Alex Harrison Architecture
University of Illinois Chicago
Chicago Building Repository- 2
Spring 2024, Professor Igo Kommers Wender
The School as a Viewfinder - 14
Fall 2023, Coordinator Francesco Murullo
Straw City - 26
Spring 2022, Professor David Brown
Winton Abstraction - 34
Fall 2021, Professor Kelly Bair
The World’s Conservatory - 42
Spring 2023, Professor Meghan Quigley
Under One Roof - 50
2024, BairBalliet - Model Fabrication, Section Drawing
Standard ADU+ - 60
2023, BairBalliet - Model Fabrication, Exploded Isometric
Located on State Street, nestled between the Century and Consumer buildings, this project blurs timelines while repurposing building materials and celebrating the rich architectural history of the City of Chicago. It acts a bridge between the past, present, and future, preserving fragments of history in time and space. Adhering to the city’s historic grid and modular bays, the building is cleverly divided into public and private sections. Here, glass panes serve as transparent partitions, delineating different functions while maintaining formal clarity. Upon entering from the rear alley, the journey of materials begins: from import to sorting where viable pieces are selected, then ascending for processing and cleaning. Once rejuvenated, these materials cross a transparent threshold, restarting the material lifecycle. When entering from State Street, Visitors are greeted by a lofty forest of columns beneath a floating arch from Chicago’s Central Station. From there, they can visit the tool library on the second floor to borrow for personal projects, or continue upward to material resale. Once visitors purchase their materials, guests head to a community workshop where history and hands-on activity converge. As guests stumble upon suspended artifacts, their journey upward continues to the fifth and sixth floors uncovering a unique indooroutdoor café, a space for public events in the adjoining space. This repository serves as both a logistical solution to the physical matter of demolished buildings as well as a cultural center for public engagement on issues related to the preservation of the City of Chicago’s rich architectural history.
“Found
materials” study exploring Heavy Suspended in Light
Processed Materials are Reused in the Workshop (bottom) while Community Events take place Above (top)
Direct Translation results in Impossibly Heavy Artifacts Floating at the Same Elevation Originally Found
Robots Automate Sorting and Material Processing (2nd Floor) before Recirculation
Penetrating Objects Create Opportunities for Visual Dialogue and Skylight
Visitors Wander Above Below and Through the City’s Past
Material and Visitors Ascend for each Step of their Journey
As the land of illusions and mirages, salt and sand, ravers and hermits, observatories and giga-factories, wilderness and colonization, the Mojave Desert is a privileged observation point for looking at the way we inhabit the world. Rather than an inhospitable wasteland deprived of life, the desert provides a canvas for invention unlike any other. The desert is a laboratory for teaching, learning, and sharing knowledge- in other words, the ideal site for an architecture school. Taking place on the Aiken Cinder Mine, The School as a Viewfinder repurposes the mine’s previously brutalized topography, utilizing its many steps, slopes, and mounds, framing unique views of the school, life, and surrounding desert landscape. The school’s permanent collective structures are comprised of board-form cinder concrete, utilizing the material on site. As students arrive each semester, their first assignment is to repurpose the remaining board form planks to build customizable housing units, picking their location anywhere on the site and framing a unique private view all their own. As villages soon form and students mingle, each student decides their role within the newly formed community, each student personally contributes to the life of the school resulting in a collaborative living and learning environment like no other.
Coordinator: Francesco Murullo
Permanent structures cast of cinder infused concrete, absorb heat during the day, gradually releasing stored energy throughout the night, maintaing a comfortable working and learning environment.
To combat the blistering heat of the Mojave, students can harness the breeze off of the mountain, circulating fresh air by simply opening their aperture. As night falls, and temperatures drop, students can retain the heat within their dwelling by closing off their unit to the outside elements.
Each Student has an Individual Role Within their Community
Students Choose their View then Re-Use Scrap Board-Form Planks to Build their Dwellings
The Main Campus Overlooking the Entirety of the Site
What if... pencil towers were bundled together to form elevated super blocks? Then, buildings and network could sit above hills and trees, creating a new relationship between city and landscape. While some buildings act as structural stilts and provide circulation to the ground, individual enclosed walkways allow for residents and visitors to circulate between super blocks, while intersecting canopied walkways allow for movement (and gathering) in a block’s interior courtyard space.
Critic: David Brown
Density Increases as the City Develops Futher Up the Mountainside
Frank Gehry initially designed the Winton guest house by constructing each room individually, then combining the singular parts forming an incongruent whole. Each form of the house is now considered an individual part, including the once rooms within rooms found inside Gehry’s original project. By way of scaling and skewing, connection to the parent volumes is seen in plan, while the separation and singularity are emphasized in section and elevation. Winton Abstraction proposes a dispensary that programs rooms for play and production processes, whilst hosting multiple events such as guided tours, product presentations and wellness lectures simultaneously in the heterogenous spaces between forms.
Critic: Kelly Bair Year-End Show 2021-22
Volumes come alive, moving and shifting as one circulates
Visitors Wander, Learn, and Observe
The World’s Conservatory proposes a warehouse complex that reimagines the possibilities of such an expansive enclosure. Merging domes allow for the maximization of internal volume, reducing the need for vertical columnar supports while experientially creating a seamless internal atmosphere The project presents an environmentally conscious warehouse complex comprised of five warehouse chains. Each of the five individual chains envelop a unique biome (rainforest, woodlands, flower garden, desert, and taiga forest) and the specialized cultivation processes that take place within. Each warehouse chain is organized linearly, maximizing process efficiency within the systematically sized domes for receiving, sorting, cultivation, packing, and distribution. Mimicking the adaptive cellular geometries of the natural world, the steel tubular frame of the recyclable ETFE structure emerges from beneath the soil the frame adapting and branching to where support is needed, while ethereal semi-translucent membranes encapsulate the environment within. Similar to that of the frame, the warehouse footprints remain dynamic. Although linear in process, the warehouses extend where most efficient, resulting in an incongruent whole that invites the visitor inwards. Practicalities (truck and staff egress) align along the perimeter of the site, facing outward, embracing the external world.
Spring 2023
Critic: Meghan Quigley
In Collaboration with: Hussein Saleh
Frame Emerging from the Earth Encapsulating the Internal Rainforest
Moment of Multiple Thresholds
In 1926, the Oak Park Park’s District ran a design competition for a one room building. This year, with the same competition run anew, BairBalliet joins Frank Lloyd Wright in the losers circle. The circle, often located by its center but defined by its perimeter, is a symbol of unity and inclusion. Today, the democratic organization that the circle encourages persists in all aspects of human gathering: for children learning from one another in schools, for community members sharing diverse viewpoints in talking circles and for performers as means of connection to their audience. Under One Roof is a proposal for a Field Center that encourages its users and visitors to both occupy the center and find overlaps in its contextual, spatial and programmatic tangencies. The Prairie Style, an architecture long embraced by Oak Park, is defined by strong geometries, natural materials, asymmetrical floor plans and characteristics that reinforce the horizontally of the midwestern prairie such as low roofs and deep eaves. Under One Roof suggests an updated prairie style through the kinked circular roof that envelopes the building massing below and blurs the line between interior and exterior as it offers playground visitors, school children, and Field Center users respite from the midwestern elements. Together, the building form, material use/reuse, and construction type reflects the innovative spirit associated with the Prairie Style movement. The project serves the needs of the park while providing a center for the community. The circular ground plane and the roof intentionally slip off alignment, expanding the circle to allow visitors to gather under, around and between one roof.
In collaboration with BairBalliet
Community Members Chat, Play, and Engage
Standard ADU+ is a 675 sf Accessory Dwelling Unit (ADU) that efficiently organizes two bedrooms (or a bedroom and a home office), one bathroom, and an open living and kitchen area under one slippery roof. The roof slides past the line of the exterior wall to provide a covered exterior space, extending the inside out while a skylight coalesces the open living space into a portal to the sky. Standard ADU is fully customizable to multiple site conditions and is designed with a nod towards accommodating a wide array of budgets without losing its charm.
Standard ADU+ Unfolded Before Assembly
