UNIVERSITY OF HOUSTON | HINES COLLEGE OF DESIGN AND ARCHITECTURE
PORTFOLIO CONNOR CAMPBELL
Growing global climate changes, resource shortages, and unprecedented population growth set the backdrop for a new generation of architects.
Our job will be to take the rapidly changing technology and understanding of our time to reduce further human impact on the globe.
By designing on the cutting edge, we push the possibilities of architecture and urban design past what we know them to be. The further we go, the sooner we can arrive at a world with space, resources, and a future for everyone.
Aug 2022 - Current
EDUCATION HONORS
Aug 2018 - May 2022
University of Houston | Hines College of Design and Architecture
NAAB Bachelor of Architecture
GPA 3.705
Clear Brook High School
High School Diploma
GPA 5.418 / 6.000
Aug 2022 - Current
Dec 2018 - May 2022
MEDIA SKILLS
Microsoft Office
Adobe
CAD | Visualization Physical Media
WORK
August 2024 - Current
February 2025 - Current Fall 2024
Sept 2023 - April 2024
LANGUAGE
English
French
Spanish
Hines College Dean’s List
University Good Academic Standing
Clear Creek ISD Superintendent Scholar
National Honor Society
Word | Excel | PowerPoint
Photoshop Beta | Illustrator | InDesign | Express
Rhino 7.0 | Grasshopper | Revit | V-Ray | Rhino Render | Twin-motion
Sketching | Wood | Maquette | Plaster + Concrete | Laser Cutting | 3D Printing
Strategic Planner and Graphic Designer Mindversity at the University of Houston
Starbucks | Barista | 3925 Gulf Freeway
Second Year 2500 Studio Mentor
First Year 1500 Studio Mentor
Starbucks | Barista | 910 Louisiana Street
Native | Fluent
University Intermediate | Self Teaching | Perusing French Minor
Novice | Self Teaching
Houston, Texas Apt. 1016 3719 Elgin Street, 77004 conncamp1@gmail.com | 1+(832) 205 6704
BRADY ISLAND GREEN-WASTE RECYCLING CENTER
Immersed in the heart of one of the largest shipping ports in the United States, the residential areas through which the Houston Ship Channel is cut pay the price for their proximity. Railroads, heavy infrastructure, chemical processing, and limited access to community spaces mark the area. Creating a beacon of vitality and greenery became the primary focus for this project. Landscaping, site planning, and the architecture across all of Brady Island work to shape the experience of the visitors to be transparent, educational, and build a sense of community along side the highly industrial area.
Warehouse construction technology, local to the area, is used for the skeletal structure of the buildings on site and a highlight of each, are the gabion shading walls, filled with scrap metal local to the channel. Through this, waste that would otherwise be bound for a landfill is removed from the cycle and planted in place. The walls provide shading to the walls of the building and reduce the mechanical cooling requirements of each space. More experientially, they all touch down on the ground, coming in constant contact with the visitors to the site.
Foot and bike paths connect the site and provide leisure walks through the reclaimed forest that occupies most of the island. Visitors bound for the restaurant complete a panoramic traffic circle, with views of the mulch processing, 610 bridge, and forest, before crossing an elevated roadway that allows for safe wildlife crossing below. The restaurant is made up of semi-conditioned, conditioned, and unconditioned spaces, which are designed to be accessible during all hours for the community.
Exploded Site Analysis [from bottom to top] Greenery, Site Perimeter, Residential/Industrial, Vista Lines, Activity/Noise, Local Architecture
Contextual Collage Captures the experience of local communities near Brady Island
The site is organized into three primary zones, the urban forest, the industrial mulch processing side, and the park space, which are organized about a central roundabout.
In many of communities around Brady Island and the Houston Ship Channel, the primary household income comes from a job within the shipping or petrochemical industry. For these families, there is no escape from the industrial giant in their backyard.
The project utilizes scrap metal gabion walls that shade the building and its semi-conditioned spaces. The sculpture is a facade study of those gabion walls and how they may age onto the concrete slab of the builds they are part of.
For two weeks, the sculpture was watered with a diluted saline solution to show the weathering of the metal onto the concrete. It was assembled from re-purposed scraps from the College dumpster, a concrete base, and found scrap metal from around Brady island.
Perspective [Southern side of the admin/pros. Building and visitor center]
Exterior
Right: Perspective
Captures southwest view from the gallery, situated behind two gabion walls
SLICE / MONTROSE
In our expanding virtual world, the contact we share with the tangible world around us, our neighbors, communities, environments, and ecosystems, seem smaller and smaller. We, as part of a collective, need to have more spaces where people can congregate over their shared and individual interests and the natural environment they share, building a community focused around the collective.
Montrose, where the site is located, has a historic and cultural air to it, being a bustling focal point for activity and activism for the city of Houston. By introducing an inclusive and diverse multi-function building to the area, a stage is created, allowing the city to hear more voices, meet new people, and stitch together the community of greater Houston and beyond.
When walking around Montrose, the Menil Collection, and St. Thomas campus, a common trait they all share is an abundance of lawn and trees. It is key to the area’s quaint and peaceful feel. The project allows this to happen on the site by compressing into a thin but tall structure, which additionally shields the green space from Richmond Boulevard, which is a notoriously busy road, and becomes a attractive element for passers-by.
The project aims to be as divers as the community it serves. It includes a sports equipment rental office, locker rooms, a restaurant, art gallery, two-story library, classrooms, studios, a cafe and bar, and a large event space, as well as a rooftop garden. Each program is also integrated with enough room to change to adapt to any changes that may be needed to accommodate the needs of the community.
Following intial site visits, the most intrusive factor on the site was the busy road, Richmond Blvd, to the south. It was a major detractor from the calm and quiet neighborhood feel of the Manil Collection Campus immediately to the north.
Above: Site Plan 1:1/72
By creating a linear structure and placing it on the southern side of the site, a large lawn is formed, which is shielded from the busy road and sits within the shade of the building for much of the day.
Above: Axonometric Site Plan
Right: Site Model 1:1/16
A corrugated polycarbonate panels are strategically organized on the outside of the trusses in response to the internal program. Areas without the panels are, in most cases, more public spaces where greater transparency with the environment connects the inside with the exterior.
Top: South Elevation
Above: South Facade of Physical 1:1/16 Model Left: Structural System Iterations
By arranging the structure such that there is a core and then an exostructure that extends from it, an ambigouus space outside of the core but within thebuilding is created. This space can act as an extension to the climate controled space of the core, or become a functional space within the building that is the natural conditioned by the natual environment outside.
The space would still have coverage from the rain and sun, and the areas that are covered by the polycarbonate panels would have greater shade and seperation from the exterior, creating a range of spaces around the building that have diverse features to accomedate the diverse needs that the structure may require.
Above: Initial Interior Sketch
Top Left: Circulation/Congregation Void in Building Core
Right: Third Floor Classroom Spaces, the colored floor indicates enclosed space, the white is exterior
CLEAN BREW
Since its foundation, Houston has been a city of commerce and industry. While its environment is not especially attractive, the city and its planners have neglected it all together, creating a concrete jungle, a culture of litterers, and a mindset that no solution exist.
Rather than design passively cooled structures, the advent of air conditioning has allowed the city to negate these sustainable systems, becoming increasingly dependent on active systems and energy consumption.
Buildings are tightly packed, trees are a rare sighting downtown, and manufactured shade is uncommon. All of this creates an urban environment where outdoor leisure is virtually nonexistent, and the city looks austere and dull.
Houston’s warm streets are empty of pedestrians, full of homeless people hunting for shade, and a lack of green spaces that are accessible to everyone.
This project aims to put the diverse people of Houston, the environment, and the city planners all in the same place.
This is done through a multifunction complex, including an education and rehabilitation for the homeless, a coffee shop, indoor and outdoor gardens, office space for a city-cleaning organization, and a gallery to show their work to the community.
In the diagram, enteties are segregated by barriers and covered in haze, but then a centralized space is created, removing bariers, clearing the haze, and diversifying the enteties
Above: Conceptual Intention Diagram
Left: 1:1/16 Clean Brew model within Studio Site Model
Above: Section Through Bayou
Top Left: Southeast/Street Elevation and Section
Top Right: Bayou-side Ground Floor Entrence Bottom: Unrolled Plan
TECHNOLOGY SERIES
Progressing directly along side studio, the technology series looks to grow student’s mental catalog and understanding of structural systems. This understanding allows them to design realistically, in ways that architecture is actually constructed, rather than doing so disconnected from reality.
Like other classes, tech is of course lectured over, but is it when students reproduce and detail construction details that they see how each part comes together, thus most of the Tech series classes operate similarly in this fashion.
Technology III expands on this the most by asking students to not only draft sections, but modify them in accordance to a change in weather or climate. For it’s course final, it also requires students to produce a 1:1/4 scale chunk model of a facade and wall. The Allienz Arena by Herzog and DeMeuron was selected as the subject of this project.
The arena features an inflatable ETFE illuminated facade, providing ample thermal insulation against the harsh German climate, and transforms the structure into a unique cultural icon for the football in the region.
180/70 mm steel channel steel grating
gutter: 1 mm aluminium sheet, PVC-coated 70 mm EPS thermal insulation to falls 2 mm aluminium sheet, lacquered 96 mm wide-flange steel Å-beam (HEA 100)
primary beam: 1321/203 mm glue laminated Douglas fir, white lazure
connection element: aluminium, welded, with thermal zoning
1.0 mm aluminium-sheet panel; 60 mm thermal insulation; 1.0 mm aluminium sheet
thermal glazing: 6 mm toughened glass + 16 mm cavity + laminated safety glass of 2≈ 5 mm toughened glass, ceramic frit pivoting aluminium solar control louver, with integrated photovoltaic module
thermal gl., curved: 8 mm toughened gl. + 16 mm cav. + lam. safety gl. of 2≈ 6 mm heatstrength. gl., all low-iron gl., ceramic frit, light permeab.: 62.5 %
sprinkler pipe
bracing / beam suspended ceiling (compression member): 60 mm steel CHS
bracing (tension member): Ø14 mm steel rod
suspended ceiling: polyester fabric in alum.
Frame
250 mm reinforced concrete; 127 mm EPS thermal ins. vapour retarder; 80 mm precast concrete unit steel studs; 250 mm reinforced concrete∂
The Seattle Public Library by OMA served as the precedent analysis for the 2501 Studio and corresponding Technology II course. Detail sections were drafted and detailed, then used as references throughout the studio, and into the final project design.
Above: Seattle Public Library by OMA
Right: Renzo Piano Pavillion by Renzo Piano Building Workshop
60 mm mastic asphalt 250 mm concrete filigree beam floor 1250/900 mm reinforced-concrete floor beams
Reinforced-concrete composite column
3500/300/60 mm lighting unit
4 mm sheet-steel smoke tap
Roller sunblind
Post-and-rail facade with double glazing
Precast spun concrete column (variable dia.)
Bolt fixing of precast concrete column
2x 12.5 mm fibre-cement sheeting with smooth render finish 100 mm mineral wool reinforced-concrete edge beam
200/300 mm steel RHS with traveller
Facade bracket, 2x 100/80 mm steel flats 100 mm dia, air duct to facade
50 mm dia, polythere air tube
Cushion, 0.2 mm ETFE sheeting
Ladder of travelling system
Secondary construction: 120/220 mm steel RHS
6 mm galvanized sheet-steel gutter
Allienz Arena by Herzog & DeMeuron
FRENCH SOLO TRIP SKETCHES
Connor Campbell
Bachelor
Cathédrale Notre-Dame de Rouen, Rouen, Normandy
Église Saint-François-Xavier, Paris
Avenue de Champaubet, Carmine Café, Paris
Rue Eau de Robec, La Petite Bouffe, Rouen, Normandy
Quai de Gesvres, Bistrot Marguerite, Paris
Pavillon des Etats, Musée de Louvre, Paris
ROOMS FOR LANDSCAPE
What is a rooms? What checklist of requirements constitute the distinction of a room, versus a park, or patio? The Manuel Dublan 46 apartments by Productora and ReUrbano, challenge this distinction with its convoluted indoor-outdoor spaces between apartments.
For this project, students were asked to analyze a precedent, and extract from it, an understanding of its contexts and design concepts and philosophies, as well as studying the designer, then analyze and apply those concepts appropriately to a different site. This new site was the lawn in front of the University of Houston School of Art.
With the precedent being located in Mexico City, Mexico, and the new site being in Houston, they shared some common traits such as the generalized climate, and the city environment. The new site is public, primarily for students at the university, and the precedent is private, but both are spaces in need of a pocket of nature and separation from the city.
By sinking a pit into the ground and extending walls above it, a space can be create that blocks the visual and audible sensations of the city, and by further shaping this pit around the existing organics of the site, trees tower above and provide shade and clamminess, further transporting the experience out of the busy city.
Trees were not required to be maintained and could be removed or moved, but with this design they are untouched and shape the spaces within the site around them. This creates an irregular circulation through the structure, slowing the pace
Above: Physical 1:1/8 model
Left: Plans 1:1/36, with and without Trees
North-South Section 1:1/36
10' 3' 1' 5
