PORTFOLIOCHARLESE.PEARSON2022
CONTENTS Table of Contents Sunset Strip Arts Collective Solar Grove Culver City Youth Housing Complex Baluarte Blanco Venice Beach Bath Facility Sand Spud UCLA Parking Lot ‘Place-2-Be’ Remodel Bumper Pod City Chinatown Drive-In Theater / Food Bank The Infinity Screen Los Angeles Arboretum & Botanic Garden Glass House Arboretum 04 14 18 22 28 30 02
Charles E Pearson Los Angeles, CA (818) cepearson@ucla.edu540-5511 I’m an artist, aspiring architect, and current UCLA AUD graduate student in Los Angeles, California seeking opportunities to further my knowledge and experience. I’m hardworking, passionate, creative, and easy going. I put my heart into everything I do and am a great addition to any team. SculpturePaintingDrawing Office Suite: Word Powerpoint Excel Adobe Suite: Photoshop Illustrator After Effects Rhino: Enscape V-Ray Vectorworks Art Minor Art History Honors Santa Barbara, CAArchitecture2019Berkeley,2014-2018CA and Urban Design Los Angeles, CA 2020-Present OBJECTIVE: To obtain a position where my skills, experience, and education are fully utilized. EDUCATIONSKILLSABOUTCONTACT University of California Santa Barbara B.A. History of Art & Architecture University of California Berkeley [IN]ARCH UniversityProgramofCalifornia Los Angeles M.Arch I Chris Cottrell Santa Barbara, CA 2015 Jackie Spafford Santa Barbara, CA 2017-2018 Art History & Archaeology Professor Claudia Moser Santa Barbara, CAJim2016And Akiko Davis Santa Barbara, CA 2017-2020 Julia Koerner Los Angeles, CA 2021-2022 PROFESSIONAL EXPERIENCE Native Son Design ArchitecturalStudio Intern UCSB Image Resource AssistantCenter Scanner/Archiver UCSB Professor Claudia ResearchMoser Assistant Wade Davis Design Contracted Draftsman & Assistant Designer UCLA TeenArch Studio Head Teaching Assistant
Solar Grove is a proposal for an arts collective that cultivates a vibrant and thermally comfortable refuge for visitors of the Sunset Strip. The design prioritizes climatology, rigorous grid logic, cir culation, activating context, and reinforcing the relationship to the existing building on the site.
Solar Grove
The core of this proposal is an extensive semi-transparent amor phous silicone photovoltaic roof system. This system takes adan tage of the intense LA sun and allows renewable energy to offset approximately 2/3 of the buildings anticipated energy useage. Beyond solar power, the roof system is designed to filter out / dis sipate direct light and heat gain which creates thermally comfort able outdoor spaces and allows passive cooling to reduce the reli ance on HVAC systems to create efficient, softly lit interior spaces.
Sunset Strip Arts Collective 04
Existing Building 05
EVAN BRUETSCH - GROUP D CLIMATIC ANALYSIS 06
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The design for this high-density apartment complex is one that mediates the program requirements of creating comfortable living conditions for vulnerable communities with some of the harsh realities of the city. The design embraces the history of the LA river as well as exlores ideas of patterning, positive vs negative space, varied scales of massing, and scales of public/private.
Blanco Culver City Youth Housing Complex 14
The project responds to the pungent river and garbage ridden un derpass that surrounds the site, as well as to the plethora of iconic and somewhat controversial buildings Eric Owen Moss has filled downtown Culver City with, by acting like a porcupine – turning its back to the city through a massing strategy that stacks dingbat inspired massing blocks like a fortress around the perimeter of the site and occupies the underbelly with all the doors and windows. However, like the porcupine, this move is not employed in simply a docile defensive manner, but in a bold and aggressive manner through a sophisticated design and rational massing strategy. In this way, the project both challenges Eric Owen Moss and his more freeform style, as well as embraces the opportunity he has forged for creative, dynamic, and atypically designed structures to exist in this space.
Baluarte
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The design directly reflects the larger city section of the site. Spe cifically, the design and layout of program reflects the urban sprawl of downtown to the south and the more natural hills of Ely sian Park to the north. The shape of the top of the wrapped screen is specifically created from the mapping of the landscape so that the screen can direct itself towards the hills of Elysian Park – a common city landscape viewing area.
The Infinity Screen Chinatown Drive-In Theater / Food Bank 18
A large singular drive-in program allows unique cinema experi ences, and the featuring of lucrative live drive-in shows can attract people from a larger scale far beyond the local community and even beyond Los Angeles. Meanwhile, the park program offers free park cinema shows as well creates other public spaces to create affordable access for the local community.
The Infinity Screen is a take on the food distribution center / drive-in cinema program that reimagines the idea of screen and resolves the food distribution program requirements in an effi cient and sophisticated manner. Several key concepts permeate the design including mediating boundaries, urban vs natural, building vs landscape, idealized vs functional geometry, scales of access, nuanced circulation, and at its core a dynamic, uniquely formed continous semi-transparent LED screen
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The result is a fragmented building system that stacks program vertically to the maximum vertical thresholds of the site parame ters in order to maximize the potential for tree growth outside these building fragments while also creating highly varied ways of interacting with these trees both from within the building frag ments and from circulating the exterior.
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A desire for minimal intrusion on the ground for the safe growth of these trees led to the development of a raised bridge circula tion system interconnecting the fragmented buildings. The prima ry circulation system features ramped bridges weaving in and out of the buildings and slowly taking the visitor up in elevation with the trees. The bases of interior ramps feature different condi tioned plant spaces for smaller native species to grow - forcing the viewer to constantly switch their interactions between differ ent scales of native California species of plants.
The design of this project is grounded on the concept of how to create large open spaces for tall native California trees to grow, as well as creating varied ways of interacting with these trees while also mediating these desires with the program requirements given for the project. It was also important in the design to incorporate the grid logic ideas explored in the precedent study of Lina Bo Bardi’s Casa de Vidro, as well as trying to capture some of the experiences of the more intimate scale of the domestic house in a larger scale public site.
Glass House Arboretum
Los Angeles Arboretum and Botanic Garden
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The design was produced by applying a simple folding operation to opposite sides of a sheet of paper and allowing the inherent qualities of the sheet itself to produce the rest of the form. This seemingly simple operation manages to produce a quite complex form that confounds the idea of line such as where sharp folds fade back into smooth surfaces.This folding operation also allows what may be considered the exterior of the form to pierce into the interior space in a way that confounds conventional ideas of inside versus outside.
This proposal for a beach bathroom facility in the Santa Monica / Venice coastal area is intimately designed around sheet logic and aims to explore a nuanced relationship between simplicity versus complexity, interior versus exterior, and to explore a complex rela tionship of movement.
Venice Beach Bath Facility 28
Sand Spud
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The scheme specifically aims at providing temporary housing for the plethora of commuter students at UCLA who often have no place to sleep on campus. The design breaks down different scales of desired private vs social spaces that UCLA students desire.
Small, private ‘bumper pods’ provide beds, storage, and private study spaces for individual students. These pods are mobile, uti lizing a complex magnet track system, that allow the pods to be driven to and connect to larger hubs for additional amenities and for different levels of social interactions - such as domestic hubs with a shared living room, ktichen, and bathroom for up to 6 pods or larger public hubs like a library.
Bumper Pod City is a group project proposal by Charles Pearson, Alessandro Bressan, Chuan Liu, and Hamid Sanjabi for a ‘ Place-2-Be’ renovation of UCLA Lot 32.
Bumper Pod City
UCLA Parking Lot ‘Place-2-Be’ Remodel 30
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Thankcepearson@ucla.eduYou!