2020-2021 Axiom: Between

Between

The subject, the design, and the between.

In academia, the practice of the built structure is seldom realized to fruition. Students are called to create narratives of designs through common means of architectural representation; drawings, models, and images. Architectural representation acts as a mediator between the design idea and the realized project, existing as a crucial dialogue. The between poses a unique pedagogical relationship between consumer and subject where the consumer is prompted to understand the subject through drawings, images, and models. This consumable media is uniquely interpreted by the individual projecting personal ideas onto it.

What follows is a collection of student designs where each project exists only as the between, represented as drawings and images.

Team Message from Axiom

Editor-in-Chief

Stormy Hall

Editors

Jeremy Grail

Robert Williams

Spencer Young

Committee

Alan Carrizosa

Jayne Goodman

Andrea Hinojosa

Olga Kedya

Christian Martinez

Sahil Shah

Atithi Shrestha

Mary Tran

Sarah Wang

Previous Contributers

Francisco Anaya

Andrew Atwood

Colby Cox

Ekaansh Kalra

Rebecca Romero

Table of Contents

Axiom is a student produced publication composed by the American Institute of Architecture Students at Texas A&M University. Axiom aims to contribute meaningful discourse to Architectural Education through the curation and documentation of student, faculty and visiting lecturer work within the College of Architecture.

Thank you to all the students whose submissions constitute the body of this publication. Without you, Axiom would not be possible.

Architectural Foundations

First Year Students

Demographics of Spatial Exclusion in the City of Bryan

Colby Cox, Christian Martinez, Garrett Redditt

It is stated that the “Raumplan” has never been defined however the concept has grown accordingly with each commission under Loos’ name. These conceptual models define both the Strasser House and Tristan Tzara as a plan of volumes rather than the arrangement of two-dimensional spaces

The Strasser House by Adolf Loos was set in the countryside of Vienna Austria, in 1918. It was one of the earliest attempts of the “Raumplan” in which each space would have varying ceiling heights based on the needs of each room. Just eight years later, Loos designed the Tristan Tzara house in the Montmartre section of Paris. While still implementing the Raumplan, the existing facade used the “Golden Section” to derive the heights and subdivide it into two unequal surfaces.

In order to dissect the qualities of the “Raumplan”, a conceptual model of the house was created, in which each void space and interior wall is represented. The interior masses were abstracted and even combined based on their function and are represented using task board coated in white paint. The representation of walls and floors were created using a combination of varying acrylic thicknesses in order to represent primary, secondary, tertiary walls. Each etching on the acrylic represents an opening on the building’s interior, to better display circulation between rooms.

Visualization in three-dimensional space is necessary in order to comprehend the complexity of elements displayed within the “Raumplan.” Aspects of the “Raumplan” are better represented through a system of masses, that way critical elements are highlighted. By leaving just the voids that involve movement, the circulation of the house can be revealed as it spirals through the acrylic floors for each model. The use of split levels show the breaking of the grid and how Loos was able to incorporate his mezzanine in between pre-existing floors. Even with the inclusion of all masses, the alignment of voids along multiple axis is still apparent from the exterior.

TRISTAN TZARA HOUSE (1926)

STRASSER HOUSE (1918)

Filling the Gap

Brynn Amacher

In this project, we had to design elevated structures over an already existing city. I created the established city on the ground level using the Fibonacci sequence, and then “filled the gap” with floating housing units in the hierarchical spaces in between. We had to take vertical circulation into account by creating nodes that connected the base to the new structures. We also had to develop paths that linked the entire elevated city so that people were not limited to only having one entry point from below. A grid was created from the system, and this grid turned into support beams and columns holding up the city. While we had to consider how structurally stable it was, we also had to make sure these supports were not taking up too much space on the ground. With the buildings supported, we then broke them down into individual housing units, and created doors that led straight to the interconnecting paths. Then we constructed windows for these units, taking sunlight into consideration. The final step was to add green spaces to the elevated city to avoid turning it into a “concrete jungle.” We used biophilic design by adding parks and nature along the floating paths. This project was the first project that I did that took more into consideration than just the building design itself. We had to take into account the circulation between the lower and upper cities, the interaction between people and their environment, structural systems, sun and wind patterns, and biophilic design for this project to be a success.

TAMU AIAS Workshop

2D | 2.5D | 3D

Workshop Led By Abigail Coover Hume | Overlay Office

Students

Manny Alvarado, Alan Carrizosa, Colby Cox, Philips Fafiyebi, Ume Farwa, Ryan Garza, Jeremy Grail, Stormy Hall, William Hapman, Lauren Hutton, Ekaansh Kalra, Jared Labus, Sean Nimmons, Austin Patterson, Arianna Ramirez, Stefany Rodriguez, Rebecca Romero, Kinjal Shah, Charlotte Shavwer, Michelle Tang, Julia Vasilyev, Courtney Ward, Robert Williams, Kaymi Wolff

Sahil Shah

Sahil Shah

Sahil Shah

Sahil Shah

We know that we don’t know

ANCE GUID

Block Parti Drawings

Student names

Rebekah Bryan, Shane Bugni, Nallely Chavarria, Logan Froebel, Travis Gerhardt, Jeremy Grail, Melanie Guerrero, Stormy Hall, Renee Hand, Sarah Hluza, Alberto Ibarra, Carmen Jimenez, Graesen Johnson, Jami Respondek, Elizabeth Scamardo, Sahil Shah, Shannon Sumner, Robert Williams

A parti is described as being an organizing thought or decision behind an architect’s design, presented in the form of a basic diagram or a simple statement. The Block Parti Drawing exercise is focused on exploring the ways urbanism can be organized through different scales. These organizational strategies exist at the master plan, building, and individual room scale. These drawings show how a community can incorporate plublic and private spaces in order to produce a more dynamic living space, challenging the current condition of urbanism in the United States. The drawings are meant to be seen side by side and beyond their own boundaries in order to create a collection of drawings that come together to create a larger parti.

Shawn Lutz

| Nicole McIntosh | James Michael Tate

Persistencies

Jayne Goodman, Mallory Jordan, Ekaansh Kalra

Circles of Community

Jayne Goodman, Mallory Jordan, Ekaansh Kalra

The youth cultural community center transgresses the Third Ward community through urban connections, circulation, and individualism. The site is located in the Third Ward of Houston, next to the Project Row Houses.

Each of the caricatures incorporates both curved and rectilinear forms in order to create a complex relationship between the buildings. By transgressing the elements of a shotgun house, we were able to repurpose them in a unique way that relates to the overall community. The subtractions in the forms recall the exterior to interior transition spaces (the porch) already existent in the shotgun houses. These dynamic relationships are represented throughout the site (art studio, music studio, welcome center, and pavilion) in order to create balance and unity within the buildings.

The six circles are fixated on axes in a grid formation. Each hedge lines up with either an element from the surrounding site or a datum of the building within their circle, and a corner on each building was snapped to a corner on its corresponding hedge. The second layer of circles is a result of offsetting the inner circles and snapping them to the hedge/building points. The final layer of the circle packing is the result of all of the circles being offset uniformly, and connected with streets and paths of the overall site. These layers of offsets and circles are meant to define key elements of the site in a way that encourages movement, without forcing paths.

Influenced by the microcosmic individualism seen throughout the House Apart by Jimenez Lai, each building has its own distinct character. This relationship mirrors the diverse nature of housing in the Third Ward. The juxtaposing relationship between the curves, linear elements, solids, and voids, creates a complex transition between extroverted and introverted spaces. Some spaces throughout the site encourage interaction, while other spaces are more private. These spaces are further defined by the use of hedges in creating security and privatization.

An Urban Hinge

Andrea Hinojosa Mary Tran

Project Row Houses in the Third Ward of Houston is a community that strives to live surrounded by art and its impact on the surrounding urban area. The following design is meant to provide a space where the community can gather and collaborate in a public sense. Inspiration of the design came from the previous precedent study of The Fisher house by Louis Kahn and The Creek House by Tham Vidgard, the Project Row Houses and the neighboring community.

Khan and Tham Vidgarm both used separation as the main focal point to create dynamic spaces while incorporating the neighboring nature. This idea was used to invite the residences of the Row Houses into the space by using two main hinge points to rotate two volumes, the secondary more public spaces, out from under the main upper studio. Creating a hierarchical focus on the primary studio space where collaboration of the artists can take place. This rotation creates an elevated space where people can walk under, in a similar manner that the creek was able to run under the Creek House. Two tertiary spaces are then further hinged and shifted off to create a children’s studio and a small studio.

Focusing on neighboring areas, like the designers of the percistancies, the gable of the primary space is misaligned creating two corner gables. The following rooflines all gather at the hinge point centralizing the focus.

Drive-Thru Bakery & Artist Residency

Laundromat & Capsule Hotel

Dalton Gibbons and Michael Mankin

Tomas Hoyos and Zechariah Simpson

Peculiar Gables

Shannon Summer, Robert Williams

For the project we focused on creating affordable housing through the use of CLT. The site was located on an abandoned air field at the Rellis Campus of A&M university. My partner and I wanted to focus on monumental within a collective living area and the way in which buildings and monuments could be organized in said area. The building explores issues of interior volume through obscure formal logic and also the way in which program works within a shared living space.

Urbia

Jeremy Grail

My original explorations focused on examining common domestic roof typologies, as well as the social implications of ownership. Coining the phrase “If you live under my roof, you live by my rules” I looked at what it meant to have direct connection to the exterior roof, and how that can impact a greater sense of ownership and stronger feeling of stability. My investigations involved questioning what may be interpreted as wall, ceiling, or roof through section. I began to look at common roof typologies specifically in the municipality of Bryan/College station. Finding a wide use of Hips, gables, sheds, and different pitched roofs. Closely associate with suburban/rural settings, these are some of the most iconic forms associated with the form of the house. Using these found typologies as modules or a kit of parts to create new volumes with more complex root profiles, I experimented with the different outcomes that were possible.

Elevating Marfa

Nathen Sorensen Jennifer Tran

This project is located in Marfa, Texas, an art mecca West Texas. Our site was located directly next to the Marfa city town hall and with that in mind the goal of this project was to create a building that would provide to the local people in the area, while also designing a building that has similar artistic values that the city has. For this building we decided to combine a bookstore and a fashion studio into a single building that would allow for interaction between the two. To accomplish this we designed the bottom floor as a bookstore with the capability to be shifted into a usable runway for the fashion studio that is located on the upper floor. Another key focus in this project was how lighting would enter the building. Knowing that Marfa is located in a rather hot and sunny part of Texas, we wanted to create a unique roof with skylights built in that would allow the building to be well lit throughout the day and not have a negative impact on the work being done within the building. One last focus for this project was how would people interact with the building knowing that there would be a large amount of people walking in this area. To address this issue we raised the building off of the ground to create an arcade area below that would allow people to loiter around our building with hopes that they would eventually go into the stores above.

Assembly of the Excess

Students Elijah Huggins, Savannah McDougal

“Assembly of the Excess” is an accumulation of excessively kit bashed objects onto a dense site which also reinforces an excessive method of organization. It was important that we establish a site that could argue for the significance of the aesthetic regime by reinforcing the use of object-oriented-ontology (OOO). For the facades of our objects, we assembled a network of gothic, residential, and mechanical parts through an understanding of OOO which dictates that [parts] react and grow from each other within a system. In the façade ornamentation, you see parts grow into, interlock, and even reject each other as they create a system of built vs unbuilt parts. We then give meaning to our heavy ornamentation by enforcing its use as structural elements. Thus, enforcing that the aesthetics of the objects are the backbone for the objects’ structural integrity. In developing the site, influences from sources such as Piranesi’s Carceri Series came to light as we continued a relationship between the objects and site. Piranesi’s Carceri Series influenced us to establish an “ungrounding” of the site that removes a leveled ground in place for a series of paths/bridges and platforms which grow from and connect the objects at different levels. As a result, the objects are not understood as objects buried into a ground. Rather, they are understood in relation to the site (paths and platforms).

Muted

Students Emily Acosta, Ximena Calderon, Isabela Ferrero

The title of the project being “Muted” relates to how women were once muted from expressing their opinions and ideas. This word also relates to the new definition of muted created through our structures which embody powerful concepts and ideas through various factors. Not only that but confronting the issue of women being in a male-dominated discipline, similar to how us being a group of three women challenged the general direction of kit-bashing in our class, by working in an opposite manner.

The main ideas in designing our structures were clearly defined objects without the use of ornamentation. Through the use of basic shapes and concepts we wanted to embody the ideas of Micheal Rojkind in The Foro Boca and Brutalist architecture that reacts to ornamental building on its geometry, mass, finish, and landscape. Through these influences we create muted masses that were composed of concrete volumes arranged randomly and varying in scale, creating an interesting spatial game. This project embodies respect for the purity of shapes, material, and landscape. In all of the programs we started to use ideas of interconnecting spaces created by basic shapes into a single massing, this was accomplished through the use of angled shapes and walls, spatial design, and minimal apertures. As we progressed through the careful planning of these systems we began introducing the idea of shadow and light, by incorporating floating geometric pieces that became cantilevers. Light was also introduced in the structures by only incorporating windows that emit from the inside of each building to the outside. Each window, in all of the systems, is strategically placed for them to be enveloped by the exterior. Although all of the structures maintain a homogeneous idea, through these details we were able to create different experiences in each of them. Additionally, through the use of concrete, being organic, uniform, and imperfect we were able to re enforce the “blocky” aspect of our structures, having raw and unapologetic use of mass and materials.

Sasha Fierce Recording Studio

Jake Taylor

Leah Thaxton

Justin Gill

Aiden Shertzer

QUIRY IN

Demographics of Spatial Exclusion in the City of Bryan

Tomas Hoyos Zechariah Simpson

Due to modes of Segregation established in the past, the city of Bryan as an urban area has developed and expanded without remedying the issue of Spatial Exclusion of minority groups. As a result, there has been much ignorance surrounding such cultural presence throughout the city’s history. Implementing a Cultural Center presents an alternative to the status quo by educating and connecting the community at large.

Interconnection through an interactive site that acts as a hub of both education and community involvement for dierent groups to learn and interact with each other. Various scenic locations of multiple scales are placed across the site in relation with the main structures.

Civic Nodes

Emmanuel Diaz Sahil Shah

The project initially began with the notion and questioning the validity of Bryan’s current infrastructural state based on the master plan. From here, we took a look at infrastructure from a city scale to determine its organization and distribution. We divided the general term of infrastructure into two categories: soft and hard. Soft is defined through inferred boundaries denoting cultural, governmental, social, and economic services; hard being defined through physical infrastructure necessary to run a city including network of movement, natural infrastructure, development-projects, and internet services. This project seeks to bridge this “vacancy” with the existing nodes by bringing together a new network. This was done by analyzing the infrastructure within a street level and using it to formalize a system of pathways.

This new system brings about a literal division to create a series of civic nodes distributed within the site. These nodes provide the infrastructure necessary to service different activities that would otherwise not be present on the site. These services include free WIFI, a recycling system, farmers’ market setup, etc. By connecting infrastructure to the different activities on the site, the project attempts to create a new relationship with the presenceof infrastructure.

The strategy to organize the site comes from the infrastructural pattern around the immediate site. Crossing this with the intersections of elevations from already constructed buildings, we were able to generalize a form to create an ground and elevated system. Coming into formalizing the design, we organized it into steps of program, form/ space, and image/ location. With the infrastructural pattern creating a series of nodes throughout the site, a unique program was fitted into each one. This includes recreational areas, kiosks, writing/reading centers, charging areas, and farmers markets. Though, the main program that ties both the site as well as its surroundings together, is the recycling system. This is constructed through a series of underground pipes that goes throughout the downtown Bryan area and feeds recycled material from one bin to a shared location on our built lot.

Urban Living Room

Students Stormy Hall. Isabela Doberenz, Logan Froebel

Urban Living Room: a place that brings together and fosters a joint atmosphere and bridges the divide created by Texas Avenue. The living room would allow for the development of a hub or district that would inspire more creative, cultural and humanitarian arts, which is something that the city of college station is in desperate need of.

The living room becomes the perfect neologism for this urban condition, especially with its relationship to the neighborhood areas immediately surrounding it. Just as members of a household have their separate dormitories and dedicated open and shared spaces, we can only help wonder where these types of open and free spaces exist in our urban areas today? The living room would be large enough for one to be able to kick their feet up and relax, throw a party, even a socially distanced one, attend community classes and events and in general promote the idea that this is a city project and as such should cater to the needs and desires of its surrounding community.

The site is a direct characterization of an urban living room that begins to bring in the population present and surrounding our site in college station. To maximize the impact of intervention, Texas Avenue is put underground and allows the site to connect with Texas A&M as well as the neighborhood areas behind it.

Programmatically, the project is centered around supporting local art and entertainment. Other than The Arts Council in college station, the support for creativity is limited. By designing a space that encourages local artists and creators to express their creativity publicly, allows for an inclusive environment for community members to come together. The project consists of multiple spaces that can be transformed into conference rooms for city hall members to workshops that community members can be involved in to learn new skills, an exterior amphitheater, and indoor theater allowing for large events to be held, multiple gallery spaces that can be used to showcase local art, repurposed offices derived from the existing buildings, and plenty of open space that can be freely used for socializing.

Vantage

Colby Cox

Philips Fafiyebi

This Project, Located in the Historic Alamo Plaza in San Antonio, serves to incentivise connection with the Alamo and the site. The proposed building, as well as the incorporated plaza are poised to draw attention to the Alamo, encouraging visitors to stay longer and to experience the Alamo from more perspectives than expected.

The plaza, which is sunken to pay homage to San Antonio’s historic River-Walk, contains Vantage frames, from which visitors can experience and take photographs of the Alamo from angles they have yet to attempt. It also includes seating and eating areas to promote visitor activity.

The proposed building: a museum and exhibition space uses glass walls to keep visitors constantly engaged within the context of the exhibits. Additionally there are designated viewing areas for visitors to experience not just the iconic front facade of the Alamo, but also the expansive site it sits within.

Ildefons Cerdà’s grided city plan revolutionized Barcelona by giving strict parameters for the growth of the city. Within the grid, pockets of social spaces called ramblas began to form as long stretches or in Spanish known as pasarelas which are urban passages which fill in the space between two significant points in the city. This in-between fill allows for pedestrian traffic which in turn creates an incredibly dynamic environment through different activities including shopping, gastronomy, and leisure. Radical Ramblas is a proposal of a single promenade which re-imagines the archetype that is the pasarela, giving a new sensibility to architecture in Barcelona. It takes the line created from a rambla and becomes wrapped and morphed by the sea in order to create this new network of passages. By doing this, Radical Ramblas departs from the convention of the pasarela and puts it within a context of redefining what an urban public space can be. In the same way a swimmer must dive and submerge themselves into the water, the user of this pavilion must submerge themselves and follow the wrapping of the pasarela to ascend the rambla itself. By doing this the project disconnects from the city and from the beach to experience a pasarela that takes in the nature of the sea and celebrates its intrusion. By following the concept and expression of the line, the pavilion creates multiple vantage points that take the inhabitant to moments above the water, underwater, and in between serving for the negotiation of enclosure, open and closed.

Ascending Vault

Arriana Ramirez Charlotte Shaywer

Functioning primarily as an archive and restoration space for the public Museums of Barcelona City, this project was developed to be a space that not only hosted documents and pieces but one which would assist in the social return within Barcelona. The key concepts throughout the project are encasement, towers, and utilization of robotic machinery. From this, the question, “What if the archive wasn’t hidden away but rather showcased and exposed?,” was derived, and allowed the project to mature into one that now could advance innovations regarding the containment and handling of the items held within. From this, we wanted to experiment with the idea of not having majority of the archive space under the block but rather highlight the program through its vertical monumentality and color. Our approach for the hangar, derived from varying infrastructures within the city and coastline such as the Estacion de Francia, the Pergola fotovolatica del Forum and Les Tres Xemencies. This influenced the development of our project from a standalone structure into an infrastructure in and of itself. One in which the archive pierces through the massing, where it was originally supposed to be housed.

Zana Bosnic | Miguel Roldan

Framing Barcelona

Zana Bosnic | Miguel Roldan

Jesus Frias Sahil Shah

The discourses on language and drawing established by the classical architectural treatise find new disciplinary relevance in current advancements and discussions concerning machine learning. The Serlio Code, a body of research that examines the illustrated expositions of Sebastiano Serlio through the lens of artificial intelligence, provides one such example. Serlio’s work provided a visual dimension to the study of architecture through copious drawings and illustrations as well as the canonization of the five architectural orders. Similar ideas are uncovered in the aesthetic communication theories of Gilles Deleuze and his understanding of the mutual interference between analog language and digital code. Significant parallels can also be drawn between Deleuze’s account of a diagrammatic modulation in the paintings of Francis Bacon and the analog-to-digital conversion process performed by image-based neural networks. The intention of the project is not simply to synthesize new images that simulate Serlio’s illustrations, but rather modulate their qualities and problematize their 2D to 3D translation beyond traditional rules of representation and orthographic projection. Architectural intelligence encoded in representation describes the ethos of an artistic endeavor, imposes severity and logic, and prepares forces and materials to create the architectural object. This project outlines a digital culture that integrates canonical architectural intelligence into a new practice, producing a new form of agency and a new mode of dialogue between a designer and a particular precedent.

Shane Bugni, Gabriel Esquivel, Jean Jaminet

Serlio Code

Grafitti and Ornament

Product Design and Fabrication

This project is presented as a critical work discussing the relationship between graffiti and baroque ornament. Francesco Guardini understands the seventeenth-century baroque as leading to modernity, ‘‘while the neo-baroque moves away from it. Guardini understands our culture as being, like the seventeenth-century era that ushered in the scientific revolution, in the “eye of an epochal storm, in the middle of a gigantic transformation” of cultural and socioeconomic proportions.

We would like to create a scenario where the images are not coming only from architectural precedent but also from popular culture like graffiti which is generally applied to architectural or urban surfaces. When applied to buildings, it produces a kind of disruption (two signs) reacting from the architectural language. This facade project explores the idea of combining those two languages - producing a new type of communication and sensibility.

Gabriel Esquivel | Shane Bugni

AI Urbanism

Our research is centered around creating AI generated cities that maintain a clear object to object relationship between perceived solid and void. With this we will be able to generate a wide variety of organizations of diff erent scales of urban planning, allowing for new interpretations and reworking of the spaces in order to produce new urban typologies. By reducing various nolli maps to pure black and white versions, we are able to generate new versions of a city plan unbiased by preconceived notions of the human. With this data set of diff erent scales and densities of cities we get a variation of nolli maps that begin to give us an overview at the city and what the city organizations could be. We feed these images into a style transfer software, Runway ML, and train these images on landscapes, extracting newly generated fi gure ground relationships. With the use of Runway we are able to create new AI versions of nollimaps and interpretations of what a city plan could be, essentially giving us a “new image of the city”. With our new generated images we begin to three-dimensionalize them with the use of Grasshopper through Rhino. We are able to use a grasshopper script that vectorizes the trained nolli maps and produces closed curves that we are then able to extrude. The extrusions are done by using the same script and are generated with randomized heights. Any remaining curves that are not extruded become part of the ground condition and can be seen as street paths. Using a parametrized process allows us to produce several diff erent outcomes the most effi ciently and with the least user error which begins to create highly curated results. This process produces a new object that can be interpreted as a “chunk” of the city. Combining several of these objects allows for the production of a new AI parametric version of a typical urban city

Rebecca Romero, Shannon Sumner, Julia Vasilyev

CATION APPLI

Push, Pull, Bend

Stormy Hall

Robert Williams

The Third Ward is a predominately African American community in Houston, TX, where in recent years has been subject to gentrification. The project connects the newly renovated Emancipation Park and small local businesses and housing provided by Project Row House. Situated within the Third Ward district in Houston, Tx, the project acts as an urban shelf housing multiple mixed use spaces varying in size. This allows for local community members and organizations to hold a variety of programs to express themselves and the culture instilled within the Third Ward.

The project consistently walks the line of what is considered exterior and interior space. Enclosing the building with translucent shingles defamiliarizes the division between interior or exterior space. The defamiliarization of the project becomes apparent in the main staircase as the user experiences multiple transitions between interior and exterior. By repurposing the existing alleyway, it activates the connection between Emancipation Park and the Project Row House businesses situated on opposite sides of the site. The project gives agency to both the architect and the user, creating a relationship that the Third Ward desperately needs.

Notes and Notations

Virgilio Duarte Spencer Young

Developed from studying the relationship of musical notation to sound, the project inspects 2d relationships of form to space. The program was derived from notions we had extrapolated from other parts of campus that we wanted to exploit such as the role of the flag room in the MSC building. Our building was to become a hybrid music school and communal environment to promote gathering and flexibility to garner a greater audience from around the campus. The design process was a direct reflection of the larger site and the density of human procession. In order to accommodate these ideas, we had to design the building in a way that would be perceived differently on each end of the building as well as represented cohesively. Our project makes use of a site that welcomes live music, auditorium performances, study rooms, rehearsal rooms, gathering areas and administrative spaces. The project is designed to encourage the students on campus to engage with an environment that combines the use of music as a public entity and a private one.

Type Redux

Alan Carrizosa

Maggie Martin

Our project takes on surface and figure through the synthesis of geometry influenced by a typographical narrative, organized into a system of parts that become our workflow and process. These approaches seek to arrive at new spatial conditions that yield when our subject matter confronts the extraction of type, which has allowed us to guide figure and surface. The project brief states “if the diversity = the surface and the surface = the figure, then the figure = diversity.” We wanted to let this become one of our drivers, to create design in response to the current approaches to form in the third ward, where our site is located, amidst gentrification. Additionally, these positions stem from analysis and study of the Newport Street Gallery by CSJ Architects. Within our study we began thinking of the significance of parts, and calling out elements such as core, facade, and nested figure. In our workflow, while maintaining the same drivers, the gesture of our project begins to move into a graphical narrative, and the interest in the idea of type/ typography starts to develop the crux of our form generation. The final design is a result of the three dimensional extraction of type organized into a collective form containing qualities of shifting, distinct parts, nested figure, and facade as found in the precedent.

Furniture in the City

Jared Thome

Sarah Whang

Located next to the Houston Ballet Company, this project is dedicated to Lauren Anderson, the first African American principal ballerina in Houston. This building demonstrates and opens up new possibilities of the arts that Anderson has inspired to the youth of Houston.

The project explores the panelization of a module that is applied to the exterior and interior of the building. Through our application of color, we were able to change the language of our building from a part to part to a part to whole argument. With the repetition of the module along each facade, the corners inherit the issues of misalignments and offsets caused by the aligning of figures in the panels. This project explores several possible resolutions to the corner, either mending the figures, extending them past one another, or stopping abruptly. While the corners facing the street are rounded off, joining the multiple levels to create a larger figure, the opposing corners extend towards the existing ballet building and join the objects which also gives the appearance of support being given by the parti wall. This building encourages public engagement through the central courtyard with entrances on each side. The walls of the first floor are inset from the exterior so that faces of the facade extend downard and create a covered area. The building includes retail, dining, offices, classrooms, dance practice studios, and an exhibition gallery.

Machine Ex-Machina

Marie Chapa, Colby Cox, Justin Kiser, Luis Sanabria, Shannon Sumner

The introduction of the machine and continual adaptations of it has intensified the anthropocentric impact. The machine is often credited for solving the negative impacts, however it cannot be forgotten that these same machines are responsible for accelerating these problems. This relates to the cultural issues of how metal and machines are viewed in their natural state.

The context of this structure frames the building with two facades that open into an interior courtyard that excavates below the ground and exposes the machine. The numerous separated massings create a varied range in verticality across the site, while creating relationships with anthropocentric machines such as hvac systems, cables, and pipes. This notion also follows the idea that machines can become icons of the city. This creates a cultural and aesthetic contrast of the ancient machine with the high tech anthropocentric exploitation of metal in the urban context.

Materiality is displayed through moments that showcase the different ontologies of parts and conditions of metal, through both human-caused weathering and nature-caused weathering. In addition to this, the individual overlapping lifetimes of all the parts are emphasized through their relativity to each other and the unfathomable timelines of these parts. For example, metallic frames encase more monolithic masses which have been carved through and built around by humans to create the metallic machine; through time, this metallic shell begins to rust over, clearly distinguishing the monolithic structure as a separate entity with its own properties and compounds. This example shows the intricacies and complex relationships of how the parts simultaneously age individually and together based on the properties of the metal compounds. Some objects appear reflective while others begin to lose their shine due to the different ways weathering treats them and, and how their surfaces react to the air around them according to their varying levels of toxicity.

Wabi Sabi Grotto

Shane Bugni, Jeremy Grail, Olga Kedya, Aaron Keller, Joel Oelze

The grotto is an artifact that by design displays a natural state, operating between object and garden. This can begin to act as a shift from an anthropocentric position to an ecocentric one. The grotto serves as a bridge or transition in the integration of non-humans in a built environment. The recreation of this condition within our project achieves a permissible condition of coexistence between human and non-humans. The video attempts to showcase this by featuring shots from both a human and non-human perspective. A world view centered on the acceptance of transience and imperfection. The aesthetic is sometimes described as one of appreciating beauty that is “imperfect, impermanent, and incomplete” in nature.

In the shift from Anthropocene to ecocentrism, we have designed moments of coexistence that manifest themselves in the close-up conditions such as the striations, slopes, cracks, and pockets on the exterior surfaces. In certain moments, the rose gold metal seam performs like the Japanese technique of kintsugi; it highlights the role of time, weathering, and imperfections within the life of the artifact.

Our project displays the ability of the non-human to be implemented into a site and propagate within a controlled region. By working with parts in various stages of their perceived natural state, the ambiguity about the overall figure of the building can be created. This makes the building more challenging to be immediately perceived by a human, and begins to raise questions about its other inhabitants, who would be able to perceive the building, and the forces that shaped it (whether as a result of human or non-human agencies), In particular, the positioning of the grotto environment set beneath allows for the casting of light into the lower interior from the structure above, joining the two.

Aberrant Ground

Samantha Garza, Ryan Garza, Stephanie Shupak, Christian Vuittoulo, Courtney Ward

The project aims to dissolve the notion that humans and their artifacts are impervious and ontologically above all other objects. We are focusing on exploring the ground as a hyper object that fosters a coexistence of ecosystems containing both human and non-human entities. Following the Deleuzian criticism of the crystallization of time, the ground is a formal network of synthesized and natural processes occurring on various scales, which cannot be comprehended within the anthropocentric timeline.

Within our buildings, various gaps establish an ambiguous transition from the ground to the building, thus eliminating the strict boundaries formerly separating humans and nonhumans. The fractured parts display a carved system differentiated by their contrasting surface conditions, insinuating a notion of impermanence through the introduction of weathering, erosion, and other natural forces acting upon each of these parts Within the context of the city, the ground is constantly being altered to accommodate the Anthropocene through subways, electrical grids, water pipes and other forms of infrastructure, this projects challenge this notion by exposing the ground and how it is an ever-changing hyperobject. This aberrant movement is facilitated by an assembly of parts, forcing an interaction with the hyperobject, setting the foundation for the coexistence between non-human and human entities inhabiting the same spaces.

Through the intervention of these natural forces, control over the artifact becomes relinquished, permitting nature to take over while also denying the modernist notion of separation between nature and architecture. These external forces act upon our object and create various articulations along the surface that promote nonhuman propagation. These natural articulations start to allude to the notion of the humble artifact and ancientness characterized by posture and territoriality.

Gabriel Esquivel | Barry Wark