SELECTED WORKS
ABDULLAH ALSAHAFI
*Interior View of a Project Model
TABLE OF CONTENTS
I.
AMAZON WAREHOUSE
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II.
ART GALLERY 1.0
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III.
ART GALLERY 2.0
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IV.
HABITABLE OBJECTS
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V.
STUDY - PHILIP JOHNSON
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VI.
EXTREME SPORTS CENTER
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VII. BREAKING THE CONTAINER
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VIII. FORCED PERSPECTIVE
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Amazon Warehouse The typical Amazon Fulfillment Center lacks human scale and basic amenities for employees. Employees walk up to 12 miles a day with few breaks and suffer mental and physical exhaustion as a product of harsh working conditions. Rather than redesign the entire center, this project acts upon the existing center by inserting spaces of refuge that allow moments of isolation from the bustling workplace. The building is placed underground to maintain the park above; a key resource to the neighborhood. 3
FLOOR PLAN The center is carved from the underground bedrock, creating large expanses of warehouse space supported with both steel and rock columns. Inside each rock column, a space of refuge is inserted to fulfill an employee need. Skylights in each refuge connect each worker back to the park above and transform mundane programs (restrooms, meditation spaces, entries, or dining halls) into meaningful, beautiful spaces within a sea of monotony and exhaustion.
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REFLECTION SPACE The Reflection Room is one of the many refuge spaces inserted throughout the warehouse. It contains individual chambers for moments of complete isolation, each chamber has its own skylight. The center of the room acts as a gathering space for groups of few people. 0’ 1’
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RESTROOM Ever y restroom is car ved out of a large rock column. Inside the column, each stall is also car ved out of a smaller rock column. The restroom becomes another place of refuge. Each bathroom stall is connected to the park aboveground through a skylight.
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LONGITUDINAL SECTION The sections contrasts the typical work space with the new intervention. The skylights not only allow light in, but also become habitable spaces for workers to use. In this case, break rooms are elevated for better isolation from the warehouse floor.
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LEFT Sectional Axon showing the unpleasant monotonous shelving area being interpreted by the refuge spaces. The spaces var y in size depending on their use. The reflection room is the smallest, allowing individual workers the oppor tunity to be alone. ABOVE Zoomed-in view showing the typical shelving area, the place where Amazon workers spend the majority of their work day.
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LEFT The Reflection Room RIGHT The Break Room. A rare moment where Amazon workers and the park visitors can see each other. That kind of interaction never happens in the current Amazon warehouses due to Amazon's obsession with secrecy.
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DINING HALL Current Amazon warehouses are located in remote places; making it impossible for workers to drive to a restaurant during their short, 15-minute breaks. Therefore, an on-site dining place becomes a necessity. Just like the other spaces of refuge, the dining hall is carved out of a large column with linear skylights. Smaller columns are distributed inside the dining hall to divide up the space.
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ART GALLERY 1.0 The building is a galler y housing a painting by the American expressionist Richard Diebenkorn. The design follows the same simplicity found in the painting by using only rectangular planar sur faces. Visitors enter the gallery and follow a ramp that takes them around the building. On their way up, they encounter a large window looking onto the back of the painting, making them curious to see the other side of it. Therefore, they continue on walking up the ramp and come back down from the other side to finally see the painting.
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ART GALLERY 2.0 This project starts where the previous one stopped. However, this galler y houses seven paintings. The main idea of the building is a series of ramps that take visitors from the ground floor all the way to the top floor. Each ramp has two platforms that look directly onto a painting hung from the ceiling. The journey of going up the ramps is analogous to circulating around the work of Richard Diebenkorn. The paintings are organized in a chronological order ; revealing to the visitors the progression and the increasing simplicity that the painter's work had gone through.
Corner Landings
Viewing Platforms
Vertical Structure Holding Up the Paintings
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Habitable Objects This project consisted of two stages; conceptual and architectural. The conceptual phase star ted by wrapping random found objects with paper. Wrapping the objects is a step in hiding their initial qualities and introducing new ones. Next, the object were agglomerated into different clusters to create interior habitable spaces. In some cases, the habitable space happened in the void between two or more objects.
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THE CONCEPTUAL 16
THE ARCHITECTURAL The conceptual ideas learned from wrapping the found objects were turned into a “real� building with a diverse program. The design divided the site into three strips. The right one was for a train station, the middle for a public swimming pool, and the left for housing units. The housing units are made using irregular forms that resemble the wrapped objects. This was an attempt to avoid using the standard mass housing typology, a giant rectangle with an infinite number of units that offer no privacy or a sense of individuality.
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THE ARCHITECTURAL Each housing unit occupies an entire floor. The family can directly interact with the exterior skin of the building. Each family has a unique floor plan that none of the other families has. Again, this project is about individuality. It is a stand against the one-sizefits-all type of approach toward mass housing.
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STUDY - PHILIP JOHNSON The assignment was an introduction to axonometric projections and perspective drawings. These two drawings were based on the Study's plan and section, as well as some written descriptions. Recently, I revisited the project to clean it up and add a new layer to it, i.e. color, which is something that have become an interest of mine.
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EXTREME SPORTS CENTER The building consists of two shells, an interior and exterior. The interior houses most of the program and ser vice spaces, while the exterior shell functions as a climbing wall. The wall wraps around the building and continues all the way to the roof ; giving users more climbing surface than a regular vertical wall.
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The left image shows the moment where the climbing wall reaches and wraps around the roof. The top image on this page partially shows the interior shell and its windows that go multiple floors. The lower image gives a site-plan view of the building. The left image shows the moment where the climbing wall reaches and wraps around the roof.
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Breaking the container PART 1: MODEL MAKING
The assignment was to design an artifact consisting of an object and a container. Although the rule was to fit the object entirely inside the container, my approach was to break the one element that makes a box; i.e., its corner. The design also attempts to make the narrow container feel spacious by using forced perspective. The form of the artifact starts small at one end and grows bigger as it reaches the end.
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PART 2: ANALYTICAL DRAWING
This part of the project consisted of making a series of drawings that not only tried to explain the artifact but also further the design. The exploded axon to the left shows how the object breaks the glass sides of the container. Only the parts that touch the object get broken, ever ything else remains intact.
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PART 3: DIGITAL RE-CREATION
The goal here was to re-create the artifact digitally and produce 3D renderings. The rendering help in understanding the relationship between shades and shadows.
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PART 4: POSSIBLE OCCUPANCY
To further accentuate the forced perspective effect, wood panels are applied on the sides. The panels get smaller and smaller in width to give the occupier of the space the false impression that the space is longer that it actually is.
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CULTURAL CENTER "Forced perspective" This project continued on exploring the idea of forced perspective. How design could manipulate the way people perceive space. The building is a cultural center placed inside a church that was burned down, except for its exterior walls. The challenge was to fit a large building inside a small one. The projects uses techniques like repetition, light, color, and edge blurring to turn a small space into a large one.
CENTER'S ENTRANCE 26
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FIRST FLOOR The plan shows the shell of the existing church (gray fill), and the new cultural center that is inser ted into it (white fill). The entr y hallway gets tighter and its walls come closer to each other ; making it feel much longer than it seems at first glance. Colorful lights coming from beneath the floor slab add to the illusion of blurred edges. At the end, the hallway opens up to large cafe space which double functions as a lobby for the center. The triangle in the middle is a 3-stor y multi-purposes room. It is a space that uses the forcedperspective technique both in plan and section.
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Second FLOOR The main highlight of the second floor is the galler y space. It contains no physical ar twork. Instead, its walls are washed with colorful lights. The exact line where the floor meets the wall is purposefully blurred with color and light. This, again, gives the space the illusion of being massive in scale when in reality it is not.
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Gallery
All this project's model images are un-Photoshoped. The lighting effects were created by spray painting sheets of tracing paper and directing light onto them. As light passed through the colored sheets, different colors lit the space. For some images, LED lights were used. The cover image is one of these photos.
THANK YOU 30