For our first Third Thursday of 2019, we decided to mix it up and keep it in-house. Our three newest staff members were invited to present on their backgrounds and previous work from schooling or companies they’d been a part of before joining our firm. Each came from different locations with unique focuses, skills, and talents. Jeremy presented on a few of his residential endeavors, as well as his own fine arts projects. Kateryna had us explore some of her graduate work and gave us an insider perspective on what it takes to build skyscrapers around the world. Laura spoke about various buildings she worked on while living in Boston, and how they compare to the projects here at our firm.
Each wrote a quick summary of their presentations which you can read below!
Jeremy
While at a previous architecture firm, I completed a house just outside of Montecito. The 9,000 square foot house has a commanding presence on Padaro Beach, highlighted by 40’ wide pocket doors beneath a 14’ cantilever. The exterior materials are reclaimed teak from Thailand, board formed concrete wainscot, standing seam titanium roof, and steel windows and doors. The interior finishes include rift sawn white oak ceilings, plaster walls and custom concrete pavers on the floor. The house features dual master suites on the second floor with panoramic views (one for the clients and one for their son who lives in LA). The owners recently moved in and I flew down to welcome them, happy to complete such an awesome project with stellar clients.
Laura
For my Third Thursday presentation I described my experience designing large-scale residential developments in Boston. One of the projects I highlighted was 345 Harrison; a 12-story, 585 unit project in South Boston which included ground floor retail and restaurant spaces, elevated private parks for tenants, an indoor gym, an exterior pool and lounge, and many more tenant amenities. Working on 345 Harrison gave me a great sense of accomplishment as a designer – it was an honor to contribute to such a landmark development in my home city.
Residential projects here at Feldman are, of course, much smaller in scale, but offer a much more personal design experience and a more focused vision, on a faster schedule – It’s a great change in pace! I can’t say how thankful I am to be a part of the team here at FA.
Kateryna
Several weeks ago I had pleasure to share a brief overview of my design work from the Master Degree that I received at IAAC, in Barcelona, as well as a variety of projects from my previous work experience at SOM and Morphosis. Academic projects covered my interest in temporary architecture, wind energy harvesting and clay tile making inspired by a visit to a renowned Catalan ceramics factory. This work resulted from the numerous discourses that were held at the school, and looked at ways to challenge energy wasteful living, while growing social awareness on the issue.
The Nubular lightweight structure, is an exploration into an injection-based architecture. A homogenous building material, in this case perforated pvc skin, is used to create tubes of custom lengths and angles, which are then filled with one’s material of choice depending on the chosen tube’s position within the overall structure. Given that the material filling is a key parameter in the behavior of the structure, several tests were carried out to identify the optimal fillings and member lengths to avoid buckling. It was decided to fill the bottom most members with soil and sawdust mixture, while the top is composed of lighter foam balls. Each tube length is split into 3 with a maximum part length of around 800mm, and allowing for 50mm flat connection gaps in between and at the ends of each tube.
The overall shape was designed in grasshopper using hoopsnake plugin. An original tetrahedron shape is drawn, and hence follows the path of an arched curve, turning and repositioning itself in the process from the start of the path to the end. After this process, the geometry was manually pulled to the ground plane and specific 3-piece curves were extracted and drawn to ensure they stay under the 800mm limit. Each of the curves was separated as a layer and with lengths fed into another definition to directly produce laser cut files which included labels and welding line engravings.
The fabrication process took about 3 full days. 78 custom lengths were laser cut, welded, filled, and holed at the junctions for connections with zip-ties. Construction took around 10 hours.