CHRISTOPHER HASSAN ALLEN
ARCHITECTURAL DESIGNER
NEW RUIN
FALL 2022
PORTLAND WHARF
FALL 2021
CHINATOWN LIBRARY
SPRING 2021
INSTRUMENTS OF ASSEMBLY
FALL 2020
FALL 2021 THREE—LEGGED CHAIR
SPRING 2023
NEW RUIN
OPTION STUDIO
PROFESSOR ANTÓN GARCÍA-ABRIL
SPRING 2022
This proposal imagines creative and residential facilities for a plein-air artists' residency located on the Illa del Rei, a small rocky island at the mouth of the Port of Maó in Menorca, Spain. The residency is meant as an extension of the operations of the existing Hauser & Wirth gallery on the island, providing studio spaces, areas for communing and dining, as well as housing accommodations for six artists. These spaces are arranged along a snaking chain of rectangular "subtracted plinths" carved into the rock of the island's landscape.
The design takes formal and methodological cues from the long history of masonry and lithic architecture in the Balearic Islands, from the ancient T-shaped megalithic structures known as "taulas," to the Líthica quarry of Ciutadella de Menorca. The architecture reappropriates the material of the site, and nestles itself into the landscape, so as to nearly disappear to the eye of someone approaching, allowing the retention of northward vistas across the inlet towards the city of Mahón from the central peak of Illa del Rei.
PLAN: STUDIOS AND COMMUNAL SPACES
PLAN: RESIDENCES
PHYSICAL MODEL:
PHYSICAL MODEL: INTERIOR
PORTLAND WHARF
CORE III STUDIO
PROFESSOR SHEILA KENNEDY
IN COLLABORATION WITH ADRIANA GIORGIS
FALL 2021
As Maine’s coastline changes hands from public to fully private, access to the shore becomes more contentious and litigious. This proposal, sited at the Berlin Mills Wharf in the city of Portland, offers a literal and figurative mooring space for the public—a point of commerce, rest, learning, and communing along an increasingly privatized shoreline. Aimed at supporting the greater Portland community, the project caters to nearby farmers, city dwellers, and independent marine businesses through the emphasis of traditional skills and their reinvention. As Portland's population, and with it the local culture, grows and diversifies, the project provides a site for the confluence of varying aquacultural, agricultural, and maritime traditions.
The building serves as a nexus for seaweed harvesting and refining activities that offer a cooperative effort around which members of the local community can organize, recognizing the undertapped potential of rockweed (an endemic species of seaweed) as an additional economic resource for Portland's professional and amateur aquaculturalists alike. Rockweed provides a seasonal cycle around which local residents can engage both with each other and with the region's biosphere.
APERTURE STUDIES: DESIGNING FOR INTERACTION
In keeping with the motivation to embody local natural materials in the building itself, the project utilizes local dimensional lumber to construct thickened walls and a long-span truss structure, limited to off-the-shelf, repairable, and replaceable elements, and emphasizing a redundancy of parts which informs the scale of the building. Marine materials also find their way into the envelope of the building, with dried rockweed batting used as thermal insulation in exterior partitions, as well as an aggregate in the composite shingles that clad the building's unifying roof.
CHINATOWN LIBRARY
Parcel R-1 in Boston’s Chinatown has experienced waves of private and public ownership since it was created through the land fill of the historic South Cove. Given that the parcel will most likely be the future site of affordable housing in the real world, and after hearing current Chinatown residents express a desire for a sense of home in their library, this proposal conceives a Return of House to the site, both programmatically and scalarly. In terms of program, this motive is reflected in domestic programs such as a communal kitchen, dining space, and tea room, providing additional spaces for residents of the neighborhood to enjoy family and group meals, which in particular operate as an integral part of many religious and cultural celebrations for the Chinese American communities of Boston’s Chinatown. In terms of scale, the return of “house” is reflected in the limited vertical extents of the massing as a counterpoint to the looming surrounding buildings and as a sign of deference to the rowhouses which originally populated the site, a line of which remain facing the south of the site. The building mass turns itself inward and the interior of the site is occupied by a courtyard which is not immediately visible or discernible by passersby, but rather reveals itself to the visitor only through an exploratory engagement with the site. This positioning of the courtyard is meant to create an intimate, protected outdoor space at the heart of the library which defies touristic voyeurism.
TIMELINE: OCCUPATION AND OWNERSHIP ON PARCEL R-1
Tracing the 169-year-long history of architectural occupation of Parcel R-1 revealed that over time, residences owned by individuals were largely replaced by commercial buildings with corporate ownership, though some vacant lots on the parcel are still owned by local community-oriented organizations. Today, half of the parcel which was formerly occupied by rowhomes now exists as a parking lot.
In response to these conditions, this project proposes a library as
. a center for communing
SECOND FLOOR
MEZZANINE
INSTRUMENTS OF ASSEMBLY
CORE I STUDIO
PROFESSOR J. JIH
At a time when populations around the world are re-evaluating the histories and morals immortalized in their built environments, these Instruments of Assembly also serve as anti-monuments for the city of Boston, which has its own fraught history with monuments that glorify racism and colonial violence.
The proposal combines the sonic tactics of protest with a participatory program of storytelling and conversation to create a nodal network of interactive auditory interventions that comprise an urban discursive infrastructure. A variety of parabolic sound-reflecting shapes are combined and iterated to create an arrangement of unique rotating structures whose differences invite exploration and interaction and whose geometries and mobility enable a range of sound-based gatherings from one-on-one conversations to concerts and rallies, which play significant roles in political and social activism.
DISCURSIVE SONIC INFRASTRUCTURE
The varied alignment, movement, and usage of these structures in the park create a complex and ever-changing soundscape nested within the picturesque landscape of the Emerald Necklace. As visitors interact with the structures and discover their geometric and sonic abilities, they find themselves immersed not only in real-time sounds of play, performance, and conversation, but also in reproduced sounds of social and political discourse: In addition to directing sound, each structure also records and replays sound through its shape and movement. Paraboloid pods on the ends of each structure may be arranged to face one another, creating a sonic chamber in which a microphone in one pod is optimized to receive the sound of someone speaking in the opposite pod. One day a year, these microphones are activated and Boston residents are invited to the park to record anecdotes in response to questions regarding various social and political experiences of the city—"How do you feel when you see police?" "Recount a time you felt at home in the city," etc. These recordings are collected and dispersed to corresponding structures in the city, situated at civic and historical sites related to the stories told by participants. Through cooperative movement and a shared auditory experience, those who interact with the structures are invited to engage in public discourse with their fellow urban residents, seeing the city not through another’s eyes but through another’s words.
POINTS OF DEPLOYMENT: NETWORKING MONUMENTS AND SITES OF CONTENTION
MAPPING RECENT HISTORY OF PROTEST IN BOSTON: KEY SITES AND METHODS OF CIVIL DISOBEDIENCE EMERGE
PARABOLOID DISH
PARABOLOID POD
SPEAKING TUBE
PARABOLIC WALL
ORIENTING SONIC INTERVENTION IN THE EMERALD NECKLACE
ECOLOGY, ERASURE, & MEMORY ON DEER ISLAND
URBANISM PROSEMINAR
PROFESSOR RANIA GHOSN
FALL 2021
This triptych focuses on Deer Island, the present site of the second-largest wastewater treatment plant in the U.S. and a historical site of the internment of Indigenous individuals during King Philip’s War, as an investigation of the role which ecological infrastructure plays in sociocultural projects of historical and demographic erasure, particularly in relation to Indigenous histories and communities, across a variety of temporal, geographic, and urbanistic scales. Bearing both its past and present in mind, Deer Island has a multifaceted history of literal and figurative washing, expressed across scales of time, infrastructure, and sociopolitics. Its current iteration as a beacon of ecological cleansing has figuratively whitewashed its history as a key site in the attempted ethnic cleansing of Indigenous communities by European colonizers.
1. ECOLOGY: SOCIOSANITARY WASTE
2. ERASURE: DENIAL AND REMOVAL
3. MEMORY: COMMEMORATIVE TRACING AND SPATIALTEMPORAL STITCHING
THREE-LEGGED CHAIR
FURNITURE MAKING WORKSHOP
PROFESSOR CHRIS DEWART
SPRING 2023
A chair with three legs, made of ash and cherry wood, produced through steam-bent lamination and CNC milling. The chair takes its formal cues from Ming-dynasty yokeback chairs, the 1950 "Praying Mantis Lamp" by Jean Rispal, and bike seats.
"COVER ME SOFTLY:" TIMIŞOARA ARCHITECTURE BIENNIAL
CURATED BY OANA STĂNESCU, WITH CHASE GALLIS AND SIMINA MARIN CURATORIAL, EDITORIAL, AND PRODUCTION ASSISTANT JUNE—OCTOBER 2024
As a production assistant, I was able to apply my architectural skill set to assist in the production of exhibitions for several local and international contributors to a biennial exposition of architecture, art, and design, including space planning, exhibition design, and installation of visual and audio works in collaboration with teams of curators, architects, artists, publicists, and other professionals. The biennial, under the theme "cover me softly," comprised 50 primary installations as well as over 80 smaller-scale contributions all centered around the interpretation of the "cover," from reinterpreting existing material (as in the "cover song") to literally covering or enclosing one's environment. This 10-year anniversary edition of the biennial exhibited works from a wide range of creative disciplines including architecture, art, fashion, film, and music, and unfolded over five weeks of community programming including workshops, lectures, and dance parties. Preparation for the exhibition included the adaptive reuse of over 3,000 square meters of interior and exterior space in a former military garrison building. The exhibition was experienced by approximately 26,000 visitors over its duration.
In addition to my roles assisting curation and production, as an editorial assistant, I directly assisted the editors of a physical publication that accompanied the exhibition, the content of which includes a series of essays, interviews, and visual pairings of canonical design works with their reinterpretations, or "covers." In this role, my responsibilities included soliciting and selecting content for contribution, producing and editing literary and visual content, and coordinating legal usage rights for images that comprise a large portion of the publication.
"SANCTUARY:" KUNSTHAUS GRAZ
AZRA AKŠAMIJA / FUTURE HERITAGE LAB EXHIBITION ARCHITECT
JUNE 2023—JULY 2024
I worked as the primary exhibition architect for researcher, designer, and artist Azra Akšamija's mid-career retrospective exhibition "Sanctuary," presented at the Kunsthaus Graz in Graz, Austria. In this role, I collaborated with the artist and a team of local curators to produce a visually cohesive and narratively coherent exhibition design for an international audience. The works selected and displayed consisted mostly of large-scale textile spatial installations, video works, and wearables. Conceptually, it was imperative to me that the works interacted with the architecture of the gallery space as much as permitted by the unconventional bubble-tecture interior, rather than either float untethered in the space, or rely on temporary walls to be erected. Over the course of the exhibition, a series of workshops were held in which visitors were able to learn about the fabrication methods of some of the artworks, and assemble portions of a large-scale modular wearable artwork.
BËT-BI
CULTURAL CENTER & MUSEUM
AZIZA CHAOUNI PROJECTS
ARCHITECTURAL INTERN
JULY—AUGUST 2021
As an architectural intern at Aziza Chaouni Projects, I designed and modeled portions of a competition proposal for a museum and art center in Senegal using Rhino and AutoCAD. Through an iterative design process, I was able to propose and visualize a series of solutions to design and programmatic challenges presented in the competition brief, for final selection by the lead architect. I produced diagrams, collages, and sketches in the development of architectural, environmental, and material concepts, in order to effectively communicate the narrative of the project proposal and its response to specific site conditions. In preparation for this, I conducted research on material, environmental, cultural, and historical contexts of competition site. Throughout my time as an architectural intern, I aided in coordinating collaborative efforts between remotely-located international teams of fellow interns, architects, and consultants in order to develop a cohesive architectural proposal and associated presentation boards under a compressed timeline.
URBAN DOVE CHARTER SCHOOL
MARBLE FAIRBANKS ARCHITECTS
JUNIOR DESIGNER
SEPTEMBER 2019—AUGUST 2020
As a junior designer at Marble Fairbanks, I was involved in the planning, design, and construction of an alternative sports-based charter school in the East Midwood neighborhood of Brooklyn. The project entailed the adaptation of an existing religious children's school into educational and athletic facilities suited for high-school-age students. During pre-design, I conducted preliminary surveys of the site. During SD, DD, and CD phases, I drafted construction documents for permit sets, and worked closely with senior architects, the client, owner's reps, and school faculty to propose renovations and finishes consistent with the school's ethos, including designing a graphic identity for the gymnasium and other common areas that ultimately became a standard for the charter school's subsequent locations. With assistance from senior architects, I managed construction administration for the project, coordinating the efforts of the architectural, MEP, and construction teams and responding to complex design and execution challenges in real time, in order to successfully deliver a project with strict time and budget constraints.
ARCHITECTURAL DESIGNER
MASTER OF ARCHITECTURE
MASSACHUSETTS INSTITUTE OF TECHNOLOGY
SCHOOL OF ARCHITECTURE AND PLANNING
CHASSANALLENJR@GMAIL.COM
CHRISTOPHER HASSAN ALLEN