Work Peter Dumbadze
Contents 1. RĂŠsumĂŠ 2. Grand Rapids Automaton 3. UrBox 4. Mumbai Social Housing 5. Speleology House 6. Reinventer.Grand Paris 7. Can the Phoenix Rise from the Ashes? 8. Nelson-Atkins Museum Case Study
Peter Dumbadze is a 2015 graduate of the three year Master of Architecture degree program at the University of Michigan Taubman College of Architecture and Urban Planning. Before attending school in Michigan, he earned his undergraduate degree in art history from Kenyon College in Ohio, where he researched and wrote about the debates concerning the design of contemporary art museums in the post-white cube era. Following graduation, he worked as a designer for Studio Christian Wassmann in New York City.
awards
skills
University of Michigan, Ann Arbor, MI Master of Architecture May 2015
Storefront TV, New York, NY “What About the Grid?” Writer and director for pilot episode chosen for second season of Storefront TV Storefront for Art and Architecture Working as Bar Studio with Derek Chang, Dustin Murphy, and Young-Tack Oh January 2015
Software
Kenyon College, Gambier, OH Bachelor of Arts Art History, High Honors May 2010 University College London, London, UK Junior Semester Abroad Department of the History of Art Spring 2009
54Jeff, Grand Rapids, MI Grand Rapids Automaton Third Prize and Student Winner, $3000 SiTE:LAB, 54jeff.org September 2013
Advanced
education
Novice
Peter Dumbadze
Rhinoceros 3D Adobe Illustrator Adobe InDesign Microsoft Word AutoCAD Laser Cutting Zünd Cutting System Adobe Muse Adobe Premiere Pro Adobe Photoshop PowerPoint VectorWorks
Harvard University, Cambridge, MA Graduate School of Design Career Discovery Focus in Architecture Summer 2008
SketchUp Revit 2014
exhibitions
Excel ArcGIS VRay CNC Milling
employment TL Magazine, Paris, FR/New York, NY Freelance writer-at-large for print and web January 2016 - present Interviews and reviews of prominent architects around the globe Intellectual Capital Investments, New York, NY Designer October 2015 - January 2016 Design development, schematic design, copywriting University of Michigan, Ann Arbor, MI Graduate Student Instructor Faculty Supervisor: Assoc. Prof. Lydia M. Soo “History of Architecture, I” ARCH 313 August - December 2014 Studio Christian Wassmann, New York, NY Designer January - May 2012; September 2010 - April 2011 Design development, schematic design, project and construction management, managing interns, model making
What About the Grid?, New York, NY Storefront for Art and Architecture Writer and director for 50 minute TV episode for season two of Storefront TV Working as Bar Studio with Derek Chang, Dustin Murphy, and Young-Tack Oh Video and script archived in Storefront’s collection June 30, 2015
Maya Mudbox Analogue Writing Model Making Copy Editing Curating
Greetings from Gibraltar, Ann Arbor, MI North Quad Exhibition Space, Exhibition of student research about the Strait of Gibraltar produced by travel studio led by Rania Ghosn and El Hadi Jazairy October 2013
Wood Working
54Jeff, Grand Rapids, MI SiTE:LAB, Grand Rapids Public Museum Grand Rapids Automaton, exhibition of works submitted to contest September-October 2013
Christian Wassmann, Principal Studio Christian Wassmann c. +1 646 339 0305
New Practices New York, New York, NY The Center for Architecture Exhibition of Studio Christian Wassmann’s work June-September 2012
Sewing MIG Welding
references Lydia M. Soo, Assoc. Prof. of Architecture University of Michigan, Ann Arbor e. lmsoo@umich.edu Christian Stayner, Principal Stayner Architects e. christian@staynerarchitects.com t. +1 213 484 0224
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Grand Rapids Automaton Reimagining Grand Rapids’ former Public Museum
Grand Rapids, MI Summer 2013 54Jeff competition, sponsored by SiTE:LAB Third Prize overall and Student Winner
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ARCHIVE GALLERY The Grand Rapids Automaton perches atop the old Public Museum. Its thirteen elevator shafts plug into each gallery below. From these elevators emerge items from the Museum’s archive. It is as though this machine, through its own machinations, can curate but also proffer new ideas regarding knowledge. But such a device is seemingly too advanced for even our digital-mad epoch through its ability to contribute to historical dialogues. And it is. In all actuality, the Automaton is not a contraption that can think for itself, but rather it is a device driven by museumgoers. Visitors are able to take the central elevator up into the Automaton’s archive and choose what items are to be displayed and how. A Central African hatchet could be displayed next to an American Bicentennial knitted-hat, a combination many would consider absurd, but it could lead to new discussions about in-
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Left: A binary relationship between the Archive and the Gallery begins to blur as the Archive’s elevator shafts (light blue) plug into the existing structure below. Right: The Archives buzz with activity as museumgoers become curators.
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ter-cultural relationships. In effect, visitors can impart their own understanding of subjects but also create new relationships, possibly questioning ideas in history that may be considered sacred. The Automaton not only allows visitors to create unique interpretations of histories through their curating, but it also allows visitors to understand how they devise their own conceptions about an idea. It is a “machine� built for constructing and understanding ideas.
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Left: The Archives awaits soon-to-be curators. Right: The mechanics of the Automaton Below: A possible curation of desperate objects
Automaton Archive Visitors can choose items from the archive and have them sent down to the galleries below for display.
Second Floor Gallery Items that arrive from the archive by elevator are installed by art handlers.
First Floor Gallery Items can be “recalled� and removed from public display and exchanged with new pieces from the archive.
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UrBox
An active index
Detroit, MI December 2014 - ongoing A. Sirota, critic Theories in Critical Conservation
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The box is that specific yet ambiguous form. Its geometric properties are precise: four perpendicular walls capped on either end that constitute a self-supporting structure. Nevertheless, while it is formally watertight, it is literally and figuratively a Pandora’s Box: the ends for which it can be deployed are endless. To control the outcome of the box is a Sisyphean task. The form of the container becomes the site of a projected ethos, where it is sub-
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sumed by the ineffable definitions of the surrounding space. Out of this chaos is where the potential for a generative device lies dormant. Within the confines of the antiseptic gallery space, the box is an object that is subject to the demesne of high culture. But once absent of the purity of the white cube, the box becomes the receiver for projection and absorption of the context that fuels it, regardless of its status. Here, affected by elements beyond its control, the box is
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a symptomatic index of what touches it. It is out of this act of indexing that the box becomes not a representation of actions or entities, but rather a bearer of actual marks: marks that show ownership by non-specious means, and marks that record a context’s history.
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Right: The site (geographic coordinates on opposite page) here the UrBox is positioned has gone through considerable change over the past 100 years. Rapidly built up during Detroit’s economic boom, it is now falling back into nature.
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Left: The first day of indexing the site December 6th, 2014
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Right: Indexing in progress December 23rd, 2014
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Mumbai Social Housing In collaboration with E. Duff Mumbai, India Winter 2014 C. Wigger, critic Scales of Mumbai
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Left: Dharavi is Mumbai’s most famous slum and is exemplary of the ad hoc urban planning and design found in formal slums. Right: Construction detail
Housing in Mumbai is a complex social and political situation. With one of the densest urban populations in the world, Mumbaikers’ access to essentials, such as shelter and water, is difficult. This proposal seeks to address the housing rights of low-income resident by creating an infrastructure that is able to adapt to Mumbai’s changing economic and environmental relationships. Many Mumbaikers, too poor to own or rent, are hamstrung by state law that prohibits them from establishing their own place to live. This social housing, in addition to providing tower units, also creates new avenues between other structures as a safe and legal means to establish streets for improvised homes. Existing in a legal gray area, these avenues allow for inhabitants to live in a space for a duration.
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Slate In Situ Cast Reinforced Concrete Air Inlet Gutter Drainage Mat Thermal Insulation Air Duct & Diffuser
Aluminum Handrail
Detail 1 Roof/Parapet 1:40
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Return Air Duct Air Duct & Diffuser
In Situ Cast Reinforced Concrete Lintel for Window fixing
Wood Window Assembly
Marine-grade Plywood Cabinetry
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Wall Detail 1:40
Waffle Slab Plywood Encasing Air Duct & Diffuser
Reinforced Concrete Plywood Cabinetry
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Wall Detail 1:40
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Speleology House A Response to Frank Gehry’s Winton Guest House
Brooklyn, NY Fall 2012 A. Trandafirescu, critic Form Studio
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In Frank Gehry’s Winton Guest House, Gehry organized the program around the central living room. In the Speleology House, the program is arrayed along a central path that ties together its various elements. While the Winton Guest House is additive in its design, the Speleology House is subtractive. And finally, the Winton Guest House begins to employ a sense of transition in the thresholds. The aim of the Speleology House is to maximize and intensify the transitions between programs
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existing site
insert incline plane
nascent circulation
glass enclosure...?
...no.
refine incline plane and circulation...
refine some more... insert shaft for light enclose and fill out.
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allowing for a duality in which separation between actions can occur, but the possibility that a single space across the central contains all programmatic elements. The garage and entry foyer become one as they begin to blend in with the living room. The living room begins to hybridize with the kitchen, and so forth.
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Reinventer.Grand Paris In collaboration with C. Sylvain K. Rolka
Paris, France Fall 2014 D. McTavish & C. Blanchet, critics Recovering Modernism?
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Meghrebi Suburb public spaces rent control
La D Défense ééfense fense Ring free trade zone educational innovation center
Les Banlieues visual connection
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Reinventer Grand Paris
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An investigation into ways of improving the physical and perceived connection between Paris and its suburbs, Reinventer.Grand Paris is the reimagining of an actual competition, Reinventer.Paris that seeks to improve Paris’s internal fabric. Looking at ways to create a more equitable Paris, this imagined competition looks at ways to challenge the status quo by using the planned expansion of Paris’s Métro system. As a group, we identified sites in the Ill-de-France region that over
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the years have become politically marginalized. Finding their links to the proposed MÊtro lines, we each created new stations that aim to mark and assert the local communities’ presence in the area. These stations, while utilitarian in their basic sense, also serve as common spaces for locals to use and to make their own.
Longitudinal Section 1:2000
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Left: An interior view of the new Saint-Ouen Métro station Right: Exploded axonometric detailing the relationship between surface level and the subterranean
existing structures
incised surface
primary circulation to Métro
tessellated ceiling with incisions
walkway and structure
entry to Métro lines 13 and 14
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Can the Phoenix Rise from the Ashes? An investigation of action as a means of design
Oberlin, OH Spring 2015 McL. Clutter and M. Arquero de Alarcรณn, critics Form Studio
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“Can the Phoenix Rise from the Ashes?” is a film that synthesizes three tracks: what is the role of a subject’s agency vis à vis the object, how can designers use narrative and fictional histories as a generative tool, and how can architecture move beyond the limits of representation and into tangible engagement? Done as a Thesis project, this film uses the mockumentary as the means to address the aforementioned questions. The film’s plot posits that in September 1972, after
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Left: Professor Alan Lucey, curator of the Oberlin Five retrospective, shares his insights into the thinking of the collective. Right: (Top and bottom) Frances Gardner’s takes on Gatti, Paolini, and Teodoro’s “Sacco”; (Middle left) George Graham’s reimagining of Superstudio’s “Histogram” furniture; (Middle right) John McNair’s reinterpretation of Archizoom’s “Mies Chair”
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the completion of the Museum of Modern Art’s seminal exhibition, “Italy: The New Domestic Landscape”, a marginal movement in the history of design began. Out of the detritus of this show, five unsuspecting young architects acquired off the street the works of such luminaries like Superstudio, Archizoom, Gae Aulenti, and others. With these canonical objects on hand, these architects appropriated their strategies of malleable design. Working for three years on ways to improve
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Left: The Oberlin Five in their Lower East Side studio on The Bowery, c. 1974 Right: Oberlin College alumnus, Stefan Klecheski, who remains the only student to have checked out an Oberlin Five piece in the history of the College’s art loan program, discusses what it was like living with McNair’s piece.
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their predecessors’ designs and contribute new thoughts to the discussion on the relationships between the subject and object, this collaborative would only stage one show of their work. Panned by critics as a failure, the exhibition staged at Oberlin College in Ohio faded into the blur of history. Nearly forty years later, the restaging of this show, “Can the Phoenix Rise from the Ashes?”, looks at the pitfalls that the young designers encountered in their exploration of ways to elevate the
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Left: Professor Lucey in the archives of Oberlin’s Alan Memorial Art Museum Right: The director’s script
subject in relation to the object. This retrospective asks the discipline: Is there a way to design an architecture that allows the subject to exercise his or her agency freely over an object and determine its ontology? Could there be an architecture that enables the subject to grow? How can an architectural experience be productive? Out of failure, there might be answers to these questions.
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Nelson-Atkins Museum A case study of Steven Holl Architect’s museum expansion Kansas City, MO Winter 2013 C. Wigger, critic Construction, I
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Circulation meander
outdoor walk straight-shot
Structure of Lens 3 “Breathing-T”
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EPDM Roofing over Rigid Foam Insulaton
Painted Alluminum Coping
Composite Lightweight Concrete and Steel Deck Motorized Solar Control Shades Welded Catwalk Assembly
Intermediate Channel Anodized Aluminum Extrusion Slotted Attachment to Catwalk Assembly
White Painted Suspension Rod Outside: Double Layer of Low Iron U-Profile Glass Units (Nominal 16” width) Translucent Insulation in Alluminum Frame System
Welded Catwalk Assembly, interior side welded to interior vertical structural members; exterior suspended from ceiling Intermediate Channel Anodized Alluminum Extrusion. Slip connection on straight angle with slotted attachment to catwalk assembly
Drywall mounted to steel frame construction of “Breathing T” Inside: Single Layer of U-Profiled Glass Units in Alluminum Frame System
Light fixture under gray fiberglass removal grating Grass
Fireproofed steel framing
3/8” = 1’
Drywall mounted to light gauge metal construction
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