Graduate Portfolio

Taylor Hart

Portfolio

Selected Works

Studio

The Future is Fusion

Nuclear Power Plant Community

Occonee, SC

Fall 2022

Partner:

Katherine Price

Nuclear energy started to gain popularity as a reliable, affordable source of energy for communities in the 1950s. This energy source is considered a technological and modern wonder during this era. Throughout the 1970s and 1980s, power plants were built in large numbers in countries all over the world despite some concerns in the scientific community about nuclear accidents, the storage of radioactive waste, and nuclear proliferation.

What technologies and power generation methods can replace nuclear power once existing plants are out of commission, and how should these technologies be incorporated throughout the existing site and the landscape of upstate South Carolina? Should energy generation and infrastructure be confined to certain places or integrated into the fabric of communities?

What ideas about landscape, technology, infrastructure, and architecture integration into meaningful place-making, and what can this mean for other decommissioned nuclear power plants and the surrounding communities? How can places that brought economic prosperity and environmental and health risks to their communities be made accessible and safe?

The Garden Community Center

A Dream Center for Dreams with Open Arms Organization Calhoun Falls, SC

Spring 2022

Partner: Katherine Price

LaSean Tutt, founder of the non-profit, Dreams With Open Arms. Dreams with Open Arms was designed to serve the “underserved and underrepresented populations.” It teaches resiliency by focusing on the skills that the younger generation needs to become both self-empowered and self-sufficient. This organization primarily focuses on teen pregnancy prevention, but it also teaches exercise, nutrition, and how to foster healthy relationships.

LaSean’s goal for the Dream Center is to facilitate the growth of an equitable economy for Calhoun Falls and the greater Abbeville area. She believes this will be achieved with programs that promote professional development, financial, entrepreneurial growth and development of equitable pathways to success.

Phase 1

Phase 2

Phase 3

Traveling Trash

Upcycling Textile School

Asheville, NC

Spring 2021

With the expectation of more detailed design development than in previous projects, the design of a residential textile design school for Asheville, North Carolina also has the requirement of creating transcendent architecture through space, light, tectonics, and site relationships. This project is ultimately a mixed-use building/complex/compound and not a traditional college/university dormitory, which tend to be single-use buildings. However, for a school, dormitories are obviously a useful precedent for relatively short-term student housing. Questions to consider: What kind of textile school is this? How does this textile school relate to Asheville? What is your textile inspiration and how does this relate to your building design across a range of scales, including such aspects as landscape design, structural design, spatial organization, facade and envelope design, and design details?

GROVE ARCADE SHOPPING MALL

GREEN MOTHER GOODS ECO-FRIENDLY RETAIL

SUGAR BRITCHES USED CLOTHING

BATTERY PARK SENIOR LIVING

UPCYCLING TEXTILE SCHOOL

ST LAWRENCE BASILICA

HARRAH’S CHEROKEE CENTER THEATER

HOTEL INDIGO

Textileinspiration

Second Floor

A Storefront for Philosophy

A Vessel for Enlightenment

Greenville, SC

Spring 2020

An entrepreneurial philosopher is looking to build a “Storefront for Philosophy.” Inspired by Plato’s Allegory of the Cave, the client want a transcendental space where daylight and shadow are the primary elements and where interesting and inspiring spaces more than practical functions. They want architecture—a “vessel for (en)light(enment). They tell you that if they just wanted physical space, they could have rented some low-rent space in an old strip mall or a metal warehouse building instead of purchasing a downtown building site. Being in the busy downtown is also important for the “storefront.” The philosopher-client selected this site for its interaction with the public and to draw in passersby. The Storefront for Philosophy will be something like a school and have a small shop, cafe, and library. Aside from the small shop/cafe, the most important functions are differently sized spaces for variously sized gatherings,. But again, more important than the functions are the qualities of the spaces.

The Beacon Chapel

Non-denominational chapel

Clemson, SC Fall 2020

A non-denominational spiritual center and memorial place for Clemson University, that will extend the intellectual, spatial, atmospheric, material investigations, while considering site context and program planning. After decades of discussions about the idea, a memorial chapel is now being built (at the time of this studio: Fall 2020) on the Clemson campus south of the Cooper Library quad. Although the building is now under construction, this project imagines an alternative design on the same site, emphasizing qualities of light, space, materials, and landscape/contextual relationships and interactions. Context and the meanings of form, as well as interior spatial qualities, are critical aspects of this design project. This building design is welcoming, symbolically and functionally, for all of the religious, agnostic, and independently reflective people that make up the otherwise secular university environment.

History + Theory

History of Architecture: Taxonomy

Fall 2020

Griffero, Tonino. “Atmospheres: Aesthetics of Emotional Spaces.” Google Books. Routledge, April 8, 2016. https://books.google.com/books?id=8CbtCwAAQBAJ.

“Threshold: Meaning in the Cambridge English Dictionary.” Accessed September 25, 2020. https://dictionary.cambridge.org/dictionary/english/threshold..

Can a history of architecture be written only by focusing on the atmosphere of the threshold? According to the Cambridge Dictionary, the threshold is “the floor of an entrance to a building or room.” The threshold is one of the most meaningful and powerful architecture elements because it is the glue that adheres spaces together to create buildings. From the modern Western perspective, the threshold is typically the doorway connecting two spaces: typically, the transition from inside to outside. This definition of threshold in architecture does not apply to all architecture across time and cultures. However, the atmospheric change element that occurs due to a threshold can be applied to all architecture, concluding that the threshold’s atmosphere can be used to taxonomize architecture. This lens can expand and flex the conventional organization of architecture by interpreting the type of threshold’s human experience instead of just understanding its threshold. Is the conventional approach limiting architecture by making assumptions, such as making the program more important to categorization before the atmosphere? Viewing architecture through the lens of atmospheric threshold allows space for interpreting architecture drawings with an element that cannot necessarily be drawn - atmosphere. Using this lens will make breakthroughs in traditional taxonomies of architecture by looking beyond the lines recorded on paper. The atmosphere is “…hardly defined not because it is rare and unusual but, on the contrary, because it is as omnipresent – even though at times unnoticed – as the emotive situation…there is probably no situation that is totally deprived of an atmospheric charge.” The concept of the atmosphere is an essential element to architecture because architecture is designed around the human experience. To represent this idea and lens, it is best to taxonomize in plan and section. The spatial quality of the threshold creates the atmosphere. Therefore, it is appropriate to view the plan and sections to determine the categorization of the space. There are different elements of thresholds that can be discovered in plan and section that create the atmosphere. In plan, the threshold can create different atmospheres by the width of the opening, the thickness of the wall/threshold, the scale of the space being entered, number of layers creating the threshold, number of thresholds into the same space, and the circulation path(s) created or emphasized by the threshold(s). In section, the threshold can create different atmospheres by the height of the threshold, the height of the space being entered, the thickness of the wall/threshold, the scale of the space being entered, and changes in ceilings if multiple layers of the threshold. The variations and combinations of elements will determine the atmospheric taxonomy of the space. Viewing through this lens allows for the period and geography of a building to be of minimum influence. The possible connections through this lens will open so many opportunities to connect different time periods and geographies. When categorizing, the importance of period and geography is a Western conventional idea that limits the potential understanding and discovery of architecture. This research’s main goal is to discover connections of architecture through the human experience, not through related periods or geography.

Production + Assembly

S+P WHITLOCK HOUSE

BUILDING PERFORMANCE

[09] FINISHES

09 21

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09 64 00 - Wood Flooring

Wood Strip Flooring for General Use Bamboo Flooring Planks ½” with tongue and groove

09 91 00 - Painting

Painting Applications

[12] FURNISHINGS

12 35 30 - Residential Casework

Residential Casework - Prefabricated and finished on site

Residential Countertops - Apple Martini Green Recycled Countertop - Eco Resin

[22] PLUMBING

22 03 00 - Plumbing

Plumbing equipment for domestic water Natural Gas Systems

22 14 29 - Domestic Water Pumps

22 40 00 - Plumbing Fixtures

[23] HEATING, VENTILATING, AND AIR-CONDITIONING

23 03 00 - Heating, Ventilating, And Air-Conditioning

Radiant Heating Units

Hydronic piping - PEX Radiant Tubing

Components: Motor, Meters, Gages, General-duty Valves

23 56 16 - Packaged Solar Heating Equipment Photovoltaics Panels - Residential flat

AND HANDLING

Visualization

Overlap Distort Bore

3D Print Model

Integrated

Poject Delivery System

Engineering & Interdisciplinary Science Complex

Managing Integrated Project Delivery

San Diego, CA

Fall 2022

Partners: Adam Hoots, Ameet Gupta, Aarons Wells

The mission of this project is to understand the original Owner requirements, understand where the current progress is failing to meet them, develop a plan to get back in compliance with the Owner requirements, and communicate that effectively to Clark Construction Group.

This project is set up as a pure IPD project operating under an Integrated Form Of Agreement (IFOA). This is a tri-party agreement between the Owner, Architect and General Contractor that also pulls in the designer’s major consultants and the GC’s major subcontractors. The concept is that all parties are to have their actual out-of-pocket costs covered individually by contract payments, but their profit must come from a pro-rata share of a group pool, the amount of which is dependent on how efficiently the project has been run.

Follow to our team’s recorded presentation https://youtu.be/Dv4mUeAstt8

Competition

The Lokal Tabo

Rebuilding Siargao: Community Center + Urban Interventions Siargao, Philippines

Summer 2022

Partners: Jeff Shryer + Kacy Lyvers

Partner: Ayla Wooten