VILLA AT AL-MEZHAR

Location: Sharjah, UAE
Type: Private residence
Structure: Concrete, Steel
Year: 2008

The project re-imagines the courtyard typology for the arid climate of the Arabian Desert, on a site located in a typically walled-in residential neighborhood of the city.

The villa initially presents itself to the street as a levitating single volume perched on a solid stone plinth. The plinth is organized around a 25 meter swimming pool which extends out into the backyard. It holds all the service and living spaces around a 2 storey high courtyard, which performs as the center of the house. Numerous light wells provide light into the depths of the plinth.

The upper volume consists of two generic boxes for sleeping quarters at each end. The solid boxes ‘soften’ in the middle and dissolve into a double layered trellis made of single sized beams to sculpt the courtyard space below. The layers of the trellis are connected with 5 standard length vertical steel rods to allow the structure to span a greater distance, while creating a shaded courtyard below. The varying distance of the layers create moiré fields as light filters through the trellis. The quality and the nature of the moiré fields evolve through the day with the movement of the sun, evolving different shaded zones in the courtyard.

HOTEL ENCLAVE

Location: Antalya, Turkey
Type: Boutique Hotel
Structure: Concrete
Year: 2009

This project explores possible surface effects of a planar geometry conceived with limited types of pre-fabricated modules. A system of 8 modules was mobilized to create a deep façade with a continuously varying field around a simple geometry, in this case a box. The required limit of 30% glass by the client was achieved with 6 deep windows per room arranged as a checker board to create the facade organizational structure. The pre-cast light weight concrete modules varying in geometry are arranged incrementally to achieve gradient effects around the planar geometry of the box. This variation provides an unstable character in the tectonic perception of the box as conditions of direct/diffused sun light, hard/soft shadows render varying identities.

Inside, the lobby and related programs are lifted one floor up from the street level. The rooms are lined along an atrium cutting through the entire height of the building. The two sides are bridged across twice on each floor. The bridges peel from the vertical atrium surface and fan incrementally from floor to floor sculpting the space of the lobby. The rugged nature of the modulated exterior is replaced with soft ribbons of bridges in the interior.

St. Ivo Variations

Bauhaus Museum Dessau

Dessau, Germany

It would be a reduction of the complexity of the Bauhaus to divide it cleanly into a technical side and an expressive side, yet technical and expressive factors were often in conflict and in conversation throughout its history. The tension between these two motivations—and specifically the shape that tension took at the Bauhaus—continues to influence art, architecture, and design today. Our design of a museum for the Bauhaus Dessau is strongly informed by such productive tension—in this case, the tension between a desire for a modular repeatable system of organization, provided by a grid, and the exploration of sensation found in color and material experimentation.

Our proposal for the Bauhaus Museum Dessau acknowledges these tensions through the design of a building as a collection of individual masses aggregated serially through a grid. We are calling these objects “vessels” as they allude to the crafted object of a vase or volumetric container. The vessels hover above the site on trunk-like legs, creating a light touch in the park and allowing passage underneath. The bellies of the vessels swell to touch each other creating an open continuous floor plan that connects the entire museum with a single floor. These combinations allow the building to fluctuate character between a huddle of singular objects, a sinuous coil of continuity, and a matrix of gridded repetition. Each attitude is at odds with the others, a productive tension resonating through the design.

The Bosphorus Grove

Istanbul, Turkey

The Bosphorus Grove was designed for the 2015 MoMA Young Architects Program at the Istanbul Modern Museum. On first glance the arrangement of clusters of branching columns with petal like elements is reminiscent of a natural tree grove, but the elements are clearly not nature. This grove is somewhere between the mechanical and the biological as the tubes allude to cultural situations as diverse as auto machinery shops and medical treatment facilities. These elements are symmetrical in plan, but where the traditional tree grove is ordered on the planted ground with the tree canopy taking on natural asymmetries above, The Bosphorus Grove is symmetrical above and informally asymmetrical on the ground. The ground organization is created through the all-over meandering movement of garden hoses across the site, a hose garden if you will. The construction is made from common industrial building materials; concrete cast in steel pipe, steel rebar structure, fiber braided hose, and zip-tie attachments. But, when assembled these material create a completely different aesthetic than their typical pragmatic associations. The drooping field of hoses combined with the sheen and flicker of light off their transparent woven surfaces produces an atmospheric effect of increased air density towards aqueous qualities. These hoses also literally hold water up to a certain level, or as it should be said, the water in the hoses becomes the weight that anchors the grove to the ground and stabilizes the petal canopy’s physical desire to flutter in the air.

Sustainability is in many ways a speculation on the future of building materials and assemblies. Most buildings are torn apart, broken down, and buried as waste in land-fills. The Bosphorus Grove pavilion is reused in its entirety. The trees are cut from their concrete bases and flipped over to be placed in a new arrangement as a fish habitat. The concrete bases now serve as anchors for the underwater structures. The surfaces of the hoses no longer scatter light reflections but now become attractors for algae and the encrustation of water life that flows through the Bosphorus. As marine life accrues over time, the hoses become closer to geological/biological material transforming the hovering cloud like atmosphere of the above ground pavilion towards artificial underwater rocks.

The Guggenheim Helsinki

Helsinki, Finland

The exterior mass of the Guggenheim Helsinki proposal is a collection of objects. These objects have a simple plan geometry that transforms from a pure circle to a pure square. But in elevation these geometries are secondary to the strange figuration that occurs. Pragmatically the downward protrusions are structure, the upward protrusions are light scoops, but the aesthetics of the figures are unstable. These objects are either all heads with horns, or all headless bodies with odd truncated limbs, or all body-less butts, butted up against each other. The collected building figuration is formed through 14 similar but unique figures huddled together. The structural legs meet the site in a completely symmetrical organization, thus the moment of the most disparate fragmentation is held together by a collective rational. As the figures rise up to congeal into the main gallery floor, each figure begins to wiggle disturbing the overall symmetry while becoming side gallery spaces.

Entry takes place through the legs and under the belly of the collected mass in an open court similar to a shipyard drydock. A material transformation occurs on the figure’s surfaces as one walks under the building. The concrete structure is clad in recycled wood in various stages of decay collected from across the country of Finland. The exterior of the building is thus under constant renovation and transformation. This deteriorating material is applied in an ornamental pattern creating a tension between the form’s geometry and their sensuous qualities along the edges the pattern draws relations between the different figures, but by the time these motifs reach the underbelly they are almost symmetrical again, alluding inappropriately in a major cultural institution. The museum may collect, preserve and display art, but this design proposes an external presence as a collection of objects which in turn collect, reuse and display the material reality of rotting wood.

Base Flowers

Volume Gallery, Chicago IL

There is a conflict in the aesthetics of the cut flower. It is a living thing purposely severed and put on display through the abstraction of a vase. A flower vase has three primary objectives. The first is to hold water suspending the flower’s death. The second, to position or pose the flower in a particular gesture. And lastly, to disappear, allowing the flower to be the prime figural focus. Considering this combination, a vase is actually closer to a support system or a base that sinks into the background.

The vases/bases developed for Base Flowers are a combination of five vase positions in one. The base can be arranged in multiple orientations to privilege one vase over another. The different positions have different character allusions that attempt to animate the neutrality of a common vase by bringing attention to the qualities of the vase itself.

This odd inversion of a vase which attracts more attention than the object displayed offered an opportunity to experiment with the flowers themselves. Base Flowers also developed five new flowers designed as mutant species somewhere between the floral, biological, geological and digital. These new flowers are primitive specimens, both in their aesthetics as a well as their digital origin. As such, they are not attempts to mimic any existing flower, but are instead the “base” flowers for an alternate understanding of floral aesthetics. The cut flower in a vase is an artificial construct, an abstracted fragment of nature, severed, re-contextualized, and posed for aesthetic contemplation.

Still Life Interventions

Team: Emmanuel Osorno

The realism of the objects as things in the world is further explored through a project in rendering and photocomposition. Each of the Donkey & Feather objects are inserted into different 17th CenturyDutch Still Life paintings. These explorations are efforts to explore the aesthetics of realism for the objects in a different context. Still life paintings are incredible efforts to develop the techniques of painting in the description of reality. They are also fantastic examples of estrangement in realism. The everyday, the overlooked objects of our world enter into relations with each other that resists the narrative interpretations of poetic panting, and even further resists the intrusion of the human into the representation. These are the relations between objects themselves, aesthetic relations of color, texture, materiality, luminosity, and reflectivity. Rarely are the objects in a still life left alone. They are broken, tipped, peeled, overturned, and cut to reveal all the strangeness that exists in the everyday world. The new objects become subtle intrusions into this realism. They seek to blend in, but not to hide. They are adjusted through rendering and photo-compositing to address issues of color, light, texture and reflection. They are reflected into objects in the scene as they also take on associations within themselves of the existing context. When the realism is successful they new objects are accepted as part of the original scene, as if the painting took 350 years to complete. The strangest qualities emerge when it is not the new objects that look weird, but the context that existed previously. The estrangement of context is a crucial aspect of realism, where a shift allows one to see the familiar in new terms. This defamiliarization is an aesthetic experience tied to the Parafictional artwork.

Still life with lobster, silver jug, large Berkenmeyer fruit bowl, violin, books and sinew sack object after Pieter Claesz, 1641 - 2014

Still life with herring and hot stone object after Pieter Claesz, 1636 - 2014

Still life with lemon, goblet and geological rub object after Williem Claesz, 1646 - 2014

Breakfast with a crab and a fuzzy rot object after Willem Claesz Heda, 1648 - 2014

Wall Reveal

SCI-Arc Gallery, Los Angeles CA

One of the most common details of contemporary architecture is barely visible, just a shadow. The gypsum board reveal has become the default detail to resolve the joint between walls, floors, ceilings, and apertures. It is pragmatic when providing an hard edge to finish the gypsum board and modern in its removal of decorative baseboards, moldings and trim pieces that conceal construction in more traditional architecture. But, the reveal also does something else aesthetically, it hyper-realizes the abstraction of the modern wall. The shadow line of the reveal produces walls that appear to float without any evidence of thickness or assembly. Walls as immaterial planes.

It is into these typical reveal details that we have jacked four different interventions. These intrusions disturb the assumed background of the modern abstract wall. With minimal modifications only on the reveals, it is no longer clear where a corner is, how thick a wall is, or what plane is in front of the other. The aesthetic effect is to defamiliarize the wall itself.

The construction also opens an estrangement of scale relations. From afar the piece appears as a fragment of typical construction. Up close, inside the gypsum board spaces, the appearance is of a finished interior with small scale details. It is at the middle distance between these two extremes that an unstable relation to scale becomes aesthetically triggered. The gap between the two scales is hard to maintain simultaneously making certain elements take on the abstract qualities of a scale model while other elements flip towards appearing too large. All this occurs even though every part of the construction is full scale. The wall becomes revealed as the abstract decoration that it is in reality.