Joel Cardenas - Architectural Portfolio

PORTFOLIO

JOEL CARDENAS

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MIDTOWN ATHLETIC CLUB

AUGMENTED DESERT LANSCAPE

CIRCLE HOUSE BROWNSVILLE COMMUNITY CENTER

GLUE-LESS PLEXI LAMP

With an understading of the site, the design led to the idea of movement. The Circle, having a notion of totality, wholeness and originality will create a space for continious circulation, where SemiPublic + Private will occupy. The circle will have segments for total privacy and other segments for SemiPublic and Public space. This will maintian a balance throughout the community, where everyone can hang around, however they understand the occupancy of their space. The concept is to create unity and harmony throughout the community.

BROWNSVILLE COMMUNITY CENTER

Livonia Ave, Brooklyn, NY

Brownsville Community Center will offer the opportunity to improve Brownsville and help the community. The community experiences different health problems, one of them being diabetes due to the fact of poor nutrition and lack of activities. The Community Center will help distribute various activities and programs by promoting healthy behaviors and fostering civic engagement for youth between 10-14 years old. The design will consists of amenities such as: Swimming Pool, Boys & Girls Club, Gymnasium Space, Teaching Space, and a Year-Round Climate Controlled Garden Space. All of these will help the community overall by giving them benefits that at the moment they don’t count on.

MIDTOWN ATHLETIC CLUB

Sequence and Flow was a radical approach towards the design of the club. How can we create architectural moments through the movement of space?

Once you walk through the main entrance, you have the eligibility to take different routes depending on the mood you are on.

Circulation throughout the building creates a breakage point between new and old. This movement allows the building to be framed for such, marking transitional moments on the building.

A new facade is incorporated to mark the approach, conserving the old and frame the new.

Restaurant/ Bar

Studio/ Class

Changing Rooms

Lobby Studio/ Class Pool/ Spa

Cafe

Basketball Court

Program Diagram

Circulation Diagram

AUGMENTED DESERT LANDSCAPE

An Exploration of Tectonic Articulation

Joel Cardenas, Nicolas Fuertes and Shyanne Sonnenberg

In this intervention geological transformation processes such as erosion, weathering, and compaction, are reinterpreted to generate ecologically-oriented dwellings. The intervention seeks to leverage both the utilitarian and aesthetic qualities of the site’s existing soil substrate to produce ecological and unique dwellings. These dwellings confidently rise from, and give it order to the valley transforming matter into inhabitable space. Highly engineered robotic deposition and carving techniques constuct the dwelings thereby allow for the expression of fabrication logic while also retaining a textural imprint, or geologic memory, of the surrounding landscape.

The project’s complex procedural texturing is akin to the sedimentation and erosion that are emblematic of the desert landscape. The chronology of the weathering process is collapsed into the realm of representation, the desert’s temporal qualities, its memories, are thus translated into a unique and tangible morphology.1

It is important to note that this project does not aim to reproduce its immediate surroundings nor to neatly embed architecture within its context. Instead this project is about systemic formation of tools that abstract, reinterpret, and augment context. The project aims to generate a logic that is adjacent to yet autonomous from the Arizona desert. This separation provokes a heightened sensory awareness that enhances users’ relationship to the desert’s natural environment. This approach aims to express the immensity, roughness, and sacredness of the desert, thus situating the intervention in an ambiguous position between nature, architecture, and landscape.

Arcosanti, Arizona

Robotic deposition of base form is followed by robotic carving of intricate detailing

Form

Technical: The form is informed by a desire to maintain a cool interior environment. Air shafts circulate air and configure the structure’s program by vertically accomodating inhabitants. Both the tapering bases that anchor the building and the connecting pathways create valuable shade in the common area below.

Symbolic: The underbelly of the dwellings offers a space of interiority and silence, a space that celabrates the scale and sacredness of desert landforms.

Technical: The applied texturing is designed to respond to incoming solar radiation. The roughness in texture creates a selfshading condition that reduces heat gain. Additionally, the texturing offers opportunity for cohabitation.

Symbolic: Complex geologic texturing is akin to the sedimentation and erosion that are emblematic of the desert landscape. The chronology of the weathering process is collapsed into the realm of representation

Precedent: Self-shading cacti skin and cappadocia’s caves

ROBOTIC SIMULATION PRINTING

Through the process design one of the challenges was to clay print a small scale model. The idea behind was: if we are able to produce a physical object of this complex form without the use of erosion and beign based only through digital techniques/machines, its predicatable that in a future we can produce larger model with future technology.

LOGISTICS ARCHITECTURE

AS URBAN & SOCIAL INFRASTRUCTURE

Joel Cardenas, Catherine Brizo, Nicolas Fuertes and Shyanne Sonnenberg

New York City (NYC) must innovatively respond to the socio-spatial challenges associated with the accelerating growth of e-commerce. The city’s spatially constrained urban grid faces substantial truck freight induced traffic congestion and pollution—a dangerous set of externalities that undermine NYC’S quality of life and economic development potential.

Architecture as an Economic Stimulus seeks to leverage spatial delivery logistics and supply chains as catalysit for economic growth and new urban spatial typologies. This proposal posits that the establishment of a multi-sided-platform (MSP) that supports public community alliances with the logistics sector can help NYC: (1) catalyze economic development, (2) foster sustainability, and (3) improve quality of life.

The proposed logistics network can serve as a vital piece of NYC urban infrastructure that doubles as a mechanism for community level socio-economic revitalization. In other words, not only can this proposed network help resolve logistics and public health challenges but it can also provide significant local economic development opportunities for both Harlem and NYCHA residents in the form of: new revenue streams, improved public amenities, and employment. Financial support for such intervention can come from the public and private sector as governments pledge billions of dollars to decarbonize and to spur economic growth and as businesses work to minimize the high costs of Last Mile delivery.

Subway Intervation

Network Capacity Logistic Flow Diagram

Three sites were studied with the proposal of creating a Hyper-Local Community Distribution Hub. The study initiated with Polo Grounds, allowing the team to create calculations based in collected data to analyze network capacity.

After the transfer of goods was delivered through the subway system and arrived to the Distribution Hub, packing will get sorted and store short term until the customer picks it up. If the package needs to stay in the facility for a longer period, it will be stored in a Fullfillment Core. Alternatively, packages that are ready to leave the Distribution Hub will be delivered with e-bikes.

POLO GROUNDS TOWER DISTRIBUTION HUB

RESULTANT BENFITS

•Jobs Created for Harlem: Approx.180 jobs, averaging a salary of $59,989 can be created per site.

•Reduced  Pollution: 2,413 tons CO2 can be removed every year from a single site.

•Reduced Congestion: 59 delivery trucks can be removed off the road every day.

•Reduced Expenses for Large Distributors: Approximately 15%, or $5,159,547 per year.

•Revenue for NYCHA: Total of approx. $4,332,809 per year or 43,338,090 in the next 10- years.

•New Amenities for NYCHA

•Revenue for MTA: Approx. $8,771,230  in yearly licensing fees, or $87,712,300 in the next 10- years.

•Revenue for Local 3PL: Approx. $2,649,248 in yearly net operating income,  or $26,492,480 in the next 10- years.

Logistic Space

Community Spaces

Fullfillment Core

Unloading Area/ Subway Connections

GLUE-LESS PLEXI LAMP

Glue-Less Plexi Sphere corresponds with the usage of Plexi-Glass and the idea to use different type of connections that will keep the model self supported and standing without any kind of glue.

The idea initiated with two concepts, Armillary Sphere and the Rubiks Cube Color Layout.

The pieces were laser cutted with it’s appropiated tolerances, allowing each piece to notch correctly without falling apart.

Details

Tolerances

- White 0.0

- Notch of Green to Red 0.0

- Notch of Red to Green 0.0

-Notch of Blue to Red +.002

-Notch of Orange to Blue 0.0

-Notch of Yellow to Orange -.002

Armillary Sphere

Rubiks Cube Color Layout

ARMABALL

The project consist of 3 steps. In a nested organic relationship, each consecutive project must include the previous one in it’s interior. These steps consist of Body Organ, Epidermis, and Mechanical Shell

BODY ORGAN

Body Organ requieres the fabrication of a physical model that will represent an internal body organ at its real scale. Prior to my case I’ve decided to pick the Large Intestine.

**Constraints:

1. “Some” space needs to exist inside the organ

2. The final organ can’t have plastics qualities. It can’t lose it’s original shape when no forces are applied to the object.

Large Intestine

The Large Intestine is mostly known as the “colon” or the “human guts”. It’s main purpose is to escort wasted from the body. Throughout the process absorbs nutrients from feces that are being created. It’s also consider the final stage of digestion. The part being focused is the Rectum and the Anus.

Throughout the process, the main idea was to test different materials and see if the results are the ones I was looking for. For this project I used Liquid Rubber, giving me results of a thing layer that will stretch and not tear apart. At the same time, this type of Rubber was easy to cure. I poured into the physical model, and later on it was easy to take out from it.

The physical model was constructed with Christmas ornaments and straws. All of them were glued together and positioned in a way that will satisfy the scale of the organ. The physical model was hunged and the Liquid Rubber was poured in different time frames, because it needed extra layering so it could be stable enough not to lose shape.

The final model consisted in an overall enclosure with a void in the inside. To achive this the model was cutted on the top part and taken off the physical model as a sock, afterwards the two parts were sewed together. Something to take in consideration for future improvememnts is to pour color before the Liquid Rubber is being poured; Aesthetic reasons

Large Intestine

Liquid Rubber

Prototype + Liquid Rubber #1

Haustra

Brushable Liquid Rubber - Skin

Prototype + Liquid Rubber #2

Liquid Rubber - Skin

Prototype + Liquid Rubber #3

Large Intestine Prototype Final Model

EPIDERMIS

For the stage of the project, students were suppose to partner in groups and work collaboratively on the fabrication of an exterior skin that must contain all of their organs inside and not touch the skin.

**Constraints:

1. The fabrication need RESIN or derivative materials for the skin

2. The final organ can’t have plastics qualities. It can’t lose it’s original shape when no forces are applied to the object.

3. The skin should include all organs of the team members and it shoukld be hold in place in all dimensions without falling out.

4. The skin’s outside layer cant directly touch the organs.

5. The skin should include a parametric porosity (screen like openings)

Greta Oto

Greta Oto Butterfly tend to have a transparency of the wings in a result from the combination of low absorbation, scattering and reflection of light. This influenced the team to use a RESIN based material + fabric to achive the transparency.

An overall pattern was determined and the material used was Liquid Rubber (it’s fast for curing and flexible to create transparency). A mold made out of chipboard was created that will help us pour the Liquid Rubber and add the fabric on top.

The Prototype was a success, however as a group we realized we needed support to hold the organs inside, and we came with the idea of “tentacles” or “pillars” that will be inside the skin, so in that way the skin won’t have a direct contact with the organs.

Team Members:

Nicole Ordonez

Joel Cardenas

Pre Accomodation of Organs with Pattern

Greta Oto Butterfly

Prototype #1 - Casting Model

Sketch for Overall Design

Material Test (Fabric) + Silicone

Final Model + Lights (Empty)

Fabric

Prototype #1

Final Model + Organs Inside

MECHANICAL SHELL

The last stage of the project was to create a shell that will satisfy the needs of connections, becomings and rhizomatic. Also the understanding of both; static and dynamic configurations simultaneously.

**Constraints:

1. The final outer skin should result in a hard shell surface.

2. The shell should include the previous group project inside and should hold it in place in all dimensions without letting it fall out.

3. The shell should cover/wrap a minimum of 75% of the previous project.

4. The outside layer of the new shell can’t directly touch the previoys project. It should be three dimensional, and have filaments, thickening mass, or a double shell system to separate itself from the previoys proposal.

5. The shell should be modular.

a. The modules should included a min. of 6 Modules

b. The modules have to be designed digitally

c. The modules have to be parametrically

d. Each module should be different

e. Each module should include articulation (mobility)

f. Each module’s exterior face needs to be partially or totally separated from the rest of the modules’s exterior faces

Armaball

The concept for the shell was the Armadillo’s Shell, and for mechanical movement the Modular Dual Mobile. The shell will be broken down and each one of them will interlock with each other. Every module will have a Modular Dual Connection (Ball Joint Connection), which it will be sticked into the skin. This will help us to proceed without any constraint because the skin won’t touch the module, and at the same time the ball joint will be able to make the module move.

On my right, we have a fast Overall Proposed Shape of how the Final Model will look. Every module will be unique and form a curvature for the overall design. To achieve this, we 3D mold one of the forms to obtain the desire curvature and we CNC the mold. Later, we laser cut the form with Acrylic. Having the two pieces, we heat up the acrylic on top of the mold to get an accurate representation of the curvature. The module was broken down into five different individual pieces. This allowed us to to connect one “ear” to another making every module to interlock. The circle in the middle is the opening for the ball joint to fit in, connecting the module with the skin, and allowing us for mobility in the mechanical shape.

CNC Pink Foam Mold + Module

Overall Design

Modular Dual Mobile

Overall Proposed Shape

Armadillo

Adding the Structure to the Acrylic Render of the 3D Connection

DIFFERENTIAL GROWTH

As an organism, differential growth features cells, allowing organs to contruct themselves in endless array of shapes and forms. In our nature we have examples such as meandering rivers, rippled surface textures of fruits, snakes, intestines etc. that simulates differential growth. We certainly don’t know how these organisms are made, but we can simulate the beauty of these forms through digital technology.

In the following examples, we used an invisble curve as a boundary and simulate the reaction of growth inside of this boundary. We tested different parameters, which altering a single number, can change the shape and form of the outcome.

Joel Cardenas, Catherine Brizo and Shyanne Sonnenberg

3D Printed Pieces- As a team, we had to create our own gcode. to print these forms. By manipulating the gcode. we have more accessibility to increase the amount the distance of the Z-Axis, giving us an amazing effect for Iteration 9

Shortest Walk- Another simulation we consider was Shortest Walk. By generating a script, we created a pattern based on curves and we calculated the shortest route from a line start point to line ends points in a network.