Architecture Portfolio | Undergraduate Selected Works from University of Minnesota | Maggie Holm

MAGDELINE HOLM

Selected Works

EDUCATION

University of Minnesota-Twin Cities, College of Design

Bachelor of Design of Architecture

Public Interest Design Minor Minneapolis,

Architectural Association Jul

Visiting School Programme

WORK EXPERIENCE

Brayton Hughes Design Studios Sep

Architectural Intern San

Brad Cox, Architect Jun

Architectural Intern

RESEARCH EMPLOYMENT

Investing with North Minneapolis, University of Minnesota Nov 2023 Minneapolis,

Evolution of Colonial and Post-Colonial Urban scape in Casablanca Jan

Directed Research Abroad Candidate

Research Assistant Casablanca, Morocco // Minneapolis,

Bio-Inspired Design Project, University of Minnesota Jan

Research Assistant Minneapolis,

EXTRACURRICULAR LEADERSHIP

Freedom By Design-MN

Project Manager, Elected May 2023

Treasurer, Appointed May 2021

American Institute of Architecture Students-MN

Architectural Student Representative, Appointed May 2021

Dec 2023

Minneapolis, MN

Jul - Aug 2023

Berlin, Germany

Sep - Dec 2022

San Francisco, CA

Jun - Aug 2022

San Jose, CA

2023 - Present Minneapolis, MN

Jan - Aug 2023

Minneapolis, MN

Jan - Jun 2023

Minneapolis, MN

2023 - Present

2021 - May 2023

2021 - May 2023

CENTER FOR FOOD SCIENCES + CULINARY ARTS

Amidst widespread nutritional misinformation, lack of access to healthy food, and lack of public participation in the food production process, this project aims to create a model for merging agricultural knowledge with culinary skills and social connection to foster transparency in how food is grown, harvested, processed, and shared. With Minnesota being one of the country’s agricultural epicenters, and the City of Falcon Heights aiming to develop a cultural corridor along Larpenteur Avenue in the midst of the experimental crop fields belonging to the University of Minnesota College of Food, Agricultural, and Nutritional Sciences department, this site provides the opportunity to become a center for food sovereignty, education, and practice.

Spring 2022 B Term

Instructor: Mary Guzowski-Lindbeck Advanced Extensive Applications:

Duration: 7 weeks Atmospheres

Bell Museum

Gibbs Farm - Ramsey County Historical Society

Larpenteur Avenue

1 SITE

The City of Falcon Heights, MN plans to develop Larpenteur Avenue to be a cultural corridor within the Twin Cities. Its proximity to the University of Minnesota experimental crop fields, the State Fair, and nearby iconic landmarks, creates the opportunity for a space that merges agriculture with social-cultural engagement.

4 CONNECT

Carving the center of the ground floor out of the mass and raising the building on stilts introduces visitors first and foremost to the crop fields, resembling a recognition and appreciation of the land that nourishes the people and activities within the building, also allowing visitors to interact with the site in multiple ways by inviting them to walk through the crops rows.

2 STACK

The building is elongated and extruded with the goal the rows of crops, and recognizing production by facing the building

5 PROGRAM

Greenhouses, food pantries, sit on the bottom level while as learning kitchens and a floor, connected by an atrium where public and institutional

3 SEPARATE

across the edge of the field goal of disrupting the direction of recognizing the beginning of food building toward the land.

Food is both a basic necessity to sustain human life, and a deeply privatized, often inaccessible, mechanism in the United States. The building highlights this contradiction by separating typically ‘Institutional’ programs from typically ‘Public,’ free, or subsidized programs within the same building.

pantries, and production machines while educational spaces such library sit on the second atrium and exhibition space institutional programs merge.

6 POP-OUT

On the educational floor, moments of pause are cantilevered, framing the land with large picture windows with the intention that during the learning process and dining experience, users will turn back to the land in contemplation or appreciation in a sensually minimal space.

L2-3 Library

L2-5 Dining Room

CULINARY LEARNING KITCHENS

Kitchens take on unique variations of the A-frame ceiling structure, adopting the vernacular of the ‘home’ where culinary practices originated, and where the skills learned in the kitchen will be practiced.

Formal differences in the framing denote different atmospheric experiences users will encounter, binding the kitchen space with the specific sensory input encountered when working with food.

LVL 2 - KITCHEN CALL-OUT

PAINTED LADY RENOVATION

This internship project entailed the renovation of a historical three-story house in San Jose, California to accommodate for family growth and ageing residents. I used Revit to draft demolition and new drawings, show floor plan options, and compose full SD sets including FF+E selections and design options for every room and the front porch. These sets were used in weekly client meetings, and improved upon each week. I worked closely with my supervisor to design schematics with the goal of making the house more physically accessible for its ageing residents by widening doorways and hallways, refurbishing dilapidated stairs, and moving essential programs to the ground floor.

Summer 2022 Supervisor: Brad Cox Internship

Duration: 2 months Brad Cox, Architect, Inc.

Front Porch Renovation Kitchen

WOVEN SERPENTINE

This project investigates the technical capabilities of plywood bendability and twistability, the spatial qualities of allowing light to dapple in to a space, to create shadows that enunciate the intersections as a means of highlighting the structural assembly, and how the method of sectioning can be used to create complex use-specific forms. These explorations are done through the medium of plywood and the program of a pavilion akin to the annual Serpentine Pavilion in Westminster.

Spring 2023 B Term

Instructor: Nina Ebbighausen

Advanced Intensive Applications:

Duration: 7 weeks Evolving the 2D Surface

Imagined Serpentine Pavilion at Kensington Gardens, London, UK

EXPERIMENTING WITH...

sectioning : the process of breaking down a three-dimensional shape into two-dimensional cross sections that can be fabricated from planar materials and assembled more easily. This creates a more efficient and precise construction process, using manufactured two-dimensional stick and planar materials that change slightly in form, scale, or orientation to emulate more complex, organic and innovative designs. Sectioning also has the opportunity to bear weight and act as structural cladding, especially with cross-tension, and provide a better understanding of construction and assembly process to the naked eye.

Weaving as sectioning can aid in controlling light filtration, neighboring tension, and pattern-making.

Woven facades can seamlessly blend cladding with structure, creating a sense of continuity.

Due to the mesh nature of open weaving, layering woven planes can add depth and three-dimensionality.

Through a series of experimental models, I investigated how different configurations of woven strips of plywood veneer can change the overall mass of the typical cylindrical shape of an imagined pavilion. Assuming that the plywood strips are cut at an equal length, what determines the height and width of the arch is the proximity between the two ends of the strips.

set of plywood strips of equal length

plan view of points on the ground where plywood strips are plugged in

elevation view

ASSEMBLY INSTRUCTIONS

1

The BASE is a plywood box filled with sand, grounded to the soil with rebar to weigh down the structure and guide ribbing placement. The center ‘X’ supports a sunken floor.

2

STRUCTURAL RIBBING plugs into the slots arrayed along the edge of the base box, creating the spatial guidelines for the flooring and weaving strips

3

CONNECTING U-PIECES attach structural ribs horizontally to guide the height and direction of alternating plywood strips

4

FLOORING

determines circulation, guiding users from the Serpentine Gallery, around the pavilion floor circling a sunken stage, and back toward the gardens.

5

PLY RIBBING

plugs into structural ribbing and connecting pieces.

6

HORIZONTAL WEAVING

creates reciprocal tension between strips, which are attached by wooden spacers.

Serpentine Gallery

Site Plan at the Serpentine Gallery in Kensington Gardens, UK

Callout: Pavilion From Above

Physical Model Detail

CASABLANCA URBANISM RESEARCH

In the nearly sixty years since Morocco’s liberation from the French Protectorate, Casablanca’s Indigenous population has appropriated the colonial French urban landscape to better suit the climate and culture of Morocco, thereby reclaiming the urban scape that was previously compulsorily imposed on them. At the same time, the Moroccan government plans to transform the city into a business-leisure, or bleisure, world capital, retrofitting historically significant landmarks to accommodate affluent western capitalists with the aim of boosting the economy and reputation of Casablanca as an internationally relevant city. My research project investigates the complex push and pull between the persistence of cultural habits among Indigenous Moroccans, and the inclination for the Moroccan government to conform to the international architecture style and tourist schemes as a means of improving the Moroccan economy that was upset by western intervention to begin with.

Spring and Summer 2023

Duration: 8 months

Mentor: Tom Fisher

Directed Research Abroad

AXIS 1 : DERB GHALLEF (SW) - PORT (NE)

AXIS 2 : HABOUS (SE) - HASSAN II MOSQUE + WATERFRONT (NW)

On each axis there are two lines: one is the most straightforward path one could take to get from Point A to Point B. This path follows a lot of long boulevards. The other is offset to the straight path, meandering through the different neighborhoods the axis passes through. This path involves a lot of smaller residential streets. Investigating the straightforward path in comparison to the beaten path thereby investigates the inappropriate French urban scape versus the more dense and diverse urban forms that live between the boulevards.

This map places the two axes in context of the entirety of the city of Casablanca. Looking at the different urban forms, densities, and land uses, the axes pass through the most dense portion of Casablanca, containing a rich combination of industrial parks, dense commercial markets, parks, single-family suburban scapes, high-rises and mid-rises, luxury shopping strips, mosques and religious sites, and the spaces in between. This portion of the city was most heavily developed by French urban planners and contains a high number of tourist landmarks, yet still maintains the lively character of Indigenous Moroccan culture.

MOHAMMEDIIMOSQUE ANCIENTMEDINA MEDINA-PORTBORDER PORT PORT

MAARIF

For each line, I studied moments of major urban or cultural clash. These are places where there may be a modern adoption of a traditional practice, traditional habits persisting in French urban areas intended to Europeanize Moroccans, or a mix of bottom-up and top-down architectures coming together.

ARAB LEAGUE PARK EXIT

DERB GHALLEF FLEA MARKET

DERB GHALLEF

For each major neighborhood the lines intersected, I marked the different street types as being a French Boulevard, a car-centric street, a pedestrian-only street, or market street, and train routes.

Flea markets are indicative of the degree of “western-ness” that had inhabited the given neighborhood. The Habous district, a French market district designed to resemble a modernized version of the ancient medina, fuses merchant stands with permanent air conditioned buildings.

OUTDOOR MARKET

ANCIENT MEDINA ENTRANCE

Rail Car-dominated streets Pedestrian market streets

Habous neighborhood Tram

Habous French-designed Indoor market

TROMBE

Equator-facing facades present the ideal orientation for both harnessing solar energy through the use of massive thermal walls, and optimizing natural daylighting into the building’s interior. The current model of the Trombe wall is exceptional at absorbing thermal energy, but poor at yielding daylight and views. In this studio, I explored the design possibilities for developing a modular building block that could be assembled to form an ultra-thick perforated Trombe wall that can simultaneously bring in light and views, all while maintaining the high thermal efficiency of the traditional Trombe wall.

Trombe walls are normally applied to single-family passive homes in rural settings, but as cities aim to lower building energy consumption to achieve carbon neutrality, we need to adopt passive energy methods like the Trombe wall system when retrofitting existing multi-story buildings.

Physical models produced in collaboration with Eliana Wright; all other work is my own.

Fall 2023

A Term Instructor: Jacob Mans

Advanced Intensive Applications:

Duration: 7 weeks Worldbuilding

Trombe system applied to condominium units

The Trombe wall model consists of a heavy, thick wall mass typically painted black to absorb heat, placed in front of equator-facing glazing. A 3’ overhang blocks the high summer sun from directing heat to the facade while accepting the winter sun in to warm the indoor space. The wall heats up slowly throughout the day, travels through the wall, and is released into the building at night resulting in stable indoor temperatures and an effective passive heating and cooling system.

Opposed to the typical carbon intensive concrete Trombe wall, this block uses rammed earth mixed with a lime stabilizer. Ramming and extruding processed soil increases density of the block and eliminates the necessity to use dark paint to render the Trombe wall more absorptive to solar heat.

step 1: excavate samples

step 2: test

step 3: excavate en masse

step 4: process

step 5: tamper

To achieve maximum indoor daylighting, the southern facade of a building is positioned as the wall with the most window openings. To maintain the thermal benefits of the massing of the Trombe wall, thick masonry blocks contain a hallowed gap to allow in light, while the wall itself remains at a 1’ thickness.

The block gap is designed to be either opened or closed, the configurations of the blocks allowing for varying levels of overall lightness and darkness within the interior, or the ability to frame views as a traditional window could.

Due to the thickness of the block, the visual sights out the window through the gap are constricted. This creates a natural privacy to the sides of the Trombe wall. This may indicate where more private and dark or public and light programs may be positioned within the building in relation to the perforated Trombe wall.

Physical models made in collaboration with Eliana Wright

INTERIOR VIEW

EXTERIOR VIEW

The perforated wall creates an effect akin to a peek-hole - the small diameter of the gap allows those on the indoor to peer out and see the scope of the building’s surroundings, while outsiders can only see the silhouette of interior components when facing the wall front-on.

As each block is six inches in thickness, and Trombe walls are most effective at 12 inches thick or more, two or three masonry wythes are layered together. Masonry wythes of different configurations can be combined to create intricate wall patterns.

Window openings will not compromise the thermal efficiency of the Trombe wall, and can be planned after block orientations and patterns are finalized. Casework should form an arch, triangle, or similar variant to support the heavy weight of the blocks above the window opening.

W1

W2

W1+W2