Colleen Sloan Design Portfolio

PORTFOLIO Colleen Sloan

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EDUCATION

May 2022

Harvard Graduate School of Design Cambridge, MA Master of Landscape Architecture

COLLEEN SLOAN csloan@gsd.harvard.edu

December 2017

University of Virginia Charlottesville, VA Major: Urban and Environmental Planning; Minor: Architecture ‘Sustainable Europe’ Study Abroad Program

June 2017

(512) 422-7841

327 Highland Ave, Unit 1, Somerville, MA 02144

ACADEMIC EXPERIENCE Research Assistant Jill Desimini, Harvard GSD Head Teaching Assistant Jill Desimini, Core IV Landscape Studio, Harvard GSD Teaching Assistant Jill Desimini, From Fallow, Harvard GSD Research Assistant Montserrat Bonvehi Rosich, Harvard GSD Teaching Assistant Karen Janosky, ETT II, Harvard GSD

June 2020 - Present January 2022 - May 2022 August 2021 - December 2021 June 2021 - December 2021 January 2021 - May 2021

PROFESSIONAL EXPERIENCE

Accenture Federal Services Arlington, VA

November 2018 - July 2019

Management Consulting Senior Analyst • Developed sales growth strategy for various federal accounts, and research for HUD’s Strategic Plan items.

• Team Lead for Accenture’s internal NextGen team in charge of increasing use of Adobe Creative Suite in client work.

National Capital Planning Commission Washington, D.C.

June 2016 - August 2016

Intern, Policy and Research • Created a guide to diagnose the inefficient reviewing process of penthouse plans in D.C. by analyzing policies pertaining to the Height Act, D.C. Zoning, and the Comprehensive Plan.

Lyall Design Architects Norfolk, VA

June 2015 - August 2015

Intern, Architectural Design • Created graphics for current projects, using primarily SketchUp and Adobe Photoshop.

LEADERSHIP EXPERIENCE, AWARDS + PUBLICATIONS Sloan, Colleen. “Figure 2.3”, Drawing contribution for Jill Desimin’s written piece in The Routledge Handbook of Urban Landscape Research, edited by Kate Bishop and Linda Corkery, forthcoming 2022.

I bring a combination of my landscape architecture education as well as my background in urban planning and architecture to reimagine public space through design. I am interested in the opportunities for interaction among people, material ecology, and infrastructure/industry, and how these three forces interact to renegotiate the boundaries of public and private space and produce new ecological systems. In my free time, I enjoy hiking, drawing and exploring new cities, domestic and abroad.

Featured Project in Boston Public Library Exhibition, Boston Public Library, Maps Collection Featured Projects for Green New Deal Superstudio Harvard GSD End of Semester Nominated Work Harvard GSD NextGen Change Adobe Super Users Team Lead Accenture Member of the Raven Society University of Virginia

Spring 2022 Spring 2022 Fall 2020 + Spring 2021 Fall 2020 December 2018 - July 2019 June 2016 - Present

SKILLS Software: Adobe Creative Suite, AutoCAD, Rhino, Grasshopper, Bison, Lumion, ArcGIS Pro and ArcMAP, SketchUp Physical Models: 3D Printing, CNC Routing, Laser Cutting, Drafting, Sketching

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CONTENTS 01_WASTE AS COMMONS Harvard GSD, MLA Thesis: Landscapes of Repulsion: Hidden in Plain Site

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Harvard GSD, Core III: Dredgescape: Forms of Borrowed Matter

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02_HISTORY AS CATALYST Harvard GSD, Option Studio: The Lincoln Avenue Cookbook

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Harvard GSD, Core I: City Hall as Connector

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03_DESIGN AS PROCESS Harvard GSD, Core I: Ashes to Ashes University of Virginia, Architecture Core I: POD Living Washington University in St. Louis, Architecture Discovery: Fold + Tuck

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01_WASTE AS COMMONS

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LANDSCAPES OF REPULSION: HIDDEN IN PLAIN SITE Harvard Graduate School of Design, MLA Thesis 2022 Author: Colleen Sloan Advisor: Sergio Lopez-Pineiro

This thesis interrogates landscape architecture’s participation in the cleaning and concealing of repugnant sites of industry through the creation of a public mountain range in Iowa constructed from the wastes of the industrial hog industry.

The constructed mountains, dubbed the De Soto Range, reveal the repulsions of industry through the collapsing in space of pleasure landscapes and disgust. In doing so, the site becomes a battleground of differing political ideologies, motives, and backgrounds connected by a common reality.

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The De Sotos are understood as not a relic of industry but an ongoing landscape system, both natural and artificial, that produces its own by-products and risks.

The processes of the site are dependent on the various landforming typologies shown below, where each landform serves an anthropogenic purpose.

Testing Typologies and Scales through Modeling Combustion Zones Hot Springs

New Material Additions

High Water Content Waste Containment Bamboo

Low Water Content Waste and Compost

Dewatering Facility and Material Processing

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The plan of the mountain, depicted here for the year 2075, shows the layering of material over time. The various colors represent time as well as the variations in the color and texture of the material itself.

Vegetation in the low-lying areas includes subtropical Bamboo and Banana Trees supported by the heat production of the site.

Plantings become more temperate moving out and up from the center, such as the western peaks planted with Magnolia and Osage Orange trees forming designs such as large spirals of vegetation.

On a clear day, the tallest peak can be spotted across a large portion of Iowa and even parts of Minnesota and Nebraska.

The tectonics and construction of each tall peak ensures structural stability, material containment, as well as allowing for the traversing of pedestrians and vehicles.

The De Sotos are a spectacle of disgust, a working landscape, a public park, and a political and social tool of expression demanding to be seen.

Isometric cutaway of constructed peak.

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DREDGESCAPE: FORMS OF BORROWED MATTER Harvard Graduate School of Design, Core III 2020 Author: Colleen Sloan Instructor: Sergio Lopez-Pineiro New Bedford, Massachusetts has become a center for material exchange where seafood derived from outside the harbor is processed and exported to consumers, while its toxic sediment, laden with PCBs, is dredged and exported for burial in a landfill outside of Detroit, Michigan. This project seeks to reimagine the potential for waste material as a resource for new types of public spaces and material commons.

Detroit, MI

New Bedford, MA

Phased timeline Phase 0: Prepare the ground

Phase 3

Phase 2

Years 8-10

Phase 1: 1 year Oats + Field Peas Phase 2: 2-3 years Sorghum-Sudangrass + AM Fungi Phase 3: 4+ years American Beech and Sugar Maple

Years 6-8

Phase 3

Years 4-6 Phase 3 Years 2-4

Phase 1

Years 1-2

Phase 0

230 m

In Detroit, the landfill that houses a significant portion of contaminated dredge from New Bedford reintroduces the once ubiquitous Maple and Beech trees in a phased capping and planting scheme to create a public park for exploring.

195 m

The proposed intervention for New Bedford outer harbor includes an archipelago of spoil islands, reimagining the lifecycle of dredge waste through the introduction of phytoremediating plant materials.

Site Details and Palette

Quercus alba

Pinus rigida

Prunus serotina

Myrica pensylvanica

Solidago sempervirens

Ammophila breriligulata

Spartina patens

Spartina alterniflora

Zostera

Fagus grandifolia

Acer saccharum

AM fungi

Sorghum x drummondii

Pisum sativum

The Islands

Avena fatua

The Landfill

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Detroit, MI

New Bedford, MA

Primary dredging channel

Non-commercial barges can navigate between islands

2100 2080 2060 2040

Natural deposition occurs on the New Bedford-facing side creating new underwater ecologies

The layering of Maple and Birch trees in the final phases of the Detroit landfill not only echo the layering of toxic material within the landfill, but make connections to the layered effect of the archipelagos in New Bedford, hundreds of miles away.

The spoil islands envelop the harbor. The constructed sides of the islands that face New Bedford are planted according to coastal slope zones, and are imagined to shift over time as sea level rise meets each stepped height in the coming years.

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02_HISTORY AS CATALYST

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THE LINCOLN AVENUE COOKBOOK Harvard Graduate School of Design, Option Studio 2021 Authors: Colleen Sloan + Scarlet Rendleman Instructors: Gina Ford + Rhiannon Sinclair

Drawing by Colleen Sloan

The Lincoln Avenue Cookbook is a collaboration with local community members of New Rochelle, NY, Walter Brown and Linda Tarrant-Reid to piece together the cultural history of the Lincoln Avenue Neighborhood, prior to the desegregation and destruction of Lincoln Elementary School and construction of Memorial Highway that cleared homes and local businesses. This cookbook serves as not only a repository of food and culture, but also a proposal for a healthy and inclusive future for the Lincoln Avenue Neighborhood.

Link to full book: https://issuu.com/virginia277/docs/sloan_rendleman_lincolncookbook_final

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Given that our focus for the project was around food and culture, our designs for four significant public spaces around the neighborhood are organized in the book by season and in harmony with seasonal food production activities. Excerpts from the Spring chapter are shown here.

Left: Drawings by Colleen Sloan and lower diagram by Scarlet Rendleman Middle: Recipe drawn/transcribed by Scarlet Rendleman Right: Drawing by Colleen Sloan + Scarlet Rendleman

The half-circle diagram below illustrates the goals and activities of Linda’s grow! Community Garden in New Rochelle which we used as a guide for our proposals.

Throughout the cookbook are family recipes from our two community advocates as well as proposed locations where food items may be sourced, publicly available kitchens, and new public spaces to eat and gather around food.

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One of the spaces of intervention is in Lincoln Park, where the Lincoln School once stood and where Linda’s grow! Community Garden currently resides. The proposal includes seating, BBQ grills, new paths of circulation, a memorial for the school, and a greenhouse to extend the growing season.

Drawing by Colleen Sloan

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CITY HALL AS CONNECTOR Harvard Graduate School of Design, Core I 2019 Author: Colleen Sloan Instructor: Emily Wettstein Anchored by the iconic Boston City Hall, the site is reimagined to emphasize the space as both connector and place of rest. A primary route of circulation, accentuated by Honeylocusts, sweeps the busy commuter from north to south while pinched contours forming stairs and benches invite visitors and employees of City Hall to sit and stay awhile among the Little Blue Stem grasses.

Study models for grading and vegetation experimentation.

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Tree planted into slope

Grasses Structural soil beneath planting

Sitting step among grassy strips

Concrete Stairs

Concrete hardscaping Concrete Supports

Concrete Brick Pavers

The steeper sloped areas have three primary conditions including stairs, densely vegetated slopes, and sitting steps integrated into the slope.

Gravel

Compacted soil

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03_DESIGN AS PROCESS

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ASHES TO ASHES Harvard Graduate School of Design, Core I 2019 Author: Colleen Sloan Instructor: Emily Wettstein Ashes to Ashes takes the form of a courtyard project that incorporates the material ash, the month July, and the time 10 pm. The design is a microcosm of a much larger process of fire and succession, as depicted below, as well as contributing to discourse about the force of nature and the ways in which we attempt to control it to shape the regrowth of the land.

Year 0

Year 1

Point of no return

Year 2

Year 5

Year 10

Year 20

Year 40

Year 75

Year 100

Year 101

Peak Destruction cycle begins again

Decay

Fire cycle Woody species begin to grow and die making room for new growth

H2O Soil

Biomass

Plant Litter

Nutrient cycling Charred trees decompose

ash

H2O + CaCO3

Nutrient from ash diminish over time

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Time

Site Pre-Fire

Site Post-Fire

Site Post-Fire Phase 2

Site Post-Fire Current State

Site Future Projection

Pioneering Species

Tree Canopy

H2O CaCO3

Lichen

Christmas Fern

Vibernum

Pin Cherry

CaCO3 H2O Ash

CaCO3 H2O

CaCO3

Topography

Walls and Circulation

Directionality of Run-off

Usage over time shapes the landscape

The process begins with a controlled burn of a grid of pine trees. Topography is altered through cut, fill and walls to shape the regrowth of the site over time.

As natural processes and intentional plantings take place, one can begin to imagine what the site may look like in future projections.

In the final plan, crosses represent the pine trees, post-burn, where nutrient run off collects in the low points creating new fertile zones of regrowth in white.

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ARCHITECTURE CORE I: POD LIVING University of Virginia, Core I 2015 Authors: Colleen Sloan, Cory Page, Sicheng Zhou Instructor: Anselmo Canfora For this studio project, my group designed a 100% recyclable living pod. We used recycled Pepsi crates from the nearby Pepsi plant in Charlottesville, VA as our material of choice. Below are studies in the tectonics and light qualities of the material during the design process.

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FOLD + TUCK Washington University in St. Louis, Architecture Discovery Course 2013 Author: Colleen Sloan Instructors: Lindsey Stouffer and Catalina Freixas The rules from Phase 01 were translated onto a plan that would inform the design of a three-dimensional cube that would become a folly, below, where line weights determine the cuts, folds and tucks.

In Phase 01 of this three-week project, I created a set of rules, above, to abide by based on the origin of a line and where it intersects on the page. This criteria became the basis for the phases that followed.

The same set of rules were applied again to a landscape to situate the folly upon, above.

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Lastly, the plan was translated into a landscape comprised of balsa wood.The lines that form both the folly and the landscape tuck under, into and over themselves blurring the distinction between site and structure.

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