Archive Logistics
The Graduate School of Design archive, almost entirely digital, floats within a cheap but pristine motherboard as if it was about to fly away and become incomprehensible. Fortunately, two heavy volumes with analog archival work anchor it to the ground and keep the archive from disappearing.
Harvard GSD | 2023
Supervisor: Iñaki Ábalos and Renata Sentkiewicz
This project starts as a response to the proposal to design a Bourbon distillery in Boston. Such proposal, its program, and its location immediately involve considering the movement of raw materials over long distances, almost more than thinking about the whiskey production itself. [Corn, yeast, malted barley, rye, and even the correct type of water are produced and or found in the mid-west of the US, 1000 miles away from Boston].
The first-floor plan is designed around a semi-truck’s turning radius. This organizes the site in plan, and separates the production area and the whiskey aging area [called rickhouse - where the barrels are stored]. The trucks can move through the center of the building while delivering raw materials and picking up whiskey barrels.
The second floor works differently, more like a computer motherboard. It contains all the offices, control rooms, boiler rooms and laboratories. All the services and circulation hang from the structure, thus never touching the first floor. The second floor should be imagined as an interchangeable piece, as if each motherboard was responsible for producing a particular commodity.
A series of seasonal logistical operations using an overhang bridge crane allow the barrels to be organized in different fashions following the whiskey aging time and the production speed. Students from the nearby Cultural Arts Center can perform and practice in various stages and setups for two years when the biannual show takes place, right before the batch of barrels that make up the seating area and stage have correctly aged.
The modularity of the motherboard allows for a small theatre fly that aligns with the biannual stage.
The result is a choreography between trucks coming in and out, piling barrels organized by a bridge crane, the constant practicing and performing of students, and the movement of the community throughout the seasons.
Harvard GSD | 2022
Supervisor: Emmett Zeifman
VISIONS BY ISSUE #3 Launch Installation
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The installation tries to push the boundaries of physical materiality. It is composed of a family of ten flags considered almost as living objects. As such, we propose ten corresponding devices that ‘test’ the flags, all similar but with a different ‘perceived materiality’ in each case.
The flags ‘suffer differently’ as the devices interact with them. By putting them in tensions, piercing them, strungling them, hanging, we showcase an organic spectrum and its mode of artificial preservation that range from an extremly fleshylike and organic appearance to its overly artificial preservation.
In collaboration with A la Sauvette
Talks: Ariadna Serrahima and Saul Baeza
in Conversation with Michelle Chang
Creative Production: Tai Sans
Photographer: Randy Crandon
DJ: Jeffery Cheung
Talks: Ariadna Serrahima and Saul Baeza
in Conversation with Michelle Chang
Creative Production: Tai Sans
Photographer: Randy Crandon
DJ: Jeffery Cheung
Monsters & Hinges
Housing adaptive reuse development in Chelsea, MA, USA
In collaboration with Paris Bezanis
An adaptive reuse project based in Chelsea, MA. Four obsolete office buildings in a site sorrounded by logistical infrastructure and large scale warehouses are transformed into affordable housing.
The project starts with a thorough analysis of the site. A series of large scale, opaque and extremely efficient buildings (defined as monsters) are found near the site. These monsters are key to understand the site and drive the project.
In fact, a series of hinging operations, involving a very rigorous conservation of mass, deem neccesary in order to demonsterize our existing buildings and to transform them into habitable housing. The operations results in a de-optimizationof volume to surface ratio of the previous existing office buildings.
By transforming the site through these hinging operations and engaging with human-scaled measures and modes of
indexing, we rehabilitate the monsters of 70-100 everett ave, Chelsea, MA away from an opaque and hermetic collection
of horizontal buildings into an urban sanctuary attenuated to the needs of both human and collective operations.
Supervisor: Andrew Holder
An adaptive reuse project based in Chelsea, MA. Four obsolete office buildings in a site sorrounded by logistical infrastructure and large scale warehouses are transformed into affordable housing.
The project starts with a thorough analysis of the site. A series of large scale, opaque and extremely efficient buildings (defined as monsters) are found near the site. These monsters are key to understand the site and drive the project.
In fact, a series of hinging operations, involving a very rigorous conservation of mass, deem neccesary in order to demonsterize our existing buildings and to transform them into habitable housing. The operations results in a de-optimizationof volume to surface ratio of the previous existing office buildings.
By transforming the site through these hinging operations and engaging with human-scaled measures and modes of
indexing, we rehabilitate the monsters of 70-100 everett ave, Chelsea, MA away from an opaque and hermetic collection
of horizontal buildings into an urban sanctuary attenuated to the needs of both human and collective operations.
GSD Harvard | 2023
People’s Palace
The project is a simple stack of programs. The manufacturing spaces (workshops, production centers) are located at the top, the consumption spaces (dining halls, projection rooms, library) are located on the 4th floor, the performance areas (exhibition) are on the 2nd floor, and lastly, on the ground floor, the digestion spaces (lounges, living areas).
This stack is disrupted by inserting three vertical elements defined as screws. They alter and break apart the program. As such, each programmatic category starts to behave differently volumetrically. The manufacturing spaces become independent of each other and very cellular, defined for their specific uses (woodshop, metal shop, media lab), the consumption spaces are also cellular, yet there is still a physical connection to each other in the corners. The areas dedicated to art exhibitions have not been split apart. Thus, they keep certain traces of cellularity while the ground floor is a single space into which the screws have punched through.
The screws work as circulation cores. Due to their nature, with four potential landings and elevator doors per floor, the disruption mentioned above occurs in plan but also in section as the rotation of each screw generates many different vertical and horizontal circulation opportunities. One could imagine how carefully tightening or untightening the screws would allow for desired floor slab changes that match the programmatic needs. The screws also work as catalysts of lateral circulation as they create or negate passage under their stairs in the horizontal axis.
GSD Harvard | 2022