JACK GOGAL PORTFOLIO
Jack Gogal he/him Berkeley, CA
B.A. Architecture
University of California, Berkeley jgogal@berkeley.edu
SLASH
Fall 2024 | Prof. Mark Anderson
A radical reimagining of Bauer Wurster Hall, home of the College of Environmental Design at UC Berkeley. An intensive slash cuts through the building, producing a great chasm which spatially integrates all studio floors into one.
The slash resolves Bauer Wurster’s current circulation of a singular elevator core on each floor, which hinders student engagement with other years or departments.
Affected floors extrude proportionaly from the cut along the far edge, bounded by frosted glass as a distinctive form prolonging the internal condition. The slash becomes circulation with a series of accessible ramps navigating the void. This chasm extends downward, physically connecting the studios to the remaining building before culminating in a grand gesture engaging the public realm.
Slash meets neighboring Art Practice Building, joining its art to Bauer Wurster’s architecture.
By slashing away a portion of the building, the separated studios unify into one connected, accessible, inclusive, and community-oriented reimagining of what a studio can be.
STARTING POINT: Seeking to critically engage segmentation in studio, a slash cuts the tower. The placement was refined to avoid structural cores (either end) and join the art building.
Rather than each studio floor being separated, dividing students of different years and majors, the redesign combines all architecture, planning, and art practice studios into one expansive studio encompassing eleven floors.
Classes intermingle across sections of the eleven story space. Collaborative worktables are grouped near the edge of the slash. On either end are either studio stations or new program - varying from social spaces, professor offices, or services such sa a dining space for CED students or a collaborative arts room.
Project within site context, UC Berkeley Campus. The chasm slashes the building entirely, so that at the new entrance, one can see through Bauer Wurster to the sky.
JUNCTION
Fall 2023 | Prof. Alissa Chastain
Design for a four-story Work Center.
Project seeks to engage community through stacking and layering. Each floor’s left side are segmented, private workspaces, while on the right, floors compose a rhythmic geometry of junctions, orbiting an atrium for collective, public interaction.
The Work Center entrance (see upper right) is a shifting threshold between public and private. Two geometries, derived from formal studies (see next page), define a semi-public extension of the street under the second-floor cantilever. A “bench” extrusion segments the space while engaging the street, followed by a “column” gate-keeping a more private zone. Between these extrusions run two ramps for accessible navigation within the entrance threshold.
The Work Center’s complex geometry is organized by its circulation, which shifts between two mirroring oblique angles. Stacking consecutively outward about the atrium, angular geometries pivot when responding to junctions of an approaching stair, elevator core, or room typology.
Model geometries rotate and mirror along key junctions that define where stairs, cores, or programs meet.
The rhythmic condition originates from a concept massing, based on stacking four identical layers at different rotations around its vertices. Intersections were then voided, resulting in a unique yet intensely organized effect.
I discovered that the abstract landscape had its own “rules” especially in how the layers mirrored each other, yet were never identical, which I applied as programmatic and experiential changes were made to the completed work center.
STARTING POINT: Concept Model derived from a stacking of four layers, which reflects and mirrors upward.
STACK
Spring 2024 | Prof. Amanda Bridges
Development of a multistory Stacked Pavilion located across UC Berkeley Campus.
Project originates from squares, “like, but unlike a square”. A modular system was derived from 8 x 8 ft cubes, joined together to create banding cantilevers which were then connected, split, and bisected to form a rhythmic geometry.
A spiraling circulation orbits and enters the modular grid-like structure, developing a stacked world within. Pavilion is an explorable, contemplative gathering space on the border of campus and city, where explorations are encouraged, and connectivity valued.
RISE
Spring 2024 | Prof. Amanda Bridges
Rise progresses Stack into an ascending superstructure. The modular banding is amplified to its extreme with massive 100 ft cantilevers stretching across the pavilion.
Alongside perpendicular banding stretching the x-y axis as in Stack, Rise adds a third direction, verticality, with towers rising to frame views, provide structure, and the concluding platform at the superstructure’s end, with the final tower ascending 160 ft into the sky.
Investigations and concept models study the proportionality of the grid (see right).
Using the gridded forms of the prior stack, the project gradually ascends from residential suburb to college campus, stretching across the site longways.
Project comprises twin circulations: a ramp and a stair, assembling an accessible yet towering pavilion. Green spaces encourage moments of rest and activity, fueling public engagement.
WORLD
Spring 2024 | Prof. Amanda Bridges
Conclusion to Modular Series, which began with Stack and evolved into Rise.
In World, the pavilion transforms into a center for community engagement, located at the crossing between the city and campus of Berkeley. The 12-story civic space features open-to-public offices, public gyms & locker rooms, and a local cafe (located at the critical edge of the site, engaging with the street).
Formally, the bandings are condensed together to enable a more expansive program, with bands facing different directions on each stacking floor. A second system also adds voided frames (white) for structural integrity and delineating major spaces adjacent to the enclosure, notably the gyms.
PIERCE
Winter 2024 | Independent Work
Inspired by the distinct ecology of hometown cliffside beaches, this independent project applies my design aspirations for integrating natural ecology with inclusive, accessible design.
Built across three stacked floors descending towards the beach front, eroded rock spires pierce the building, reimagining natural features as the structural and organizational basis for design. Bathroom wet-walls encircle the tallest spire, with floors sharing typologies based on their proximity to natural terrain.
An organizing stair cuts across all floors in a single swoop, while an equally-essential ramp “switchback” wraps behind, mirroring the natural path up the beachy slope. The equality of experience between these interacting circulations promotes inclusivity, or universal design, in beachside living.
WALLS OUT
Spring 2023 | Prof. Rudabeh Pakravan
Walls Out reframes the structural wall as an internal composition, from which the following massings and program are systemically rebuilt outwardly, promoting connectivity with site.
A jagged wall forms the organizational and structural system defining a residential duplex. Both units have the same program typology, but alternating differences cast by the shifting walll alters the spatial understanding between. These shadows reflect in the opposing units.
The units share a mirroring program and circulation logic (see right axon). Entry starts at the wall’s center before exploding out. Each unit’s stairs encircle the outstretched program along three floors, with living and cooking spaces on the first floor, offices and terraces on the second, and bedrooms on the third, split between two landings (a byproduct of differing ceiling heights, which mirrors the wall’s spatial reflections vertically).
Such similarities amplify the twin units’ formal differences defined entirely by the casting of the wall, where the walls out system creates terraces and stairs clung to the edge, encouraging connectivity between the duplex and its surrounding environmental community.
BLUE SKY
2018 - 2021 | Independent Work
To supplement my portfolio application to WDI, I have attached a series of “Blue Sky” themed design projects I created as a hobby prior to my university studies. Many of these projects were ideated as expansions or development to existing Disney or Universal theme parks, inspired by the powerful thematic design of Blue Sky Imagineering.
Disney Villians Theme Park Concept 2018
New England Disney Water Park Concept
Critter Country Complete Retheme to Bayou Concept
Al’s Toy Barn as Themed GIft Shop Concept
Suess Landing Reimagining Concept
NORTH SEAS
Spring 2021 | Independent Work
A thematic reimagining of Point Isabel Waterfront, near Berkeley CA, as a Maritime Park dedicated to the Arctic Circle. This project was inspired by increasing trends of melting sea ice and glacier loss in our North Seas, to which the Bay Area and all other watersheds are instrinically tied to.
This project seeks to raise awareness on the importance of protecting our Northern Seas by drawing focus towards the incredible creatures living within it.
Headlining the site is an educational animatronic ride North Sea Voyage, an idyllic voyage across our planet’s Northernmost Waters. It is defined by a series of memorable events, all linked to the isolated yet beautiful ecosystem of the North Seas.
Concept Art Generated With Assistance of OpenAI and edited with Photoshop
The proposed site, Port Isabel, features a chain store warehouse alongside Albany’s waterfront. Next to the site is preexisting green space, preserved and renovated next to the themed maritime park.
The voyage journeys past abandoned expedition camps & fossils of the arctic’s past.
North Sea Front Facade
Lost Cavern
Glacier Bay
The expedition voyages past icebergs and arctic life, such as walruses & polar bears.
North
Sea Voyage Floor Plan
Under Ice
Figuratively diving into the frigid sea, boats pass under cascading ocean light.
Deep Sea
Dimming light marks the Lion Mane’s Jellyfish & Greenland Shark, inspring creatures.
Arctic Edge
The boats ascend briefly into warmer waters of the Siberian & Canadian taiga.
Northern Lights
Our voyage concludes with mammoths of arctic past, admist a stunning aurora.