Brandon Jacobson 2023 Portfolio

BRANDON JACOBSON

PORTFOLIO

CONTENTS

Center for Social Justice

Spain: Ecological Market and Learning Center

USC Cinematic Arts Extension School

Fuzzy Mind

Sevilla City Towers

Bird Study and Recreational Center Program

Drawing Earth: Los Angeles Border Fossils

Professional Work

BRANDON JACOBSON

I have been interested in becoming an architect since high school. I was fortunate enough to have a high school that taught engineering and architecture classes, which helped guide my passion and love of architecture and learning. In my undergrad, architecture was more of a challenge than I anticipated, as I often struggled with producing work in an efficient manner. But through the efficiency working challenges, I feel like I have gained an understanding of my process that takes a very curious approach to ask many questions to understand what I am trying to make and helps guide the process to create strong ideas. Through graduate school, I have developed interests in sustainable ideas and CLT building construction. I hope to be able to do architecture that presents sustainable ideas in a more involved way. The most positive aspect I have gained is confidence in speaking and presenting work in a way that is engaging for myself and audience. I have always been an inquisitive person, but I really have developed the confidence to question ideas or express myself on trying to develop more knowledge. My goal in life is to become a licensed architect and eventually open my own practice and provide for the community and environment at large.

EDUCATION:

Master of Architecture

University of Southern California

Fall 2021 - Spring 2023

Certificate in Sustainable Design

Bachelors of Science in Architecture

Texas Tech University - Cum Laude

Fall 2017 - Fall 2020

Minor in Environmental Studies

WORK EXPERIENCE:

Student Worker Sep 2022 - May 2023

USC Facilities Planning and Management

Summer Intern May 2022 - Aug 2022

HLW

Class Assistant Aug 2021 - Dec 2021 & Aug 2022

University of Southern California

Spring Break Extern Mar 2022

ShubinDonaldson

Student Assistant

Aug 2019 - Dec 2019 & Aug 2020 - Dec 2020

Texas Tech University

ACTIVITIES AND AWARDS:

University of Southern California

• USC AIAS Vice President

• Featured Work in USC Architecture Blueprint Exhibition 2022 and 2023

• USC Warren Lortie Graduate Scholarship Fund

• USC Graduate Merit Scholarship

• Participated in competitions: USC Guild Charette 2022 and Museum of Emotions #2

Texas Tech University

• Tau Sigma Delta Secretary

• TTU AIAS Historian

• dARC Vice President

• Knights of Architecture Club

• MPI Architects Endowed Scholarship

SKILLS:

Revit Rhino

AutoCAD

Illustrator, Photoshop, InDesign

Houdini

Enscape

Unreal Engine Lumion

Center for Social Justice

Spring 2022

Professor: Lorcan O’Herlihy, University of Southern California

Programs: Rhino, Enscape, Illustrator, Revit

The CLT tall timber building is a social justice center, with program for offices, community gathering, and events. The building promotes social justice through the use of servies and the principles instilled into the building. Principles such as transportation friendly, open balconies for gathering, serving the community with a welcoming site, and sustainable practices.

Cross Laminated Timber and Glulam beams were chosen for the primary structure to showcase a more sustainable approach to an office building and to promote social justice values through the transparency of the glazing and nature-like feeling of wood. Mass Timber creates opportunity to expose the structure, creating a more aesthetically pleasing look than typical steel and conrete.

This building is located in Chinatown in Los Angeles, CA. Located next to Union Station, allowing for a more equitable form of transportation to avoid having to use a car. Each floor has their own purpose and allows social/work aspects to happen in an indoor/ outdoor environment. The project takes cantilevering and open to air floors to provide social spaces witin the building.

Sevilla, Spain: Ecological Market And Learning Center

Spring 2019

Professors: Elisandra Garcia & Angel Martinez Garcia-Posada

Texas Tech University

Programs: Rhino, Illustrator

The Ecological Market and Learning Center is built around a central pavilion stair tower. The tower paying homage to the city’s landmarks as they are all taller than the base level apartment buildings. The market and learning center provides opportunity for local vendors and educators to provide their goods and expertise on topics such as cooking, sciences, and craftmaking.

Section Perspective: Showing context of the market and pavilion in relation to the city and water

The purpose of this project was to accommodate the Guadalquivir river site in Sevilla, Spain. This site hosts historic buildings and mounuments such as the Torre del Oro and the Monumento a la Tolerencia. The site has a distinct city level and a river level directly underneath. This goal of this project was to transform the ideas of local Spanish food to create a pavillion and market for this site. This site occupies this large amount of space for the ecological market and learning center, while also having social space.

Program sketch

Occupiable Space Sketch

Gastropub Floor Plan

Grid Forming From Pavilion

Circulation Sketch

Exterior Façade W/ Roof Skylight Sketch

Development Sketches And Diagrams

Block Program Sketch

Roof Orientation Diagram

These diagrams show the initial development of the market using the pavilion grid to create the building market grid. Eventually forming the building spaces and shapes designated by their use and relationship to the grid.

Diagrams Of Market Form

Transverse Section Facing Torre Del Oro

Transverse Section Facing Opposite Direction

Longitudinal Section Facing The City

SECOND FLOOR PLAN

Top Floor Plan Of Pavilion

Pavilion Section View

USC Cinematic Arts Extension School

Fall 2021

Professor: Wes Jones University of Southern California

Programs: Rhino, Illustrator

The USC cinematic arts extension school, located at the corner of the USC Village, targets community members to experience vocational-like experience from USC faculty/students in order to gain necessary skills to acquire technical cinema jobs. The building is made from CLT+Glulam structure with exterior wood vertical fins and exterior concrete stair cores.

The building has a large multi-purpose room that will be primarily for used for a sound stage, but can used for other purposes such as banquet space or meeting space. The building has classrooms and a screening room to learn technical production skills. The first floor is not attached but allows for passage between the village and USC campus. In the in-between space, there is a large exterior screen that can be used to play movies or graphic artwork at different times during the day.

Fuzzy Mind

Fall 2022

Professor: Jia Zhou Zhu University of Southern California

Programs: Houdini, Maya, Unreal Engine, Rhino, Illustrator

This studio took inspiration and input from Artificial Intelligence software, Midjourney, to create a 4 forms of building objects: Skin, Tissue, Flesh, and Bones. Transforming the 4 objects in buildable forms and eventually into a museum space.

RENDERINGS

Sevilla City Towers

Spring 2020

Professor: Sarah Hammond

University of Southern California

Programs: Grasshopper, Rhino

Exploration and manipulation of data through the use of grasshopper and OpenStreetMap to take the dense city of Sevilla, Spain and transform the building footprints into a collection of towers using the footprints as the tower form. The OSM extracted data included information about street name, building height, location, etc.,

City context

South Elevation of Towers with extracted data

East Elevation of Towers with extracted data

Grasshopper Script

Processing output

<nd ref=”4278372733”/> <tag k=”addr:housenumber” v=”7”/> <tag k=”addr:street” v=”Calle Orfila”/> <tag k=”building” v=”commercial”/> <tag k=”building:levels” v=”3”/> <tag k=”name” v=”Ateneo de Sevilla”/> <tag k=”office” v=”association”/> <tag k=”source” v=”ide.Sevilla”/> <tag k=”wikidata” v=”Q4813091”/> <tag k=”amenity” v=”school”/> <tag k=”loc_name” v=”Colegio Itálica”/> <tag k=”name” v=”C.D.P. Itálica”/> <tag k=”official_name” v=”Centro Docente

<tag k=”website” v=”http://www. colegioitalica.es”/> </way> <way id=”428744709” visible=”true” version=”1” changeset=”40441613” timestamp=”2016-0702T14:34:33Z” user=”erlenmeyer” uid=”875518”> <nd ref=”4278372708”/> <nd ref=”4278372707”/> <nd ref=”4278372708”/> <tag k=”addr:housenumber” v=”9”/> <tag k=”addr:street” v=”Calle Orfila”/> <tag k=”building” v=”commercial”/> <tag k=”building:levels” v=”4”/> <tag k=”name” v=”Colegio Oficial de Agentes

OSM extracted data

Formmaking City Blocks

Bird Study and Recreational Center Program

Spring 2019

Professor: Chris Taylor

Texas Tech University

Programs: Rhino, Illustrator

These models are ribbed wooden models of a recreational center and a bird pathway model. The bird path model is the elliptical shape with individually carved studied pathways of birds observed in Lubbock, Texas. The drawing shows the pathways of bird travel from east to west during sunset.

Drawing Earth: Los Angeles Fossils

Summer 2020

Professor: Elisandra Garcia

Texas Tech University

Programs: Rhino, Illustrator

Exploration of Los Angeles historical topography and landscape, highlighting the La Brea Tar Pits and Beverly Hills High School oil derrick. The topography was a speculation from 10,000 years ago using previous topography maps. The oil derrick was drilling for decades, until it was covered with an art installation by Ed Massey, until it was eventually disassembled completely.

HLW Professional Work

Summer 2022

Supervisor: Mathew Kilivris

Programs: Revit, Enscape, Photoshop

Working at HLW under supervision of Mathew Kilivris, this is some of the work that I personally did fully or to a very large extent. This building is a repositioning project for a downtown LA building to redefine the first and second floors and introduce a mezzanine level space for social interaction in this building. This was a completed schematic design set sent to the client.