Architecture Portfolio - 2020

Ruchi Patel

Architectural Portfolio

Projects: Sounds of Stories

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Artist-in-Residence + Public Housing

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Cultural Learning Hub

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Community Hub

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Castings

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Machinery of the Midwest

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Sounds of Stories Arsenale, Venice, Italy Group Members: Ryoka Matsuno, Merwick D’Souza, Rodcely Muro Professor: Peter Goché The brief of this project requires the replacement of the archives of Venice. We critique this selective process of entering and accessing artifacts and historical depictions of Venice by countering it with an open place for storytelling. We place the archive underground to maintain the necessary requirements for an archive. On the levels above sea level, the storytelling creates its own actively changing archive that provides a space for individuals to speak of their own backgrounds.

Storytelling provides a place for narratives, neglected through selective archives, to be expressed freely to an international public.

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Throughout time, the myths of Venice were created to foster their own identity as an autonomous state harnessing military, economic, cultural, and religious power in the Mediterranean Sea. It became a Papel City with the fabrication of the divine will of San Marco’s desire to be rested in Venice rather than the higher possibility that the body was kidnapped from Alexandria.

What comes out of this mythological method of viewing Venice is a realization of Venice to be its own hero in its story. What’s assumed to be correct/false depends on the storyteller’s biases. A story contains a power that is in some ways manipulative, but in attempting to understand it further, each account of the past is confronted.

Through experimentation of materials and form-making, the tensional relationship of myths and stories are examined.

Materials and form-works are manipulated to understand the spatial consequence of this dependence. We experiment with plaster, fire, flammable materials, cotton, and yarn. With this our understanding of an atmosphere of change and tension is formed.

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Myths of Venice Drawing

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Drawings Exploring Atmospheric Qualities of Venice

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The drawing process to understand the relationship between stories and tensions reveals the correspondence of myths and draping. In the process of storytelling, tensions that may be hidden are unveiled. This stress creates a relationship between stories, it begins to pick at the drape that create historical documentations and myths.

The uncloaking is a physical movement that reveals what is forced into seclusion.

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Cloth Drawings Exploring Storytelling and Tensions

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The atmosphere that is inhabited is affected by the stories that are told in the pavilion. The stories are given the power to break down one sided assumptions that prevail in myths and historical accounts of the past. Atmospheric movement is created with the alteration of air through sound projection.

Sound mirrors amplify and physically allow for the transformation of the atmosphere with the movement of the sounds of stories being told.

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Atmospheric Sound Drawings

Sound Mirror Model

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Building Shell

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Exterior Visualization

Exterior Shell

Interior Storytelling Space

Interior First Level Atrium

Below Sea Level Archive Storage

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Short section emphasizing sound reflection from story telling space to first level atrium

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Interior Render of Storytelling Space

Artist-in-Residence + Public Housing Cocheras de Cuatro Caminos, Madrid, Spain Professor: Cem Kayatekin

The site is an architecturally significant unused existing Garage for subway cars. The plot is to be reused for a mixed use social housing complex.

Located between an affluent neighborhood and a lower income neighborhood, the site is rich in history. The area within Madrid is a growing art district, with an increase of artist studios and schools. The young student population is countered with families comfortably living in the neighborhood.

The site draws the public in as an active park and studio where artists and local community may collaborate.

This mixed use proposal restores significant existing buildings for “open to public” spaces and creates a housing strip hugging these moments.

Courtyards become important play of spaces where pedestrians are led across the site to the center moment of tension.

This tensional area signifies the collaboration of artists, residents, and local communities.

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Cuatro Caminos: Lower Income / Immigrant Neighborhoods

Calle de O’Donn

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Calle de O’Donn

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Chamberi: Affluent / Traditional

The Metro Plan consisted of: A North-South line connecting Cuatro Caminos and Sol A East-West line from Goya to Sol to Ferraz Another line connecting Serrano Plaza Independencia to Diego de Leon

As the Madrid grew, slums, inevitably organized within the urbanscape. In the case of Madrid, the cost of living began to organize with people of higher class making their homes in the center of the city, and the poorer laborers fend for themselves around the outskirts of the city.

Originally, a higher population of inhabitants were in Chamberi, where there was still easy access into the center of Madrid. As the members of higher class citizens fell into Chamberi, though, laborers were forced to move up the current location of Cuatro Caminos.

Art Schools

Around 1900, the census showed a majority of the population in the Tectuan region to be laborers. The main street running through the area, Calle de O’Donnell (later to be named Calle de Bravo Murillo) was lined with construction workers, artisans, merchants and “rag pickers”.

Art Galleries

Line 1 had 8 stations; Cuatro Caminos, Rios Rosas, Iglesia, Chamberi, Bilbao, Tribunal, Gran Via y Sol. 2007

round 600,000 resone of the stops for Otamendi, Carlos esigned this metro

atro Caminos area they owned about arks, churches and

amino Roundabout as also increased, inos. This increase

Subway Garage Existing Small, roughly put together infastructure be- Buildings Taverns

The garage for the train cars was located in Cuatro Caminos. It was designed with multiple “naves”. Each had a different purpose for the cars; parking, review, repair and assembly.

gan to show up in Cuatro Caminos as the population increased. Often only one or two stories, these homes and businesses lined Calle de O’Donnell and other main roads.

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and bars became social places for the residents. Chumbica, pictured, was known to be a cheap and very popular bar at the now Cuatro Caminos Roundabout.

Site of was violent protest This town highly ignored by the govern-in 1917 due ment. “Ragpickers” piled garbage in the cortonersgovernmental negligence of and clean water and other services was lacking for these overworked laborers. This eventually ledCaminos to a violent protest Area of 1917.

Cuatro

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The proposed building wraps around the existing buildings.

Allowing small courtyards to be created and forming spatial relations between the residential and recreational.

The units themselves face the public recreational spaces.

The single lined hallways look outward to the city.

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This sectional sketch explored the creation of the courtyards within the looping building structure.

The existing building (short building on right in sketch) is re-purposed into public spaces, such as a gallery for live in artists to mingle with other residents in the neighborhood. The threshold between the public spaces and the residential building is activated by elevating some residential units.

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Ground Plan

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Site Diagrams

Live - In - Artist Studio

Two Bedroom / Double - Story

One Bedroom

Floor Plans

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The site is a stepped landscape with a lowered park southwest of the site and multistory buildings on the north side. The proposed project adjusted to the stepped landscape and uneven skyline by stepping the series of building that decrease in height from north to south.

Elevated units open up the view and access to the recreational building renovated from the existing shell.

Geo-thermal heating is used to heat the buildings as the near by subways increase the geothermal heat of the area.

Longitudinal Section

Mechanical Room Elevators

Radiant Floor Heating

Plumbing System Rainwater Drainage

Single Lined Hallways Brick Veneer on Residential Units

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Technical Axonometric

Wall Detail

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Cultural Learning Hub New Mexico Pueblo Community, USA Professor: Lynn Paxson The Cultural Learning Hub is a combination of buildings that are connected through outside circulation. Each building has a different function that brings the community closer together using cultural connections. Its close proximity to the Community Academy and the Head Start allows different generations to interact with each other. Increasing the spreading of cultural stories and skills as well as contemporary tools. This space creates a celebration of the Pueblo cultures and traditions while attempting to empower the youth with a deeper understanding of their identity by being able to learn from their elders.

The center of the site is occupied by farm land that experiments with gardening types and styles. This frames the schools to emphasize to the kids the farming technology of Pueblo communities. This farming ground is also connected to the Cultural Learning hub by a path.

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Exterior Visualization of the Hub

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Cultural Learning Hub Floor Plan

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Wall Details

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From the location of the central amphitheater, facing to the North, the two buildings frames a view towards the cultural landmark, Mount Taylor. The amphitheater could be used as a cultural gathering space for various activities including dances.

The ramps into the amphitheater are accessible, designed for a range of generations from children to elders.

The storytelling space within the library mimics the importance of space of the amphitheater, being the only other space that is dug into the ground.

The mica-like glass facade of the storytelling space has a sliver of clear glass facing the direction and latitude of Chaco Canyon.

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Longitudinal Section

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Community Creative Hub Ames, Iowa, USA

Professor: Firat Erdim Project during third year of Architecture School, investigating Landscape and Place’s affect on Architecture. In this project, architectural domes become a manifestation of the material experimentation performed by the neighborhoods and college students around the site.

Located on a parking lot behind a college apartment complex and amidst a coal pile, spare [fire]wood pile and retention ponds, this site becomes a fermenting site for the community to create art together.

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Pile of discarded wood: free fire wood University Owned Coal Supply

University Housing

Water Retention Basins

Site University Campus

Ames Residential

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2020

2030

2040

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Progression of Site Through Time

Site Plan and Sections

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Exploitative Drawings: project exploration is based on variety of explorations with the existing discarded wood.

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Wood and Dome Making Explorations

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Castings

Professor: Firat Erdim Series of material explorations focused on plaster and concrete.

Femininity was a series of casting forms to understand what femininity looks to me. The form is strongly related to draping, pleating and clothing from a cultural background.

Childhood Inscriptions explored the materiality of plaster and concrete together. Created reversely to a inscription into a freshly paved sidewalk, the fingerprint inscriptions were created prior to the concrete base. Here the concrete base supports the fragile and cracked plaster inscriptions.

Faucet explored the ability of plaster to cast an action. As the poured plaster sets, water is pressure sprayed into the sink. This leaves behind a texture reminiscent of the water sprayed, and the details show the delicate paths of the water.

Part 3 of Femininity

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Childhood Inscriptions

Faucet

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Farming Machinery in the Midwest OPN Masterclass Drawing

During a four day Masterclass with Yoshiharu Tsukamoto from Atelier Bow-Wow, we researched the landscape and machinery of Rural Iowa. With a group of five other students, we individually researched different farming machinery, such as irrigation and its physical changes on the landscape. For example the changes in irrigation methods caused changes in farmland organization and affected the underground water sources.

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Ruchi Patel

ruchi.patel977@gmail.com