Holly Smithberger Student Work 2024

Holly Smithberger Portfolio 2023

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Comfort Zones Fall 2023 Professor Brian Phillips

Plan view showing the projects expansion into the surrounding site

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Interior Rendering Showing cohabitational housing

The proposed housing project for new arrivals to Philadelphia is centered around the act of planting roots, both literally through the emphasis on community growing, as well as mestaphorically by incorporating programmatic elements in support of the Philadelphia Welcoming Center. Courtywards organize neighborhoods of housing at varying degrees of vertical interaction with the mall. These courtyards serve as public space, meant to create community while encouraging moments of solidarity through interconnectedness with one another as well as nature. The courtyards are lined with operable greenhouses made of CLT and PCP. The shell affords occupants full autonomy over their climate, both for personal comfort levels and greenspaces. The opportunity to curate climate offers the preservation and sharing of culinary and agricultural traditions otherwise lost to migrants during their entrance to another country, or through the ongoing climate crisis. The project taps into the malls existing heating and cooling systems, subverting the mall’s conpicious consumption of climate changing fossil fuels. The housing’s upward facing ventillation tower serves both as a cooling strategy as well as an opportunity for community sanctuary via third spaces. These sanctuary spaces act as a third space embedded into communities and used as they see fit to ptovide rest and resolute as they transition into life in Philadelphia.

A wide array of unity types are dispersed throughout each climate community to sustain civic life within each cluster and across the development.

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Section Perspective

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Second Floor Plan HOUSING LAYOUT DIAGRAM Neighborhood Layout SINGLE FAMILY UNITS

LIVING SPACE

COHABITATIONAL UNITS

COMMON SPACE

HOUSING LAYOUT DIAGRAM SINGLE OCCUPANT UNITS

GREEN SPACE

HOUSING LAYOUT DIAGRAM

Neighborhood Layout SINGLE FAMILY UNITS

LIVING SPACE

COHABITATIONAL UNITS

COMMON SPACE

SINGLE OCCUPANT UNITS

GREEN SPACE

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Housing is dispersed across the roofscape intersecting below levels of the mall at varying heights according to optimal daylighting.

This facades operability and varying degrees of shading and ventillation offer inhabitants autonomy over their climate.

Climate autonomy given to every unit means a variety of micro climates within a single housing community.

Handmade Model showing relationship between materiality and the housing to mall relationship. Made using wood, paint, and corrugated acrylic.

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The Festival of Autonomous Futures

Spring 2023 Professor Eduardo Rega

Plan view showing the projects expansion into the surrounding site

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Section Axon Highlighting circulation between individual modules and occupancy of the tmeporary structures

The proposed Long Festival of Autonomous Futures is a speculative project which aims to create alternative futures for Chinatown North, a Philadelphia neighborhood experiencing rapid gentrification fueled by the development of the Rail Park Project. The Long festival of Autonomous Futures will invite local and global architects, community organizers, and designers to the site for the opportunity to participate in a community centered design-build festival aimed to prototype new means of urban life and land stewardship. The Project is organized around a series of horizontal registers of metal grid, which serve as the structural foundation for projects to be built on. The Long Festival will invite participants to create spaces for living, working, food-growing, flea markets, and a plethora of additional urban typologies which ground Chinatown North in their identity as an artists neighborhood with Industrial Roots.

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Registers of structural grid organize the construction and dispersal of individual programs throughout the site

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Rendering showing the projects relationship to the viaduct as well as communities engagement with the project.

Rendering showing interaction with the tempoarary structures

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Porcelain Resurgence Scheneck-Woodman Competion Spring 2023 Holly Smithberger, Regina Gonano, Loopz Lopez, Benjamin Oliver

Exterior Detail: done by Gonano, Lopez, Oliver, and Smithberger

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Interior Render, done by Gonano, Lopez, Oliver, and Smithberger

The proposed ceramics market within the existing Philadelphia Wholesale Drug Company (1929) factory will be not only be a source of neighborhood economic activity but of social capital as well. Ceramics studios incorporated into the market will offer local artists a space to expand economic and creative opportunities with one another as well as the community as a whole. The proposed ceramics market will seize the opportunity to create a third space within Callowhill centered on creative expression and local artistry. The aim of the project is to redefine ceramic production in Callowhill as a market which looks inwards for inspiration surrounding both economic strategy and craftsmanship. Blue and White Chinese porcelain was chosen to be defamiliarized due to its historical, economic, material, and aesthetic context. The fragility of the material recontextualized as a robust industrial element, pipes, entrenches the lost Philadelphia ceramic and porcelain industry back in Callowhill as a celebration of praxis not solely production. Releasing exhausted heat from kilns within the studio spaces, the pipes will serve both functional and ornamental purposes. Callowhill’s connection both geographically and socially to the adjacent Chinatown neighborhood as well as its new ceramic industry’s departure from the existing free market economics precedent set by the Western World is represented in the choice of blue and white Chinese porcelain. Historically a good marketed to the middle and upper class, the material will be defamiliarized through its industrial application via scale of application onto pipes in a neighborhood often overlooked.

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Elevation Render done by Smithberger, Gonano, and Lopez

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PMA Expansion & Boathouse Fall 2022 Professor Daniel Markiewicz

Interior Detail Render

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Elevation Rendered showing the building aging and changing with the site over time on the left, and the building as built today on the right

When the world and its environments, people, beliefs, and values are facing tremendous change and challenge on an accelerated timeline, architecture can take a position not just as shelter or comfort or displays of wealth but as a symbolic basis of our collective rituals. The proposed PMA exhibition expansion and boathouse on the existing Fairmount waterworks will work around three core principles, evolution, revolution, and multiplicities. The building is adaptive to changing environments and changing programmatic needs (day to day and throughout the building’s lifespan). Creating a third space in a community that responds to the multiplicity of user needs. Evolution. The building’s facades and, in turn, the spaces within them are metaphorically carved away by the Schuykill, evolving in a relationship similar to that of a rock evolving with water. 3 actions are taking place on the general massing, erosion, fracture, and fissure. Revolution. The site has a history of adaptive reuse. First, the waterworks, then a public pool, then an aquarium, and now a boathouse and exhibition space. The new building will not stop there. The design will be one that is able to exist when the institutions which uphold its validity (both culturally and monetarily) are gone. Multiplicities. The building will not solely be an exhibition space and a formally separate boathouse. The two programs will be in constant dialogue with one another. The spaces are not binary; the spaces allow for multiplicities of circulation, uses, and experiences.

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Section Cut Drawing

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site context render showing kayakers using the boathouse Handmade Model using plastic, paint, plaster and wood.

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Site Plan

First Floor Plan

Second Floor Plan

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Metamorphosis Chamber Fall 2022 Professor Daniel Markiewicz Julius Quartey-Papafio, Holly Smithberger, Nick Wong, and Zoyce Zhang

Narrative Render: 3-D Modeled by Smithberger, rendered by Wong

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Model made of 1/4” plywood, 1/8” MDF board, CNC’d scultpor’s foam block, 1” metal pipes, spray paint, rockite, 3/4” wooden dowels

After being given the task of creating a sarcophagus for our last four projects, my group and I wanted to think about the role both culturally and functionally of a sarcophagus and the stories it tells. Historically Sarcophagi are meant to crystallize the deceased by adorning them in gold and jewels or sculpting heroic stories pertaining to their inhabitant's legacy. The sarcophagus has no role culturally in the question of what happens posthumous, but is merely a means of validating the person or thing’s significance during its life. However, the word sarcophagus in ancient Greek means flesh eating stone, due to their construction out of limestone in Greece for its speculated ability to accelerate the decomposition process.

The functional purpose of a sarcophagus wasn’t to preserve the person, as is its purpose culturally, but to create a void in the absence of the deceased. We wanted to find a way to adorn our sarcophagus and give it form not by historicizing or creating monument to the past objects but by suggesting modes of how the void they left can be filled. We extrapolated fours means of transformation: rebirth, evolution, growth, and uplifting, from our previous four projects and used them to answer the question of what can formally inhabit the space left.

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Orthographic Drawings (Plan, Section, and Elevation) done by Smithberger Axonometric Drawings: Done by Smithberger Assembly Diagrams: Done by Quartey-Papafio and Wong Relief Analysis: Done by Smithberger and Zhang Narrative Diagram: Done by Quartey-Papafio

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Penn Fashion Show Poster Art Spring 2023 Work for Pennlooks Graphics Committee

Concept and Poster Art used for the 2023 Penn Charity Fashion Show. The theme of the 2023 show is “Verdant Renaissance: Nature’s Reclamation.” Lush vines and wildlife renew an urban landscape in a way that’s never been seen before— a take over of post-industrial ruins that lets nature run wild . Images and phrases from a collective moodboard as well as gown designs by Iris Van Herpen were photoshopped, reworked, digitally remodeled, and rendered to create promotional art to adverstise the show.

All work including A.I. image generation, photoshopping, modeling, and rendering done by Holly Smithberger for PennLooks at the University of Pennsylvania.

Poster Design #1.5

Poster Design #2.3

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