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JOHN RAULSTON GRAHAM

ARCHITECTURAL PORTFOLIO

TABLE OF CONTENTS

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ARC 404 | TWO WEST STREET

Instructor: Tessa Kelly

This studio responded to the Jubilee and Columbus Urban Renewal projects in the center of Pittsfield, MA. Each student produced an individual building on the land that was replaced by four lanes of highways in 1973. This area held important mixed-use buildings that were the heart of everyday shopping for residents of the surrounding neighborhoods before urban renewal. Fronting both West St. and a new north-south connector, my project reintroduces the scale and program that was wiped away by a 1973 urban renewal project. My site sits across from a bank and grocery store, which both sit off the street among large parking lots. However, my building, pulled close to the street and ringed by a generous sidewalk, engages with pedestrians walking along the historic commercial corridor of West St. It consists of two mixed-use buildings joined together. To break down the facade, the building appears as two buildings only about 40 feet wide with different materials and formal vocabularies. One hosting a bike shop is sheathed in metal. The other, in brick, has a blockier mass, but includes cuts on the ground floor, tapering the facade back at the corner. With this gesture, I highlighted the prominent corner, which would likely have visitors approaching from three directions. Along with other perspective buildings, my building forms a large interior courtyard with a consolidated parking lot and outdoor space.

Site Plan

Floor FirstFirst Floor

Second Floor Second Floor

ThirdFloor Floor Third

West Elevation

South Elevation

East Elevation

North Elevation

Transverse Section

ARC 351 | BOX OF TRIM

Instructor: Erin Besler

Asked to build an 8” x 8” box as an introductory assignment, I designed and built my box to comment on common domestic construction methods. My box was constructed from cut pine, joined with glue and nails, and painted with white spray paint. After a series of pipes burst in my home, I repaired the drywall ceiling and the surrounding molding. The stipulation that our boxes should “minimize the appearance of the process of producing the boxes” reminded me of the arduous process of filling nail holes and painting trim, after cutting and mudding drywall. All of these processes obscure the processes of construction. My box with its elemental shape brings this obstruction into focus. It uses the same materials and methods as household trim or moldings but divorces them from its domestic setting and common form. From a distance, it appears solid. However, a close look reveals the difficulties of its construction. Just as a climb on a ladder reveals the shortcuts and difficulties of every ceiling.

Corner Details

Exploded Axonometric

ARC 351 | FOUR COURSE MEAL

Instructor: Erin Besler

This studio focused on designing a home in Philadelphia for the Pennsylvania Horticultural Society in a former warehouse in Fishtown. The project was completed in pairs. My partner and I began the project by designing an event that allowed visitors to experience food production from four perspectives: learning about plants, gardening, cooking, and eating. The event included a series of information panels, planting beds, kitchens, and tables. Not only would the event raise awareness around food production but also it would be a communal experience with a group. Our building, combining a greenhouse and the existing warehouse, expressed the complex relationship between humans and plants in all four of these stages. We began with all human-oriented program like classrooms and community spaces located in the warehouse and all plant-oriented program in a newly constructed greenhouse. The existing warehouse building stands in for the human and the new greenhouse for the plants. However, we displaced a section of greenhouse into the warehouse and a section of the classrooms into the greenhouse to demonstrate the interaction between the two and maximize the opportunities for reveals of the infrastructure and technology involved in the growing and cooking processes. The project was completed in collaboration with Keith Zhang. We shared all aspects of the project, but I took particular ownership over our 3D model from which diagrams and renderings were produced.

Event Model

Plan

Axonometric

ARC 350 | SPLIT STUDIO

Instructor: Marshall Brown

This studio focused on architect’s practice both in program and process. With bi-weekly deadlines, the studio had an emphasis on hand craftsmanship, including hand drawing and woodworking. The site was an existing block building in Princeton, NJ at 22 Witherspoon Street, buried within the commercial core of the city. My solution dramatizes both the alterations of the existing building and the division of the program. A large, glass atrium houses shared program, almost exclusively circulation. Studio spaces are spread across the two levels on the east side, and personal spaces on the west side. As a public alley runs along the south and east elevations of the building, the more-public studio program sits along that side. With a large parking lot to the south, this facade features the primary entrance and from this elevation the divide in program is most clear.

Massing Model

Conceptual Collages

Structural Model

Transverse Section

Second Floor Plan

First Floor Plan

South Elevation

Exploded Axonometric

Longitudinal Section

ARC 206 | CUTTING CORNERS

Instructor: Erin Besler

In response to an assignment asking students to document carefully an existing corner condition, I studied the interior of a dormer outside my room in Laughlin Hall on Princeton’s campus. I became fascinated with the layers of plaster and the evidence of revisions on the surface. I studied both the construction and opening of the building in 1925 and its subsequent renovations. I used the exercise as a way to learn about common building practices at those times and to understand the ways in which the wall was made.

Cut and Patch Plaster Repair Wire

Exercise 1 John Graham 3" = 1'

ARC 204 | STREET VIEW

Instructor: Annie Barrett and Paul Lewis

Completed for my first studio at Princeton, the assignment gave students a base model of a streetscape and asked us to imagine expanding usable space into the street, as a result of the pandemic. In my solution, I was interested in expanding both the private and public space available into the street and marking the division. My elevated set of platforms expands public space without significantly compromising views from housing units or light to the street below. I divided the plan into roughly three sections: one aligned with the mixed-use buildings on one side of the street, one over the street, and the last associated with the housing on the opposite side. Although my project’s section remains complex, I attempted to dramatize the relationship between public and private space by decorating platforms associated with the buildings as extensions and the public platforms as streets in between.

Exploded Axonometric

Matrix

ARC 981 | JUNIOR PAPER

Advisor: Jay Cephas

I researched the development of the stadium in the United States on college campuses, relating it to broader trends in Beaux Arts architecture. While mass architectural types like the library and train station have clearly defined histories, the stadium, which has many of the same characteristics, does not have a settled origin story. In the paper, I highlighted the role of stadia in the formation of community identities at colleges. Although discussions of the development of new mass architectural types in the nineteenth century abound in architecture history courses, the stadium is often left out. Enabled by new technology, enlivened by the development of new social pressures, and dressed in academic styles, these new stadia on college campuses share much in common with other mass types. These stadia became important representatives of the universities on whose campuses they sat, representing the brand of the team and of the school to a world of spectators beyond. They had to unify and satisfy diverse constituencies of faculty members, alumni, students, and athletes. My paper examines the first major stage of college football stadia construction from 1900 to 1920 in order to explore the roots of a prominent architectural type, which is often neglected by scholarship.

Harvard Stadium (1904)

Palmer Stadium (1914)

Yale Bowl (1914)

Ohio Stadium (1922)