James Swider Architectural Portfolio by James D'Artagnan Swider

JAMES SWIDER SELECT ARCHITECTURAL WORKS

Table of Content

Additional

Agricultural Theater Formal Texture Field In Folly

Conch Middle AfterWall

Home Mindedness Public Incinerator

Franklinton Housing Point St.

Bad Copies

HACK Design Network | Research | Summer 2020 Andrew Atwood & Anna Neimark | The Ohio State University | Spring 2021

Shoring it Up

Informal Analysis Mediums 3

Voracious Vernacular Delirium Manifested Preforming Glass

Studio Work

Agricultural Theater Neil Denari & Graysen Babbitt | Spring 2021 The aim of this project is to create a farm to table experience that integrates past farming techniques with new farming technologies and a food hall. The traditional farming takes form on the floating landscape, while new agricultural technologies are organized into long truss structures. One structure rises above the landscape while the other projects from the landscape and cantilevers over the garden. These structures are supported by vertical piers that pierce through the structures and connect thinner horizontal circulation structures.

Inflated between these systems are spheres deformed by their interaction with the structural bars and the other spheres. This space constitutes the public food hall and test kitchens that are food produce from the circulation structures that stretch between the agricultural structures.

Organization of the project is based on two separate orientations, north-south and 36 degrees that aligns with the edges of the site and a pier. These two systems integrate through plan in the landscape and the structures. The orientations ground the systems to the land while sectionally the systems become detached from the ground, commentary of the changing reliance our food sources have to land. The food hall structure, the bubbles that inflate between the other systems, is released from th constraints of the orientations as it does not rely on the ground but on the bars itself, placing the humans in the project as observers and recipients of the agriculture. Pratt Institute

Formal Texture Galo Canizares | Fall 2016 The Holmes County Community Center has mixed program, including the following: a gallery, auditorium, gymnasium and health center. Using a loose conception of form, a set of objects were molded to weave and entangle into one another, creating individual figures for the diverse programming, yet creating influences between figures. Initial sketches were studies of figures that when compressed were woven together, with the space between having a force that maintained a margin of separation for paths or itself wove into the figures, to the point that the figures and space become objects of interaction. These objects are then organized as extrusions and begin to sectionally displace each other.

Further studies of imaging and displacement brought together a texture for the figures consisting of a repetitive patterning of my own name. The pattern was used to displace the forms at a scale that creates grooves, like a gear. in plan that can be usable niches. While, in section, the pattern created a textured ceiling and roof. The name within the pattern itself can only be observed from a bird’s eye view. The Ohio State University

Field in Folly Dylan Baker-Rice | Fall 2018 Field in Folly was an experimentation with material qualities and figural objects within a park space in Lower Manhattan. The objects are rectangular prisms that are manipulated through a union or difference of platonic solids. The ground is manipulated in an angled orientation to the objects and the interactions between the two systems negotiate habitable spaces and circulation. Playfulness within the making of objects and the organization is meant to mirror the program of the space. Withing these playful operations, the park itself becomes a playful space. Explorations of the space is encouraged, as well as leisure.

The physical model itself tests the capabilities of Rockite, resin, wax and PLA. The materials range in opacity and question the privacy of space and how light can influence some of the tucked away spaces. Pratt Institute

Conch Middle Danielle Willems | Spring 2019 The conception of Conch Middle, a maritime middle school, was a relationship between the systematic installation of the conch pattern, based on mathematic algorithms, and experimentation with a combination of materials. The conch pattern was injected into the floor plans as a geometrical organizer. The pattern can be scaled to certain degrees, allowing the pattern to be repeated upon itself, organizing scales of programing while under one structural grid. The shapes were then developed vertically to create pyramidal structures.

The material studies led to the concept of floating program around a large central space. Ideally, the space between classrooms and the large circulation would encourage a sense of independence for the middle school students. To achieve an open space, clusters of the conch volumes were “vacuum formed”.

The vacuum form served as the envelope for the building while the space between volumes served as this open circulation space. The concept of objects and the space between was developed further by the implementation of “shells”. Pratt Institute

SECTION - SCALE 1/16" =1'-0"

0' 1' 2' 5'

10'

20'

30'

50'

AfterWall Karen Lewis | Fall 2017 AfterWall is a U.S. Embassy located in Mexico City. The project is split into two sections: the privately ran embassy and the publicly attainable consulate. While the two sections are split by a massive wall, there is a porousness to the wall that allows for circulation on both sides.

The wall also becomes the location of a public garden floating about the embassy, and also a gallery/reception hall. These spaces are meant to serve as cultural cultivators, allowing for American and Mexican citizens to harmoniously work and party together. The wall also serves as a privacy screen to the more secure proceedings of the embassy, yet the garden exposes the interior of the embassy, in order to install a conception of trust in the embassy. The embassy function require security but not entire privacy.

The consulate side of the project is mostly accessible through an exterior path that winds it way up levels of different functions until reaching the cultural center at the top. The coloring of the wall is in reference to Luis Barragan’s work and Mexican architecture use of bright colors. The Ohio State University

Home Mindedness Bill MacDonald & Mara Lookabaugh | Fall 2020 “Home Mindedness” aims to produce domesticities of the future that encourage a greater psychological and sociological mindedness. These domesticities are produced by techniques of branching and innervation, creating a hyper-connected system that takes advantage of rising vacancies in Manhattan office buildings due to the 2020 global pandemic and the continuous advancement of technology for work and leisure.

The use of digital projection glass and screens creates an environment of media, broadcasting scales of information from international, local, and personal. With the ability to stream from personal devices, occupants can broadcast themselves to system and in return view themselves in a digital mirror. The consistent broadcasting of ones “avatar” overlaying the reflection of streamed media produces greater perceptions of oneself and their relation to society. The aim for greater psychological and sociological mindedness with in the new domestic is determined by their relationship with the hyper-connected nervous system. Ideonomies of rumination and perception, which together afford psychological mindedness, and sympathy and protean which afford sociological mindedness. Pratt Institute

Public Incinerator Henry Smith Miller | Spring 2020 IN COLLABORATION WITH ZACH HAWK, this project combines an industrial garbage incinerator with a public natatorium and park. Its location on the East River on the Queens side faces Manhattan and the UN. Initial research on the site, Anable Basin, unearthed a previous water inlet. Carrying the water through the current site created a island pier for a ferry stop and barge traffic.

On the site, the project is constructed of three truss structures that span over thee water to the island and form a triangle. These structures are supported by vertical piers that layer the horizontal structures sectionally. One structure that runs along the coast contains the garbage processing plant, feeding garbage from the grounded site, through the structure and depositing the product to the island to be barged out. Reaching out to the water is the public natatorium that contains two pools, one interior on the east side of the structure and an exterior pool atop the structure. Around the exterior pool is a park that grants skyline views of Manhattan across the river. The third bar lies close to the water and is the entrance to the ferry riders while also allowing space for public programming like a cafe or restaurant and meeting space. While the majority of the structure is exposed, the project is wrapped with curvilinear panels of mesh that are integrated with LED lights allowing for displays across the projects entirety. The bare structure is both meant to present the industrial nature of the project’s programming, but also suggest an incompleteness, that accounts for the future transformation or expansion when the need for garbage incineration is bypassed by future technologies in waste management. Pratt Institute

Franklinton Housing Rob Livesey | Spring 2017 The city of Franklinton sits to the west of Downtown Columbus and was the original settlement in the area. As many American cities, it began as an industrial town that relied on the resources of the Scotio River. As time passed, the city moved across the river to avoid flood planes and the city of Franklinton was left to industrial scrap. The new Franklinton renovation is set on creating an arts district. The seed is planted in the shells of old industrial buildings where local firms and studios have appeared. This project is a mixed-use housing project that includes amenities for art studios and a gallery. The edge to the street is a storefront with five spaces and a large indoor market that can open to the outdoor plaza.

Between the two buildings is an exterior gallery space that leads to the water front of the river and up to the residential level of the complex. The Ohio State University

Point St. Stephanie Bayard | Fall 2019 The Brooklyn Heights area along Flatbush Avenue is growing with luxury apartments within ever taller structures. This studio was a study in density and verticality.

Point St. is a mixed-use tower that metaphorically takes the idea of a typical Brooklyn residential street and sends it skyward. Along this vertical street, now identifiable as a large cylindrical atrium that reaches over 600 feet, the common amenities of the street are displaced among residential and commercial blocks. The amenities, sky park, bodega, laundromat, etc. are indicated by the voided spaces in the form. These voided spaces serve as the common space for the residents of the particular block, and are the stopping points for a main elevator. This organization is supposed to encourage a sense of neighborhood along the vertical “street.” It allows the opportunity for residents to interact while attending to the chores of a typical day.

The large central void allows for views across from one block to another, and encourages a neighborhood watch, similar to what Jane Jacobs writes about in The Death and Life of Great American Cities. The bridges between common spaces also provide pedestrian paths to stroll around the neighborhood. Pratt Institute

Bad Copies Sandhya Kochar | Fall 2019 This was part of a two part research studio. Part one consisted of a seminar format that examined the history of architectural graphics and imagery to contemporary practices and the techniques of duplication, copyrights, analogy, cliche, etc. The seminar encouraged the pursuit individual interests within the material, my focus leaning on an interest in the alteration of perceptions through a manifested experience within architecture.

IN COLLABORATION WITH THEO MORROW AND ZACH STEWART, who shared similar interests, “Bad Copies” was an examination of architectural imagery as we had been exposed to in the Knowlton School. We chose several projects that could be easily identified by a single image and put these images through digital alterations on a scale from subtle to crude. From these alterations we examined the ability of these images to deceive and in turn established a separate perception of the project in whole. This was then translated to the modeling of our bad copies and a detailed modeling and documenting of the Venturi House. The Ohio State University

Additional Work

Shoring it Up HACK Design Network | Summer 2020

David Erdman PI; Natalia Echeverri/Ivan Valin PI; Stefean Al CI; David Burnye CI IN COLLABOARTION WITH SOH HEE OH, SARAH BRANDT, AND MAX SOPHER, Cyberport is a multiphase project that extends the Cyberport complex on the south side of Hong Kong Island in Telegraph Bay to the water front. The back corners of the project have cascading terraces that are planted green. Planter fins expand from the building, developing a green facade in the center atrium that reaches down to the watered landscape. The bottom of the project hosts public retail and commercial space that circulate to the existing Cyberport complex, while the upper levels host private office space with private terraces. Pratt Institute

Informal Analysis Andrew Atwood & Anna Neimark | Spring 2017 The analysis of a mountain is tedious to draw and represent. This workshop experimented with techniques for representing mountain ranges through digital drawings and physical model making.

Through turning down the resolution of a mountains surfaces, the complexity of form began to dissolve into abstract forms of relation to the original mountain range. The complexity of the mountain is reduced the new physical model is presented. The complexity and representation of the model is pushed through on the physical model with a graphic printed on the surface of the model. The graphic itself was deduced from breaking down images of the mountain onto a cube and projecting it onto the surface of the model. The Ohio State University

Mediums 3 - Visualization Jeff Anderson & Danil Nagy & Olivia Vein | Spring 2020 This course examined the capabilities of Augmented Reality integrated with architecture beyond a representational capacity. The final for the project for the course asked that an AR experience would coordinate with a physical environment when triggered by a placed marker. Initial studies involved the projection of AR models onto a 3D printed tower model. The projections would relay additional information as color coded program or sectional cuts of the model, adding to the representational abilities of a physical model. This transformed into the ability that an AR experience could interact in an occupied space by the alteration of the space. In this case, the changing environmental factor was an led light that would alternate between white light, red light, and blue light. The marker that triggers the AR on the phone is composed of red and blue squares that would become invisible to the camera lens with the corresponding color of the light.

Ultimately, when the light would change, it would change the color properties of the marker printed on paper. By attributing different AR sequences to altered marker, a single marker could supply multiple AR experiences that would change based on the color of light in the room. Pratt Institute

Documents for Artists Maria Sieira | Fall 2020 The course “Voracious Vernacular” provoked studies of non-urban environments through provocative modes of representation. Through this course we examined the political, spatial, and cultural environments outside of the city as they may pertain to temporary settlements or sprawling communities.

My individual interests took me to my hometown of Mentor, Ohio where I recorded instances of vacancies through out the city, and self-imposed the photographer into the images as though being reflected from a sheet of glass. This was inspired by Cindy Sherman and Eugene Atget. Atget collected images of Paris on the fringe of modernization, his images often being empty of living figures and flattening the Parisian streets. Sherman, on the other hand imposes herself into all her work, but is always disguised, ultimately distancing herself from the scene.

My images of the desolate suburbia resonates Atget, predicting and provoking a major shift in the future for the space, this being especially relevant at the time as the COVID-19 pandemic saw shifting populations from city to suburb. Yet, while Atget remained detached from his images, I impose the character of the photographer into the images as a ghostly figure that is ambiguously fading from the scene or returning to the scene.

The glass like reflection also suggests a barrier between the photographer and the scene, a threshold between the two, similar to images taken through a car window when driving through some of these towns. Pratt Institute

Delirium Manifested Maria Sieira | Spring 2021 This film was constructed in an effort to examine ideas of threshold as they are expressed through traditional symbolisms and theoretically. Symbolically, the character steps through a door that emulates with a glow that translates to the following space. The transition through the threshold includes a change in perception from 3rd person to 1st. The film as a whole is meant to represent a build up to the manifested threshold, a turning point reached, which is indicated by the moving camera and the 3rd person perception following the movement from the door and the detachment as the character moves away. The montage clips were composed in comparisons of scenes that could provoke a perceptional shifting of the viewer. Maria Sieira read these scenes, in relation to the rest of the film as a sectional drawing. To expand on this, I believe the sectional quality of this film comes from a cutting and splicing of clips that portray snippets of spaces that come together to portray this privileged perception. There is never a full round shot but by bringing these clips together, a full space begins to form, some of these spaces are representational of a real space, while some are constructed into surreal or mystical spaces that only exist in the film. This interpretation gives more meaning to the spectating nature of the final scenes that follows the character, insinuating that the privileged view is not just of the architecture and space, but of the inhabitant as well. Continuing the comparison to architectural drawing, the scenes that fade to black, or flash black and hold are necessary pauses that allow for a transition between the spaces, or tying the spaces together through the use of th void, or th white space as used in architectural drawing. Using the white space while having the music pull the two spaces together allows for the recognition of the sound, arguably the second most important characteristic of film. It advocates for the same recognition of other forms of perception beyond vision in our designed spaces.

This film is spatially both the omniscient architect user spectating their drawings from above, and the occupant of a lively space fully aware of the sensory provocations within the space. Pratt Institute

Design Intelligence: Performing Glass Philip Parker | Spring 2021 This seminar was an exploration of the use of glass as a performance in its relation to architecture. Readings prompted discussion surrounding the history of glass as an accessory to a fundamental architectural material, and how glass can influence perceptions of space through its unique characteristics. The project used the rendering software Maxwell to duplicate natural qualities of glass, like opacity, reflection, and refraction. Then, manipulate those qualities in Maxwell, while incorporating mineral imagery, to create a new “glass” material that can respond to and influence a public space.

My project focused on a two plane sheet of glass that used two different mineral images. One pane of glass diffracts a colorful mineral image that projects the colors onto surfaces in proximity. The second pane had larger mineral cells that determined the opacity of the light that passes through the glass. This allowed for each side of the glass to have different images, yet both diffract the same color spectrum. The color quality and intensity is then determined by the source of light, the lights intensity and the side that it comes from.

This new material with these qualities were put into practice in a subway entrance that curves from a canopy to a ground cover. This exposes both sides of the material, bending so that the duller earth toned side would become ground, yet the colorful diffraction would still shine through to the trees and sidewalk. Also, the earth tone side presents the entrance into the subway. Pratt Institute