Ali Sherif / Selected Works 2019-2023

ali sherif

selected works 2019 – 2023

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resumé

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Experience & References

core iv / COMMON(S)

6-23

in collaboration w/ Pa Ramyarupa Charlotte von Moos

options / UNTERBAU CITY

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Sharon Johnston Hanif Kara & David Fixler

options / POST-INDUSTRIAL REFUGE

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Fernanda Canales

thesis / THREE LETTERS IN THE DUST

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Lisa Haber-Thomson

professional Johnston Marklee

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NADAAA

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education Harvard University, Graduate School of Design Cambridge, Massachusetts Master of Architecture

2023

Northeastern University Boston, Massachusetts Bachelor of Science in Architecture, Cum Laude Minor in Graphic and Information Design

2018

experience Johnston Marklee Cambridge, Massachusetts Architectural Intern

05.2022-08.2022

JAZ Architect Brooklyn, New York Architectural Intern

09.2021-12.2021

NADAAA Boston, Massachusetts Designer

07.2017-08.2019

BOS-UA Boston, Massachusetts Architectural Intern

09.2021-12.2021

honors & publications Complete Houses, Harvard University.

2023

Unterbau City, Harvard University.

2022

Cossutta Prize for Design Excellence, Nominated.

2022

Section for Reclamation, Koozarch.

2019

Northeastern University’s Dean’s List.

Northeastern SOA Portfolio Prize, Finalist.

2014-2018 2018

Annual SOA Ryder Hall Exhibition.

2017-2018

Northeastern Annual Design Award – Finalist.

2015-2017

University-wide Card Design Competition, Winner.

2016

Ryder Hall Entry Competition, Honorable Mention.

2016

Structures Market Hall Competition, Winner.

2014

references Nader Tehrani Sharon Johnston Charlotte von Moos Paxton Sheldahl

ntehrani@nadaaa.com sharonj@johnstonmarklee.com c.vonmoos@sautervonmoos.com sheldahl@bos-ua.com

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COMMON(S) / w/ Pa Ramyarupa Charlotte von Moos / spring 2021 “common(s)” is not meant to be read as an autonomous object. Rather, the affordable housing project embeds itself into the urban fabric. The project gives back its ground level to the local community, is physically tethered to the park across the road, and marks the end of North End’s greenway and the beginning of an extension to the Emerald Necklace. At the city scale, “common(s)” sutures a void in Boston’s parkway system in an ambition to make a more liveable city, while at the building scale, it reimagines how housing can leverage the tension between thinness and thickness to accommodate for spatial transformability over time.

The design hands over agency to tenants to subdivide, combine, and redefine room-ness. A slim infill spine defines the project’s interior. It consolidates each unit’s domestic fixities—bathroom, kitchen, bedroom—within a partitioned plywood system that is also the apartment’s wall, entryway, and storage. The spine unites and divides the public and private through a series of thresholds and apertures. On its public side, punctured voids become seating space and built-in planters, transforming hallways into communal wintergardens. Vertically stacked and interlinked by circulatory cores, the spine is also where mechanical and structural systems stem. Its compact nature frees the rest of the building of any structural disruptions. Thus, the thin form’s seamlessly thickened hinges provide for uninterrupted space and (re)programmable regions, which account for housing’s inevitable change over time.

An array of single and multi-bedroom unit types flanks a middle portion that houses (Culinary, Art, and Co-Working) Residential Communes, a co-housing model designed to foster community-building. With a wide variety of apartment types—all of which accommodate hyper-personalization and transformability—the project aims to draw in a diverse group of young professionals with wide-ranging identities, interests, and aspirations. While each unit leverages slimness to maximize exposure to sunlight and the outdoors, shared (re)programmable areas capitalize on thickness to provide space for tenants to collectively inject creativity of use and express identity.

The design of “common(s)” does not end with its outer wall. The project cultivates a reciprocal relationship with nature and its local fabric. “common(s)” redefines Boston’s green continuum at the city scale, while enhancing interconnectedness and cohesion at the neighborhood scale. The design proposes a new form of urban living, where architecture takes on both the territorial and anthropocentric approach, to mediate both the inhabitant and the building’s relation with nature and the local surroundings.

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Made of affordable materials–metal, glass, and plywood–the gridded building is lifted on a series of pavilions. Each pavilion is treated with a different surface to animate the minimally-imposed ground floor.

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COMMON(S) / pavilion park & resident entrance

The project redefines Boston’s green continuum at the city scale, while enhancing interconnectedness and cohesion at the neighborhood scale.

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COMMON(S) / L: one-bed unit, R: spine & one-bed plan

A slim infill spine defines the project’s interior. It consolidates each unit’s domestic fixities—bathroom, kitchen, bedroom—within a partitioned plywood system.

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COMMON(S) / L: reconfigured one-bed unit, R: spine axon

The spine also becomes the apartment’s wall, doorway, and storage. On the hallway side, the punctured spine accommodates for planters, seating, storage, and entryways.

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COMMON(S) / second floor plan

The thin volume thickens at its two hinges to house larger communal units and areas. As you ascend, the lower hinge decreases in thickness, creating a series of cascaded interior balconies.

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COMMON(S) / L: expressed thinness, R: thin section

The spine unites and divides the public and private through a series of thresholds and apertures. Each unit leverages slimness to maximize exposure to sunlight and the outdoors.

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COMMON(S) / L: communal hallway, R: cascaded section

The cascading balconies create shared (re)programmable areas that capitalize on thickness to provide space for tenants to collectively inject creativity of use and express identity.

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COMMON(S) / L: artist commune, R: thick section

At the thickest section of the volume exist the residential communes, a cohousing model designed to foster community-building.

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UNTERBAU CITY Sharon Johnston, Hanif Kara, David Fixler / spring 2022 The studio’s site is Regent’s Quarter in London. The Quarter was split up into twelve plots, one plot per student, with each plot containing buildings that are designated as heritage buildings, as well as newer construction buildings that can be edited or demolished altogether.

My plot, the SW quarter of block B, contained three heritage buildings and 2006 hotel, a monolithic building that took up the whole site. As part of my approach, I decided to demolish the hotel and create a massing that addresses the site’s concerns and to its surrounding context. The new massing, an office building, maintains the street edge of the Quarter, using a familiar façade rhythm, while still designating itself as new. The massing breaks down in scale and into parts as it goes deeper into the quarter to relate to the scale of its surroundings, and to a more human scale.

The heritage buildings are preserved, and added to, to create a portal into the middle of the block. A server farm tower emerges from one of the existing buildings, as a distinctive marker, not just to serve the whole Quarter, but as a navigational beacon, guiding visitors to the heart of Regents Quarter. The project embeds within it, and within the Quarter, public spaces: a commercial courtyard and a covered retail street, that ensures year-round usability, transforming it into a versatile space for various activities and events. The edge bar houses a typical office floor plan, while the other volumes contain more loosely-defined coworking spaces and workshop areas.

The building’s materiality changes with every break-down of scale, to emphasize autonomy of its parts, but also to further relate to the Quarter’s fabric. The street edge maintains the Quarter’s character by using the same brick materiality, and a load-bearing construction. The rest of the building, however, is built of a light-weight metal construction to allow for future change in use. By designating the edge as load bearing, or more permanent, it ensures the Quarter’s perceived character remains unchanged, while the heart of the Quarter can remain more flexible down the line. The interior of the block, borrowing from existing roof line, is designed to break down scale, creating intimate yet interconnected spaces.

This approach continues in the secondary interior, where a brick veneer signifies continuity with the past. In between, the large, pitched glass volume unites the edge bar and the smaller volumes within. A metallic wrapper leads the way from the edge, into the courtyard and into the heart of the Quarter. The public courtyard, seamlessly integrated with the newly pedestrianized street, serves as a social nucleus surrounded by pubs and restaurants, enriching the cultural vibrancy of the area.

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UNTERBAU / L: public space, R: collective site plan

heritage

demo

new

The new massing, an office building, maintains the street edge of the Quarter, using a familiar façade rhythm, while the interior of the block, borrowing from existing roof line, is designed to break down the scale of the building.

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UNTERBAU / L: site axon, R: model photos

The heritage buildings are preserved, and added to, to create a portal into the middle of the block, embedding public spaces within the heart of the Quarter.

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UNTERBAU / L: interior street, R: first floor plan

The covered retail street, that ensures year-round usability, while the public courtyard serves as a social nucleus surrounded by pubs and restaurants, spilling onto the newly pedestrianized street.

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UNTERBAU / L: edge, R: second floor plan

The edge bar houses a typical office floor plan, while the other volumes contain more loosely-defined coworking spaces and workshop areas.

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UNTERBAU / section through new

The street edge maintains the Quarter’s character by using the same brick materiality, and a load-bearing construction. The rest of the building, however, is built of a light-weight metal construction to allow for future change in use.

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UNTERBAU / L: roof lines, R: section through new & existing

The interior of the block, borrowing from existing roof line, is designed to break down scale, creating intimate yet interconnected spaces, while maintaining a connection to the heritage building through its materiality.

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UNTERBAU / courtyard at night

At night, the metallic wrapper takes on a transformative role, catching and reflecting light, turning the building into a beacon that illuminates the Quarter.

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POST-INDUSTRIAL REFUGE Fernanda Canales / fall 2022 Valparaíso, known as the Pearl of the Pacific, is Chile’s second largest city. While it has become a popular tourist destination, it also harbors one of the largest Venezuelan refugee communities in the country. Unfortunately, due to a lack of integration policies and competition for resources, particularly housing, Venezuelan migrants face challenges in assimilating into the existing communities. Many Venezuelan migrants end up at temporary shelters for prolonged periods of time, or even in makeshift camps in public spaces. Additionally, Valparaíso is plagued by devastating fires that ravage through the hills of the city, burning everything, it comes across.

Thousands at a time could end up losing everything, their homes included, and end up in impromptu shelters, adding to the competition over housing.

This project creates a possible framework for communities to form and thrive in the face of these natural and social disasters. Meant for medium-term (2-5 year) occupancy, the building becomes its own city of communities within the larger community of Valparaíso; connecting the existing fabric to the water and embedding new communities within existing ones. The project reuses the abandoned warehouse on the coast of Valparaiso and extends it along the water edge. The new city becomes a haven for displaced local communities and for new refugee communities to form and to flourish. The project is sited in center of the city to facilitate easier assimilation of new communities, but also in a location safe from wildfires.

The project aims to undomesticate housing and to challenge the ideology of domestic space as privatized and enclosed.

Individual space is minimized to just a bed, making the bed the epitome of refuge. All other spaces, kitchens, living rooms, and workspaces are blended into one: a collective street.

Domestic labor immediately becomes a shared activity that creates a community with many services to offer its inhabitants, by its inhabitants. Plywood modules can be easily assembled, or disassembled, to provide housing for larger numbers when needed. In between both bars, a park extends itself along the coast, creating connections to the city at both ends and at multiple points in between. The park allows the residents of the community, and locals of Valparaíso alike, access to green space not found elsewhere in the surrounding neighborhoods. Throughout the park, new infrastructure is created: a school, a supermarket, among other program, creating new jobs for new and existing communities. Atop each infrastructural pavilion rises a water tower that collects water to mitigate droughts and damages that occur due to fires, serving Valparaíso as a whole. The new city becomes, not only a self-sufficient organism, but a fruitful one to the benefit of its communities and of Valparaiso at large.

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REFUGE / L: wildfires & refugee crisis, R: aerial views of site

The coastal plot contains an abandoned warehouse and a pier, once used for trade loading and unloading.

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REFUGE / L: model photo, R: site plan

The existing building is doubled, and a green park emerges in between. The park contains a school, a grocery store, and an community center. The project creates new connections between the city and the water.

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6 beds individual and family

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REFUGE / catalog of modules

8 beds family

12 beds individual

12 beds individual w/ workspace

kitchen & laundry

Plywood modules can be easily assembled, or disassembled, to provide housing for larger numbers when needed.

bathrooms

retail kiosk

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REFUGE / L: window to the (outside) R: zoom-in plan

A complete house: 1. is able to contain any and everything, 2. creates space for the quotidian and the ad-hoc, 3. provides the feeling of safety and of autonomy, 4. nulls the boundary between inside and outside, 5. is permanent, but flexible.

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REFUGE / L: a moment of respite, R: interior oblique

Domestic labor immediately becomes a shared activity that creates a community with many services to offer its inhabitants, by its inhabitants.

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REFUGE / first floor plan

The park allows the residents of the community, and locals of Valparaíso alike, access to green space not found elsewhere in the surrounding neighborhoods.

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REFUGE / L: model photo, R: second floor plan

The building becomes its own city of communities within the larger community of Valparaíso; connecting the existing fabric to the water and embedding new communities within existing ones.

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REFUGE / L: looking inward, R: section

Atop each infrastructural pavilion rises a water tower that collects water to mitigate droughts and damages that occur due to fires, serving Valparaíso as a whole.

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REFUGE / interior oblique

The new city becomes, not only a self-sufficient organism, but a fruitful one to the benefit of its communities and of Valparaiso at large.

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THREE LETTERS IN THE DUST advised by Lisa Haber-Thomson / thesis spring 2023 “Dust is resourceful as a metaphor, but also pervasive and unavoidable in its materiality. Dust is multifaceted. It is both of the inside and the outside, of the living and the dead; it is everything and it is nothing.” (Nassar, 21).

Dust is ubiquitous in Cairo, but especially prominent in the City of the Dead. Traces of the past collect on the city’s streets bearing witness to the city’s past and allowing for future imprinting to occur. Dust transforms the city by collecting and incorporating particles of different origin within itself It exchanges parts of itself with its environment, gathering and leaving behind, constantly engaged in a mutual exchange with its place.

The City of the Dead (COD) is the largest cemetery in Egypt and has been the primary burial place for Egyptians since the seventh century. Family tombs make up the main building block of the cemetery. Sitting in the heart of Cairo, its fabric is distinctive: A tapestry of interlocked buildings separated by dusty paths and alleyways. A new fabric unseen anywhere else in Cairo. It stands only physically connected to the urban fabric, with select moments of interception favoring the living, but otherwise isolated from its surroundings, sitting as an archive of Cairene history and as a collector of dust.

The land of the COD not only provides an eternal resting place for an extraordinary number of dead, but also homes for countless of living inhabiting its tombs. Life in the COD is as old as the COD itself. In Ancient Egypt there were large numbers of laborers, craftsmen, and tomb keepers living full time in the cemetery. However, at the beginning of the twentieth century the COD experienced a substantial rise in occupancy due to a rapid population growth, extensive rural-to-urban migration, and a general housing shortage.

Because of the nature of the Egyptian tomb typology, it was easily adaptable to become a livable space for many, with sometimes up to seven people a room, with a generous outdoor area that would be impossible to find elsewhere in Cairo. This allowed the cemeteries to absorb the enormous residential overflow.

This thesis aims to enhance the already-existent, vibrant public sphere in the City of the Dead by providing a framework of interventions for the collective, as well as providing basic infrastructural needs: a tea house, a pigeon coop, and a classroom. The project employs dust, both materially and metaphorically, to produce architectural form by drawing on the inherent nested kinship Egyptians have with dust.

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LETTERS / L: plan/section showing tomb usage, R: life in COD

Life in the COD is as old as the COD itself. Today, it is estimated that somewhere between 200 and 500,000 people live in the City of the Dead.

Either in their own family tombs, or rented from the tomb-owners at a very cheap price.

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LETTERS / L: typical family tomb inhabited plan, R: axon

Tombs consist of a permanent structure that includes one or more rooms and a walled courtyard. In the courtyard, a set of stairs that leads to two vaulted burial chambers.

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LETTERS / dust accumulation & aggregation

In this project I challenge that and take seriously the form-giving capabilities of dust through three interventions gesturing towards a larger reimaging towards the City of the Dead.

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LETTERS / model photos

letter one: a tea house The tea house occupies an empty plot that exists between two family tombs, a common condition in the City of the Dead. It builds up the previously discontinuous street edge and thickens the walls of its surroundings to create small spaces of inhabitation. In the middle, a garden to plant teas and mints used daily by most Egyptians. The tea house not only creates an infrastructure that allows for social connection; but also provides bathrooms, a more mundane but equally necessary infrastructure for not just the tea house but the surrounding area and its inhabitants.

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Ceilings and walls, made of linen fabric, borrow their form from the city’s laundry lines, wedding decorations, and market sheds. These surfaces move with the wind; they move in concert with their inhabitants, portraying the life behind them, always taking on a new form.

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Within this movement, the tea house allows for a moment of pause; for settling.

At the end of the day, one can take respite in one of its nooks to sip tea and connect with others.

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LETTERS / model photos

letter two: a pigeon coop The coop lies at the edge of a block. It perches, as does dust, lightly on the wall of an adjacent tomb, collecting itself upwards and creating an arcade below. The structure not only houses pigeons, of course, but it also delineates space for other things that occur, here, in the streets of the city: Weddings, Ramadan meals, a moment in the shade, or funerals and large gatherings, events happen and disappear, leaving nothing but a marking in the dust

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LETTERS / birds/worms eye oblique

A new water tap is installed; a place where a necessary infrastructure surfaces.

Borrowing its transience from dust, its occupancy is in constant flux.

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The coop, in particular, is a marker, pigeons flying in and out above, and activity below call attention to – and thus symbolize life in the City of the Dead.

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LETTERS / model photos

letter three: a classroom The classroom exists in the in between spaces, in inverse courtyards that precede the buildings around them. Walls extend from the surrounding context creating open rooms. The classroom’s walls are constructed of stone, gleaned and recycled from the city’s torn-down mausoleums and tombs. They are constructed with local knowledge, using a method indigenous to the area. The classroom walls, like dust, are taken directly from its surroundings: maintaining a circularity that rebuilds the walls of future using traces of the past.

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LETTERS / model photos

The space is furnished, but loosely: chairs and tables are moveable according to changing needs of its inhabitants. The classroom allows for accumulation without bounds.

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Accumulation happens against walls that have blackboards and electrical outlets and collection around objects scattered on the site: a toiler, a sink, and a clock tower. As such, the classroom is a place to learn to read and write, and also builds a child’s curiosity: where did this wall come from? And, why is it formed in this way?

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Dust is slippery. Indeed, talking about dust is talking about immeasurability, about a material and an affect that is absent inasmuch as it is present. Dust is often forgotten. Those living in the city of the dead are a forgotten society. They live amidst the dead, yet are absent within conversations occurring outside of their own walls. When these two forgotten objects, cultures, communities, realities, are placed side by side, are acknowledged, and are taken quite seriously, they are written back in to existence. Dust piles up against walls, it fills in cracks, it lays gently on a surface, or flows with the wind. Dust can, sometimes, make itself wholly present and alive. These 3 letters in the dust ascribe themselves upon, within, and around the city of the dead.

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LETTERS / exploration with dust

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WHITNEY MUSEUM ISP BUILDING Johnston Marklee / 2022 Team: Sharon Johnston, Mark Lee, Nicholas Hofstede, Nelson Byun, Andrew Fu, Lindsay Erickson, Ali Sherif, Kyle Winston, Arta Perezic, Jocelyn Chiou Photos by Max Touhey Johnston Marklee: ''The future permanent home for the Whitney Independent Study Program (ISP) at Roy Lichtenstein Studio (RLS) will provide a communal setting for post-graduates in art practice, curatorial studies and critical theory. Bequeathed to the Whitney Museum in 2022 by Dorothy Lichtenstein, the 10,000-SF former factory building located in the Greenwich Village Historic District, four blocks south of the Whitney, will be renovated and adapted to accommodate 14 artist studios, a seminar room, and spaces for study and collaboration. A rooftop addition will house a visiting artist studio and apartment.

The addition follows the legacy of artists’ adaptive re-use of industrial buildings in Greenwich Village. Foregrounding the existing former factory building, the recessed brick façade of the third-floor addition brings symmetry to the structural and programmatic organization of the mixed industrial and residential-use building. The addition and renovation integrate the existing green roof and terrace as an outdoor urban room, central to the informal social and intellectual setting of the program.

The interior transformation of the existing RLS opts for a flexible loose fit approach of underdetermined spaces supporting multiple uses that may evolve over time.

Interventions throughout the studios, reading rooms, and lounges moderate between the scales of architecture and furniture to tailor the existing spaces to ISP requirements.

Together with new cores and services within the existing shell, the new interiors will be a generous spatial framework allowing different uses and modes of occupation to unfold with each annual cohort. The adaptable spaces will host school-aged art students in the summer months.’’

This was a very fast-paced project. I was on this project from the beginning of DD until the end of it. I worked on facade studies and finalizing the brickwork and window dimensions, as well as the plan and the rest of the elevations.

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WHITNEY / L: rendering of addition, R: face and brick studies

NEW ADDITION AT WASHINGTON STREET

14”

8”

Sailor course bricks

Brick returns at window head and jambs

9’

Painted grey steel windows - 8’ (w) x 9’ (h) - fixed above - awning below

Metal flashing over top of ex’g precast coping

Ex’g soldier course embossed detail

North Facade Enlarged Elevation Ex’g painted double hung windows

align North Facade Plan Detail (NTS)

West Facade Enlarged Elevation

West Facade Wall Section

WHITNEY MUSEUM OF AMERICAN ART 741/745 WASHINGTON STREET, NEW YORK, NY

The recessed brick façade of the third-floor addition brings symmetry to the structural and programmatic organization of the existing.

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WHITNEY / L: plan & section, R: photos of first floor

The interior transformation of the existing RLS opts for a flexible loose fit approach of underdetermined spaces supporting multiple uses that may evolve over time.

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WHITNEY / L: plan & section, R: photos of second floor and addition

The rooftop addition will house a visiting artist studio and apartment, with access to the green roof.

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BOSTON PUBLIC LIBRARY, ADAMS BRANCH NADAAA / 2019 Team: Nader Tehrani, Katherine Faulkner, Arthur Chang, Amin Tadj, Michael Schanbacher, Amin Tadj, Nathan Vice, Lisa LaCharité, Gretchen Neeley, Ali Sherif, Tim Wong, Alex Diaz, Dustin Brugmann, Ronnie Kataki, Hannah Wang Photos by John Horner NADAAA: ''The Adams Street Branch Library is nestled into Adams Village in Dorchester, one of Boston’s great workingclass neighborhoods. The library is set at a focal point where Adams Street bends, making its presence a marker for the neighborhood.

A single pitch monumentalizes the transparent façade on Adams Street, while a breakdown of peaked roofs in the rear matches the scale of the residential neighborhood. The folded roof draws rainwater towards the east, creating a watershed in a new pedestrian landscape. By extracting a wedge out of the southern portion of the site we draw light and air into the center of the building and create a garden of native plants.

Another garden in the north framing the heritage oak tree is a featured view from both the community room and the circulation desk at the building’s panoptic center.

Quiet reading areas within the library lie tangent to the gardens with views of the neighborhood. Situated on a single floor, the entire building is inclusive and accessible to all, aiming to bring the community into one shared space. This new building doubles the usable spaces for the community compared to its former counterpart on the same site. With a flexible community hall for lectures, films, and other events, the library also contains several lounges in all wings. It also has a music room and conference rooms that can be used for tutoring sessions.

On the façade, the use of multiple terracotta glazes allows the sides of the building to respond to their immediate contexts and speak to the language of traditional New England Greek Revival and brick-ended public buildings common in the area.

Informal in its composition, the color additionally helps to decompose its massing and give it warmth.''

I was involved on this project from the beginning of DD, all the way through the end of CD's. I was involved with most aspects of this project, including the exterior and interior, furniture design, signage package, among other things.

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WHITNEY / L: axon diagram by Amin Tadj, R: photos of interior

Quiet reading areas within the library lie tangent to the gardens with views of the neighborhood.

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WHITNEY / plan & elevations

A single pitch monumentalizes the transparent façade on Adams Street, while a breakdown of peaked roofs in the rear matches the scale of the residential neighborhood.

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WHITNEY / L: photos of corner conditions, R: details by Tim Wong

The use of multiple terracotta glazes allows the sides of the building to respond to their immediate contexts.

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ADAMS / L: children’s wall, R: photo of children’s area

In the children’s area, a wall routed with North American animals subtly brings a playful element, while maintaining the plywood wrapper within the building.

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alisherif@gsd.harvard.edu +1 407.716.6130