Portfolio

Contents

01

Thesis Beginnings

A study of engaging the senses to provoke memories of time, space, and identity within the context of memory care design

02

Reflective Urgent Care Center

An exploration of health and well-being through framed views, interplay with topography, and circulatory flow

03

Copenhagen Collective House

A vision for a communal, work-live space that fosters art and innovation, nestled within a historically spiritual site

04 Room + Street

A dialogue between opposing materials in this Blacksburg hotel illustrates the story of the landscape of southwest Virginia

05 Room + Garden

An intersection of orthagonal and circular geometries forms a dwelling for living and teaching atop the library

06 Sketch Studies

A compilation of architectural drawings and sketches, with a focus on exploring ink pen techniques

Thesis Beginnings

Senses & Memory

Engaging the senses to provoke memory and establish connection to time, space, and identity

This thesis explores the intersection of senses and memory, focused on engaging the five senses in order to provoke old memories and establish new connections. The program manifests itself in the form of memory care design. With diseases like Alzheimer’s and dementia, there is disorientation in three main areas: time, space, and identity.

In these design studies, the focus is to find ways of engaging the senses while orienting the residents timely, spatially, and individually. These details bring distinct sensoral qualties to each space they occupy, thus differentiating the areas of the memory care facility to allow for better navigation for those who can’t inhabit through memorization.

The site borders Kentland Farms in Blacksburg, Virginia. Here, Tom’s Creek flows beneath traintracks overhead, into the New River with a boat launch nearby. The varying topography and the residents’ awareness of it helps to orient them spatially from within: to the east is the rising mountain, and to the west is the sloping hill that leads to the wide expanse of the river. The site engages the inhabitants visually, audibly, and physically: the seasonal foilage, the gentle flow of water, the splashing of boats passing by, the rumbling of the train every hour.

Domesticating Time & Space

“Nothing gives man fuller satisfaction than participation in processes that supersede the span of individual life.” - Gotthard Booth

Daylighting

These studies show the ability of daylight to function as a wayfinder and a sundial, to orient the residents spatially and timely.

Identity: Freedom, Privacy, + Individuality

In typical dementia units, residents feel a lack of choice, no privacy, and lost within the group. This design of an exterior corridor allows for continuous circulation with multiple varations of routes, giving freedom of choice and access to the outdoors. With the angle of the bedrooms, each door’s approach is individualized, with no two doors on the same plane. Also, the rooms all have access to southeastern light, reinforcing the natural circadium rhythm to establish routine.

The Collective

A common issue in typical memory care facilities is abrupt change from private bedrooms to occupied public space. In this design, there is a gradient of transition between the private and public. The bedrooms have pseudo “front porches” and personal gardens, and slowly integrate into the shared spaces of the building. The exterior corridor extends the public space outside and leads to the performance hall, a audible sensory experience in itself.

Structure: Sense of Place

The building sits atop a steel column and concrete pile foundation, to reveal the gravity of the slope below. The materiality reflects that of the adjacent railroad, implementing steel vertically and wood horizontally. As the residents move from the inside to the outside corridor, they can feel the change in floor material, both in texture and sound. The wood deck extends the quality of the interior outward, while the metal grate echoes at their feet.

Reflective Urgent Care Center

This ambulatory care center in Blacksburg, Virginia explores how a building can promote health and well-being through the framing of views, interplay with the curved landscape, and a circular flow of patients and staff. Biophilia is in the heart of the design through the reflective glazing, which further emphasizes the hill-like form of the building, with the sloping landscape being physically reflected in form and literally reflected in the glass skin.

The site’s topography slopes downward from East to West, and concaves from North to South. This creates a teardrop-like form in the depression of the landscape.

The teardrop-shaped enclosure with a gradually, sloped roof mimics the form of the surrounding, rolling hills.

Aerial Perspective

During the day, the reflective glazing creates a uniform skin which emphasizes the natural qualities of the landscape.

The teardrop gestures towards the mountainous landscape while encasing the trees in the courtyard, putting nature at the center of the building.

The parking lot is divided in two. The north section is dedicated to patient drop-off and parking, the south section designated for an ambulance route and employee parking.

Considering Spaces

The design promotes biophilia inside and out

Addressing the Topography

The hilled landscape seemingly hugs the building, which hovers above the sloping ground below, creating an outdoor space for waiting patients or staff on break.

The teardrop form lends itself to allow for a circular flow, effective for both patients navigating the building and staff moving from one department to another.

The angled exterior windows direct the inhabitants’ views onto the mountainous landscape, away from the street traffic and thus creating privacy for the exam rooms.

The angled exterior walls guide the interior organization of the program, directing patients back to the central hallway of the building, allowing for easy navigation.

Patient vs Staff Flow: The Floor Plan

The angular form easily divides the departments, with the secondary concentric hallway creating an alternative path for staff to take.

The square columns are pulled back from the glass enclosure, giving them a strong presence in the hallways of the building. The steel structure also supports the glazing through connecting to glass fins along the walls and roof. The glass varies from windows to insulated units, thus framing views or creating privacy where necessary.

The structure is comprised of steel columns and beams, in a hollowed square shape. The steel columns are left exposed in the interior of the building so that patients and staff have a sense of the structure as a whole. This system is extended into the outdoor space below, gesturing the verticality of the nearby trees.

Copenhagen Collective House

Nestled between the Reformed Church and the Danish Architect Association, The Copenhagen Collective House functions as a modern creative hub in the center of the historic street of Åbernå. The public space invites local artists, musicians, and members of the community to interact and share ideas. Above, the office space serves as the headquarters for Kopenhagen Collective, a conglomerate of local freelancers working with photography, journalism, publishing, design, and more.

These creatives not only work here, but also live communally in the top three floors. Sharing kitchen and main living spaces, they can still have privacy in their bedrooms and intimate family rooms. The house itself borrows from the geometries of nearby buildings. The chamfered corner gestures to the Church and the roof line continues the precedent set by the street. Congregating in the areas housed by the window boxes, the residents feel intergrated into their surrounding city block.

Street Elevation

This both visually illustrates and physically represents the tension of modern building on such a historic street.

History + Modernity

The Copenhagen Collective House extends the lines made by the adjacent roof slope and window heights. The dimensions of the wood cladding echo the heights of the older brick.

Public vs. Private in Plan and Section

The chamfered corner invites passersby at the street level while the windows reach towards the sky from inside.

Ground + Sky

The ground floor provides communal space for gathering, eating, and art.

The second floor office acts as a spatial gradient, filtering out public visitors from private residents and employees. The office’s conference table doubles as a larger gathering space for the residents after work hours. Still, the residential floors provide shared and personal spaces to balance community and family.

Dormer Windows

Drawing from the neighboring forms, these dormers create intimate spaces within a communal living situation.

The bleacher style staircase encourages a moment of rest while beginning the transition from public to private space.

Room + Street

A Hotel for Blacksburg

In the heart of downtown, a transition from room to street

Located off of North Main Street in downtown Blacksburg, this hotel’s design is grounded in the surrounding natural elements indigenous to Southwest Virginia. The horizontally implemented concrete and the vertically placed wood represent the mountains and forests that comprise the Blue Ridge Range.

The opposing materials create a dialogue with each other and thus communicate the building’s story to its visitors. The rigidness of the concrete slab and column structure directly opposes on the lightness and fluidity of the warm, curving, cedar-planked walls.

With careful consideration of the boundary of street and room, the buildings’ walls ebb and flow within the confines of its structure. The main entrance is pulled back, creating a space of pause and relief from the constant movement of the street. The chamfered corner distinguishes itself against the flatness of the adjacent street facades.

Louis Kahn: The Street

“The street is a room by agreement, a community room... dedicated to the city for common use... Its ceiling is the sky.”

The Threshold

The “Blacksburg Corner” echoes the vernacular while letting the street breath, welcoming vistors inside.

Pilotis + Free Design of the Ground Plan

The structure is supported through a reinforced concrete column and slab system, allowing for fluidity of the timber constructed walls. Along the southeast facade, the walls concave to form alcoves at the additional entrances. While functioning as dropoff areas for visitng guests of the hotel, these intervals of rest also blur the lines of exterior and interior space, integrating the room with the street.

Expression of Structure

The smoothness of the column is optically and tactily experienced throughout. The structure is brought out to the face of the building, visually communicating its strength and points of tension. Inside, the columns are interspersed between rooms, providing moments of physical interaction while directing flow. The structure does not hide, even the weight and curvature of the pool is sensed from the rooms beneath it.

Room + Garden

Rooftop Space

A dwelling for living and learning at Virginia Tech

Designed for a visiting professor to reside in and teach, this dwelling sits atop Newman Library on Virginia Tech’s campus. Expanding on the geometric conditions creating by the library’s curved walls, this building frames the surrounding views and captures daylight through the intersection of orthagonal and circular forms.

Robert Venturi’s rounded addition to the old rectilinear section of the Newman Library gestures to Cowgill Hall, housing Virginia Tech’s School of Architecture. The midpoint of the larger curve points to Cowgill’s entrance. The rooftop dwelling’s form emphasizes this directionality and the garden paths converge at that viewpoint.

The Corner Condition: Blacksburg Vernacular

The varying scale of the columns signify different hierarchies of the angular form.

The staircase is an experience in itself. Situated at the meeting point of Venturi’s addition and the original library, the stair embodies the marriage of angular with circular. The structure is comprised of square steel beams, which carry the spiral staircase with rounded landings.

Providing ample views of the campus, the stairs lead to a long processional path directed towards the rooftop dwelling. The path itself is straight until it curves along the wall of the classroom.

The dwelling is supported by the Library’s waffle slab structure and concrete footing.

The Roof + Waterline

The concaving roof guides rainfall to the center lightwell, then reflecting pool, creating both a visual and auditorial experience.

Live + Teach

The concentrically organized classroom creates a collaborative atmosphere separate from the living areas. The translucent windows provide ambient light, ideal for a studio space.

Sketch Studies

Note Taking

“How does one record their encounter with something?”

- Gene Egger

Story Telling

This series of sketches illustrates a personal interpretation of a lecture about Philidelphia’s architecture and its people.

Sketching brings out a personal quality within the page. In the physical manifestation of our thoughts, it communicates what we think is visually important. It’s our perception of what we have seen, only to then be perceived again through the sketch itself. Sketches are a recording of our encounters, a recreation of our memories, an illustration of our senses.

For me, my sketches are molded by time. With a flash of a scene, I quickly scratch out what stuck me visually. With no hurry, I focus on texture and developing drawing techniques. In any case, my challenge with each sketch is to capture the essence of the thing, or in other words, my encounter with it.

The Human Scale

People’s presence clearly expressed in design

Bringing the human scale into architectural representations is crucial to our understanding and relation to buildings. In sketching people, we are confronted with our own bodily proportions, natural movements, and sensoral experiences. Sketches of humans in an architectural context inform physical dimension and sensory perception, whether it is the rise of a stair step, the height of a handrail, or the horizon of a line of vision.

A study of human proportion given a variety of time constraints, exploring how to capture the whole gesture.

Figure Drawing

Travel Journal

A series of sketchbook spreads from my semester abroad studying architecture in Copenhagen, Denmark.

The journal is an amalgamation of media, each capturing a different atmosphere of what I saw that day. The pages show scenes of Copenhagen, mainland Denmark, and a study tour of Germany and the Netherlands. My sketches from that week won first place in our class competition.

This is a collection of my favorite sketches from my travel journal over the course of my four months in Copenhagen. This shows a variety of pen techniques, full contrast ink drawing, and pencil shading without contours.

From left to right: blind contour line drawings of a city square, hatch-shaded sketches of sculptures, a series of vantage points throughout an art museum, a sketch of an industrial museum, a continuous line of canal house, pencil shaded figures, and a full contrast ink drawing of The David.

ERIKA WORKMAN

Objective

Fifth year architecture student seeking a full time, entry-level architect position beginning in July 2023. Extensive background in communicating with clients to reach desired designs as woodworker and graphic designer. Aspiring to grow skills in hand drafting, model making, and rendering.

Education

Bachelor of Architecture

• Virginia Tech, Blacksburg VA

• GPA 3.94

• Dean’s List nine consecutive semesters

DIS Study Abroad

• Danish Institute, Copenhagen, Denmark

Expected: May 2023

Contact Email enworkman@vt.edu

Phone 804-937-1191

Address Glen Allen, VA 23059

Skills

• Hand Drafting

• Sketching

January 2022 - May 2022

• Courses included Architecture Design Studio, Visual Journal, and Danish Language & Culture

• Conducted historical architectural research trips throughout Denmark, Sweden, Germany, and the Netherlands

Related Experience

Student Instructor | Blind Design Workshop

January 2023 - Present

• Collaborating on architectural design activities to be implemented at five day workshop in March for visually impaired students

• Creating a design activity for sensoral wayfinding by manipulating clay, with consideration of relying on tactility for process making and final product

• Conducted research and design studies on innovative construction details that are designed for handicapped assistance in architectural settings

Administrative Assistant | State Farm Insurance

May 2022 - August 2022

• Continually sought methods for improving daily operations, communications with clients, recordkeeping and data entry for increased efficiency

• Mentored junior administrative team members in insurance procedures

• Created and maintained databases to track and record customer data

Woodworker | SCT Woodworks

May 2021- August 2021

• Operated Power Saws, Planer, Jointer, Routers, and Pneumatics

• Built custom cabinetry by utilizing hand drafting and AutoCAD to create plans, cutting materials, and installing finished pieces on site

• Chose appropriate lumber and supplies for multiple projects based on wood species, project type, client needs and budget

Public Relations Officer | The Big Event

October 2020- Present

• Developed graphical media campaigns to increase exposure of opportunity and engage students, resulting in over two thousand social media followers gained

• Produced and edited visual content for social media and press releases to increase public awareness of one thousand completed service projects in Blacksburg area

• Autodesk AutoCAD Photoshop

• Illustrator

• InDesign

• Revit

• Model Making

• Woodworking

• LEED Green Associate Exam Prep Course

Honors & Awards

3rd Place- Integrative Design Competition

• Awarded for design of Urgent Care Center (December 2021)

Colonel Richard Hallock Scholarship

• For veteran dependents with scholastic merit and community service (July 2021)

Phi Kappa Phi Honor Society

• Top 7.5% of Architecture & Urban Studies Class (March 2020 - Present)

Tailhook Education Foundation Grant

• Awarded to students in STEM curriculum (April 2018)