AlexAnder Gibson Portfolio
This project gave and reinforced my intuition for layouts, schemes, and ratios as a crash course in composition.
1. Foundational Design
Drafting was all about patience, precision, and discipline. It ended up being my favorite class as I honed my craftsmanship and worked with my hands to make drawings I could take pride in and reminisce about in later years
Through this process I was introduced to the synthesis of function and design. This house for bees is a radial design to match their social structure and the solids and voids adapt to a given neighborhood of other bugs for expected defensive and symbiotic relationships.
This project was all about compositional patterns and layering. It was here that I discovered the appeal of radiality and the difference between physical and psychological depth
This project was all about the iterative process and deriving design from chaos, and from design, form. I started with tank model kit parts and from there teamed up with two other classmates to explore the combination, disection, and evolution of our models.
The Kaleidoscope Observatory and Optical Illusion Museum was the first juried project I did. I learned autocad and the concepts of liminality and scale. Model making was also an important element as I was encouraged to use nontraditional materials.
2. Exploring Form
The Theatre of Craft is my favorite project. It has unique functional challenges that I tried to blend with a phenomenological biomimicry, creating a forest of columns so that the structure would resemble the natural source that all craftsmen draw from.
This was my first final project with digital sections and floor plans with proper quare footages, stair dimensions, and sectional quality. My first floor storage is the quarter circular space below audiece seeting that I am uniquely proud of.
Section A
Section B
Axons of the Neugabauer House was a study in detail as we were tasked with illustrating a Richard Meier building with minimal information beyond online images. This and the rest of our Architectural History classes were some of my favorite.
Shreveport,
This project, the Butterfly Complex for the Noel Furniture Gallery, was a class in detail. We had to finish out second year thinking more structurally than we ever had before. I took this opportunity to fit custom structure to custom formwork to design a building that would be an art piece because what houses art should also be art.
This was my first time exploring the unique role 3D printing plays in model making. At such a small scale I had to balnce representation with material feasibility
25 Shreveport,
At the beginning of third year we took a trip to Houston where I chose to study The Nancy and Rich Kinder Building’s facade structure and phenomenology.
Channel glass tubes bracketed to the concrete walls make up the facade.
Southeast Face
Northeast Face
These are my latest floor plans and sections. I focused most on the representational quality of the spaces, intrroducing more furniture elements to give the spaces abstract scale.
Section A Section B
The Tree House was my first attempt at deriving form from structure. The tree collumns express the growth of the Menil comunity in Houston with a connection to nature indicative of the Menil’s roots. This was also my first time using Twinmotion.
This is a structural model highlighting my proposal for tree shaped cast steel columns (basswood) that line the perimeter of the cultural center and tie back to a concrete core (3D printed).
I had a team in the beginning phases of design that came up with the Nautilus boat launch. Im proud of our ability to communicate and synthesize a doable design and the Nautilus was my brainchild concept highlighting sheltered exploration and development.
In our shop class we learned woodworking to prepare for the construction of our dock. This took the table saw, band saw, compound miter saw, the holesaw connected to a drill press and glue and nails to secure the joinery.
Welding is a key skill I learned in shop class as well. This 4 ft tall coat rack was fabricated using a grinder, welder, band saw, plasma torch and sand blaster, all of which I am now profficient in.
The Captains’ Launch was the iterative tango that would never end. It taught me endurance, management skills, the value of personal design choices in a project and how to balance design and functionality in the real world.
Charcoal is one of my favored mediums. It is quick and forgiving and the closest thing to painting when it comes to dry mediums. The practice is meticulous but rewarding.
My great grandfather was a professional artist and I use many mediums to explore my roots in his life and legacy. Oils, ink, and charcoal were all utilized in my AP 2D portfolio from which these works were drawn.
I have also sppent a long time with 3 dimensional mediums: found objects, recycled materials, and clay.
