John Clark - MArch II - 2011

Research, Lally 2010

House and Museum, Lai and Kipnis 2010

Workshop, Ron Witte 2010

Retirement Housing, Rois 2010

Essay, Somol 2010

Tower, Lai 2009

Archibald was always late. His meeting had gone long and his portable analogical simulation unit had been malfunctioning. He knew he should have gotten that taken care of last week, but now he was hustling down State Street before his clock ran out. The world was quickly spinning out of focus. His pulse was rising and his mind was reeling with datastrips, image packets, video environments, relationary equations, human networks, and machinic protocols. Sweat started to drip down his forehead and his eyes were starting to go fuzzy. He staggered past a crowd of blissfully smiling people up the hazy front steps of the Digital Detoxification Depot which was dutifully spewing its haze on to the street outside. These people seemed to look to the bit strewn world with an almost euphoric rapture, like children gazing upon the ocean for the first time.

Digital Detoxification DepotFall 2010: Sean Lally Research Studio

At this point in the history of the digital revolution a content limit had been reached. The speed and saturation of daily life with connectivity had produced an irrevocable deterioration of the bodys ability to bounce back into natural reality. With most of his time spent in the digital virtual world it was necessary for Archibald to replenish his analog conditioning and awareness for 2 hours in a Depot for every 33 hours he was connected to the Network. Otherwise his mind would become fried and he would become one of the Computors, perpetually existing in a spiral of information halfway between the life of an avatar and that of a comatose vegetable. His society had to develop a renewed focus on spaces that would reenergize them in the face of this technological exhaustion. But it was no longer enough to simply get on the freeway in search of open space for a picnic next to a waterfall. Sensory overload via the power of the Detox system was on the only way to reboot ones capacity to feel.

Archibald slipped through the door, disengaged his ocular computer implant and collapsed into a fold in the floor. During the next few hours he went through a series of rooms in which his traditional five senses went through a regimen of analogically restorative procedures as administered through the building. A thick cool fog descended over him lowering his blood pressure as his chair began to slowly emit a low humming frequency that shook him to his bones. Patterns and color tones swathed the room reseting his sensory presets to basic norms. The room proceeded to slowly cycle between high pressure humid climes where the liquid suspended in the air could be cut with a knife and arid low pressure environments in which he could almost taste the desert dust in the air. The walls swelled and contracted in time with the varying pressures and temperatures. Saturated smells, tones, and textures permeated the air lulling him into a trance and restoring his instinctive relation to the world. An hour in, once fully relaxed he left the silence of the isolation chamber and proceeded to the communal pit where he sat with others around the caveman tv. Sitting around what the floor that acted as a fire pit they warmed themselves by the radiation that emanated and recounted stories of almost lost sensations from camping trips they may or may not have taken as kids. The room slowly hummed in response to their collective memories as they returned to normality. Feeling fresh and with senses temporarily rejuvenated Archibald and the others got up out of their chairs and walked to the door. Taking a deep breath of the crisp city air he slipped his Net-connect bud back in his ear and reconnected his neural network to those of the other denizens of his digital world. As the voices in his head chirped to life and his eyes glazed over Archibald started back toward his office for the afternoon meeting.

These people seemed to look to the bit strewn world with an almost euphoric rapture, like children gazing upon the ocean for the first time.

Working with a limited Archive of cultural and a r c h i t e c t u r a l intuition we worked as a Bohemian D e m i m o n d e with the task of reinventing the discipline of architecture as a creative enterprise in the aftermath of total cultural e r a d i c a t i o n . Through the creation of narrative librettos and the intense and deliberate investigation of our Archive we sought to create a fresh palette of architectural affects in the design of two buildings to sit amidst their n e o - u t i l i t a r i a n contexts as reminders of the joyful potential of architecture: one House and one Museum.

The Society of Helpful AssociationsFall 2010: Jimenez Lai and Jeffrey Kipnis

Hejduk, Wall House

Lynn, Slavin House

R+U, Sagaponac House

House

Some time in the future, the axiom of the greatest good for the greatest number has prevailed. Art is considered not only destructive, but poisonous.

We All Share the Same Abominable Heart!

We All Share the Same Abominable Heart!

This collective confidence in ultra-pragmatism is now evenly matched by the popular mien of reserve and modest bearing

that has come to be known as the International Fashion.

This is the story of a Society, marked by an image from their

collective childhoods.

The aim of the experiments were to send emissaries into Time, to summon the Past and Future to the aid of the Present.

A condensation of untold influences, it is through these metrics of abstraction and urbanity that perceptions are subjectively synthesized.

Gestural form that is the antithesis of the rational order of the geometric background.

Irreverance and existential onomatopoeias are considered truths.

Abstract forms that represent.

Museum

They seek to reoriginate the paintings into the intrinsic, irreducible and irreproducible palette of architecture.

Figure is always the protagonist.

These pieces of architecture are evaluated in terms of their discourse in a conceptual world, their production of plasticity of character, and their creations of a palette of fresh aff ects. Lessons are learned from the autonomy of the plans and the singular broad-stroke quality of the lines. Because the Society of Helpful Associations relates to the buildings not as familiar representations of reality, but as reality itself, nothing buff ers them from the self interested conceits of the experimental architecture.

Faces of happiness, though different.

Maintaining irrelevance, avoiding good, and hysterically amplifying the objective gaps in logic lead them to obvious illusions and sophisticated yet frivolous conclusions.

A contrast of the organizing force of intelligence vs. the random effects of gesture.

The familiar, upon repeated glances, becomes uncanny.

Pattern Workshop 5 day workshop investigating figure, program, and pattern with four surfaces.w/ Ron Witte

Elevations

Plans

Ruppie Co-OpSpring 2011: Juan Rois

A place for Chicagos burgeoning population of Retired Urban People to move for their empty nester years. A communal greenhouse encloses the condensed and stacked front yards which fl oat in the void as well as penetrate into the double height space of each unit. If the community is so inclined the building can become a veritable factory of vegetable production, or it can just provide a place for couples to compete with their orchid collections.

An urban/suburban condition that creates multiplies farmable soil while creating a unique condition within the city. The open space on the fi rst fl oor is used as a community center for which the older generation can pass their skills and knowledge to the younger, as well as learning the tricks and trades of the contemporary urban dwellers.

Division Street View

Level 5 Level 3

Level 1 Unit

a.

Plans

a. Greenhouse Structure with Sidewalksb. Community Center at Street Levelc. Individual Hanging Gardensd. (16) - 1250 SFUnitse. Circulation and Communal Spacesf. Back Decks

b.

c.

d.

f.

e.

Front Elevation

Side Elevation

Section

Winter Garden

Summer Garden

The Lost Memories of Chicagos Urban Palaces

w/ Bob Somol

Below me, amidst the rusty morass of ancient tuck-pointed brown brick walls, stolid little yellow bungalows, confused storefront churches of every denomination, mid-century aluminum sided additions, still stagnant empty lots from the 68 race riots, sodium vapor yellow lampposts piercing the frost-bitten air, blue eyes-in-the-sky on lilting telephone poles, glass brick windows of art deco warehouses, crumbling sidewalks, weedy trees, boarded windows, blue-tarped seeping roofs, wig shops, laundromats, chicken joints, taquerias, liquor stores, payday loan sharks, and the ever westward growing tide of CMU-laden, faux-contemporary, yuppie condos there exists the skeleton of a civic landscape. This skeleton, distended at points and shriveled in others, is a pinched necklace of green boulevards that loops its way through neighborhoods of every conceivable ethnicity. Envisioned by the developer John S. Wright and designed by the vigilant American landscape makers F.L. Olmsted, Jens Jensen, and finished by architect William le Baron Jenney, this emerald chain now lies mostly neglected in a recently city priding itself on its verdant hues (both literal and metaphorical).

Lessons from the Prairie Romantics

Balancing on the teetering Green line train as it hurtles away from downtown above Lake Street through Chicagos West Side I look out the window at a vista that is quite foreign in this part of the world. The view from this 20th century train car is down over the fractured beginnings of the long flat expanse of gridded territory that descends from the mafia-built modernist peaks of the Loop skyscrapers all the way to the true peaks at the edge of the plains. Only punctuated here and there by the downtowns of a few provincial metropolises; cities that all took their cues from these rigid-backed avenues.

Built at a time when Chicago was the boomtown that Shanghai or New Delhi claim now a series of Romantic monuments anchor the city in a curving strip of boulevarded parks that sit oddly amongst their fading context. A paradox of projective inventions, they exist in the New World which could never be created without the formalisms of the Old. Though with the intention of defining the 19th Century American Ideal City, these sons of European immigrants built field houses, manor houses, receptories, conservatories, formal gardens, pavilions, and other structures prairie whose formal elegance was embedded with dreams of the old world. Through these fragments of bourgeois European fantasies these designers were trying to establish a definition of urbanity and sophistication for a burgeoning industrial population. Miniature Versailles on the prairie for meatpackers picnics.

Today the structures stand as totems of fictive leisure that now have fictive civic importance. At a time when civic pride is contained and advertised as only being ringed by the glimmering towers of the loop in the guise of millennial parks and overtly narcissistic monuments, this promenade of stateliness that processes through the West side neighborhoods is all but forgotten. Granted that the Daley administration has been putting scaffolding up around many of the parks structures in recent years, there is a different emphasis than upon the tourist-centric model of architectural production. Mostly there are stagnant forests of untended scrawny deciduous undergrowth surrounding the structures. Languishing lagoons that once held the splashing of youth now harbor scrawny urban waterfowl and perch swimming in waters that lap at the decaying boardwalks. Muddy patches of lawn and dales where community gardens once flourished provide the picturesque backdrops. Cloistered arcades (with cultural memories of palatial promenades), granite slab waterfalls (natures wildest elements tamed), bronzed prairie style lamp fixtures (enlightenment literalized), and council rings (native democractic rituals reincarnated) provide the romantic textures that can still shine if caught in the right light of a fading afternoon.

What John S. Wright and his designers created was a fictional piece of American ground that served as a respite from the vicious cycle of servitude instituted by the barons of 19th century Chicago with their control over the land of the Chicago grid. The romantic paths that curved around these dreamy structures with their filigree, gargoyles, and loping arches were statements of the unconscious desires of those Chicagoans to exist in a natural world that their fathers had smothered in a grid of pavement, brick, and stone. Anti-Jeffersonian moments of clarity.

Note, that pretty much all of the structures that inhabit in the city today were built by the immigrant craftsmen that lived in them at the time. The field houses and their attendant follies were built by people for use by their own communities, not as pretentious objects. Today, the west side is mostly inhabited by a shifting population of immigrants, largely Hispanic or African-American, that are the inheritors of another immigrant populations work. Though it may have been their own subliminal post-modernity (post-romantic) compelling them to replicate images of the past for their future, those initial immigrants imagined a new historical fiction. A building stood as a representation of importance, not just as an isolated ethnic community, but also as a piece of the citys collective narrative fabric.

Though these structures still hold pretenses of romantic civic pride, they are quite rebellious in their capacity to illuminate difference within the city. The romantic buildings to those with non-European motherlands are not signifiers of a certain world. They are not even reminders of the type of nature that they were designed to pay homage to. That prairie ideal has long been suppressed in our collective memory beneath a tableau of urban agriculture and selective histories regarding our inherited landscapes. They are temples to the forgotten Gods of manifest destiny. Signifiers of something that may be in our instinctual emigrant DNA, but is not directly applicable to the real history of our imagined world. Our context doesnt include a stylistic memory of those European castles and gardens. As such, we are free to project on to these buildings what we will. They serve as moments of typological form in the city that stand as free from history. Nostalgic futurist ambitions should be fueled by the same abstract passions that motivated Wright, Jensen, Olmsted, and company rather than the cynical modernist revivals that we today perceive as our civic legacy. Our own architects and city-makers hoping to resurrect postmodern tools of invented narratives, probing ironic affects, flipped political narratives, and stylistic appropriations need look no farther than these romantic follies. Without apology these demystified monuments serve to remind us of the American capacity for rewriting landscapes and dredging images from confused memories to create the most important and free moments of our city.

Stiletto TowerFall 2009 Urbanism StudioJimenez Lai

A prototype mixed-use tower to generate revenue by reprioritizing traditional typology arrangements. The basic hotel and office tower types are trimmed into thin towers that divide the aggregated public cultural, entertainment, meeting, and dining programs into two mega-lobbies. An outrageous extrusion of the vernacular Chicago Frame that reasserts the potential of the existing urban white collar condition to support the most potentially lucrative and cutting edge cultural and public institutions. The Stiletto utilizes the structural precariousness of its form to give priority to the elegance and beauty of the creature that it supports.

Identify Typical Chicago Typologies

Trim the Fat and Compress Essential Program

Hotel

Theatre

MEGA

LOBBY

Identify Trimmed Communal Program

Compress into Aggregate Lobby

Split into Upper and Lower Lobbies based on Programmatic Needs

Identify TypicalChicago Typologies

Hotel

Office

Theatre

Lobby Options

Trim the Fat Compress Essential Program

Identify TrimmedCommunal Program

elevated culture - 200%

Bent Plinth - 130%

Sandwich Lobby- 190%

Slumped Slab- 125%

Sloped Deck- 105%

Suspended Slab- 145%

Solar Deck- 110%

Extended Plinth - 107%

Water Tower - 165%

Hanging Shapes - 132%

Hanging Lobbies- 155%

Blob on Bottom - 105%

Blob on Top- 151%

Arched Lobby - 175%

Suspended Sphere - 113%

Perched Pyramid - 129%

Promenade Lobby - 121%

Pasta Lobby - 101%

Blob Outline - 124%

Mega Ground - 114%

Sky Frame - 167%

Halo Lobby - 119%

Donut Lobby - 130%

?????? - 500%

elevated culture - 200%

Bent Plinth - 130%

Sandwich Lobby- 190%

Slumped Slab- 125%

Sloped Deck- 105%

Suspended Slab- 145%

Solar Deck- 110%

Extended Plinth - 107%

Water Tower - 165%

Hanging Shapes - 132%

Hanging Lobbies- 155%

Blob on Bottom - 105%

Blob on Top- 151%

Arched Lobby - 175%

Suspended Sphere - 113%

Perched Pyramid - 129%

Promenade Lobby - 121%

Pasta Lobby - 101%

Blob Outline - 124%

Mega Ground - 114%

Sky Frame - 167%

Halo Lobby - 119%

Donut Lobby - 130%

?????? - 500%

elevated culture - 200%

Bent Plinth - 130%

Sandwich Lobby- 190%

Slumped Slab- 125%

Sloped Deck- 105%

Suspended Slab- 145%

Solar Deck- 110%

Extended Plinth - 107%

Water Tower - 165%

Hanging Shapes - 132%

Hanging Lobbies- 155%

Blob on Bottom - 105%

Blob on Top- 151%

Arched Lobby - 175%

Suspended Sphere - 113%

Perched Pyramid - 129%

Promenade Lobby - 121%

Pasta Lobby - 101%

Blob Outline - 124%

Mega Ground - 114%

Sky Frame - 167%

Halo Lobby - 119%

Donut Lobby - 130%

?????? - 500%

elevated culture - 200%

Bent Plinth - 130%

Sandwich Lobby- 190%

Slumped Slab- 125%

Sloped Deck- 105%

Suspended Slab- 145%

Solar Deck- 110%

Extended Plinth - 107%

Water Tower - 165%

Hanging Shapes - 132%

Hanging Lobbies- 155%

Blob on Bottom - 105%

Blob on Top- 151%

Arched Lobby - 175%

Suspended Sphere - 113%

Perched Pyramid - 129%

Promenade Lobby - 121%

Pasta Lobby - 101%

Blob Outline - 124%

Mega Ground - 114%

Sky Frame - 167%

Halo Lobby - 119%

Donut Lobby - 130%

?????? - 500%

Identify Typical Chicago Typologies

Trim the Fat and Compress Essential Program

Hotel

Theatre

MEGA

LOBBY

Identify Trimmed Communal Program

Compress into Aggregate Lobby

Split into Upper and Lower Lobbies based on Programmatic Needs

Compress into Aggregate Lobby

Split into Upper and Lower Lobbiesbased on Programmatic Needs

Identify TrimmedCommunal Program

elevated culture - 200%

Bent Plinth - 130%

Sandwich Lobby- 190%

Slumped Slab- 125%

Sloped Deck- 105%

Suspended Slab- 145%

Solar Deck- 110%

Extended Plinth - 107%

Water Tower - 165%

Hanging Shapes - 132%

Hanging Lobbies- 155%

Blob on Bottom - 105%

Blob on Top- 151%

Arched Lobby - 175%

Suspended Sphere - 113%

Perched Pyramid - 129%

Promenade Lobby - 121%

Pasta Lobby - 101%

Blob Outline - 124%

Mega Ground - 114%

Sky Frame - 167%

Halo Lobby - 119%

Donut Lobby - 130%

?????? - 500%

elevated culture - 200%

Bent Plinth - 130%

Sandwich Lobby- 190%

Slumped Slab- 125%

Sloped Deck- 105%

Suspended Slab- 145%

Solar Deck- 110%

Extended Plinth - 107%

Water Tower - 165%

Hanging Shapes - 132%

Hanging Lobbies- 155%

Blob on Bottom - 105%

Blob on Top- 151%

Arched Lobby - 175%

Suspended Sphere - 113%

Perched Pyramid - 129%

Promenade Lobby - 121%

Pasta Lobby - 101%

Blob Outline - 124%

Mega Ground - 114%

Sky Frame - 167%

Halo Lobby - 119%

Donut Lobby - 130%

?????? - 500%

elevated culture - 200%

Bent Plinth - 130%

Sandwich Lobby- 190%

Slumped Slab- 125%

Sloped Deck- 105%

Suspended Slab- 145%

Solar Deck- 110%

Extended Plinth - 107%

Water Tower - 165%

Hanging Shapes - 132%

Hanging Lobbies- 155%

Blob on Bottom - 105%

Blob on Top- 151%

Arched Lobby - 175%

Suspended Sphere - 113%

Perched Pyramid - 129%

Promenade Lobby - 121%

Pasta Lobby - 101%

Blob Outline - 124%

Mega Ground - 114%

Sky Frame - 167%

Halo Lobby - 119%

Donut Lobby - 130%

?????? - 500%

elevated culture - 200%

Bent Plinth - 130%

Sandwich Lobby- 190%

Slumped Slab- 125%

Sloped Deck- 105%

Suspended Slab- 145%

Solar Deck- 110%

Extended Plinth - 107%

Water Tower - 165%

Hanging Shapes - 132%

Hanging Lobbies- 155%

Blob on Bottom - 105%

Blob on Top- 151%

Arched Lobby - 175%

Suspended Sphere - 113%

Perched Pyramid - 129%

Promenade Lobby - 121%

Pasta Lobby - 101%

Blob Outline - 124%

Mega Ground - 114%

Sky Frame - 167%

Halo Lobby - 119%

Donut Lobby - 130%

?????? - 500%

Swiss Suites Section - AA1

5

10

20

Tower PlansCross Section - BB

AA

BB

1

5

10

20

1

5

10

20

Swiss Suites Section - AA1

5

10

20

Tower PlansCross Section - BB

AA

BB

1

5

10

201

5

10

20

Hotel

Offi ce

15

10

20

1

5

10

20

A

B

A B C D E

C

D

E

Bottom Lobby Plans

1

5

10

20

A

B

C

D

E

A B C D E

1

5

10

20

Top Lobby

Bottom Lobby

Structural Detail

Massive Concrete Shear Walls and Cores with Transfer every 20 fl oors.Circular cuts to relieve massiveness and to allow circulation. Ring Beams for lateral stiff ness.

Shear WallsTransfer Floors Slabs Facades

Office Floor

Sky Lobby

Aerial View

Theatre Spaces