Ian MacPherson_Undergraduate Portfolio

High Atlas Foundation | Sustainable Development Intern | Spring 2021

(remote) Charlottesville, VA; based in Marrakesh, Morocco

• Support local communities in Morocco in achieving their priorities in agriculture, education, and health

• Study, explain + visualize Land Rights Law for Legal Aid Clinic at Sidi Mohamed Ben Abdellah University (USMBA) in Fez, and investigate the compatibility between Islam and participatory design practice

• Consultant: contribute context analysis to $3 million cultural heritage grant proposal for interfaith sites

General Architecture Collaborative, sponsored by Google | Researcher | Fall 2020

(remote) Charlottesville, VA; based in Kigali, Rwanda

• Prototype 3D printed molds for modular mud brick construction

• Model urban data using geotagged points to create didactic 3D objects

Winter Architectural Externships

office shadowing + work experience

• 1DesignLab - Design Director | (remote) based in Hangzhou, China (2021): See competition entry through from concept to submission, preparing drawings while directing small team of illustrators. Shadow firm leadership to learn about organizational structure + research-oriented practice

• LTL Architects | Midtown Manhattan (2020): Propose schematic plans, facade schemes, and entry sequences for an ADA compliant private residence

The Kotroni Archaeological Survey Project | Specialist in Architecture | Summer 2019

Lake Marathon, East Attica + Oropos Apothiki Museum, Skala Oropou (Greece)

• Field: Investigate physical trace of agricultural and intermittent urban settlement in the field on the north and west shores of Lake Marathon, including terracotta, glassware, foundation+kiln stones and flora

• Apothiki: Clean, identify, and catalog finds from Mycenean, early Roman, Frankish, and Ottoman eras

• Specialist: Troubleshoot catalog and field conditions GIS data and sketch architectural stones

The Fralin Museum of Art | Mellon Museum Fellow | Summer 2018

• Prepare research documents for artworks by artists from underrepresented minority backgrounds

• Run museum education events, such as restorative art therapy with Alzheimer’s patients and artmaking with children, and maintain school outreach database

• Summer 2020: Consult for seminar at national virtual conference, introduce museum educators to teaching tool for building empathy and dismantling bias

Landscape Studies Initiative (LSI), Center for Cultural Landscapes | Spring 2021

Project Manager A. James + Co-Director Elizabeth Meyer, FASLA

• Contribute to development of the LSI ISLAND platform, a global atlas tool seeking to aggregate academic, industry and community-driven research into one information ecosystem

• Create metadata tags for images, maps and plans and conduct archival research to expand database

UVA School of Architecture | Lumina Bicentennial Pavilion | Fall 2017

Directors M. Goldman (FabLab), L. Beaman (Betafield), and A. Kudless (Matsys)

• Route polypropylene construction elements generated in Grasshopper on a CNC machine

• Assemble system of polypropylene pipe modules into vaulted structure

• Opened to tens of thousands at the UVA Bicentennial kickoff on the Lawn

Teaching Assistant | UVA School of Architecture

Responsible for grading students, identifying areas for increased instructional support, and coordinating with professors

• ARCH 1030 (Spring 2021): Introduce first year students to architectural scale: the body, buildings, landscapes, and cities under Associate Dean of Academics Anselmo Canfora

• FabLab TA (Fall 2019-Fall 2020): Facilitate making and hands-on research, ensure safety, develop and pilot skillbuilding seminars in the woodshop and research labs

• Lessons in Making (Fall 2020): Introduce first year students to design through the lens of aesthetics and ethics, taught by Professor of Art + Design Sanda Iliescu and Belen González Aranguren

IAN MACPHERSON

The University of Virginia School of Architecture

BSArch | minor in Architectural History

iandmacpherson.myportfolio.com

May 2021

GPA: 3.6

idm2ft@virginia.edu

I’m Ian MacPherson, an aspiring architect engaging a lifelong passion for the built, made, and curated environment. I am fascinated by physically layered material histories, aesthetics and ethics, and global stories.

Software

Rhino, AutoCAD, Grasshopper

Photoshop, Illustrator, InDesign, After Effects

Arcmap + Mapbox

Elementary code: Javascript, HTML + CSS map workflow

Digital + Analog Fabrication

Physical Model Building

3D Printing and Laser Cutting

CNC Routing

Rockite + Plaster Casting

KUKA Parametric Robot Control

Machine and Hand Sewing

Potterbot Clay Printing

Skills

Language Competencies

French-English Certified Biliteracy

Spanish intermediate reading, elementary speaking

Awards

Top 30/465 competition entry (final result pending) | Winter 2021

• Sound of Water proposes retrofitting a historic water tower in Jiaxing, China with interactive cymatic elements, converting it into an urban instrument (Lead designer)

Mellon Diversity Grant | Summer 2019

• Awarded to rising Arts professionals from minority backgrounds underrepresented in museums

SARC Studio Selection Finalist | Fall 2018, 2019 + Spring 2020

• Semester’s work chosen to represent the work of the studio for publication, recruitment and exhibition

Joseph W. Gold Scholar | 2018, 2019 + 2020 recipient

• Merit award, nominated for three consecutive years by a faculty/ staff member and recommended by the Dean

References

Prof.

Kenan

Karen Van Lengen, FAIA

Professor of Architecture

(434) 982-2106

kv3f@virginia.edu

Melissa Goldman Manager, UVA Fabrication Labs

(434)

924-6443

goldman@virginia.edu

speculating possibilities allows us to build and project new memories.

Sites are thick with stories. Architecture sits within physically and chronologically layered material culture and explains how where we are makes us who we are.

Place identity has the power to preserve links to architectural ecologies Across vast distances. It encapsulate the spatial, geographical, climatic, and tectonic qualities of a place, and how people navigate socially, religiously, and politically. In my case, it was my family’s history of repeated immigration and oral history tradition that gave me the tools to assemble an architectural worldview to explore through practice.

Communicating multifaceted cultural narratives is the special strength of tangible artistic culture. Art reframes how places of origin and immersion alike define us. Architecture introduces the rigor of spacemaking, and questions the potential embedded in material properties to enable vast speculation on ways we may build. It bridges the material and the humanistic.

Archaeology teaches us the geographic and climatic conditions that shape the unique historical arcs of global cultures. Through this approach to site immersion, we encounter brand new spatial systems and palette of natural materials, and discover unexpected links between place and materials through the acts of cataloguing, visualizing data and mapping.

Proposing radical interventions on landscapes of memory reveals how engaging landscapes we form emotional bonds with heals us, and how to inhabit sites beautifully and ethically. Provocations from the past afford rich opportunities to hallucinate alternate futures to that which seems clear and immutable. Even such persistent social ills as religious discord can give way to restorative environmental practice when people are willing to critically assess the past.

I believe that the job of the architect, or of any other designer of the built realm, is to craft public and private spaces that bolster communities, and to unite people through the experience of place.

Collapsing

Courtyard ecosystems at

The mid-sized American city exhibits binaried chain of food production begins with healthy and depends upon reliable labor, and ends at the warehouse, or the supermarket. Meanwhile, civic shared and privatized space in the bustling promenade respectively.

The response is a courtyard ecosystem at the the sprawling suburb. Micro private spaces and both parties and allow the block to actively situate development while maintaining robust links to

Second Year, Spring 2019 |

the Binary

at the scale of the block

behaviors and development patterns. The and productive environmental systems, fruit stand, the vendor bazaar, the civic life is predicated upon the negotiation promenade and shuttered apartment,

scale of the block: an alternative hybrid to and expansive commons meet the needs of situate itself in a gradient of urban the countryside.

critic: Anthony Averbeck

URBAN TYPOLOGY: Single-loaded Double-Core

Micro private space, expansive commons. Garden chutes, public passageway, and neighborhood deck orient units toward sky, urban life, and infrastructural gardens.

RURAL/SUBURBAN TYPOLOGY: Tower Shophouse

A: Front B: Middle C: Back

3+ Floor(s): Stacked Sub-family units

Ornament, elements, grid. Singaporean shophouses densify the family and promote communal and commercial life

Second Floor: Neighborhood Deck + Sub unit 1

Passage and stacking. The sectional line mediates the upper woonerf, a slow street, and the bioswale below, connecting nature with commerce.

First Floor: Shopfront + Communal Family Living

PRODUCED BY AN AUTODESK STUDENT VERSION

PRODUCED BY AN AUTODESK STUDENT VERSION

B1/Ground: Storeroom + Public Passageway

PRODUCED BY AN AUTODESK STUDENT VERSION

Wooden modules house kitchen, bath, and storage/shelves. They float within the plan and divide space.

The preexisting road is closed to traffic and turned over to the life of the city dweller. This promenade houses the new incarnation of the Charlottesville city market.

Skin of Berlin

Haptic AI + Commodifying

Q: In the pursuit of “ultimate knowledge,” through a lens more personal, immediate, of sight or sound— through the haptic? and aural history, what might a haptic In other words, why exploit the haptic? between a city of static enclaves and ethical boundaries should constrain surveillance

Fourth Year, Fall 2020 | critics:

Berlin [film]

Commodifying Counterculture

knowledge,” how would a system surveil immediate, and ubiquitous than the sense haptic? Stemming from a culture of visual record of human existence offer? haptic? What could be the middle ground one that is shaped by flux? What surveillance capitalism?

Bradley Cantrell + Michael Lee

Public-private partnerships project new readings onto the city. A district amassing around the now decommissioned Tegel Airport and the historic surveillance capitalism that mines data from

In a near future thought experiment, a system of surveillance governed a simulation and an infrastructure of information. Users immerse themselves their reactions to haptic stimuli measured to allow the AI to The AI feeds users locations and interactions around the city that conform people that satisfy the most popular range of

district called The Hub, including the new concentration of tech companies historic seat of government in the city center, governs a system of from Berlin and packages it for consumers.

governed by the Hub’s AI, called the Haptic System, converts the city into themselves within a consumable virtual gaming platform, consent to have learn, and contribute to a living library of haptic knowledge. conform most strongly to their desired narrative, so areas, events, and of narratives are the most heavily surveilled.

Weimar Republic: Queer and Socialist resistance identities

Berlin Wall: Resisting Consumerism (West) and Communism (East)

Contemporary Globalization: Resisting Gentrification

Interacting with People

Meaning conveyed through touch

Interacting with Space

Proprioception + Proxemics

Proprioception (Kinesthesia)

Interacting with Objects

Tactile Qualities

The body’s ability to sense its location, movements, and actions

Heat or cold; quantity of heat energy residing in a medium, surface or mass

The and

All social interactions are assigned a haptic point value within the conveying meaning through

1. Functional/Professional Expresses task orientation

2. Social/Polite Expresses ritual interaction Expresses

1. Texture Formal deformations in a surface that constitute its topography

2. Temperature

Proxemics

Measuring spatial expanse, object scale, and compression relative to the body

3. Friendship/Warmth Expresses idiosyncratic relationship

5. Sexual/Arousal Expresses sexual intent

4. Love/Intimacy Expresses emotional attachment

3. Wind/Air motion, breathability, thickness, and other ambiant qualities of air

4. Magnetism + Energy Physical or intuitive: vibration, pull of attraction or push of repulsion gaming platform, which focuses on simulating physical space and through physical contact.

The social transformation of nature happens as the ways of seeing and the city itself become commodified. infrastructure networks invisible and aesthetically pleasing: a barely perceptible

commodified. According to the theory of undergrounding, this motivates architects to render urban perceptible skin. Paid actors live in the city and engage with users.

Today, medical, technological, and athletic performance companies have pelling ways. Our haptic interface would similarly be a wearable skin chip would fill in the gaps where simulation must occur in Thus, the body is uploaded into the city, and

have developed wearable haptic devices that simulate the haptic in comskin tight suit. Projecting forward from advances in prosthetics, a neural the brain rather than being registered on the user’s skin. and the city is in turn uploaded as a game.

The AI reads the city as surfaces with embedded haptic information. and ambient energy that moves across surfaces, such as wind or packaging, a projection, and of

information. This includes the planar construction of space, tactile qualities, temperature. The commodified haptic surface also has a pleasing of course, a monetary value.

Intermission

Exercises in form, time,

I celebrate the spirit of speculation, interdisciplinarity characterizes architecture by engaging modern, contemporary, ancient and imagined we use them to tell

spring 2018-2021

Intermission

time, object + place

interdisciplinarity and discovery that engaging with tangible materials. The imagined all coexist in objects when tell our stories.

Fabrication + Object Study

Spring 2018: Design+build recycled living pod, “Anthropod”

Fall 2020: Alterior Office, left: mockups for exhibition GA Collaborative, right: Mold negatives prototyping modular mud-brick construction system

In diagnostic finds, characteristics survive that provide obvious, exceptional clues about their context + intended function

Summer 2019: Field Archaeology Internship Abroad, Oropos + Kapandriti, Greece

THESIS: Archival Phase

Buddhist Gardens + Medicinal Tree Nursery: My thesis seeks to revive and revimagine a beautiful moment of local and global harmony (1952-1968) as an interfaith rural landscape and mutable architecture for the 21st century.

The site sits in the heart of the Middle Atlas mountain range one hour south of Fes, the religious center of Morocco.

1956: Students of different colors, creeds and countries of origin engage in dialogue.

Toumliline Benedictine Abbey, Azrou, Morocco | ongoing Spring

1956: Conversation tents in the field. Annual global youth summits sponsored by the King of Morocco and the Pope focused on interfaith exchange.

Break out spaces create lively studio atmosphere

Atrium facilitates circulation between programs and across site

Uplift

An Inhabited Path for

The Dell is comprised of two non-spaces: ics, Education, and Old Dorms above, below. Dividing the site into a striated ft and 20ft modules, and constructing out of the terrain- one soaring upward downward to the ground- Uplift takes into fields for contemplation, interfacing nity.

Outdoor stage engages wetland plain and adjacent program Lookout terminus cantilevers over terrain and captures sound of stream

Uplift

for Social Academia

non-spaces: the leftover “backyard” of Physabove, and the underutilized grass field AB grid system of alternating 60 a building from two bars lifted up to the sky and the other gesturing these non-spaces and turns them with nature, and building commu-

critic: Karen Van Lengen,

Early concept sketch iterates the sectional

By crossing two longitudinal paths, I can create moments of interest and exchange at the intersection

The site links the School of Engineering, first year dorms, and the football stadium to the lawn. Water flows from Observatory Hill past the building and into the Dell

The building-as-path negotiates a steep hillside and converts two non-spaces, an upper parking lot and a lower wetland plain, into communal places for spending time

A succession of concrete slabs on grade and retaining walls step down the hillside. A series of steel frames supports a lightweight aluminum roof. The exterior cladding system is channeled glass perforated by clear glass apertures. Partitions divide the interior.

Two longitudinal bars of program socialization and exchange. Reaching embrace the landscape and capture

program meet at a center for Reaching out into the Dell, they capture it within frames.

forest for people | level ground

Who has a right to own space downtown, and who what constitutes a democratic space? Charlottesville’s fora; the monuments, parks, and assembly spaces ideologies of who belongs and who does not. and on the public transit line, people first encounter foot by way of the Mall. The site spans 400 feet Pavilion, and SNL Financial Center, and a service the site receives direct sunlight year-round.

Second Year, Fall 2018 | critic:

Forum

ground | a new identity

who has a right to benefit from it? In short, Charlottesville’s identity is inscribed within its public spaces that people inhabit carry conflicting Situated at the eastern entrance to the city encounter the site by car or bus, then approach on feet of Market Street between City Hall, Sprint service road cuts behind the site. South-facing,

critic: Adriana Pablos-Llona

A field of cylindrical volumes scaled according to the demands of program and the human body supports the daily functionalities of users and creates a microcosm of Charlottesville. The skins of these pavilions are highly permeable- accessed via sliding doors or wholly transparent. It forces meaningful interactions between groups that are content to remain homogenous, or who are prevented from interacting with the community at large.

To foster communication between these tree trunks, three structural terraces create level planes for interpersonal exchange. Where the terraces are rooftops, people can enjoy the sun and scenic views; where they are ceilings, people can enjoy their shade. Puncturing the terraces are clerestory benches to allow in light and provide dynamic seating conditions, glass light boxes for greenhouses, and trees to create vertical visual connections.

Informal programming on the NW terrace Looking SE to Monticello, Montalto, and Carter Mountain

PRODUCED BY AN AUTODESK STUDENT VERSION

View from beneath Upper SE Terrace looking west

plot, x5 r = 24 ft r = 7.75 ft