FIRM: Florencia Pita & Co. in partnership with Quezada Architects
ROLE: Project Manager / Lead Designer
5th Ave, NYC, constructed 2020
A project that questions the temporality of architecture within modern culture by creating pop-up venues within DTLA. Architectural trends are updated into a “slang aesthetic” where each space visually represents a particular word while maintaining the ability to change as popular culture shifts. These momentary spaces, represented by a large 3D image relief, have the ability to not only be physically non-permanent but suggest a digital presence through interactive AR, making the experience transitory through the use of a mobile device. This project creates something new by drawing from the linguistics of slang and updating the recognizable to fit the desires of popular experience today.
thesis advisor: Hernan Diaz Alonso
We took a previously designed project and developed it through built construction documents. Here a multi-use high-rise that acts as a flower market can be seen.
The siding and roofs were developed as a textured plastic (marble print) FRP panel and occasional glazing. Half of the building was constructed using steel beams and columns, where the other used concrete construction techniques.
Within this class, we held conversations with an FRP panel construction company, and even made FRP “mock-up” panels for our siding.
Team: Alayna Davidson, Asmaa Abu Assaf, Julia Arnold, Ning Yi Lui, Cisem Saglam, and Weiti Wang
Architecture is changing in front of us, as architectural concept thinking is becoming more and more a way to see, understand and operate in the ever-changing world. As an overall strategy or some kind of pre-meaning, this project proposed a re-examination of the possibility of architectural thinking applied as an act of dual and parallel scale and augmented behaviors between architecture and health fashion. As an extension of this interest, this project focused more specifically on the degree to which body architecture and architecture could be interpreted as an accumulative mutation of interactions, or as having a new potential for integration.
The studio aimed to use architecture and fashion, or body architecture, as a way to increase and improve the lives of people with health conditions or disabilities, creating new forms of life, and integration between the home and its inhabitants, as new ways of life synthesis. Bringing the architecture of the body and architecture of the house together in a very literal manner, not as healing elements, but understanding these operations as opportunities for new individuality and a way of self-empowerment.
Instructor: Hernan Diaz Alonso and Rachael McCall
bench made from cotton and plywood
Paper box is an introduction to the description of space through measuring, drawing and modeling a room. Measurements are taken of a room that includes features like doors, windows, and vents.
The model is an elevation of the space which looks as if it has been folded out from its upright position and flattened into the same plane as the plan. This developed surface interior is a representational technique to show the internal rather than the external elevations.
Once the model was created, projections of light were used to trace shadows. Graphic content was then added to the image of the developed surface.
This project was an investigation into the future of the architectural detail. Beginning with the question, “what is an architectural detail today?”, this project considered a range of critical positions on the issue, and tested their outcome through the design and fabrication of an architectural detail.
The project was to redesign a stair in relation to the Eames House. Within this project we found ourselves designing a stair in regard to the autonomous or subervise detail and the detail as abstraction. This stair, through a series of repetitions, hides the true, joint detail and leaves the aesthetic detail. This makes the visible details abnormal, and the true, join details unexpected. In reference to the Eames House, this stair is clearly an autonomous detail, looking nothing like anything within the house, yet works in parallel as a detail of abstraction, hiding the true construction. While the original stairs within the house do use wood and metal, this new version takes the simplified detail as motif, and revamps the design as an aesthetic architectural stair that makes a statement of its own.
Team: Alayna Davidson, Asmaa Abu Assaf, Julia Arnold, and Heidi A.Y.
instructor: Dwayne Oyler
In Today’s universe, Beinecke is nicknamed the “jewelry box” symbolizing the opaque safety box nature that encapsulates the precious rare books and symbolizing the knowledge held by Yale.
Flipping the switch, in a new universe the “jewelry box” now becomes the symbolic “crown jewel.” The fragile structure sits on the site paying reference to the original location and its surroundings by getting close, but touching nothing. Taking up half of the original volume mass, the library becomes a piece of jewelry, dressing Yale for extravagance.
Unlike before, the books are now held in an underground vault, accessible from the building next to it on site (woodly hall). This storage vault is never seen above, but is mimicked by a floral cave paying homage to the outdoor sculpture gallery of the existing Beinecke.
As you make your way up the building, you can see an outdoor study or reflective space, underneath a canopy of porcelain flowers.
And as you make your way back down and view the jewel from the site of the cave, the fragile jewel of Yale calls the existence of the fragile book collection held below, wile gracefully exposing this knowledge as a porcelain sculpture for all to view.
instructor: Hernan Diaz Alonso and Rachael McCall
A project that explored the potential of optical effects in a digital and physical environment. Becoming familiar with color interaction, scripting, video making, UV ink printing and AR personal device capabilities this project engaged in a conversation on the ambiguous power of contemporary materials and their unparalleled ability to produce new forms of imagination.
instructor: Elena Manferdini and Andrea Cadioli
In this project we approached the concept of a large mixed-use development as a problem of cities, and more closely as specific objects made of a collection of parts. The mixed-use development is in a way a counterfeit object, as it attempts to re-create elements of world-making or city-making with cliche nods to city elements like community, nature, and commerce. Somehow, they often stop so far short from becoming ‘enchanted objects’ or things that surprise us and create wonder. We attempted to level up the mixed-use development to the status of a specific object or ‘world’. Our approach was to literally ‘build’ a city that was appropriated from Vegas to create a menagerie of raw material to work with. We treated these like Japanese dioramas of snow-globes, reducing them all to the scale of toys, defamiliarizing them and reconstructing a new city from its parts.
Designed with Mariya Bandrivska
Instructor: Tom Wiscombe
Taking SANAA’s Zollverein School of Management and Design, plopping it in Southern California, and making design changes due to weather changes.
Team: Asmaa Abu Assaf, Yi Ning Lui, and Julia Arnold
This project covered issues of contemporary representation and the development of splines in relation to complex digital form and physical/visual space. Visualization today encompasses the development, exploration and communication of information and ideas in multiple mediums. This project engaged recent techniques related to splines, gesture interfaces and virtual reality. It developed critical visual literacy and reviewed methods for generating and evaluating lines, surfaces and volume. We reviewed modes of drawing and modeling in three-dimensional space, including the importance of precision and abstraction. Finally, this project fostered the development of architectural character while introducing us to methods and concepts of three-dimensional drawing (zero gravity), digital modeling, multiple realities and digital/physical fabrication.
Designed with Bohong Qiu
instructor: Kristy Balliet and Casey Rehm
This project exploited contemporary methods of measuring and analyzing 3D form and space in conjunction with human and computational forms of design production to identify how this transforms our understanding of the relationship between context and architecture. The technology behind data collection allows for the production of overwhelming quantities of information which need to be interpreted and structured.
The focus is on the aesthetic dimension of architecture and the possible production of new modes of being in the world. If the shift in modes of reproduction accompanies transformations in the architecture invention, a contemporary approach to architecture would be affiliated to modes of imaging that dislocate the subjectivity of single point perspective, such as machine vision.
This work is based on the use of the sampled data in the production of architectural form. The vehicle for exploring resolution, and how these differences may produce multiple authenticies.
This Library that is set in Duarte’s Encanto Park was produced through a series of photogrammetry and laser scanning techniques, where new perceptions of common artifacts were remodeled and composited at a different scale.
Designed with Bohong Qiu
Instructor: Marcelyn Gow
