Architecture Portfolio 2024 by Alianna Becerra

PORTFOLIO ARCHITECTURE

ALIANNA BECERRA

Art has always been a major aspect of my life. My grandfather was an illustrator, my grandmother a painter, my dad a photographer, and now myself a designer. Although I have always loved the creativity of other arts like illustration and painting, I also appreciated the more structured aspects of architecture and design. I liked that it could combine the creative mind with the analytical.

Throughout my life and career I have continued to focus on both creativity and analytics. I spent most of my studies in college in art history, architecture, art and design classes. This allowed me to incorporate a more creative eye into my work in architecture and a more analytical eye into my art. The influences each of these areas have had on each other through my work have served to be the foundations of myself as a designer.

Professionally I have focused my career on both architecture and graphic design. These experiences and influences throughout my life have informed my designs and my portfolio aims to show that. Through a mix of architectural and graphic design, I intend to tell a story not only of my designs, but of who I am as a designer.

PROFESSIONAL

04.

URBAN CARTOGRAPHICS

EDUCATIONAL

08.

14. 18. LEE HARRIS POMEROY ARCHITECTS

MUSEUM ARCHIVE GALLERY EXTENSION

10. JOHN SNYDER ARCHITECTS

URBAN CARTOGRAPHICS

2023-2024

In early March of 2023 I began working as a Graphic Designer with Urban Cartographics, a small group of planning and zoning consultants specializing in the NYC development approval process.

Here I created a lot of maps, presentations, and other related graphics to help clients throughout various stages of the development approval process. I made these visuals mainly through the use of QGIS for map making and CorelDRAW for making presentations. I also used various other tools to aid my design process including SketchUp, Photoshop, Rhino and more.

In this section, you can see a few different samples of the type of work I did throughout my time at Urban Cartographics. Included on this spread is the Urban Design Diagram (left), which was created to help clients visualize early massing models on their site. Also included on the right is the Plan Beautification Project. This was an initiative I developed to help clients to better interpret the architects’ plans for their projects.

Addresses in this section have been changed or redacted for confidentiality purposes.

Urban Design Diagrams - SketchUp, Rhino, Photoshop

Plan Beautification Projects - QGIS, CorelDRAW

As I became more familiar with the team’s work throughout my time at Urban Cartographics, I became the lead designer on presentation work. These presentations were often used by our clients at meetings during their development approval process. The goal through the presentations was to dissect the plans for the site in question and present them in a way that was clear for any viewer with any level of zoning knowledge to understand. Although I created a lot of these presentations for various projects, no two presentations were ever the same. There were some

slides that were seen in almost every presentation to some capacity, such as the “Access to Many Transit Options” and “Tax Map” slides seen above, but I also created many unique slides that were customized to each project. Examples of those are the “Contextual Design” slide to the left and the “Existing and Proposed Developments” slide above. Despite variety in some of the content of these presentations, they were always cohesive with one another and aligned with the identity of the Urban Cartographics brand.

Full Presentation Slides - CorelDRAW, QGIS, Client Plans, NYC DOF

LEE HARRIS POMEROY ARCHITECTS

During the summer of 2019 I worked with Lee Harris Pomeroy (LHP) Architects in NYC as an intern. I spent 3 months on their team and learning about the industry.

Throughout my time with LHP, I strengthened my skills in Revit, SketchUp, and Photoshop. I also created design proposal books and presentations.

One major project I worked on with LHP during my internship was the redesign of their office. I was tasked with handling the majority of the drawings for this design and working with our principals to ensure that we had a great office space moving forward. Pictured to the right are some renderings from this project.

After graduating from Ithaca College in 2020, I went on to become a full time Junior Architectural Designer with LHP Architects. I worked on various projects during my time with LHP Architects, specifically designing a school addition with the NYC SCA.

Please note that some of the pages in this section had to be temporarily redacted for online publication until completion of the project. Please contact me directly if you are interested in learning more about my work on these projects.

Junior Architectural Designer - 2020-2021 Internship - Summer 2019

Office Remodel Renderings

J. SNYDER ARCHITECTS 2020

During my final semester at Ithaca College I worked at John Snyder Architects (JSA) as an Architectural Intern from February until June. This internship provided me with valuable information about the architecture industry and the skills to better my practice of architecture.

A lot of the work I did during this time was for the redesign of the JSA website, including the work shown in this section. During this time I worked hand in hand with the website designer to create various graphics showing our past and current projects. This experience working on redesigning the JSA website allowed me to practice my graphic design skills in a more professional setting than I had done previously during my time in college.

In addition to the work shown in this section, I also worked on a variety of technical drawings and designs for different projects including residential homes and car dealerships.

Website Imagery - Illustrator, Photoshop

About a month into my time working with John Snyder Architects, the Covid-19 pandemic was quickly escalating throughout the world and where we were located in Ithaca, New York. This began a long period of remote work that forced us to re-imagine what our practice would look like.

During this time, I was doing a lot of work on redesigning our firm’s website and we were in need of a set of new, cohesive headshots for the team. This proved difficult being that we were all in different places and unable to meet with a professional pho-

tographer. Because of this, I decided to make digital headshots for the team based on recent photos that they sent me, as seen above. This allowed us to have an up to date set of headshots that were all following the same format. This also helped me to make the headshots in a style that was connected to the style of the rest of the website imagery.

Employee Headshots - Illustrator

In additional to the technical architectural design work I did with John Snyder Architects and the graphic design that I did for their website, I also was tasked with managing the firm’s Instagram. They did not post on their Instagram very frequently, so I made it my goal to post more often and engage more with our community so people could know more about JSA as a firm.

In doing this, I started a “Throwback Thursday” series, where on Thursdays I would highlight a past project we did. To the top right you can see two images from a highlight I did of The Bank Tower building, a building in Ithaca, New York, that the JSA team did renovations on. Through research of this project I was also able to find historical records of the building before our renovation of it to include in this post.

Between this initiative and other interesting posts I made about JSA, I was able to increase their Instagram’s engagement by an average of 155% and inform the community more about our team and the work we did.

GALLERY EXTENSION

2019

This piece was part of the work I did for Architectural Studio II at Ithaca College. The project was to make an extension to our campus art gallery, the Handwerker Gallery. In my vision of this project, the extension was focused on showing student work, since there wasn’t a designated place to display that on campus.

For this project each student was assigned another building to use as a precedent to base their design off of. For mine I did an evaluation of another museum: The Paracus Museum in Peru. This allowed me to get a basis of an idea for the gallery’s circulation and structure. I then used this precedent study as a foundation for my own design.

This project was created through the use of various mediums including Rhino and 3D printing.

Precedent Study - Mixed Media

Precedent Interpretation - Rhino

Isometric Sections of Precedent Interpretation - Rhino

Model of Precedent Interpretation - Cardstock

Massing Model - 3D Printing and Cardstock

3D Rendering - Rhino

Section - Rhino

MUSEUM ARCHIVE 2019

This project was completed for the Architectural Studio II class at Ithaca College. The goal of this project was to create a museum archive for the Cooper Hewitt museum in New York City. I chose to make my archive to hold pieces that represented the evolution of urban professional fashion.

A founding idea I had for this project was to preserve and activate green space in the urban setting.

An inspiration for this archive was the Kimbell Museum in Texas. Since my design is largely underground, I used foundations of light access seen in the Kimbell Museum to inspire my method of allowing natural light into this archive.

Mediums used in this project were pencil, trace paper, Rhino, and various materials used for models created by hand, such as cardstock.