Portfolio 2024

KYLE KALMAR

SYRACUSE UNIVERSITY SCHOOL OF ARCHITECTURE

PORTFOLIO

2019-2024

SELECTED WORKS

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PORTFOLIO CONTENTS

Convent in Éveux

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Selinunte Film Institute

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Gabion Pavilion

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Campus By Pixel

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Professional Experience

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Additional Works

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Convent in Éveux

Location Éveux, FR Year Spring 2023 Program Convent Collaborator Sebastian Schwarz

Twisting walls that erupt from the landscape form the productive, spiritual, private, and gathering spaces of the convent, prioritizing pathways of movement choreographed by a sequence of typologically-inherited loggias. Stone and timber define the tectonic expression of the built forms, and control the duality between the divine & mundane, the ancient & temporal, and solid & veiled architectural expressions.

The complex is a manifestation of twists and dis-alignments extended from an existing chateau, an adjoining vineyard, and Corbusier’s La Tourette in which the convent is nestled. Interlocking motions persist down to the detail of cast stonepanel connections and timber joints, promising a ritualistic experience of the architecture that is both monumental and highly refined.

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Convent in Éveux / Éveux, FR / Spring 2023

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Winery Chapel Terrace Cloister Dormitory Chateau

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Plynth

Stone-Hanging System

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Holy Relics

Convent in Éveux / Éveux, FR / Spring 2023

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Procession into chapel

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Selinunte Film Institute

Location Sicily, IT Year Fall 2022 Program Education & Recreation Collaborators Alexandra Grypinich & Trey Heller

Located at the gateway to the Mediterranean, the youth film-making camp activates the cinematic tranquility of the island of Sicily. The camp, organized into six programmatically-redundant ‘pods’ is imagined as its own narrative, transforming its interiors across the site like moving stills along a film roll.

Each pod embeds itself differently into the topography of the shoreline site to create dual pathways representing the vastness of Italian piazzas and crooked, narrow streets of Sicilian towns. The masterplan is ordered by a system for collecting light and framing interesting views of the site and the buildings themselves. The volumes are controlled by a language of folding, which generates the duality between figural planes and boulder forms. The entire campus becomes a material landscape that continuously repositions itself as backdrop, to stage, to frame, to set for experimentation with filming.

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Selinunte Film Institute

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Gabion Pavilion

Location Napa Valley, CA Year Spring 2021 Collaborator Recreation & Research Collaborator Romi Moller & Sebastian Schwarz

Surrounded by a vineyard landscape, the research center is surrounded by a petal-form pavilion complex. The Wappo, indigenous to Napa, are known for novel construction technologies that utilize local resources. The project rediscovers the Wappo’s intervention in the landscape through the intentional use of found, common ground stones as the building’s material system, which repurpose existing materials from local, abandoned deposits and visually conforms with the iconic vineyard landscape.

The enclosure system of programmatic spaces and some of the petal-form pavilion roofs employ the ancient gabion construction technique. The gabion method passively cools and shades the complex, accommodating the local climate, as well as produces an organic and monumental experience for visitors. Shadows are cast as spontaneous fractures from the gabion elements and as regular line networks from the steelwebbed pavilion petal-forms, blending the historical-indigenous and the modern in harmony.

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Campus

By Pixel

Location Sandusky, OH Year Fall 2021 Program Education & Agriculture Collaborator Sophia Levy

This experimental campus design repurposes nearly 7,000 unused acres of the NASA Neil A. Armstrong test facility as a research university formed by a shared, productive landscape. Campus

by Pixel understands agriculture at the scale of the individual crop, autonomous device, and user.

The productive landscape celebrates pixel farming, an intricately-managed farming practice which yields numerous ecological benefits including increased biodiversity, improved soil health, and optimized crop production. The campus as an urban simulator becomes the scene which facilitates democratic participation in developing resilience for agriculture and infrastructure. It bridges the city and the countryside and projects urbanization to the convergence of the networks and ecologies that support both.

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The understanding of scale, derived from the pixelated landscape, informs an organization by quantity in the architecture. Regularized scaffolds elevate above the productive landscape which economically orders artificial agriculture and technologies, while human activity is spatialized in disruption to the scaffold, morally favoring the student to the crop. This idea of productive adjacency is applied to the university at large: between growing and campus activity.

The campus as an urban bridges the city and the countryside and projects urbanization to the convergence of the networks and ecologies that support both. Campus by pixel speculates urban life that is at once massively productive & sustainable, localized & inter-orbital, and a new social landscape that integrates the crop, the human, and the non-human.

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37 Professional Experience

Rural Rwandan Housing Survey In collaboration with Yutaka Sho & the General Architecture Collaborative

In the analysis of 340 houses, this representational exploration analyzes the complex conditions of the typical rural Rwandan house and its relationship to site, economy, and regional politics. In a post-genocicde Rwanda, the state is ambitiously reforming the social, economic, and cultural landscape of the country, imposing various policies on architecture and development. State policies have predominantly focused on the most urban regions of the country, and have left behind or contradicted the economic conditions of rural citizens.

The analysis reveals the significant need for repair in rural houses as well as thoughtful intervention that improves access to public infrastructure, health, and safety. The diagrams and eventual publication are intentionally legible to audiences ranging from governmental officials, donor bases, designers, and the rural citizens themselves.

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Totem House In collaboration with studioSUMO Exhibited at the Crystal Bridges Museum, Totem House is one of five prototypes for the fundamental house. The small footprint of the conceptualized house activates its four ‘totems’ as spatial dividers, structural components, and inhabitable interfaces for the basic functions of living. Their thoughtful wooden construction generates a manageable and visually-compelling architectonic relationship.

The exhibition itself reveals the duality of the totems and allows visitors to imagine a range of enclosures to the space. Integrated into the wooden slats are a series of timeline panels, which delineate the historical negations of Black and Indigenous Americans in the region. My primary contributions to the project were in developing the technical drawings of the exhibitions components for review of design leadership, consulting engineers, and the construction managers of the museum.

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The Land Is Not For Sale In collaboration with Line Algoed & the Institute for Public Architecture Community land trusts are an integral cultural asset to communities throughout the developing world. Puerto Rico and the island of Barbuda are home to energized groups of people dedicated to restoring and ensuring the survival of their right to collectively own land.

Line Algoed, an anthropologist and researcher, is an advocate to these communities and helping to advance their legal and political challenges. In collaboration with her while at the Institute for Public Architecture, I developed visual representations of policy structures and her research findings, as well as generated maps relevant to the topic. The project culminated in an exhibition on Governors Island, which presented the research drawings, and numerous exhibitions artifacts, including the screen-printed campaign poster that embraces the contentious nature of the project and a call to action.

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43 Additional Works

Golden Center for Policymaking Sat at the foot of the rocky mountains and maneuvering a vibrant runoff stream, the policy center is organized as a terracing system climbing the stream’s bank. The terraces take shape by mediating the hill topography edges and capturing views of the scenic stream and distant Denver landscape. office spaces line the view-centric facades, allowing for both interior and exterior access, which intentionally promotes an adaptable, health-concious workplace.

The terraces and thoughtful siting of the building establishes platforms for gathering and dissent, while actively disrupting both the symbolic and physical aisle present in state building typologies.

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Pavilion Lively Dug into a downtown Syracuse existing corner park, Pavilion Lively performs as a pair of juxtaposing members. The overhead cover extends the boundaries of the site, with an orthogonal line network superimposed as linkages and reliefs. Moments in the cover detach from the lining frame network and hinge above and below the cover’s height. This dynamic scape of rotating hatches offers an animated spirit harmonious to the pavilion’s airborne and tectonic nature. The carved ground responds in alignment with the overhead network and its stoic, blank platforms invite one to look above and find definition and revelation in the dynamism overhead.

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PORTFOLIO 2024

970.219.2928 kjkalmar@syr.edu

KYLE KALMAR