MODEL A // 1/32" = 1'-0"

MODEL A // 1/32" = 1'-0"

Nohar Zask-Agadi Noharagadi@gmail.com +1-917-6835477