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PREMIATIONS Portland State University School of Architecture AIA Northwest & Pacific Region Annual Student Design Awards 2012—2016

PREMIATIONS Portland State University School of Architecture AIA Northwest & Pacific Region Annual Student Design Awards 2012—2016

Preface This modest tome is a celebration of the exemplary work of the students of the Portland State University School of Architecture, as recognized by the AIA Northwest and Pacific Region Annual Student Design Awards over the past five years, since their inception in 2012.

Consistently, each year, our students have betrayed the creative speculation that characterizes our pedagogy, with projects from both graduate and undergraduate programs being recognized with awards. These have included individual and collaborative endeavors that engage issues that are pressing in this second decade of the twenty-first century, and challenging to the conventions and expectations of citizens of the contemporary city.

The school’s ambition to always address the cultural questions that transcend and inspire the making of architecture is effectively demonstrated by each of these projects. They succeed in translating pertinent, well-articulated issues into propositions for insightful experience through architectures of transformation. The work reveals our diverse attitude toward media through drawings, models, and artifacts that precipitate emerging and substantiating ideas—evidence of the embodiment of a unique perceptiveness in each student upon the common flesh of a shared world.

Clive Knights Professor of Architecture, Director of School

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2015

Honor Award

Honor Award

Nicolas Pectol, Master of Architecture Design Thesis “Vanport Necropolis”

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Citation Award Andrew Matia, Arch 481 “Weave PDX”

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Citation Award 11

Honorable Mention Janna Ferguson, Alejandra Ruiz, Peter Heibel, Arch 581 “Opportunity Knocks” 19 Matthew Rusnac, Master of Architecture Design Thesis “Dwelling in Wanderlust: Architecture as a Vessel for Human Stories” 27

Contents

Nada Maani, Master of Architecture Design Thesis “Refugee Camp to City”

Julia Mollner, Master of Architecture Design Thesis “Once Upon a Time”

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Cheryl Leontina, Arch 480 “River Gallery - Girona Spain”

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2014

2012

Honor Award

Citation Award

Christopher Kline, Master of Architecture Design Thesis “Creative Common Ground: Reclaim the In-between”

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2013

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Professor Rudy Barton, Arch 480 “Crossing Sullivan’s Gulch”

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Students:

Honor Award Josiah Henley, Arch 580 “Transit Studio for the Insomniac Printmaker”

Dylan Morgan, Arch 481 “A Patchwork Community”

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Robert Abell, Wendy Baker, Jennifer Bradley, Nathan Clifford, Michael Coon, Benjamin Deines, Jason Elstad, Ali Joori, Christopher Kline, Dylan Morgan, Amaya Navarrete, Andrew Pulliam

“Vanport Necropolis�

Nicolas Pectol Honor Award 2016

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This thesis explores how architecture, as a cultural act, responds to rituals of human death, burial, and remembrance. Through burial, a ground-plane relationship develops between the living and the dead as the deceased is removed from the realm of the living. To contextualize ideas about death, burial, and memorial, this thesis explores a specific people and place in the history of the Pacific Northwest. Vanport, Oregon, was a city that died as it lived, quickly and dynamically under the influence of water. This thesis acknowledges the loss and displacement of working class heroes who constructed ships for Allied victories in World War II. The proposed design demonstrates ideas of remembrance through a funeral procession and burial ritual of this shipbuilding community. The proposed design will exist as a memorial and a reconciliation of a place that currently shows little evidence of its history. The site is located

between Portland and Vancouver on the southern bank of the Columbia River. The proposed Vanport Necropolis is a series of locks and canals that span a section of the historic Vanport City. The design provides for the funeral procession and burial ritual for the 20,000 people who lived in Vanport City. The three focal points of the design include the “Threshold of Departure,” the “Lake of Return,” and the “Docks of Initiation.” The design of the building is motivated by the mechanics and structures of mid-century shipyards. Half of the building is exposed scaffolding to appear “ghosted,” while the other half is covered in steel cladding. The rusting steel and changing water level stains the concrete to demarcate time and decay on the concrete foundation. The structure appears dynamic, between completed construction and a state of constant demise.

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“As the site is flooded, water is able to enter the columns, where the vessel containing the body always remains on the water’s surface. In this way, the body of the deceased is participating in each new burial, a gesture toward the collective spirit of a community, and a way of being forever active with the rise and fall of water.”

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“Weave PDX”

Andrew Matia Citation Award 2016

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This project is made up of three parts. “Weaving Peaks” is a direct response to the earliest investigations of the idea of domestic activity. Research on the textile industry and its evolution from the home to the factory resided in a suitcase artifact and was useful in generating ideas about the city. The urban block is spatially divided into a typical, yet pedestrian focused, grid forging alleyways between structures. The resultant masses create a weave composition to reflect textile production techniques. The development creates moments of orientation and mystery, aligning itself to the city block but also deviating from moment to moment. “Nesting Elements” seeks to create a simple and intuitive method of design, construction, and inhabitation. The base unit is an uncomplicated, triangulated module that allows for the greatest degree of flexibility in spatial

arrangement. Prefabricated from steel columns and wooden frame diaphragms, they provide a cost effective mechanism for production, transportation, and rapid implementation on site. Distributed both horizontally and vertically, the resultant form is correspondent to the spatial requirements of inhabitants and becomes useful in both domestic settings and professional disciplines.

“Excavated Crevasses” is a formal intervention that seeks to maximize inhabitant density on the 200’ by 156’ block. The formal moves derive from the notion of crevasses commonly found on cliff faces and mountains.

So the innards of the structure are excavated to create a dynamically exciting experience. Large masses are removed to allow pedestrian passages of movement and circulation, so a courtyard emerges full of life and activity.

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“The lively intervention, while being efficient with resources, is readily adaptable, seeking to best reflect the dynamic and multifaceted culture of the Alberta Arts District.�

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“Opportunity Knocks�

Janna Ferguson, Alejandra Ruiz, Peter Heibel Honorable Mention 2016

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“Opportunity Knocks” is an exploration of how the Rebuilding Center, in partnership with the North Portland community, can build affordable tiny house communities across the city from reused materials. Because of their ability to be salvaged, dimensional lumber and doors are always abundant and always available.

“Opportunity Knocks” has developed a modular system using these two materials to create quality, affordable tiny homes built through a system that encourages equity, sustainability, community, homeownership, and economic development. A master plan was developed for a tiny house community on a site located immediately

adjacent to Humboldt Elementary, a school closed in 2008 and vacant since then. In the master plan, this school is transformed into the workshop where the prefabricated panels are built. In this initial proposal, there are sixteen tiny homes that offer students working at the workshop an opportunity to learn marketable skills, and community members an opportunity for homeownership. This model of construction and implementation has the potential to be reproduced and adapted across the city of Portland, reducing the amount of waste entering landfills and increasing the number of homes for Portland’s lowincome communities.

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“The material salvaged from just 12 deconstructed homes is enough material to build 98 tiny houses. If the 323 recent demolitions had been deconstructed, it would have provided enough material for 1,850 tiny houses. This represents more than half the houseless population in Portland.�

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“Dwelling in Wanderlust: Architecture as a Vessel for Human Stories�

Matthew Rusnac Honorable Mention 2016

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By melding stories with the craft of architecture one can arrive at an architecture that offers clues and wisdom as to what it means to be a human inhabiting the earth. Such architecture recognizes the diversity of humanity, and the diversity of individual stories affirms a sense of humanity, identity, and community. “Dwelling in Wanderlust” seeks to discover a design process that engenders an architecture in which one’s story can unfold graciously within. Archetypes became the inspiration for the design of a six-home housing complex. The design questions the typical standards of contemporary urban housing and suggests a way to design that is rooted in the diversity and timelessness of human character and relationship.

Dwellings come with telling names: the Innocent, the Orphan, the Wanderer, the Warrior, the Altruist and the Magician. The housing complex is set in SE Portland on a

currently empty lot on SE Division St. and 23rd Ave. The Wanderer is a linear, elevated space. The Magician’s home is tower like, focusing on the vertical dimension.

The Innocent’s house is a nest-like home that is light and fragile, resting on top of the Altruist’s home. The Altruist is at the center and is somewhat formless as the house fills the spaces between the others. The Warrior’s house is two-part: one is long and thin, representing action and forcing its way between the other homes; and the other is cube shaped, representing protection and respectful assimilation. The Warrior’s home protects the Orphan’s, which is set in the back corner. It is made of stone and concrete that is characterized by a fissure that splits the home’s functions. The six archetypes embody a different set of desires and dreams that all humans, this thesis contests, experience at some point in life.

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“How can a story-driven architecture, confident in the cosmos, fortify a person’s sense of humanity, identity, and community in an alienating, disorienting, and isolating age?�

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“Refugee Camp to City” Nada Maani Honor Award 2015

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Despite refugee camps being designed to secure a population and suppress grass-roots urbanism, refugees have transformed some camps into informal cities with neighborhoods and a growing economy. At the Zaatari refugee camp in Jordan, the vision of this thesis is to create spaces that respond to existing social networks established inside the camp. Traditionally, emergency relief is reactionary and temporary. The goal is to challenge this notion and begin to respond with long-term resilient solutions. The design focuses on empowering and making space for the youth along the so-called Champs-Élysées.

U-shaped housing in Syria allows for communal living, with the courtyard being women’s public space during the day.

The lessons learned from traditional Syrian cities can be applied inside the camp. The layers that traditionally exist in Syrian courtyard housing are fundamentally created for a woman’s privacy thus giving her public space in her own home. A module has been designed that can incorporate the following spaces: existing shops, dwelling units, women’s public space, the Nadi (children’s space), circulation, family space, and the business’s interaction and customization. When several of these modules are put together along a street they create the courtyard while being stacked to create a raised social level for children.

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“How can architecture transform a refugee camp into a childfriendly city that is designed around existing social networks?�

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“Once Upon a Time” Julia Mollner Citation Award 2015

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This thesis investigation is a reaction to artificial “clock time” and engages the relationship between humans, their immediate environment, perception, and time through the art of walking. The way people move through the contemporary urban environment has shifted as cities have become more dense and fast-paced. As cities evolved, human connection to larger cycles of time— cosmic, geological, seasonal, corporeal—has been lost with the economically driven culture and mode of living reliant on a constructed understanding of time.

The proposal asserts the importance of being in urban

space as an act of participation and as an alternative way of gaining knowledge of the city and its larger temporal conditions from the perspective of an individual traveler.

The adherence to “clock time,” defined as a quantified way of measuring events, labor, and time, disengages the human experience from the present moment and one’s immediate perceptual environment. This reliance is not conducive to experiencing the diverse natural patterns of life’s temporal conditions within our urban environment, which this thesis sets out to re-imagine.

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“This thesis proposes that the design of urban edge conditions can enhance the everyday activity of walking while gaining an understanding of urban events, their present surroundings, and the larger notion of temporal existence in the urban world.�

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“River Gallery - Girona, Spain” Cheryl Leontina Citation Award 2015

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The city of Girona is located in Spain’s northeastern Catalonia region, along the River Onyar. The Old Quarter dates back several thousand years and was built up over time, organically following the river’s edge with long, narrow, curving city blocks. The east and west bank of the Onyar share a dialog with a colorful and irregular push and pull of building facades, which has become Girona’s unique iconic image. The Visitors’ Center along the River Onyar is the uneventful termination point on the east bank city block, doing little to activate the connection between the east and west portions of the city.

Additionally, access to the river from the plaza is uninviting, creating a subtle barrier and causing a disconnect between the people and the waterway. This proposal creates a new architectural space that both celebrates the event of the river and adds an exciting punctuation point to the head of the long, narrow, snaking block, worthy of international notice. This space should sparkle and call people to it, stitching the two halves of the city together with its place making, and reactivating people with the river.

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“The gallery interacts with the river by positioning the south section of the building in the river—as if the gallery were touching its toe into the water—allowing the river to flow in, around, and through its base.”

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“Creative Common Ground: Reclaim the In-between” Christopher Kline Honor Award 2014

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Opportunity exists in the landscape we have cultivated for our cities, the common result of modern urbanization and complex interactions. Social, technological, and economic processes have overlapped in the development of contemporary urban growth. As cities fluctuate and density increases, people shift in and out of the urban core, where often vacancies remain. This project looks to investigate how architecture can identify the unused or underutilized spaces in the city. This project aims to explore possibilities of temporary structures and pocket structures that identify with their immediate contexts.

Possible sites for exploration include under freeways, adjacencies to infrastructure, brownfield sites, and undeveloped land in the city core. The thesis explores concepts of micro-business, temporary business spaces,

and site-based development. The specific site examined exists on Portland’s Central Eastside, where a margin of highways overlap one another to create a divide between the natural resources of the river and the small industrial landscape. A complex arrangement of elevated transit infrastructure creates difficult access to the river, along with potent spaces filled with underutilized parking and storage. With vacancies adjacent to one of the most active pedestrian and cycle lines, the Eastbank Esplanade, the in-between spaces of the elevated freeways have become transitional zones, moving people through them as quickly as possible. The system proposed here produces vibrant public spaces through the means of hundreds of individualized, community-generated interventions.

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“The forgotten, unfunded, and abandoned sites throughout the city fall into this typology.

These sites contain partial, damaged, or condemned structures, yet offer the opportunity for creative and useful programming.�

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“Transit Studio for the Insomniac Printmaker” Josiah Henley Honor Award 2013

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The goal of this graduate design studio was to research issues surrounding the nighttime condition and explore different ways of addressing them through the process of architecture. A series of maps and artifacts was created in order to generate topics of interest relating to the night. Personal areas of interest included the creative link between insomnia and the arts, and the public perception of fear while riding public transportation at night. These topics emerged from Louise Bourgeois’ book titled The Insomnia Drawings, in which she documented her sleepless nights through drawing. Simultaneously, riding public transit at night revealed a shift in the behavior of passengers after dark. These research topics manifested themselves in two different forms.

The first was in a slide made of oiled paper stored in a wooden box that acted as a lantern. The second was explored through the creation of a map after riding light rail at night and documenting the conditions of each stop in order to compare the perceived level of safety with information from the city on the frequency of crimes committed there. After this, a site was chosen based on criteria developed during the mapping phase. Program elements included a smoking deck, changing room, restroom, and studio space. The final product was an architectural proposal that could both express an acute understanding of the research conducted and illustrate new ways of thinking about how architecture can address the habitation of the city after dark.

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FULL BLEED IMAGE

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“The insomniac printmaker accesses the studio via public transportation and works into the next morning, exhibiting the printmaking process. The night’s creations are displayed at the front of the building for daytime commuters, as the insomniac printmaker takes the train home to rest.�

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“A Patchwork Community” Dylan Morgan Citation Award 2012

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“A Patchwork Community� strives to create a cohesive multifamily housing experience that focuses on the integration of neighborhood and healthy environments to allow families to thrive. Mountainview Crossing is a Habitat for Humanity site with a complex location. It is bordered by Mountain View Junior High to the northeast and Foster Road to the northwest. After the testing of many alternative strategies, with the goal of creating uninterrupted pedestrian paths and green space, it was determined that on-street parking should be the primary means of automobile access. This design allows for a

transitional pedestrian space between homes and automobile traffic. For the building itself, the use of variable terrace designs and covered entries allows the stitching of public spaces, starting with the street and moving into the building. The terraces are used again to stitch together public and private spaces between each individual housing unit and the exterior space in front and behind. Reprogramming the street allows for connecting spaces through the use of varying materials to extend boundary lines.

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“A terrace as a way to stitch together private and public space.�

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“Crossing Sullivan’s Gulch”

Professor Rudy Barton, Arch 480 Studio Citation Award 2012

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Portland’s five-mile-long Sullivan’s Gulch corridor stretches eastward from the Willamette River to Interstate 205, serving the region’s transportation needs since 1881 when the Union Pacific Railroad first laid tracks.

Although this corridor encourages movement across the city, the design and intensity of movement in the corridor becomes a boundary and effectively restricts connectivity amongst neighboring communities. The ultimate aim of the studio was to develop north-south linkages and reconnect those same communities. The studio was structured in two phases: for the first half of the quarter the class investigated and analyzed contextual relationships in the study area to develop a foundation for future design proposals. The analysis resulted in an Atlas of Fields & Flows illustrating design observations ranging from layered landscape and circulation networks to depictions of existing and future demographics, to perceptual and temporal elements like sounds and public

gatherings. In the second five weeks, each student created a strategic design proposal for a north-south crossing of the Sullivan’s Gulch corridor, with particular attention paid to the threshold between public and private realms. Primary design strategies were conceptualized as Linkages and Places, reprogramming existing connectors as both “integrated linkages” and “places for exchange.”

Each design intervention proposed a reframing of public space toward a multiplicity of possible futures for increased social interaction and improvements within the public realm.

Students working on this project included Robert Abell, Wendy Baker, Jennifer Bradley, Nathan Clifford, Michael Coon, Benjamin Deines, Jason Elstad, Ali Joori, Christopher Kline, Dylan Morgan, Amaya Navarrete, and Andrew Pulliam.

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“Each design intervention proposed a reframing of public space towards a multiplicity of possible futures for increased social interaction and improvements within the public realm.�

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AIA Northwest and Pacific Region Annual Student Design Awards 2012—2016

2016 Honor Award Nic Pectol, “Vanport Necropolis”

2014 Honor Award Christopher Kline, “Creative Common Ground: Reclaim the In-between”

Citation Award Andrew Matia, “Weave PDX”

2013 Honor Award Josiah Henley, “Transition Studio for the Insomniac Printmaker”

Honorable Mention Janna Ferguson, Alejandra Ruiz, Peter Heibel, “Opportunity Knocks” Honorable Mention Matthew Rusnac, “Dwelling in Wanderlust: Architecture as a Vessel for Human Stories” 2015 Honor Award Nada Maani, “Refugee Camp to City” Citation Award Julia Mollner, “Once Upon a Time” Citation Award Cheryl Leontina, “River Gallery - Girona, Spain”

2012 Citation Award Dylan Morgan, “A Patchwork Community” Citation Award Arch 480, Professor Rudy Barton, “Crossing Sullivan’s Gulch” Students:

Robert Abell Jennifer Bradley Michael Coon Jason Elstad Christopher Kline Amaya Navarrete

Wendy Baker Nathan Clifford Benjamin Deines Ali Joori Dylan Morgan Andrew Pulliam

Acknowledgments

Published by

Thank you to all the students and faculty whose imagination and effort have generated exemplary design work consistently over many years to make this celebratory publication possible.

School of Architecture, College of the Arts Portland State University P.O. Box 751 Portland, OR 97207 architecture@pdx.edu www.pdx.edu/architecture June 2017 ISBN 978-0-9718903-3-6

Gratitude for design and production goes to Alesha Hase, Karen O’Donnell Stein, and Clive Knights.