Hasan Hachem - Sample Work - 2020

Hasan Hachem 20 20

Sample Work Design, Media, Computation

Intro Hasan Hachem is a researcher, designer and strategist focused on architecture, sustainability and technology. He is founder and director of Origin Zero, an architecture practice that explores the eco-politics of the built environment and experiments with natural systems to address the climate. Hasan holds a Bachelors of Architecture from Syracuse University as well as a Master of Science in Advanced Architectural Design from Columbia University; he is currently studying for an architecture license.

Education Columbia University | Master of Science

2017 - 2018

Syracuse University | Bachelor of Architecture

2012 - 2015

Experience Immersion Studio Teacher | Columbia University

Summer 2020

Science for the People | Editorial Collective

July 2020

Origin Zero | Founder + Director

2015 - Current

TPG Architecture | Design Strategist

2019 - Current

Architecture + Information | Design Strategist GA Collaborative | Junior Designer Syracuse University | Research Assistant

Skills Adobe Suite | Rhino | Grasshopper | Python | Processing

2018 - 2019 2015 2014 - 2015

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Content Masoro Medical Complex GA Collaborative

Native Soak Origin Zero

Sustainability Toolkit TPG Architecture

Generative Art Origin Zero

Bauhaus: The Cult Columbia University

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Masoro Complex GA Collaborative

The Masoro Health Center is a medical and housing campus for nurses in rural Rwanda. The campus offers programs that teach health education, medical treatment and prevention, as well as living quarters.

The project strategy was to separate programs based on utility needs and fill the void spaces with communal areas to create a connection between people, program and landscape. The program includes meeting spaces, administrative offices, washing areas, community gardens and courtyards.

Contribution: Junior Designer, schematic design, design development, renders

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Local participation

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Site plan Situated on a steep topographic site, the campus utilizes a series of terraces and ramps to maintain a strong connection to the natural environment.

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Above Community garden Below Main hall

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Native Soak Origin Zero

Given Miami’s topographic disadvantage, the strategy of Native Soak is to create natural infrastructure that captures, channels and absorbs excessive water using Limestone, Vegetation and Deep Injection Wells. The porous limestone forms channels that direct flood and rainwater into a deep injection well via a basin. Flood tolerant vegetation such as Cypress trees also help absorb water through natural processes such as transpiration.

Contribution: Project Lead In collaboration with YHCE (Miami, FL)

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tural exchange space.

se tradition by offering a public

oor area is naturally cooled

es creating a community space

oject multiplies on a larger

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Program Concept

frastructure for a new rhood.

culture of sustainability in order

wer-income neighborhoods in

ght and rainwater for vegetable

ate a local economy through

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access to fresh food while

nt-rich limestone can soak water

uch as mangos, oranges, lettuce

Production Concept

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Orange Citrus atrantium

Lettuce Lactuca sativa Lemon Citrus limon

Tomato Solanum lycopersicum

Banana Musa acuminata

Drain Pool

Cypress Trees

Mango Mangifera indica

Community Programming

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Flooding Infrastructure

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Sustainability Toolkit TPG Architecture

Sustainability in architecture spans from the climate scale to the human scale. The energy necessary to construct and operate buildings directly impacts climate change which ultimately affects our health.

TPG’s Sustainability Toolkit engages the holistic relationship between climate change, workplace and wellness. The goal of the Sustainability Toolkit is to create a system that engages all three topics while representing a company’s core values.

Contribution: Research and Strategy Lead Services development in collaboration with Samantha McCormack, Creative Director

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bil

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Climate

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Building

Health Wellness

Climate

Health

Reduce energy consumption & greenhouse gas emissions

Lower building operating costs with optimized systems

Provide healthy environments to building occupants

Attract tenants/employees with similar sustainability values

Start an ear ly transition to NYC Climate Mobilization laws

Attract tenants/employees with similar wellness values

Contribute to the growing low-carbon economy

Increase worker productivity / Decrease turnover rate

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Generative Art Origin Zero

Generative Art is the marriage between art and coding. A major question about Generative Art is the humans role in the creation of work. Fully acknowledging that observation, I view Generative Art as a collaboration between human and machine.

By using the Processing language, my goal is to use computers to visualize and analyze natural processes.

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Random Walker

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2D Perlin Noise

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2D Perlin Noise

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Circle Packing

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Line generation

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Bauhaus: The Cult Columbia University

This essay investigates occult influences on the Bauhaus - from Gropius’s vision of the school to Itten’s strict diets and Kandinsky’s spiritual references. The project was developed at Columbia University in Mark Wigley’s Extreme Design course on the Bauhaus for the school’s 100 year anniversary.

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Bauh aus: T he Cult

H a s a n H a ch em

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Sample

Weima r

Weimer set the precedent for the spiritual culture at the Bauhaus. After the formation of the school, Gropius selected Johannes Itten, Wassily Kandinksy, and Paul Klee as well as Gerhard Marcks, Lyonel Feininger, Oskar Schlemmer, and LĂĄszlĂł Moholy-Nagy as the early masters. Itten, Kandinsky, and Klee played a large role of introducing spiritualism into the Weimar Bauhaus curriculum early on with contributions from other profes7 sors such as Gertrud Grunow and Lothar Schreyer.

Johannes Itten was on the extreme end of the spectrum (in relation to his contemporaries) for his radical approach to achieving the gesamtkunstwerk.

Itten developed the required preliminary course on basic form, colors and materials where students were enrolled for one year before being placed into a workshop. Itten was influenced by Mazdaznan, a religion that treats the body as a vessel for achieving enlightenment. Under Itten’s direction, his students performed breathing exercises and engaged in strict diets including mashed vegetables with garlic and porridge from wheat and barley (Droste, 1988). Extreme accounts recall Itten encouraging his students to puncture their skin and rub oils over the wounds, believing it would cleanse their 8 bodies (Droste, 1988). Itten was forced out of the Bauhaus in 1923 after developing tension with Gropius, however, his introductory course can be 7 This is a simplified list of professors influenced by spiritual guidance. Occult practices were quite popular among intellectuals across Europe in the early 20th century; meaning other professors (i.e. Georg Muche) may have been influenced in smaller degrees.

8 Itten prohibited meat and tobacco.

Johannes Itten and his color wheel (beyond)

Mazdaznan symbol

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Sample

Des s a u

The Bauhaus was a cult and the building was its lodge. The Weimar Bauhaus was placed in the building that was formerly occupied by van de Velde’s School for Arts and Crafts from 1919 to 1925. This moment in the school’s development proved critical in its early influence of theosophical virtue, however, Dessau Bauhaus was Gropius’s masonic lodge.10 Beyond being designed by Gropius himself, the building complex performed internally and externally to support the Bauhaus order.

Gropius developed a preliminary design of the Dessau Bauhaus in 1925 and it was completed in 1926. The design included an asymmetrical building consisting of three wings, a five-story student-housing block and master’s housing that was a walking distance to the school. Each wing accommodated a specific function that included the four-story workshop with the glass curtain wall, the arts and crafts wing and the elevated administration building that connected the two production spaces.

Both student and master housing served as the backdrop for their claim to the new domesticity. This meant the conflation of live and work under a single lifestyle, similar to the masonic lodges. For students, their rooms became just as critical as the workshops as spaces of production. For masters, it was the 10 Haus am Horn, designed by Georg Muche, can be considered as an early attempt to view objects as central to the one’s life. The small exhibition building organized a series of rooms around the central living space where work can be placed. I chose to focus on Dessau Bauhaus due to its overall significance and its inclusion of living and working space, more similar to a mason’s lodge.

Dessau Bauhaus (Designed by Walter Gropius, furnished by Bauhaus workshops)

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Sample

An O ppor tunity for Ack nowledg ement

In 1953, Robert J. Lifton published Thought Reform and the Psychology of Totalism. In the book, Lifton interviews 25 Americans held captive during the Korean War and 15 Chinese who fled their homeland after indoctrination attempts by universities. From the research, Lifton developed his “Eight Criteria of Thought Reform” in which he explains the techniques the communist organizations employed in attempt to alter and influence one’s thoughts. The points include: milieu control, mystical manipulation, demand for purity, confession, sacred science, loading the language, doctrine over the person, and dispensing of existence.

It is unclear if the Bauhaus employed every tactic identified by Lifton, specifically, formal confessions or debating the right of existence. Yet, the majority of Lifton’s characteristics are applicable when analyzing the Bauhaus.

From the isolation in Dessau to the school curriculum to the housing arrangements, there was total control over every individual’s daily life at the Bauhaus.

Although students were able (and encouraged) to express themselves, it was always towards the gesamtkunstwerk, the Bauhaus’s philosopher’s stone.

This doctrine was practiced and explored through different mediums and techniques; it was considered to be the truth and superior to any individual person. Students and professors endured rigorous diets and health plans in order to cleanse themselves for divine and spiritual advancement through the production of their work. In turn, the word of the Bauhaus was proliferated by their prolific media production that represented their avant-garde ideol-

Unidentified masters and their families at a master’s house.

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