AXIOM 2019-2020

The Texas A&M University Student-Run Architectural Publication

a subset of the american

institute of architecture students

AXIOM 2019 - 2020 ISSUE

STUDENT EDITION

CONCRETE MENAGERIE

CONRETE MENAGERIE AXIOM is the Texas A&M University Student-Run Architectural publication, serving to publish the voices & works of our department’s student body. The theme of this year’s

issue illustrates the notion of the MENAGERIE, which is defined as a strange or diverse collection of people or things. We are attributing this to the variety of work, ideologies, aspirations, and curiosities present within the Department of Architecture at Texas A&M University. Our hope is that this publication can serve not only to illuminate and celebrate the internal diversity of Langford (our personal concrete menagerie), but to simultaneously contribute to a broader scale of menagerie that is the discourse of Architecture at large, with its miscellany & incommensurable facets.

2019 - 2020 AXIOM EDITORIAL TEAM Editor-In-Chief.....................................................................Angela Alissa Keele Editor........................................................................................Katherine Gesing Curator (fall).....................................................................................Jared Labus Curator (spring).........................................................................Francisco Anaya ...and a sincere thank you to; our subcommittee members for their perspective & contributions, to the American Institute of Architecture Students, to our sponsors, AIA Brazos and The Arkitex Studio, Inc., to the professors who inpsire & challenge us everyday, and, above all, to the students whose submissions constitute the body of this publication, without whom this endeavor would not have been possible.

AXIOM THROUGH THE YEARS

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letter from the CURATORS Through this curatorial process, we want to sincerely thank all the students who submitted their work to the AXIOM team. Sharing our work can seemingly be the most daunting task in our workflow, yet you all took the step to show the talent, rigor, and potential of the Department of Architecture. Without student submissions and involvement, AXIOM would not be possible. We would also like to personally thank all the faculty involved in our work, whether that be in encouraging your students to submit their projects, helping in our portfolio and curation workshops, and beyond.

- Jared Labus & Francisco Anaya

letter from the

EDITOR

I want to thank all the students for the tremendous amount of effort put into the projects that were submitted to us. This year we had an exceptionally talented group of designers who made it extremely difficult to narrow down the pieces selected and represented throughout this publication (YAY!) Our college is bursting at the seams with intellectual diversity and those dedicated to pushing the boundaries. I am proud of my peers and everything they have accomplished. With great honor, we present the following works in the hope of fostering communication about the current architectural discourse, showcasing the menagerie of thought within our Langford buildings, and celebrating the students who have lived here with me.

- Katherine Gesing

letter from the

EDITOR-in-chief

It is with pride that we present the Student Edition of AXIOM. Within this publication, you will find the dedication put forth by our student body to represent our collective, though multifarious, values & fascinations. and it is our hope that this edition can provide a means of engagement between the discipline & profession of architecture.

We value the rigor of our students in their producation of work. With such rigor (and the current digital ease of production), comes an overabundance of images. Our response to this is a careful curatorial process of selecting the images of a project, and the projects as a whole, that contribute most to critical discourse. The work within this publication showcases the variety of skills, talents, & knowledge and the exemplary standards we strive for within the Department of Architecture.We hope this process of curation will mirror the criticality that is present in our curriculum; both to 1. ) foster an acceptance of criticism, not as a daunting obstacle, but as a necessary part of growth; and 2.) to develop our own individual sense of critically through which to analyze & question architecture and its related fields.

- Angela Alissa Keele 03

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Aaron Sheffield & Michael Marroquin | 3rd-year Integrated Studio | ARCH305 | Marcel Erminy | Fall 2019 |

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Dump Vestige | Emily Majors, Cynthia Castro, Alejandra Valdovinos, Jeannelle Fernandez ARCH 206/406 | T4T Lab | Gabriel Esquivel & Joris Putteneers | Spring 2019

How can an ecosystem dependent on the production of human waste, such as the garbage dump, survive without humans available to generate input? This machine uses big data collected from digital waste and physical waste in order to optimize dump emissions with the intent of sustaining both the earth and the ecology of the rubbish dump, privileging the dumps’ agenda to preserve itself in the case of human extinction through a process of machine learning and synthetic trash manufacturing.

Dump Vestige | Emily Majors, Cynthia Castro, Alejandra Valdovinos, Jeannelle Fernandez ARCH 206/406 | T4T Lab | Gabriel Esquivel & Joris Putteneers | Spring 2019

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The W-A-L-L is a modular interlocking system designed to generate a partition in a larger architectural scheme. This project acts particularly as a secondary structure in this sense and is visualized in this project in a domestic setting. The project is comprised of 4 basic units which allow for versatility in form and material selection. The forms allow for the wall to bend as a way to address a corner, and the opportunity for varying textures and materials is numerous. The imagery on this page serves as a packing diagram to convey how the objects can unroll or disband to be built from continuous or discontinuous sheets of material.

The elevation and plan on the final page divulges only one of many possible schemes at a particular scale for this arrangement of objects.

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Will Van Dusen | ARCH317 | Product Design | Gabriel Esquivel | Fall 2019

Carlos Romo, Merk Pilar & Ken Hoggard | ARCH301 | Study Abroad Studio | Castiglion Fiorentino, Italy

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Columbus, Indiana, a city known as an unlikely home for numerous architecture classics is also home to a corporation acting as a patron of the arts, architecture, and culture. They are able to influence the growth and development of the city; claiming to want the best for the community they continue to develop in order to increase profits. Following the actions of the ultra-rich in the wake of the Trump presidency, the corporation becomes more confident and decides to fund a monument to their company while elevating themselves to the level of God. A church in the shape of their product; the soon to expire internal combustion engine.

Creating a landmark, a monument, a machine, and a relic in one structure.

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Chris Loofs & Jordan Marshall | ARCH405 | Integrated Studio | Koichiro Aitani | Fall 2019

Chris Loofs & Jordan Marshall | ARCH405 | Integrated Studio | Koichiro Aitani | Fall 2019

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Chris Loofs & Jordan Marshall | ARCH405 | Integrated Studio | Koichiro Aitani | Fall 2019

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The initial program started as separate experimentations; however, through the formal conditions of each building design, the two forms began to share a language of radiality, initiated by the seams created, through distinctive boolean operations. By designing on the same site located in Houston, the two individual masses create an index for the other through puncture and wrapping conditions thus creating a charged void within the spatial separation between the two. The site therefore becomes a Houston urban center with a library represented in render on the left and a cultural museum on the right. The forms provide distinguishing qualities while traversing the plaza and surrounding spaces which are designed to highlight and centralize the separate zones of the site. The library retains a singular and subtle movement inviting incoming passers from the city tram to walk around and explore the area through the use of the plaza bridge, while the cultural museum provides contrasting and differing figures to diversify and challenge the notion of the glass box skyscraper. The charged void and plaza opens out to the shops and restaurants of the city to attract visitors.

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Houston Urban Center | Alex Rosenbalm & Lauren James |ARCH 206 | Shawn Lutz | Spring 2019

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Daniel Eynon & Joseph Reich | Integrated Studio | Fall 2019 | Koichiro Aitani

“This project poses a question about the value of wasted landscapes, specifically garbage disposal sites and landfills. My research began by developing a basic understanding of the infrastructure related to waste management at various scales. After asking myself why certain regions produced more waste than others, I concluded that there seems to be a relationship between landfill volumes and metropolitan economic output. At this point, I focused on the Bryan/College Station area in order to form an understanding of land use around local waste sites. Together, these findings led to questioning whether the institution of waste disposal sites really were the last step in their economic life. The closed Rock Prairie landfill became my location of interest. There are plans in place to develop the surrounding area into residential housing as well as a private endeavor to create a “new city center.” Rather than seek ecological healing (a strategy which continues to encourage public ignorance concerning waste and contamination), I chose to exploit the buried remains, reform the landscape and restrict physical access to certain portions of the new program. By extracting landfill gas and using it to power an industrial scale automated hydroponics system for lettuce, I’m turning the wasted landscape into one of production. Restricting access to the elevated volume dedicated to crop growth mimics the current non-public condition of the site. A Virtual reality education center allows visitors to explore the grow space, a “Human exclusion zone,” to better understand the networks of food production, transport, and ironically disposal. The same way we modified the landscape to store waste, I chose to rework the land and “cap” the mound with the massive glowing “pinkhouse” as a reminder of what is buried beneath.”

Resourceful Waste | John Scott | ARCH 605 FALL 2019 | Marcelo Lopez-Dinardi

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Stephanie Madamma | “The Female Survivor: Baroque to Present” | ARCH 441 | Baroque & Rococo Architecture | Stephen Caffey | Fall 2019

“Inspired by the story of Artemisia Gentileschi, I created a series of collages in order to promote conversation about the limited progress that has been made for gaining equality between men and women just since the Baroque Era. These collages primarily focus on a woman’s right to her own body and the ability of women to be treated equally in the eyes of the law when it comes to issues like rape and abortion. Artemisia was raped by the man who was teaching her to paint, and in the court case which found him guilty of such, Artemisia was tortured during her testimony while her rapist was simply questioned, found guilty, then exiled without any enforcement, thus being freed.”

Stephanie Madamma | “The Female Survivor: Baroque to Present” | ARCH 441 | Baroque & Rococo Architecture | Stephen Caffey | Fall 2019

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Sean Nimmons & Alyssa Dophied | ARCH206 | Shawn M. Lutz | Spring 2019

The parameters of this project were defined by the urban conditions of the city of Houston as well as the rapidly developing fabric of the city.In part of repurposing the site into two functionally and aesthetically ontologically separate buildings, the objective is to transform the undesirable state of a vacant parking lot and the raw character of the context between the buildings with a charged void that is further accentuated with a joint plaza. The ground patterns within the plaza were developed around the idea of the transgression of objects as individuals in their relation to the notion of the figure ground condition of the city and the moment of tension between them. A charged void is established through the juxtaposition of a chunky and a sculptural moment. From this moment we articulated the spatial conditions of the interior of the object through both the denial and acceptance of the charged void.Within this moment of the charged void we deal with the idea of kissing architecture as presented in the work of Sylvia Lavin, this is represented in the overlapping conditions of the joint elevation and section. This defies the reality of the charged void as at no moment do they actually touch.

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Learning from Lockhart | Ryan Garza | ENDS108 | James Michael Tate | Spring 2019

“My project explored the time and place i am entering the discipline of architecture. My design is a Post-accelerationist envisioning of a distribution center in the near future where online shopping will reign supreme over traditional brick and mortar retail stores” (left)

“In this project, I focused on using logic to both interpret and impose disorder. A singular form was created by an array of prisms at a gradual slope that inspired a similar dissent of disorder in the form of a glitch. As a viewer moves through my complex, the glitch moves as well. In response to this process I chose a scientific research facility as my program. The movement from disorder to order reflects the journey from ignorance and chaotic thought to the enlightenment associated with the scientific method.” (below)

Alexia Konopka | ARCH206 | Vahid Vahdat | Spring 2019

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ORNAMENT AS CRIME

This project speculates on a prison in the post-sin exposed to a customized VR simulation as punish still carrying out the intended correction. In creati of a post-singularity and post-anthropocentric so proper reintegration into society.

This model is based in cities and can be impleme thus acts as both a panopticon and a reflection of generation. In this manner, the influx of crime da form of a narrative collage in which the progres collaged images become something else—a new fo reality.

This produces a program that blurs the lines betw societal perceptions of the purpose of prisons. Th a solution in the form of a post-heterotopic existe repurpose the influence of the prison on society.

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Courtney Ward, Francisco Anaya, Anna Cook, Luis Rubio, Benjamin Hergert T4T Lab | Gabriel Esquivel & Joris Putteneers | Spring 2019

ngularity era. The prison is occupied by both humans and AI who have committed cyber crimes who are hment to fit their crime. This process would simulate time and therefore expedite prison sentences while ing this new prison typology, we are reinterpreting Foucault’s anthropocentric basis to fit the conditions ociety where the effects reach both human and AI while redefining the rehabilitation process to achieve

ented in multiple locations throughout the world as needed. Each model will be tethered to the city and f crime rates within the city. The aesthetic agency operates as an interpretation of ornament through VR ata gathered from the city generates further ornamentation. These concepts are represented through the ssion through the experience of the prison is displayed in a digital reinterpretation of the collage. The orm that is neither representative of nor derivative of the original architecture that seeks to further dilute

ween reality and simulation through strategies of manipulation of time and space in an effort to change his progresses past Foucault’s analysis of prisoner treatment and separation from society by providing ence: an in-between space that acts as a way to not only alter an individual criminal, but as a way to

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Will Van Dusen & Andrew Lane | ARCH405 | Integrated Studio | Marcel Erminy | Fall 2019

Converging Interstices | Andrew G. Atwood & Courtney Ward | Study Abroad - Barcelona Architecture Center | Pasqual Bendicho | Fall 2019

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Jared Labus & Alex Rosenbalm | ARCH 305 | 3rd-year Integrated Studio | Michael O’Brien | Fall 2019

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Daniel Eynon & Mitchell Dasilva (Roger Williams University) | Study Abroad - Barcelona Architecture Center | Miquel Rodriguez | Spring 2019

“This proposal focuses on exploring the issue of building between the pre-existing spaces within the city. The area of intervention lies along Paulista Avenue in Sao Paulo, Brazil, here we were assigned a specific sector of the city to study and explore the site conditions prior to formulating our design.�

Filling the Gap | Pedro Barron & Zion Lewis | ARCH206 | Davi Delima | Spring 2019

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Marie A. Chapa & Alejandra Valdovinos | Study Abroad - Barcelona Architecture Center | Miguel Roldan | Spring 2019

“The renovation of the Martorell Museum blends the community and the park with the design of a new access to the building and a local market on the site. The market is free for locals to create a unique experience, as it is designed with movable elements that divide space.

Lightwells and vegetation are key elements to connect the underground with the rest of the Ciutadella Park.�

Plaza de Luz | Mariana Echanove | CARC 604 | Study Abroad - Barcelona Architecture Center | Miguel Roldan | Spring 2019

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LEARNING FROM LOCKHART “This project concerned the way I entered the discipline of architecture. We were required to design a building of our choice in the small town of Lockhart, TX. My design is a community living center for those in their mid to late 20s. The way in which I entered the discipline of architecture was through the creation of 2D representations, more specifically The Populated Plan. I did this in order to add “more” to my traditional floor plans. I think it adds liveliness and character to the building by having people actually live and interact with my design.”

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Learning From Lockhart | Rebecca Shein | ENDS 108 | James Michael Tate | Spring 2019

Clara B. Mounce Library Renovation | KAtharine Woehler | 3rd-year Integrated Studio | ARCH 305 | Kateri Stewart| Fall 2019

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Meagan Dinh & Taylor King | ARCH 206 | Hyoungsub Kim | Spring 2019

Meagan Dinh & Taylor King | ARCH 206 | Hyoungsub Kim | Spring 2019

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“The design of the church is formed around three programmatic volumes connected by social gathering/lounge spaces that facilitate the most efficient circulation within the building and across the site itself.

The three main programs include the auditorium/worship center, the children’s ministry/ admin. area, and the two classroom levels where courses of varying lengths/depths are offered to young adults and ages above.

The church is designed with the intent of providing a space where people can gather for various events, discover ways to become more informed on God’s heart on different topics, as well as learn practical ways to apply those teachings through main services on Sundays and the different courses offered throughout the year.”

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Community Church of Columbus, IN | Jacob Savage & Kenny Gilbert | ARCH405 | Integrated Studio | Dr. Koichiro Aitani

Empathy: A Home in the City | Katharine Woehler | ARCH 206 | Davi Delima Xavier | Spring 2019

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THE WATER TOWER The Water Tower is a building that creates an argument on how ground can inform design and program placement. The design focuses on a reversal of roles with what would usually be found underground- such as infrastructure like pipes- and placing that at the top of the building and taking what would be above ground- such as program- and placing that underground, with the ground and the extruded shaft mediating the two. In terms of representation, the color pallette was sampled from Michelangelo Antonioni’s film The Red Desert in order to instil a gloom industrial environment.

The Water Tower | Rob Williams, Shannon Sumner, Austin White | ARCH205 | Gabriel Esquivel & Nancy Al-Assaf | Studio Coordinator: James Michael Tate | Fall 2019

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The Water Tower | Rob Williams, Shannon Sumner, Austin White | ARCH205 | Gabriel Esquivel & Nancy Al-Assaf | Studio Coordinator: James Michael Tate | Fall 2019

The Water Tower | Rob Williams, Shannon Sumner, Austin White | ARCH205 | Gabriel Esquivel & Nancy Al-Assaf | Studio Coordinator: James Michael Tate | Fall 2019

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POPULATED DRAWING Francisco Anaya | Independent Research | Advisor: James Michael Tate

This project proposes to create various digital depictions of a populated architectural drawing through the usage of the entourage in architecture. Entourage in architecture is the usage of people, and other inanimate objects in architectural drawings to showcase a set building/project in our reality which has traditionally been used to convey scale. This research showcases a new drawing convention in architecture of the populated drawing and a recent phenomenon of viewing them at a larger scale through the agency of the entourage and its implication and connection to the normality and biases of a society. The entourage will be presented in a new light by progressing it beyond its traditional use.

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This project builds upon past research done in the architectural field mainly Dora Epstein Jones “Little People Everywhere: The Populated Plan”, as a guide that will influence the final drawing. Along with visual references of previous populated drawings such as “The Garden of Earthly Delights Triptych” by Hieronymus Bosch and “A Situation Constructed from Loose and Overlapping Social and Architectural Aggregates” by MOS architects. These drawings show strategic ways of using the entourage based on a subject/idea. Which will further the ideas of using entourage as an entity beyond scale.

The expected outcome of this research project is to produce digital drawings based on the new drawing convention in architecture known as a populated drawing.

Then making a connection between the entourage and its implication to society and emphasizing the ability of these drawings to make a type of proclamation.

In the representation of an architecture project, 2-dimensional drawings are used in order to convey the project in different visual terms to showcase a new perspective of the project. Drawings communicate ideas beyond the physical whole of the project which makes them a vital part of an architectural project. A new drawing convention in architecture is starting to emerge known as a populated drawing. Often set in an urban context and serves as a representation of an architectural project (Jones, 2019). It resembles traditional architectural projection drawings comparable to sections, plans, perspective, axonometric, and obliques. However, extends beyond their regular norms of the physical object that traditional architectural drawings represent through the mass aggregation of the entourage in them. By partaking in a new architectural convention of the populated drawing through the usage of the entourage it will exhibit the implication of the entourage to our society by redefining the entourage in order to further the narrative of a drawing. Which enacts new a subject into the drawings apart from the usual building. The new element that is added is the mass amount of entourage.

Entourage in architecture is the usage of people, and other inanimate objects in architectural drawings to showcase a set building/project active in the reality we live in. Entourage traditionally provides scale, depth and human interest through various imagery used to make a compositional rendering invigorated and populated in architecture drawings (Ryan, 2017). The entourage represents individuals who perform life in an orderly manner within a populated drawing. These drawings recognized architecture’s position as a spatially charged stage for social interaction, economic transition, and political behavior formulating a connection between architecture and humanity (Jones, 2019). The entourage demonstrates a great deal about social standards. With some architecture renders showing patterns of the predominance of unequivocally in gender positions like men in the lounge room and females in the kitchen (Walker, 2015). A new possibility has arisen that allows architects to design new realities through the extension of drawings and using the entourage to further the narrative of the project and exceed previous typical notions of it.

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Offset Facade | Sean Nimmons | ARCH206 | Shawn Lutz | Spring 2019

City as Facade | Gabriella Del Rio | ARCH206 | Shawn Lutz | Spring 2019

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MEMORY OF ECOLOGY

/ A group of Texas A&M University architecture students participated in the Texas Society of Architects Student Design Competition at the 2019 TxA Conference in Galveston, TX. The competition addressed issues of resiliency in small coastal communities /

Faculty Advisor: Marcelo Lรณpez-Dinardi Team Members: Ashley Baughman, Andrew Lane, Christopher Loofs, Maclane Regan, Joseph Reich

How does a coastal community retain a resilient position against the threat of rising sea levels? Galveston Island is projected by the year 2100 to be nearing total submersion, a reality that threatens the social, ecological and economic sustainability of the current conditions.

This competition aimed to understand the agents that comprise the identity of Galveston and speculate on ideas of adaptation, preservation and sacrifice amidst the threat of global climate change. Galveston is not only home to 50,000 people, but is a historical relic in the history of Texas, as well as an economic contributor through its tourist pull, various shipping ports, offshore oil rigs and nearby Texas City refineries.

The re-negotiation of how to produce a resilient Galveston against climate change forced a strong adherence to methods of adaptation as a means to preserve the memory of Galveston as an ecological system and provide a new model of living, transportation and economic production for the island.

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“We want to create a narrative of dual realities in contradiction, to redefine the state of ambivalence for the inclusiveness of fictional architecture. One side of the contradiction is the reality of our curated object that gives the sensation of entropy. The other reality is our representation by alluding to the Japanese garden/landscape that will give us harmony, concord, and balance. Representing in this form is meant to create an affiliation to the Japanese ‘Way of Tea’ which connects to the notions of being and becoming. Notions that arrive from this form of representation bring up“The Machine in the Garden” by Leo Marx and the implication of the landscape. What we get is the allusion of two odd realities and representations entangling with each other, which is meant to highlight the sense of amalgamation that will contrast our formal commotion, while still retaining cohesiveness.

Our object consists of a shell that is the product of misalignment, displacement and entropic organization of drapes. In which creates openings and voids that will never be whole— never complete. And this plays into relations such as figure/void and presence/absence. Not only this but we also notice a violent behavior of the drape attempting to shelter objects within, while contradictorily is the source of entropy. The purpose of the drape is to contain and envelope our interior arrangement whole, in a sort of dictatorial way. Correspondingly, the drape serves to create major partitions interiorly which defines our spatial arrangement from exterior to interior. Lastly, the drape serves to define our figural poché.

We took a curatorial approach to a scalar game of envelopment for our sectional objects by using techniques such as positioning, orientation, and critical intersection of joints, which speaks one with the entropic language of our object. This introduced the notions of multiscalar implication of tension, and the illusion of whole to whole relations, as opposed to part to whole. Existing simultaneously is a discord of ‘figural parasite’ which comes to fruition in section seeping within and out of the inner organizations. We applied the notions of figural/ fragmented parasitism to create more moments of impact throughout the section, but from this, they were able to become spaces of occupation, transitional space, and falls well within a critical aesthetic implication.Our project as an entity of its own reality is about stark divides.

Yet the inclusion of representation to the argument will force the strength of our object to succumb to a state ofobjectness; the state of being. And as our objects detach themselves from their ontologicalidentities—through our drawings they become whole. Our project is to become this new enhanced reality where the garden is realized in harmony. The allusion of completion and being known, being in a state of impartiality. The impossible whole.”

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The Impossible Whole| Alan Carrizosa, Sahil Shah & Maria Cruz Ochoa | ARCH 205 | Gabriel Esquivel | Fall 2019

The Impossible Whole| Alan Carrizosa, Sahil Shah & Maria Cruz Ochoa | ARCH 205 | Gabriel Esquivel | Fall 2019

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Sephorah Belizor , Garrett Farmer, Andrew Atwood, Marie Chapa, Julia Vasilyev | ARCH206/406 | T4T Lab | Joris Putteneers & Gabriel Esquivel

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Sephorah Belizor , Garrett Farmer, Andrew Atwood, Marie Chapa, Julia Vasilyev | ARCH206/406 | T4T Lab | Joris Putteneers & Gabriel Esquivel

Katherine Gesing | ARCH 441 | Baroque & Rococo Architecture | Stephen Caffey | Fall 2019

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Utilizing the site of an existing mobile home community in Bryan, Texas, the project proposes a new look at how land can be owned and questions the stigma around mobile homes in cities.

Through several existing methods, including shared in-between space present in Community Land Trusts, customization in iterative modular design, and vertical growth through unit stacking, the resulting complex design is one of Territorial Ownership.

Each unit can support 1 to 6 separate or shared inhabitants who can determine interior space use with modular panels. The units themselves and the in-between space outside are all shared, with designated ownership applying only to the activities occurring within or without material borders.

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Territorial Ownership | Stephanie Maddamma | ARCH305 | Marcelo Lopez-Dinardi | Spring 2019

“In order to understand how the climate of College Station would affect our building, we studied various components of the climate. We chose to group the overall climate into one diagram that represents how the weather changes throughout the year in a circular diagram to show the relationship between the different elements as they change. The wind study helped us understand how the wind direction and speed would affect our building orientation. The shadows and altitude diagrams aided our understanding of how the sun would affect the solar radiation outside the building on our site as well as how it would enter into our building throughout the year. This also helped us determine where to add trees to the site in order to create a more comfortable outdoor space.�

TAMU Educatorium | Ashley Baughman, Melissa Ellis, Ashleigh Fulcher | ARCH 405 | Integrated Studio | Davi Xavier | Fall 2019

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Condensers of Bryan | Chris Loofs & Jordan Marshall | ARCH 405 | Marcelo Lopez Dinardi | Spring 2019

CONDENSERS OF BRYAN As a response to years of pollution and mismanagement of resources, the city of Bryan is forced to adapt in order to protect its citizens from the inhospitable surroundings that it created. Through severe urban consolidation, ten social condensers spread throughout the existing city and connected by a rail, eliminating the need for automobiles, become the new Bryan. The new system allows for a reassessment of the role of the city in the 21st century, as well as challenging traditional ideas of land-use, energy production, transportation, and infrastructural systems.

Condensers of Bryan | Chris Loofs & Jordan Marshall | ARCH 405 | Marcelo Lopez Dinardi | Spring 2019

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WINDOW TO THE PARK “The current situation of the Ciutadella Park in Barcelona, Spain is the result of the overlay different plans, projects and various activities related very especially to the history of the city. Ciutadella’s pavilions are mostly inactive at this moment. Central buildings such as the Castle of the Three Dragons, the Martorell Museum, the Umbracle and the Greenhouse are closed to the public. This studio focus was to use the Martorell Museum as a converging point of multiple communities surrounding the park. These communities consist of Sant Pere, Santa Caterina I La Ribera and the University and Research Facilities. This project host research and study areas linked to the universities and the uses for the neighborhood that surrounds the park, in order to consolidate the Ciutadella Park and University Campus for both citizens and the university community. “

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Zion Lewis &Abiel Canales | Study Abroad - Barcelona Architecture Center | CARC 301 | Pasqual Bendicho |

This project was designed as a contemporary library that sits within the urban fabric of downtown Bryan, Texas. It deals with notions of programmatic definition as a result of the human condition of understanding knowledge. This condition is defined through an interior atrium and reverberates into the form and circulation of the library as a whole.

Sean Nimmons & Alexander Kingsley | 3rd-year Integrated Studio | ARCH305 | Marcel Erminy | Fall 2019

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Belvedere | Oscar Avila & Rodrigo Matas | Study Abroad - Barcelona Architecture Center | Miguel Roldan | Fall 2019

Belvedere | Oscar Avila & Rodrigo Matas | Study Abroad - Barcelona Architecture Center | Miguel Roldan | Fall 2019

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“The project focused around entering the discipline of architecture. I did this by using the concept of inversion from a case study and applying it to my design process. I started by inverting the facade of the courthouse, which gave me elements that I then used to Boolean out of a cube, which then formed an interior courtyard. Finally, I unrolled this courtyard to reach my final design.�

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Stormy Hall | ENDS 108 | Learning From Lockhart | James Michael Tate | Spring 2019

A proposed facility in Columbus, Indiana, Convergence acts both as a multi-denominational church (including all faiths present in the city) as well as a higher education facility. It presents a direct comparison of secular and religious forms of knowledge, connecting them through their primary commonality: procession. This similarity has been highlighted through light, an element very important to sacred spaces, and leads to a moment within a 200-foot spire, a nod to the monumentality present in both the sacred and secular.

The act of rising toward the spire is demonstrated processionally, compositionally, and formally throughout the project, and alludes to the aspiration toward a higher state being that both religion and secular education promote. The means for reaching this spire is also symbolic, utilizing a MERO Spaceframe structural system to point at Columbus’s excitement for architectural innovation and their willingness to push architecture as practice forward.

Stephanie Maddamma & Raphael Lee | Integrated Studio | ARCH405 | Koichiro Aitani | Fall 2019

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A Liminal Paper Hans Steffes

Reflections on the 2019 T4T Lab at Texas A&M, which examined Houdini as a procedural design tool to generate complex architectural forms under the guidance of Gabriel Esquivel and Joris Putteneers. Featuring work by Fernando Rosas, Rebeca Romero, Aaron Sheifeild, Hans Steffes.

When Deleuze and Guattari published A Thousand Plateaus, their essay The Smooth and The Striated was received by the architecture community as a revolutionary treatise on place and delineation.This essay aims to expand upon their thesis and discusses the implications of mediation and flux on the smooth and the striated through the lense of topology. Topology in mathematics is the study of properties that are preserved through operations upon the geometry, finding and preserving spatial and geometric relations in an object. The principal for this topological expansion on the Smooth and the Striated is the idea that there is some act of mediation, or retopologizing, that has reaches far beyond the scope outlined in The Smooth and The Striated.

Smoothing as a function of re-topology has implications in geometric operations, politics, digital media, territories, and philosophy that deeply effect the way we explicate reality. The act of smoothing permeates all levels of the architectural discourse from geometric operations and site interaction to programmatic and theoretical premises.

The act of smoothing is an expansion on the dialectic nature of the smooth and the striated.

Whenever a dialectic is set up, the opposition of two elements implies that there is a mediator, a third element that allows for the transition and translation of the two opposed elements. Nothing is completely smooth, nothing completely striated. This triadic structure, and act of mediation, has many forms: in OOO Aesthetics as the mediator of the Sensual and the Withdrawn, Timothy Morton’s Spectral as the mediator of Human beings and Non-Human beings, Lacan’s paths as the mediation of reality and the real just to name a few. This triadic framework allows us to examine the two core issues of this project: delineation and place through a new lens, that of smoothing.

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The Smooth and the Striated lays out the two titular concepts as characterizations of how we are able to delineate things and places. The smooth is the unmarked surface and the striation is the marked, the ocean being the perfectly smooth and the city being the perfectly striated, the nomad being smooth, the sedentary being striated. However; how we are able to define a space as either smooth or striated is entirely dependent on the territorialization we choose to apply to it, a city when viewed ecologically is a striation, but when viewed by itself becomes a smooth patchwork, and when viewed as a neighborhood again becomes a striation. In this way, smoothing presents as a mediation of territory. Smooth surfaces have a quality of Immanence to them, making them the architectural site par-excellence, a subliminal blank canvas for the designers ego. The striation, the consciousness of a mark then begins to present morphologically. The mathematical discrete (vectors, voxels, points, lines) and merological delineated part and its relation to the whole have been extensively explored in architecture over the past decade as the repetition of similar parts to reverse the issue of parts to whole, bringing the importance of the part to the forefront. In this sense, Smoothing is the retopologizing of immanence (imminence, eminence) and mereology, and acts through two operations: Relaxation and Creasing. Relaxation is the retopologizing of the striated to the smooth, a non-destructive unfolding of the delineation. Creasing on the other hand is the retopologizing of the smooth to the striated, the non-destructive folding and delineation.

The digital implications of smoothing are far more literal and apparent than those of place, digital packages often include it as one of their critical functions and its use is varied and widely practiced; however, the implications of this operation have been largely passed over since the early years of the digital in favor of computational discussions. The discussion of the digital is often centered around the concept of a digital trace, a signifier of digital operations. The digital trace almost exclusively presents as the discrete: Voxels, Artifacting, Vectors, or other analogous elements that have a definite binary delineation, a striation. The discrete, being the method of access for all digital systems, stores and addresses data of all kinds. Voxels for example operate as discrete containers and address for all kinds of digital information: position, color, density, velocity, etc. but can also be used to store user input: words, paragraphs, essays, images. All of this data can become material for the operation of smoothing to act on. The Houdini smooth surface operator (Smooth SOP) smooths out or relaxes polygons, meshes and curves, rearranging geometry to reduce roughness of any float values. Specifically in this algorithm a discrete base

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Discrete Vector Generation

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of surface vectors is voxelized, meshed and smoothed. The Smooth SOP is then the operation of smoothing the digital trace, an unfolding of the digital striation and asymptotic progression towards the smooth. Smoothing produces Liminal objects.

Liminal objects exist on the boundaries of definition, neither smooth or striated, relaxed or creased, introverted or extroverted. The Non-Place is the fuzzy place on the edge of our perception, that is either too difficult to access or nearly completely withdrawn from us. The smoothness of these Heterotopic Non-Places like the ocean or the desert is mediated by a place of smoothing, a Liminal Place. Liminal places are in a state of becoming, between place and nonplace, the past and the future. Representation, through a Hermeneutic lense, is the liminal place of interpretation, A place where the thought of the artist is interpreted or pathed onto the thought of the viewer. Liminal space forms an eddy in the stream of consciousness or experience, forming Places that are experienced for both no time at all and an eternity: Elevators, Lobbies, Hallways, Terminals, Subways, Gangways. These places are defined in anthropology as transformative places of waiting, unknowing, and thought, mediating through preemption to ritual the smooth unknown and the striated known. These can be human rituals such as TSA screenings, waiting for the subway, the dance of flight attendants, or digital rituals such as iteration, recursion and smoothing. Liminal Places are in the act of smoothing Place and Non-Place. Liminality itself is part of a triadic structure, the smoothing of the Subliminal and the Supraliminal or the unconscious and the conscious, the smooth and the striated. This presentation of smoothing is the hermeneutic concept of pathing, the explication of meaning onto consciousness.

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Iterations of Smoothing

Programatically the liminal place is a space of transition and change, Airports, Highways, Stations, Hallways, Elevators, Lobbies, ports of entry, and so on. These places are infrastructural by nature and bridge the experience of two distinct places, the origin and the destination. The act of traveling being smooth and the definition of place being striated, transport hubs are a place of smoothing. The Transition Hub is a place of interchange and waiting between systems of transit and geopolitical states, an adaptable interchange that can accommodate both traditional and future infrastructure, as well as mediate this transition through places of waiting. The algorithm itself starts to display these qualities of movement and transition, with strong areas of flow and eddy, that smooth together to create the base of the massing. The total massing of the object itself attempts to mediate the striation of hard surface kitbash kits and the smoothness, the state of having been relaxed by the SOP, of the algorithm. By layering and augmenting the algorithm with the hard surface components the perception of the two systems start to smooth together to form a cohesive object.

The work shown in conjunction with this essay is envisioned as a Proto-Megastructure, a structure in flux between the striation of a single building and the patchwork smoothness of a megastructure. The single structure placed in the vast smoothness of the Sonoran desert is at first a distinct striation on the land. The desert, or the overwhelming experience of it, has a character of smooth non-place. By imposing an object a striation is created and a resultant sense of place develops. As the Proto-Megastructure grows and smooths toward megastructure, it acts on the site and the site acts upon it, smoothing the initial striation caused by the imposition.

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As the site is transformed by the object and the object is transformed by the site, they are pathed onto, arround, through each other until it is unclear which is acting on the other. The area of the sonoran desert east of the Salton Sea is a vast wasteland, experienced by most as the subliminal place between Phoenix and Los Angeles, however the landscape is dotted with places of liminality, striations in the act of smoothing back into the landscape, abandoned airfields, water pumping stations, gold mines, and more than 1.7 million acres of bombing range. These liminal places act on the building their implications reflected in the character of the object and its program. This is the act of smoothing in its most Deluzian form, the mediation of site and place with the object, a retopologizing of the fold.

The operation of smoothing addresses the issues of territories, smooth and striated, the digital trace and liminal space in a new capacity, by relaxing the definition of the discrete elements (the vectors and voxels that generate the geometry), the operation of smoothing removes the distinction that is inherent to the discrete and allows for the partial removal of the digital trace, leaving behind a signifier of some indiscernible discrete operation. An introduction of transition and flux between the states of smooth and striated. Different methods of non-destructive relaxation and creasing allow objects to exist in this state of flux between some original state and an asymptotic smooth, preserving their original character while bringing forward a new, liminal state.

This work examined T4T Lab: 2015 Gilles Retsin, 2017 Casey Rehm, GSAPP: Francois Roche 2012, UCL Material Architecture Lab 72

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Katherine Gesing & Ashleigh Thoele | Study Abroad - Barcelona Architecture Center | Miquel Rodriguez | Spring 2019

Katherine Gesing & Ashleigh Thoele | Study Abroad - Barcelona Architecture Center | Miquel Rodriguez | Spring 2019

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“Exploring Campus Heritage:

The World War I Memorial at Texas A&M University” In a campus full of rich histories, perhaps one of the most interesting landmarks of Texas A&M’s past is the World War I Memorial, currently located in the Corps Plaza. The ninefoot-tall granite monument was originally dedicated in 1924 next to Guion Hall (demolished 1971) as a memorial to fifty-two Aggies who died in the service of their country in World War I. Since then, the monument has moved locations twice before reaching its current location, and more names have been added to the list of “Gold Star Aggies.” This project had two objectives: First, to research the monument’s history and the details of its dedication, design, and current maintenance. Second, to use photogrammetry to create an accurate 3-D model to serve as a record of the current condition of the monument in case of an unpredictable event such as a natural disaster or vandalism. These two objectives were carried out simultaneously.

Detailed photographs of the monument were taken at an early stage of the project so that they could be processed and fine-tuned using Agisoft Metashape software. The research also involved the use of archives in the Cushing Library combined with meetings with historians from Cushing and Evans Libraries and the staff from University Art Galleries. Together, these two portions of the project provide a basis for a new analysis of this important monument of campus heritage and a 3-D model of its current state with detailed textures of its form, reliefs sculptures, and inscriptions for preservation documentation

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Jared Labus | Center for Heritage and Conservation, College of Architecture | Research Advisors: Kevin Glowacki and Andrew Billingsley

Learning from Lockhart | Isabela Doberenz | ENDS 108 | James Michael Tate | Spring 2019

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Alyssa Dophied & Evelyn Ringhofer | 3rd-year Integrated Studio | ARCH305 | Michael O’Brien | Fall 2019

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Alyssa Dophied & Evelyn Ringhofer | 3rd-year Integrated Studio | ARCH305 | Michael O’Brien | Fall 2019

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Learning from Lockhart | Spencer Young | ENDS108 | James Michael Tate | Spring 2019

Ezra Stoller was the architectural photographer that elevated architectural photography into what is to this day, taking some of the greatest photos of some of the modern architectural marvels of the 20th century such as Wright’s Fallingwater and Aalto’s Finnish Pavilion.

Fernando Maselli had an exhibition known as “Infinite Artificial”, that in black and white photography showcases the fear of the landscape and the fear of infinite space during the 2019 PhotoEspana event that would influence the following photos. The following photos are photos of the Barcelona Pavilion done in an attempt of the same style of Stoller and Maselli.

The photos were taken at 6:30 a.m. in the morning for the perfect amount of lighting for the sun to hit the building at the perfect angle.

Erik Lugo | ARCH 485 | Architectural Photography | Marcel Erminy

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