Diller Scofidio + Renfro

Team: Charles Renfro, Matthew Johnson, David Chacon, Brian Tabolt, and Tyler Polich

I was involved in this project from the beginning of concept design through to construction documents and worked on all aspects of it.  I started making early models and renderings, and during SD and DD I managed the drawing set.

The SAAHB is in the middle of construction on Stanford University’s campus.  The new home for the Department of Art and Art History will be interdisciplinary hub for the arts at Stanford. The 96,000sf building will unite the programs of art practice, design, art history, film / media studies, and documentary film and vidio in a single location.  The building will also include art studios, screening spaces, film editing rooms, exhibition space, the Experimental Media Art Lab and Sound Studio, and the Art and Architecture Library.  

The buidling is a reinvention of the typical Stanford courtyard typology.  It creates two courtyards on separate levels one open to the sky, and one covered from the elements.  It consists of two program strands, one art history and one art making that both wrap around the shared library rectalinear volume.  I spent the majority of my time at DS+R working on this project and took it from concept through the start of Construction Documentation.   I started making concept models, and ended managing the DD set of drawings.

Powerhouse Company

This private villa in the Netherlands is a collection of travertine blocks floating on a series of wood and stone walls.  The private program of bedrooms exist in the enclosed stone cubes, while the public functions are on the ground floor separated by a collection of walls to give a high degree of transparency.  These walls are arranged as a composition of shapes to provide the necessities of each room as well as views out to the yard.  Underground are the swimming pool, utilities, and wine cellar.  The house is based around a courtyard with a single tree.  This courtyard brings light down into the basement while also providing a connection between the separate layers.  I worked on this project from the earliest concept model through to the end of the schematic design phase.  I created many iterations of study models in foam, plaster and stone to get the proportions and materials right, made presentation models, created and managed the 3D model throughout the design, made the exploded axonometric, and rendered the final images.

Yale School of Architecture - Fall 2014

Professors - Tod Williams / Billie Tsien

Nominated for Feldman Prize

Two separate worlds one lifted towards and open to the sky and one embedded into and rooted to the earth are linked through light and water. 

Set above everyday life, a serene volume devoted to higher learning consists of serialized programmatic spaces arranged around courtyards fostering a communal and introspective academic setting.    Each space provides specialized ways to work and study in various fields pertaining to the Andean culture, thus creating a modern cabinet of curiosities based on the country’s history.  Open to above, the spaces get light and views from the sky sealed off from city around, only the courtyards open to the surrounding reminding the scholars what their purpose is.  

The ground level seamlessly integrates into the city fabric creating a new public garden plaza protected and shaped by the upper world.  Light and rain pour down through choreographed voids above to create moments of brightness and downpour feeding the pools and gardens that weave their way throughout the public promenade.  At once a public plaza and a gallery, a curated selection of new works and historical objects are housed in the walls and vitrines that both support the world above and bring light down illuminating the articles on display.  

Collaboration with Alice Chai, Mike Robitz, and Merica Jensen

There is no Here here was an entry to the Under the High Line competition put on in 2012.

In Manhattan soil is invisible. It is hidden below the finish of our buildings and streets, playing an unseen role.  

This project is conceived of as a ground tasting menu. The other forty-nine state’s official soils are each suspended in a bag nine feet above the ground. The bags spill their contents, recomposing the site with the ground of the ‘other’ states. Together, the soils- transplanted, emigrated, relocated- take on the cosmopolitan life of New York. Reciprocally, the site takes on the identity of each state’s soil.  If the High Line was the penultimate act of ground-making, then THERE IS NO HERE, HERE is the reset button, reverting the city to its true conglomerate identity. What results is a geological tapestry of every place but here, here.  

With time, the dirt, dust, rocks, stones, and soil will erode away from the site, reverting again to an urbane blankness.

Yale School of Architecture

Professors - Ed Mitchell and Aniket Shahane

Partner - Daniel Luster

Cambridge Commons studies the redevelopment of Central Square in Cambridge, Massachussetts.    Central Square is the new center of Cambridge and as such needs a large green space for the public to gather in, much as they do in Boston Commons and Harvard Square.  This new green space reinterperets the public commons as a place for nature to come together with city life seamlessly and for a multitude of programs to happen in the same space.  It aims to weave together city streets with commercial building space all while existing in a natural setting.  The main axis of Massachussetts Ave is split into two one way streets with the park inserted into the middle of it.  Then the park is shaped to better connect the local NS streets being pulled apart as well as being pulled up for certain streets to go underneath it.  Commercial built space is then inserted underneath the park and the distinction between built and natural starts to blur.  In the end, apartment blocks are put above the park to shape larger civic spaces as well as to provide more density to enliven the new Cambridge Commons.

Collaborators: Ania Molenda, Magdalena Stanescu and Agata Pilip

Together with two friends, I came up with a competition proposal for the new Symphony Orchestra Hall to house the Sinfonia Varsovia in Warsaw.  The new Concert Hall had to fit into a historic building site that used to be a veterinary school.  By submerging the Concert hall one level, the entire supporting program not used by the public is put underground.  This frees up the ground level to be almost devoid of other program than the main concert hall and a smaller auditorium.  These two performance spaces are now freestanding objects like the existing buildings and become united as a building through a single roof and glass facade to provide enclosure while retaining the sense of openness.  The roof extends out over the park to let the public walk under the roof before going inside to further blur the line of inside and outside.  I helped lead the team in the design process and was responsible for the 3D work, axonometric diagrams, hall interior, and final renderings.

Weiss / Manfredi

Summer 2014

Diller Scofidio + Renfro

DS+R was commissioned to renovate the Cooper Hewitt Smithsonian Design Museum and one aspect of that was a new entrance canopy that will allow visitors enter the mansion's garden on 90th Street for the first time.  This awning also serves as a marker and signage for the museum visually connecting the entrance to the visitors walking on 5th Avenue.  

Diller Scofidio + Renfro

This competition entry was for the central park in Aberdeen, Scotland.  We won the competition and the commission only for the government to cancel the project.  I was involved in the competition from the conception all the way through to final deliverables.  I was in charge of the plans and sections as well as contributed to diagrams and renderings.

The Aberdeen City Garden will fuse Nature and Culture into a vital social network at the heart of the city.  Rejecting the classical model of the cultural building isolated on the green, the Garden extends the surrounding urban fabric as an elastic web of 3-dimensional interconnections across its site.  The warp and weft of urban lines support both park and cultural activities within a resilient fabric of layered programs, conjoining history with the contemporary and the urbane with the pastoral.  Stretching across the historic river site, this parkland web is permeable, revealing a multi-tiered archeology while connecting to the city’s emergent future as a technological hub for art, performance, leisure, and commerce.  Collaboration with Keppie Design and OLIN.

I was asked to design a structure that would allow the users of this house to take advantage of the views from their roof that they enjoyed many times sitting on tar shingles.  To do this, I extended the structure of the porch through the roof and created a hexagonal deck.  From the deck, two chairs cantilever out while stabilizing each other.  Then a table was added around it.  It is constructed out of standard pressure treated lumber.  I designed the deck with the owner and built it in a period of 1 week.

Collaboration with Peter McInish

This project consists of a series of hidden rooms within a solid material that are revealed when shone with light.  

A monolithic piece of foam measuring 24" x 24" x 4" is milled from one side creating voids of varying depth.  When viewed from the blank side, the rooms remain unseen until lit from behind when the foam glows with different intensities revealing the spaces within.

Powerhouse Company

The Netherlands Dance Theater, Music Conservatory, and Royal Orchestra are currently located in an assortment of outdated facilities throughout The Hague.  They put on an international competition for a single building of 360,000sf in the heart of the city to pull the disparate groups together.  Of the 20 invited first round proposals, we were selected for the second round along with Zaha Hadid and Neutelings Reidijk.  The building operates on the idea that there are two types of program in the building: performance space, and support space.  The private serving space is the rectilinear white volume to be as efficient and economical as possible, while the performance space is made up of curving wooden bands to provide a grand experience for the public users.  I was part of the 3-man team that created the first round proposal and I led the 6-man team in the second round.  I created the building in Archicad for sections and plans, was responsible for the 3D model for renderings, worked on the final imagery, developed the concert hall interiors, contributed to the presentation movie, made drawings for final model fabrication, and helped with the final boards.

Powerhouse Company

This villa is located in Cyprus.  The harsh climate and site position dictated the design.  It consists of a hole taken out of the site to create a sunken yard, the house dug into the ground by the sunken garden, and a thick roof to shelter the program from the sun.  The sunken yard retains privacy from the road nearby.  The roof extends beyond the house to blur the line of indoors and outdoors.  On the south, the roof is close to the ground with a pool outside of it to provide indirect light, while on the North, there is all glass to give the feeling of openness.  I worked on the initial concept, drew in plan, did all the 3-d work, and was responsible for the final imagery.

Partners - Daniel Luster and Julcsi Futo

This site specific installation in the sixth floor studio entrance of Paul Rudolf Hall is an exercise in perception, tactility and displacement. A thin plane, obscured from view by the entry doors, separates this unique condition in the architecture building—a hall way with glazing on both sides—into two zones. This division of space and circulation sets up a dialogue between the two sides of the plane. One side is tactile, covered in sheep skin, while the other displaces the viewer outside through the glass as it is covered in reflective, mirrored golden film. The undulating plane creates a compression on the furry side to emphasize the tangible qualities of the sheep skin, while it forces the viewers to encounter the surface. Cantilevering 12 feet, the plane is lifted off the ground to give views of the other side though denying access. Thus the view, after inadvertently choosing a side, by opening one of the two doors, is confronted with two different forms of perception. The viewer is either displaced through the faceted and mirrored space or embraced through the smooth and curvilinear surface, all the while being aware of the presence of others experiencing a different aspect of the piece though only partially seen. 

Yale School of Architectuer

Professors: Tod Williams Billie Tsien

The Illa is a Peruvian talisman that is meant to represent oneself.  Our first assignment with Tod and Billie was to create our own Illa.  

Yale School of Architecture

Professor Brigitte Shim

Nominated for Feldman Prize

The Vienna Skating Club has long been part of Viennese society, and what was once held up as a spectacle and heralded for its ability to bring people together in communal activity has become suppressed and hidden behind closed walls.  The current ice rinks found in Vienna are in a social black-hole abutting the Intercontinental Hotel and the Vienna Konzerthaus but engaging neither and remaining hidden from the street.  This project sets out to reimagine the ice-skating rink as seamlessly integrated into the public realm.  It refigures the site as one large sheet of ice that is both visibly and physically accessible to everyone.  Much like the Dutch Painter Hendrick Avercamp’s paintings depict, society would occur on the ice blurring the distinction between public plaza and ice rink.  This new free space allows for a programmatic mixing that brings a multitude of different groups together inhabiting a frozen tabula rasa.  Planes of solid resplendent and luxurious materials then start to shape spaces for specific and frame views while retaining the visual transparency across the site.  The hotel rooms and apartments that make up the private functions associated with the project are suspended above the ice in travertine blocks alluding to the surrounding white buildings that make up Vienna’s fabric.  These blocks in turn shape larger public moves referencing both the adjacent Stadtpark and Beethovenplatz and framing views out to each.  The horizontally free public space of the ice rink makes its way up through large atriums in these blocks spilling out public space vertically allowing the public to inhabit the voids. 

This chair is a perfect cube

A comfortable chair and built in storage is set within a platonic solid boundary.

Two sides of the cube are squares of a single material displaying their inherent visual properties as the detail.  These two solid sides are thickened to create the structure, armrests, and storage accessed from within the chair.  Bridging between the solid sides are two planes creating the seat and back of the chair.  A variety of materials can be employed on the sides giving different versions of the square chair.

Collaborators: Anthony Gagliardi, Jared Abraham, Isaac Southard

As part of The Chair class, we had an assignment to build one chair from one 4' x 8' sheet of 3/4" plywood.  In the spirit of Donald Judd, we created two chairs and a stool from the single sheet.  

Gouaches, Ink, and Whiteout on watercolor paper - 6" x 9"

Yale University

with Professor Tom Beeby

The city of Chicago has long since been