Design Sheets

I recently put together some 'design sheets', kind of a mini-portfolio, which I thought I would share with you. This is only a small sampling of the work so it is difficult to get a full picture of each project, but here it goes. Click on each image for an enlarged view.PAGE 1 :: This is from my thesis project which explored strategies for intensifying intermodal exchange points of the public transit system in Atlanta, GA. The project looked at three typical conditions in the transit network, which I called primary, secondary, and tertiary node types depending on the sites geographic location in the metropolis, the transit intensity and territorial scale, and the context's density and programmatic mix. The specific sites were chosen based on current proposals for Atlanta's transit system, including a new downtown multi-modal transit hub, the Beltway light-rail proposal, and a series of BRT suburban shuttles. These images are from the proposal for the downtown site, one of the few primary nodes in the city.

PAGE 2 :: The project at the top is a housing project which developed a series of vertical strata which reacted to the contextual and programmatic contingencies: a landscape/parking/townhouse layer that dealt with the sites extreme topography and housing's need for a layered sequence of private, semi-private, and public spaces; a slab condition which creates the required density and a complex assortment of apartment types; and a series of twisted towers that creates an iconic 'skyline' for the project's lakefront site.
The middle project is a group project with my boys Penn and JJ for a bus station in Zacatecas Mexico. The project explored fabric formed concrete, new forms that could be made with this process and fabrication techniques. For the form we developed a series of hollow-core column types that would perform as both structure and as a sustainable infrastructure support system for the project, such as cisterns, gray water filtration, planters, solar energy collection, lightwells, ventilation etc.
The bottom project is series of ceilings that explore digital fabrication and design.


PAGE 3 :: The top project is a courthouse in Allston, MA.
The middle project is at Sirkeci Station in Istanbul where the new tunnel going under the Bosphorous Strait would connect the European and Asian sides of Istanbul. The design begins by redesigning the highway, creating a roundabout that connects the various transit types (water ferry, train, and car) by taxi for fast connections that forms a large public square in the center of the roundabout. A variety of programs were added to further intensify the site such as theatres, a hotel, restaurants, and a market under the raised highway to mitigate the effects of the road.
The bottom project is for a satellite campus of a junior college in the greater Boston area. The site is a big box retail parking lot and the design again involves redesigning the road network to break down the nebulous site structure into a more manageable geography. A series of hybrid buildings were designed to engage the new road system and develop symbiotic relationships between the academic institution and more public and/or commercial institutions to engage the community and leverage financial investments.

Stack City :: Ben Behin

Stack City, Ben Behin, via archinect

Archinect posts an interview with Ben Behin featuring some beautiful images of his amazing graduate thesis from the Harvard GSD which one the prize for best thesis this past spring.
The project, titled Stack City, is a proposal for a zero-carbon development in Ras al Khaimah in the UAE. It uses Jorg Schlaig's "solar chimney power generators" as a jumping off point for re-thinking the role of technology, nature, and utopia in contemporary urban development strategies.

Here are some choice quotes from the interview:

Behin: Here I would refer to Melvin Kranzberg's first law of technology: "Technology is neither good nor bad; nor is it neutral." My intent in this project is neither to celebrate technology, nor to demonize it, but merely to point out that it underlies an emerging form of urbanism, and that it will ultimately be only what we make of it. Technology presents us with a series of choices, with both pitfalls and opportunities. To address them, we require not additional technology, but rather its integration with culture and politics. It is precisely here that I think architecture has a role to play; it can provoke discourse about the ethics which will shape the nature of technology in our future environments. The "machinistic" in Stack City is intended to provide such a provocation.
...
On the other hand, faced with the futility of a positive social/cultural/ecological project for architecture, giving up and regressing to an empty cynicism or retreating into formal and stylistic navel-gazing seems to get us nowhere. I think the answer is to find new ways of being earnest which are, perhaps, more nuanced, and difficult to pin down.
...
Specifically, as you pointed out in a previous discussion, cities are an accumulation of technological infrastructure which enables all the experiences we have in them. I think this is especially true in the "zero-carbon" urban developments that are being proposed today. By articulating this infrastructure as a zone that can itself be occupied, I hope to bring it into the open, and to exploit it architecturally and urbanistically through its relation with the other strata.

Stack City, Ben Behin, via archinect

You should go check out the interview for more great images and thoughts from Mr. Ben Behin.

NewComers: Infranet Lab and New Geographies

Ho-Yeol Ryu, Airport, 2005, via Infranet Blog
InfraNet Lab is a new research organization founded by Mason White and Lola Shepard of Lateral Architecture. The new site for the group also features a blog of the same name which features a great breadth of work, research, and discussion on infrastructure and urbanism. I've long been a fan of Lateral's work and Mason's writing frequently featured on Archinect. Their work often deals with the relationship between suburbia, infrastructure, and geography. Their's is an earnest attempt to transfigure the suburban landscape through the reconfiguration and remodulation of its everyday matter--highway off ramps, big box retail, parking lots, and a nebulous landscape in search of definition. Here is a blurb about the site from its creators:

InfraNet Lab is a research collective probing the spatial byproducts of contemporary resource logistics. The laboratory posits the argument that a body of unique built works continues to arise out of the complex negotiation of, and competition for, biotic and abiotic resources. Operating in a manner similar to infrastructures, these works have evolved to merge landscape, urbanism, and architecture into a sophisticated mutant assemblage of surfaces, containers, and conduits.

'Wall' by Andy Goldsworthy

New Geographies is a new journal created by 'Doctor of Design' students that Harvard's GSD under the direction of Professor Hashim Sarkis. I had the pleasure of taking part in the seminal seminar of the same name a couple years back that I assume generated the idea for the journal. The seminar explored emerging concepts in architecture, landscape and urbanism surrounding the enlarging scale of design, an expanded scope for designers, and a new focus on a 'geographic' approach to design instead of a 'topographic' approach.
The last was one of the most interesting ideas of the seminar to me--a geographic project is one which attempts to reveal the inherent nature of a larger territory through the use of geography itself. According to dictionary.com geography originates from the latin word geographia which means "description of the earth's surface," from ge "earth" + -graphia "description," from graphein "write." A geographic project can be understood as a form of writing on the earth's surface in an attempt to describe it. A topographic project, on the other hand, is one which attempts to meld with the landscape. Geographic techniques might include using a strong geometry which allows topography to register against it, creating a micro-scale version of macro-scale geographic formations (see also image below and here), or any number of techniques used by land artists (Andy Goldsworthy's work, shown above, was one strong influence in the seminar).

Mansilla + Tunon, Museum of Cantabria

I have not had a chance to read the issue yet (being in China has me a little out of the print publication loop) but my buddy Chris picked me up a copy a couple of weeks ago and I can't wait to get my hands on it! It features articles by Charles Waldheim, Bruno Latour, and Sarkis himself. Here is the blurb about the journal from its creators:

For more than a decade, architecture and urbanism have been seen as the spatial manifestation of the widespread effects of globalization. As cities became denser, they intensified in their horizontal and vertical thickness with large-scale urban development projects, yet they also became dispersed with urban sprawl. Within the design disciplines, key words such as rapid urbanization, mapping, networks, and flows affected the analyses and interpretation of emergent mutations on the spatial and urban dimension; and design attitudes toward this expanding scale tended to oscillate between research/mapping on emergent urban/global networks and the extra-large (iconic) landmark. On one hand, the production and popularity of design in contemporary culture has increased immensely, and on the other, designers are being compelled to address questions—related to infrastructural, ecological, regional, and cultural issues—that previously were confined to the domains of other disciplines. By encouraging designers to reexamine their tools and develop strategies to link attributes that had been understood to be either separate from each other or external to the design disciplines, those questions opened up a range of technical, formal, and social repertoires for architecture.

You can purchase the first issue of New Geographies here.
(My apologies to Hashim and the rest of the NewGeo gang for my bastardization of their concepts)