Connor Gravelle Portfolio (Selected Projects)

Portfolio 2012-2017
Connor Gravelle

Intro &
Table of Contents

ABOUT THE COVER
Having spent four years at SCI-Arc, it seems that my
small body of work has become somewhat productively
unruly. Though some themes permeate the larger
structure of the work, collecting everything under one
banner (let alone four) is sometimes difficult. For this
reason, I have resisted the temptation to lift any single
project to the status of covering a book. Instead, all covers
(seen in each in its miniature to the left) come from
one enlarged image taken over a year ago in a field
outside of my hometown.
What this image means to me aesthetically more than
compensates for its non-linear entanglement with the
projects inside these books. In its most basal sense, it
is a photograph taken of the edge between a cornfield
and the sky on a late summer’s day. The balmy summer’s
sun in New England blinded the camera with
its intensity. At low exposure, the camera approached
the leafs at the ends of the cornstalks in an ultimately
vulnerable condition, unable to encapsulate the truth of
what it was tasked to capture. With a flick of my wrist,
the camera found itself completely unable to comprehend
what stood before it. Light failed to register on the
machine’s sensor in a way to which you might ascribe
any fidelity.
A brief obsession with the Japanese author Yukio
Mishima this year left me with this quote from his 1968
book, Sun and Steel:
“The upper atmosphere where there is no oxygen is
surrounded with death… No movement, no sound,
no memories… In this stillness was a beauty beyond
words: No more body or spirit, pen or sword, male or
female… I saw a giant circle coiled around the earth,
a ring that resolved all contradictions, a ring vaster
than death, more fragrant than any scent I have ever
known.”
This image, too, is a certain kind of death. It is the death
of a word — the death of a “cornstalk”. It is the final point
at which the nomination of what we see eludes us,
leaving nameless what we desperately seek to identify.
Where the atmosphere’s outer boundary scraped
at the edge of what he breathed to puncture and peel
at Mishima’s reality and its definitions, the camera’s
strained lens breaks the identity of what stands before
it. More than cornstalk or sky, this image is the last
instance of time for an entire reality. It is the border at
which nouns become insufficient to transcribe what is
perceived.
A weltanschauung of sorts, it resonates with a great
deal of the work in these books in regards to the mutual
cadence that each poses towards hardline truths. The
atmosphere, the cornstalk and the building all stand
to defy the qualities we presume for them. More than
merely encapsulating something novel, their true power
emerges in the moment we stand back from the spectacle
and see again exactly what we saw before. To see
the cornstalk anew is to liberate its identify to the extent
that we accept its capability of ontological transgression
without entrapping it to our subjective demands.
Rather, from where we stand, a world lifted from us for
only a second to be delivered back slightly askew offers
a realignment of external reality so fundamental and yet
so belonging that we too find ourselves changed.

About Me
6

ABOUT ME
Hello! My name is Connor Gravelle, and I am currently a
candidate for an undergraduate degree here at SCI-Arc,
approaching thesis as I enter my final year here.
This is my portfolio. Between its covers, you will find an
amassing of what I think about as per my work in visual,
architectural, designed and documented forms. Its
organization has been curated to follow a genealogical
order, which is described in further detail on the next
page.
I have a particular interest in resolving new ideas about
the perspectives which are cast on architecture. Both
the development of the field towards its current form
in historical retrospective and the possibility of future
tangents into new paradigms for our built world as a
whole fascinate me.
I believe that architecture holds the keen possibility to
influence us, as the human race, on a profound level.
It is perhaps the art which encapsulates us the most
within its grasps, and, in those regards, its powers
should be appropriated in order to further our understanding
of the human condition as manifested in our
designed reality.
ACADEMICS
––
3.96 GPA at SCI-Arc
––
Instruction in the German language at
Goethe Institut Boston (2008-2011)
––
4.1 Graduating GPA from Newburyport Public High
School in Newburyport, Massachusetts in 2012
AWARDS AND RECOGNITIONS
––
Specially selected to represent SCI-Arc to prospective
students on both tours and students panels
––
Chosen to display work at SCI-Arc’s annual Spring
Show of student work for 2013, 2014, 2015 and 2016
––
Chosen to participate among three students
as SCI-Arc’s representation to the 2016 Julius
Shulman Emerging Talent Award’s competition,
organized by the LA Business Council
––
2012 winner of Scholastic Art Award in
the Architecture category as well as subsequent
Prismacolor Scholarship for design
of “Mexican Border Memorial”
CONTACT INFORMATION
Address (LA) 411 South Main Street
Unit 318
Los Angeles, California 90013
United States of America
Address (MA) 5 Milk Street
Newburyport, Massachusetts 01950
United States of America
Phone +1 978 918 2575
Email connor_gravelle@sciarc.edu
connor.gravelle@gmail.com (personal)
7

Table of
Contents
8

Lima Museum of Art .............................................................................12
Synopsis ..............................................................................................12
The Core ..............................................................................................17
Scales of Institutional Experience .....................................25
Architecture and Freedom .....................................................25
Subtle Deviations between Architectural
Elements .........................................................................................30
About Subtlety ...............................................................................30
Where Subtlety Places Us ......................................................39
Pondering the Lima Exposition Hall ................................39
Learning from Grammar ..........................................................39
Paseo Penasco House ........................................................................50
Odd Blocks ................................................................................................. 78
SP Chinatown Depot Redevelopment ...................................102
Synopsis ...........................................................................................102
Project Scheme ...........................................................................102
About Chinatown .......................................................................102
Chinatown’s History ..................................................................120
Berkeley Museum of Art ..................................................................128
Elevations and the Politics of the Art Museum
as a Contemporary Medium for Architecture ......132
Circulatory Strategies ..............................................................136
About the Façade .....................................................................140
Organization ..................................................................................143
Circulatory Vignettes .............................................................. 157
[We] are LA ....................................................................................189
Canonical Images in Fashion and Architecture .....194
Pertaining Quotes ......................................................................194
Skin ......................................................................................................194
Nelson Atkins Museum Precedent Study ...........................206
El Rosario Market Redevelopment ..........................................220
The Situation in El Rosario ..................................................220
Engagements of the Façade ..............................................220
Contextualities ............................................................................220
Urban Wallpaper ........................................................................225
Lower 4th Street Masterplan ....................................................... 252
Synopsis .......................................................................................... 252
Site Ecology as Building Parameter .............................. 252
Los Angeles Mall Office Tower ..................................................266
The Education of a Neighborhood ................................266
Preservation and Cultural Identity ................................. 270
Urban Dichotomies .................................................................. 270
Learning to Walk Again ......................................................... 270
Rancho San Juan Rehabilitation Center .............................. 278
Synopsis .......................................................................................... 278
A New Federal Penitentiary No. 1 ................................... 278
Tilting the Unité Model .......................................................... 278
BAM Design Development ............................................................160
SCI-Fa ..........................................................................................................170
Synopsis ...........................................................................................170
Thoughts on Program .............................................................170
Thoughts on Institution ..........................................................170
The Fourth Wall as Societal Device ............................... 176
The Fourth Wall in Architecture........................................ 176
F***, the Spline ............................................................................. 179
A Mechanized Pool for Fashion ........................................183
Los Angeles, or Epileptic Shock .......................................183
Escape is Futile: LA Live .....................................................189
Beginnings and Ends in Architecture ...........................189
9

10  

11

LIMA MUSEUM OF ART
Thesis Studio
Spring 2017, Michael Young with AT Melissa Shin
Awarded Blythe and Thom Mayne Best Undergraduate Thesis Prize
Synopsis
Our cultural moment might be described
as one of intense self-reflection. Concerns
of what it means to belong and
what exactly an identity is have recently,
more so than ever, foregrounded themselves
as questions paramount to, if not
at times even more bombastic than, the
very definition of such terms in a given
situation. Consequently, this problematizes
the architectural practice as a
transcriptive discipline for identifying,
materializing and, most importantly, defining
the ideological conditions of given
contexts, cultures and programs.
In particular terms, this extension to an
existing art museum takes to task preservation
for its immediate engagement
with identity. Thus, questions of institution,
context and even the literal tectonic
manifestation of a building become
crucial in understanding how a building
might in itself establish the possibility of
productively estranging what we take for
granted. This opens a working ground on
which the architectural formation of the
project is constantly defined by its efficacy
to unsettle (though not persistently to
resist or to undermine) presumed tropes,
values and institutional underpinnings.
The Façade
This process begins first in the demands
of a competition brief that places heavy
cultural worth in the elevations of the
existing Neoclassical structure onsite.
Rather than conforming below grade or
retreatingly offer a building which disappears,
the project literally exercises the
original structure of its west façade and
moves the amputated face 40 meters
towards curbside. The leftover negative
space of this operation provides the
working room for the new contemporary
art wing to infill the space between the
original structure and its severed streetside
face.
The Screen and the Fake Materiality
From the exterior, this elevational relationship
is further challenged by the
intermittent construction of a glass skin
wrapping between the existing and new
wings of the building. Fritted with an
mere image of the original building, the
misregistration of this surface from its
literal material referent below problematizes
the orthographic elevation for which
the project brief places such implication
in favor of an oblique.
Likewise, a perforated metal cladding
around the volume of the extension mimics
traditional architectural materiality in
its faux travertine patterns, further enlivening
this sometimes-graphic, sometimes-spatial
depth. Whatever sense of
depth offered in the filigree ornament
of the original building offered is both
highlighted and contested in the visually
uncertain contradiction between the
absolute flatness yet experiential dimensionality
of the screen and cladding.
The Entrance
Moving into the building, the museum
consumes the site’s demand for a pedestrian
underpass across a heavily trafficked
thoroughfare as well as a subway
entrance by gently, slightly pulling
patrons, passersby, metro riders, delivery
trucks and flaneurs alike below the masses
of both structures through a crevice
between the ground and the perceptual
weight (something ostensibly of stone
with a certain heaviness) of the museum
extension. This circulatory flattening of
the presumed hierarchy between museum
lobby, public concourse and delivery
dock challenges the institutional parameters
of the architecture from its very
moment of entry.
The Core
From here, visitor circulation branches off
and ascends to a lobby space at grade
with the street, pinched between a fragment
of the original structure’s façade,
the metal-as-stone cladding and an interstitial
space, framed in glass, between
the two which houses a café. Program
becomes performance as the circulatory
pathways of the build leverage their
architectural intensity (as opposed to a
more pragmatically blank space such as
an office or gallery) to focus the experience
of traversing the building.
The Storage
These subtle shifts in the relationships
between floorplates and walls provide
spaces of “betweenness” through which
several stairways and elevators slip
between levels to provide different rates
of passage between the building. The
primary visitor route of these becomes
a central core, inhabiting the interstitial
space of the section between the lobby
and the galleries, itself bisecting the conservation
and storage areas of the museum
as it bridges between the ground and
second floors. Moments of interstitiality
create inhabitation in the sectional gray
space typically reserved for institutional
program, storage or mechanical space.
As one passes through this space, the
museum as a curatorial and collecting
space is opened up, framing the experience
of the art viewer not merely as one
of passivity but as one of a kind of active
transience (the art not on exhibition nevertheless
becomes in a way public but
12 Lima Museum of Art Thesis Studio

14 Lima Museum of Art Thesis Studio Axonometric

Connor Gravelle Portfolio 2012-2015 15

New Wholes
Lamination
Subtleness
Bent
Irrelevance
Composition
Collage
Mere Parts
Leaned
Rotated
(“Boxes Galore”)
Displaced
Architectures (Left to Right):
Heydar Aliyev Center, Zaha Hadid Architects, 2012
Ordos 100, multiple authors, 2012
Chicago Federal Center, Ludwig Mies van der Rohe, 1960-1974
Neue Staatsgalerie Stuttgart, James Stirling, 1977-1984
Artworks (Left to Right):
Shaved
Orange Crush, Marylin Minter, 2009
Untitled, Ryan McGinley, 2007
My Bed, Tracey Emin, 1999
Red Relief, Ellsworth Kelly, 2009
Untitled, Kardashian Collage, Shana Sadeghi-Ray, ~2015
the spatial positioning of its enclosure in
relation to the pathway of circulation infers
a kind of reverse performance on the
part of visitors in a kind of institutional
voyeurism). Opportunities for transparency
engage new axial relationships
with the surrounding park and its various
structures while enframing the context
of the experience of vertically moving
through the museum.
The Center
Where the original building provided a
direct, axial Beaux-Arts scheme centered
around a courtyard, the rearrangement
of the museum spaces in this project
creates a charged and ideologically less
certain choreography. Where one wing’s
courtyard fetishizes centrality and the
subject’s subordination to a panoptic
condition of architecture, the other willfully
enforces a constant state of peripheralization.
The core of the new building
is something unable to be experienced
all at once, something that at times faces
the visitor with abstraction and at other
times with intense literality (such as in
the storage spaces) but involved in a
constancy of otherness.
The Regard of Oldness
This does not infer a constant subordination
of the existing architecture or
promote a fetishistic hierarchy between
old and new, but instead proposes that
the careful consideration of one might inform
the capacity of the other to engage
the cultural conversation at hand. For
instance, the repetition of enfilade gallery
spaces in the existing building repeats
across the top level and makes impetus
for skylights.
Providing a wide, open space both performs
the curatorial expectations of the
exhibition spaces and engages the architectural
ambition to establish (in this case
through these skylights) a productively
conversive and uneasy posture between
old and new. It is this very formal repetition
of the poché inferred in the enfilade
through which one pops into the galleries
from below.
(Above) Diagram demarcating the
barriers of subtlety between objects,
attempting to establish a working space
(Right) Interior rendering of
space between public circulation
and institutional storage
16 Lima Museum of Art Thesis Studio

A constancy of interruption between
spaces reminds one in each moment of
an imminent “otherness”. Not always the
primary focus of a space, there remains
throughout the building slippages of
space, both literally and figuratively that
challenge the assumed boundary conditions
between programmatic, material
and formal conditions. These posit a
state of belonging between old and new,
and within the new itself, that is not necessarily
binaristic. Architecture begins to
blend in for the sake of standing out.
In these terms, the project probes architecture
as a method for producing alternative
means of belonging beyond an
outdated dichotomy between traditional
vernacular and building as something we
might call “object-gift” to the city. Settling
into its situation in a gesture of perhaps
unsettled belonging, it establishes a
series of conversations which reframe its
context, both literally in terms of a neighborhood
and a park and more figuratively
in terms of a culture and a value system.
These concerns highlight the performative
quality of architecture the contemporary
cultural field as a method only for
establishing value but for questioning it
through tightly choreographed interventions,
subtle adjacencies and their consequent
conversational possibilities.
The Core
The circulation “core” does only a few
things, but ponders an execution of such
things in terms of extreme exactitude.
Where sectional variability between the
entrance, storage and exhibition spaces
of the museum reveals only slight dimensional
differences when regarded against
the overall size of the museum itself,
these very minor differences in level
pose extreme problems for the articulation
architectural elements with such
finite requirements as stairs and ramps,
whether those issues be the result of
building codes, ergonomics or otherwise
aesthetic considerations. This represents
a moment of strange efficacy in terms of
generic architectural elements around
the possibility of an immediate adjacency
between basal architectural prerogatives
(such as circulation or code-conformation)
and the very problem of conceiving
(and realizing) an architecture.
A series of alignments and level considerations
become the primary drivers of
the core’s articulation. While these may
be banal in the overall summation of an
architectural work, their manifestation
is directly tied both to the experience of
a building and the general set of possible
influences for its very generation. A
stair or a ramp have within themselves
an entire accompaniment of geometries
governing rise, run, angles, permissible
head heights and widths. These values
are in some sense more than enough in
their combining to produce a believable
building, but moreover in their confabulation
they acquire the ability to produce
an architecture.
If a confabulation is the “disturbance of
memory, defined as the production of
fabricated, distorted or misinterpreted
memories about oneself or the world,
without the conscious intention to deceive”
(Wikipedia), then the arbitration of
these architectural standards (the widths,
heights, spacings and rises-over-runs)
must be the most ubiquitous confabulation
imaginable. They are a confabulation
whose character is completely unavoidable
for the fact that architecture has no
baseline concept of reality against which
to attest a deviation. The first instantiation
of any building is blankness, the
utter absence of constructed material,
and yet the architectural process could
be thought of as standing to compensate
that void.
Moving outside, as the subtly shifted
bars which define the interior project out
into the park, their slight misalignments
begin to consume the disorganization or
the park and justify the immense variety
of local conditions throughout the
block. This aren’t okay when misaligned
if there’s a clear, orthogonal system,
against which everything must answer
for itself constantly. But, if that system
embraces the variability of everything,
Connor Gravelle Portfolio 2012-2015 17

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01 Rc_A.01
02 -
03 Rc_A.02
04 Rc_A.03
05 Rc_B.01
06 Rc_A.04
07 Rc_A.05
08 Rc_A.08
09 Cr.10
10 Sp_A.03
11 Sp_A.02
12 Cr.08
13 Cr.09
14 Ov_A.01
15 Sp_A.01
16 Sp_A.04
17 Sp_B.04
18 Sp_B.05
Main Entrance Foyer
Concourse to Subway
Main Lobby Ramp
Main Lobby Landing
Main Lobby Exhibition Space
Ticketing and Elevator Bank
Ticketing Booth
Aft Lobby
Lobby Public WC Foyer
Lobby Women's WC
Lobby Men's WC
Ticketing Hallway 1
Ticketing Hallway 2
Ticketing Offices
Coat Check
Lobby Staff WC
Power Unit
Power Control Room
397 m2
-
338 m2
215 m2
323 m2
106 m2
57 m2
165 m2
14 m2
23 m2
21 m2
18 m2
8 m2
20 m2
53 m2
12 m2
51 m2
24 m2
19 Cr.06
20 Ov_C.01
21 Ov_C.02
22 Sp_B.02
23 Sp_B.03
24 Cr.01
25 Ov_B.01
26 Rc_A.06
27 Rc_C.01
28 Sp_A.05
29 Cr.02
30 Cr.12
31 Ov_C.05
32 Sp_A.07
33 Sp_A.08
34 Re_A.01
35 Re_A.06
36 Re_A.05
Lobby Administrative Access Hallway 62 m2
Lobby Storage Room 1
7 m2
Lobby Storage Room 2
7 m2
Deliveries / Loading Dock
334 m2
Equiptment Room
48 m2
Ground Floor Freight Elevtor Lobby 45 m2
Woodshop
63 m2
Education Foyer
250 m2
Main Café Space and Bar
202 m2
Café Kitchen
33 m2
Existing Stairwell North
51 m2
Café WC Access Hallway
48 m2
Library Storage Room
11 m2
Café Men's WC
22 m2
Café Women's WC
22 m2
Library
364 m2
Library Reading Room
55 m2
Library Book Depository
25 m2
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53
54
Cr.14
Re_A.07
Cr.13
Rc_A.07
Cr.15
Ed_A.01
Ed_B.04
Ed_B.01
Cr.16
Sp_A.09
Ed_B.05
Ed_B.02
Cr.17
Sp_A.10
Ed_B.06
Ed_B.03
Cr.18
Sp_A.11
Library Office Foyer
Library Office
Library Transitional Space
Courtyard
Education Main Hallway
Lecture Hall (373 seats)
Medium Classroom 1
Small Classroom 1
Education Classroom WC Foyer 1
Classroom WC 1
Medium Classroom 2
Small Classroom 2
Education Classroom WC Foyer 2
Classroom WC 2
Medium Classroom 3
Small Classroom 3
Education Classroom WC Foyer 3
Classroom WC 3
7 m2
16 m2
19 m2
577 m2
238 m2
423 m2
75 m2
53 m2
6 m2
13 m2
68 m2
46 m2
6 m2
13 m2
83 m2
61 m2
6 m2
13 m2
55 Ed_B.07
56 Ed_C.03
57 Cr.03
58 Ed_B.08
59 Cr.19
60 Sp_A.13
61 Sp_A.12
62 Ed_C.02
63 Ed_C.01
Large Classroom
Educational Storage
Existing Stairwell South
Education Breakout Space
Education WC Foyer
Education Women's WC
Education Men's WC
Education Offices Auxiliary
Education Offices Main
127 m2
21 m2
74 m2
136 m2
11 m2
19 m2
18 m2
36 m2
56 m2
18 Lima Museum of Art Thesis Studio Plans (-0,5, +1 and 2)

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01 Ov_C.06
02 Rc_A.09
03 Cr.23
04 Rc_A.10
05 Rc_A.11
06 Ov_A.04
07 Ov_A.03
08 Ov_A.02
09 Ov_C.07
10 Ov_C.08
11 Ov_A.06
12 Ov_A.07
13 Ov_A.08
14 Ov_A.05
15 Ov_A.09
16 Ov_A.10
17 Ov_A.11
18 Ov_A.12
Collection Storage Vault
844 m2
Storage Foyer
191 m2
Administration West Access Ramp 63 m2
Administration Lobby West 157 m2
Administration Lobby East 233 m2
Administration Workspace South 238 m2
Administration Workspace North 108 m2
Administration Foyer
96 m2
Museography Storage Room 105 m2
Museography Storage Office 14 m2
Small Office 1
11 m2
Small Office 2
11 m2
Small Office 3
10 m2
Conference Room
36 m2
Large Office 1
18 m2
Large Office 2
18 m2
Large Office 3
18 m2
Large Office 4
16 m2
20
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Sp_A.14
Sp_A.15
Ov_C.09
Cr.22
Sp_A.17
Sp_A.16
Cr.24
Cr.20
Ov_B.02
Ov_B.04
Cr.25
Ov_B.05
Cr.26
Ov_B.06
Ov_C.11
Ov_B.03
Cr.27
Ov_C.11
Administration Kitchen
25 m2
Administration Private WC
7 m2
Administration Storage
47 m2
Administration East Access Hallway 19 m2
Administration Lobby Women's WC 28 m2
Administration Lobby Men's WC 28 m2
Conservation Area Access Hallway 34 m2
Conservation Freight Elevator Lobby 35 m2
Conservation Workshop 1
231 m2
Conservation Office 1
34 m2
Conservation Transitional Space 29 m2
Conservation Office 2
25 m2
Conservation Workshop 2 Foyer 10 m2
Conservation Office 3
24 m2
Conservation Storage Room 2 7 m2
Conservation Workshop 2
113 m2
East Egress Breakout Space 61 m2
Conservation Storage Room 1 16 m2
01 Ex_E.01
02 Ex_E.02
03 Ex_E.03
04 Ex_E.04
05 Cr.28
06 Sp_A.20
07 Sp_A.19
08 Ov_C.12
09 Ex_B.05
10 Ex_A.05
11 Ex_A.01
12 Ex_A.04
13 Ex_C.01
14 Ex_C.02
15 Ex_A.02
16 Ex_D.01
17 Ex_D.02
18 Ex_D.03
Contemporary Art Hall South 908 m2
Contemporary Art Hall East 617 m2
Contemporary Art Hall West 687 m2
Contemporary Art Hall North 1025 m2
Gallery WC Foyer
6 m2
Gallery Women's WC
22 m2
Gallery Men's WC
26 m2
Cont. Gallery Storage Room
17 m2
Video Projection Room
80 m2
Auxiliary Special Collection Room 99 m2
Textiles Room
228 m2
Silverworks Gallery
331 m2
South Hall Exhibition Space 1 73 m2
South Hall Exhibition Space 2 40 m2
Prado Room
113 m2
Modern Art Hall South
139 m2
Modern Art Hall
148 m2
Modern Art Hall North
139 m2
19 Ex_B.01
20 Ex_B.03
21 Ex_C.03
22 Ex_C.04
23 Ex_B.04
24 Ex_A.03
25 Ov_C.14
26 Ov_C.13
27 Ex_C.05
28 Ov_C.15
29 Ex_D.04
Colonial and Precolumbian Art
Republican Art
North Hall Exhibition Space 1
North Hall Exhibition Space 2
Photography
Drawing Gallery
Drawing Gallery Storage Room 2
Drawing Gallery Storage Room 1
Auxiliary Exhibition Space
Textiles Room Storage Room
Modern Art Foyer
295 m2
251 m2
74 m2
40 m2
113 m2
354 m2
18 m2
18 m2
33 m2
18 m2
185 m2
Connor Gravelle Portfolio 2012-2015 19

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20 Lima Museum of Art Thesis Studio Plan Details
48
47
33 31
32

08
03
07 14
15 16
06
17
18
05
06
19
20
07
10
12 13
23
24
22
21
02
05
04
01
Connor Gravelle Portfolio 2012-2015 21

22 Lima Museum of Art Thesis Studio Render: Circuation and Storage

Connor Gravelle Portfolio 2012-2015 Render: Galleries and Circulation
23

Roof
Gallery-accessible patio
Skylights
Long-Span Roof Underside Structure
130cm-depth structural truss
Upper Level
Galleries
Core
Façade Cladding
Perforated Panels
264cm standard width
624.3cm standard (but variable) height
Vierendeel System
Upper Supports
100cm x 60cm W-Sections primary
80cm x 50cm W-Sections secondary
Middle Level
Administration
Collection storage
Conservation workshops
Façade Cladding
Metal Support Structure
45cm x 20cm W-Sections vertically
47.6cm x 23.8cm W-Sections horizontally
10cm x 7.5cm C-Channel sliding connections
12.5cm strut panel connectors
Vierendeel System
Main Crossing Members
60cm x 30cm W-Sections primary horizontally
40cm x 20cm W-Sections secondary horizontally
50cm x 30cm W-Sections vertically
Glass Screen
Support Structure
15cm x 5cm vertical clip struts
10cm x 3cm horizontal tube steel members
15cm x 5cm façade connectors
Vierendeel System
Vertical Supports
100cm x 60cm W-Sections
Lobby Hung Glass Ceiling
526.5cm x 273.4cm standard glazed panels
7.5cm tube steel connection frame
5cm diameter hanging members
Glass Screen
Fritted Glass Panels
350cm standard width
900cm standard (but variable) height
Ground Level
Entrance concourse
Education facilities
Auditorium
Deliveries
24 Lima Museum of Art Thesis Studio Exploded Axonometric of Structure

Subtle
Subtlety
Awkward
~1600 C.E. (mid-16c. as a surname),
sotil, "penetrating; ingenious;
refined" (of the mind);
"sophisticated, intricate, abstruse"
(of arguments)
Imported from Old French sotil,
soutil, subtil "adept, adroit; cunning,
wise; detailed; well-crafted"
Originally Latin subtilis "fine, thin,
delicate, finely woven;" figuratively
"precise, exact, accurate,"
in taste or judgment, "fine, keen,"
of style, "plain, simple, direct,"
from sub "under" + -tilis, from
tela "web, net, warp of a fabric".
~1600 C.E., sotilte, "skill, ingenuity,"
from Old French sotilte "skillfulness,
cunning" (Modern
French subtilité),
Originally Latin subtilitatem
(nominative subtilitas) "fineness;
simplicity, slenderness," noun of
quality from subtilis "fine, thin,
delicate" (see subtle).
First attested in late 14th century
as "cleverness, shrewdness;
trickery, guile, craftiness," also
"thinness, slenderness, smallness;
rarity"
~mid. 1500s C.E., "in the wrong
direction," from awk, "back-handed",
+ adverbial suffix weard.
Meaning "clumsy" first recorded
1520s
→ Awk
From Old Norse ofugr /ofigr /
afigr, “turned backwards”, from
which also come Danish avet,
“backwards”, and Swedish avig,
“turned backwards”
Cognate with German äbich, and
Gothic ibuks, “turned back”; Akin
to Sanskrit अपाच् (apāc), “turned
away”
Subtlety
in space
Subtlety in angle
Overall Disposition
Minutia, Detail
Endgame
Means
Object-Object Relations
Nonsuperlative Statement
Nonhierarchical Adjacency
Subject-Object Relations
Value Judgement
Social Transgression
Photos: Ruedi Walti, BBC, Hiroshi Sugimoto
Etymologies: Etymonline, Wiktionary
then the disorder of the park itself becomes
an asset.
Scales of Institutional Experience
There should be two nearly distinct
yet intertwined circulatory systems.
The main system is a series of roughly
4-meter wide ramps which wind down
through the galleries, bisecting the storage
space and administrative areas as
they trudge down through the tertiary
core (a lightwell, of sorts) of the building.
Somewhat intertwined yet in more
intimate spaces, 2-meter stairs offer short
cuts between spaces, bridging the further
removed programmatic areas, such
as education to administration. One set
of spaces offers the “public” experience
of the institution as a singular, communal
place in all its ‘placyness’, while
the second provides for more solipsistic,
individuated experiences by virtue of its
more intimate scale and more expedient
circulatory routes. The contemporary art
museum is architecturally a space expected
to deliver somewhat paradoxically
on these distinct levels of experience.
Where circulation can come to underline
this capacity of architecture
Architecture and Freedom
We expect certain standards of our
democratic instructions, such as universal
treatment standards and bureaucratic
transparency. Such exulting expectations
of public institutions have in a
way become aestheticized into a series
of rather representational maneuvers,
extending all the way into architecture.
A prognosis of contemporary design in
the public realm reveals a ubiquitous, yet
unspoken, cadaver of material, organizational
and infrastructural tendencies
that proclaim the democratic values of
our buildings. Far from truly denoting
the internalized veneration of democracy
that a building’s occupants might stand
for, these are often a top-level gloss that
(Above) Diagram of the differences
between subtlety and awkwardness,
both of which deal in terms of particular
slight differences between things
merely performs its support for liberatory
politics. That bureaucratic office buildings
in China, Russia, the United States
and Germany might all look rather similar
only proves the fallacy that we can indicate
the progressiveness of a society in
stone, metal and glass.
While it may seem contradictory, this is
not to undermine the innumerable investments
made by certain architectural
movements in the name of progressive
architecture, particularly the Modernists.
A great many Modern buildings
do indeed (or rather did indeed in their
prospective times) successfully align the
materiality and organizational qualities
of their architecture with political trends.
This eloquent complexity can be found in
Modernism’s dual capacity to represent
in nearly identical maneuvers at once the
transparency and freedom of Neimeyer’s
work in Brasilia and Terragni’s work for
the Italian Fascists. The problem contemporary
architecture runs into which is
successfully avoided in these examples
is a misalignment between expressed
political intent and the actuality of a
building’s situation.
A glass façade’s ability to express transparency
makes only pathetic ripples
in its wake if the institution behind its
curtain wall is the American government’s
National Security Agency. Until
actual political change can take place,
the architectural intent of this element is
merely ironic and consequentially unsuccessful.
This contextuality is precisely the
reason why a fairly elected Italian city
council can adequately perform its expected
democratic functions in a building
the origins of which hail from the wartime
Connor Gravelle Portfolio 2012-2015 25

Façade Cladding
Perforated Panels
264cm standard width
624.3cm standard (but variable) height
Façade Cladding
Metal Support Structure
45cm x 20cm W-Sections vertically
47.6cm x 23.8cm W-Sections horizontally
10cm x 7.5cm C-Channel sliding connections
12.5cm strut panel connectors
Long-Span Roof Undersid
130cm-depth structural trus
26 Lima Museum of Art Thesis Studio Structure Axonometric (Details)
Vie
Ver
100
Vierendeel Sy
Upper Suppor

Vierendeel System
Upper Supports
100cm x 60cm W-Sections primary
80cm x 50cm W-Sections secondary
t
Roof
Gallery-accessible patio
Skylights
Middle Level
Administration
Collection storage
Conservation workshops
Vierendeel System
Main Crossing Members
60cm x 30cm W-Sections primary horizontally
40cm x 20cm W-Sections secondary horizontally
50cm x 30cm W-Sections vertically
Glass Screen
Support Structure
15cm x 5cm vertical clip
10cm x 3cm horizontal
15cm x 5cm façade con
e Structure
s
Upper Level
Galleries
Core
Vierendeel System
Vertical Supports
100cm x 60cm W-Sections
Lobby Hung Glass Ceiling
526.5cm x 273.4cm standard glazed panels
7.5cm tube steel connection frame
5cm diameter hanging members
Glass Screen
Fritted Glass Panels
350cm standard width
900cm standard (but va
stem
ts
Connor Gravelle Portfolio 2012-2015 27
Ground Level
Entrance concourse

28 Lima Museum of Art Thesis Studio Model Photographs

Fascist construction campaign. It is the
reason for which one might have a picnic
at the Nuremburg Rally Grounds without
indulging in the politics of the Nazi
Party. A building is only as valuable as
its political underpinnings, or rather the
extent to which its continued inhabitation
repudiates those foundations (such as in
the case of the Rally Grounds or the civic
buildings of Mussolini’s Italy).
We must at once hold steadfast the trial
by which architecture is kept to a strict
moral code and allow for the slippage
of this code to the extent that we might
question the presumed expectations this
forces us to enact on an architecture.
Why do we continue to create building
which so thoroughly fail to represent the
progressive values of our age? Conversely,
why do we expect architecture
to free us? This is surely too tall an order
and identifies the ultimate irony that
proclaimed the downfall of High Modernism.
If the sheer starkness of the difference
between the Barbican’s tumultuous
exaltation into architectural stardom and
nearby Robin Hood Garden’s dilapidation
alongside London’s docklands does not
elucidate the point clearly enough, we
must look harder to realize that architecture
is ultimately subservient to the
respective capabilities of its financers to
provide for the proper services, maintenance
and larger democratic ideals by
which it thrives or in the lack of which it
ruinates.
Subtle Deviations between
Architectural Elements
Presumption frames everything in the
field of one’s experience. In the same
way, each architectural element comes
alongside a series of expected functions,
aesthetics and positions relative to the
other systems which define a building.
These ingrained complacencies
of circumstance dictate a great deal of
how we perceive the built environment,
a stalemate status quo against which
“radical” architecture has spent the
majority of the last half century resisting,
undermining and perverting in the name
of producing a truly new architecture.
This precipice has, time and time again,
proven reticent to be crossed. Ostensibly
radical architecture has focused almost
solely on the foreground of human perception,
at once ignoring the subtleties of
the periphery and overwhelmingly failing
to undertake the task of addressing political,
economic and social concerns.
About Subtlety
Perhaps the thesis isn’t so much about
overall subtlety, but an approach which
takes each architectural element into
account on its own scale. What would be
the subtle manipulations of the standard
architectural elements (a floor, a wall or a
column) which would gently push them
far enough beyond the typical boundaries
of normative perception but within
the borders of reconcilability as their
own distinct elements? E.g. one needs to
recognize something as a column prior
(Below) West elevation showing
the relationship between the glass
screen, the removed façade and
the fake stone panels behind
(Right) Oblique axonometric drawing
showing the organizational shifts
between different architectural
elements that produce ambiguity
in the building’s organization
30 Lima Museum of Art Thesis Studio West Elevation

Vierendeel Truss Supports
Original East Façade
Secondary Egress
Core and Skylights
Adminsitration Shortcut
Gallery Egress
New Façade
Original Façade, Repositioned
Skewed Building Layers
Connor Gravelle Portfolio 2012-2015 Axonometric of Internal Shifts
31

2 4 6 8
8 7 6 5
1 3 5 7
Architectural End Matching
1 2 3 4
Panel End Matching
Book Matching
1_1 1_2 1_3
Eight-Piece Sunburst Matching
Box Matching
Herringbone (V-Book) Matching
2_1 2_2 2_3
Continuous End Matching
32 Lima Museum of Art Thesis Studio Stone Material Studies

Slip Matching
Random Matching
1_4 1_5 1_6
Reverse (End Grain) Box Matching
Parquet Matching
2_4 2_5 2_6
Reverse Diamond Matching
Swing Matching
Connor Gravelle Portfolio 2012-2015 33

5
4
13
3
14
1
2
Section: Vertical Compression of Institutional Space
34 Lima Museum of Art Thesis Studio Section: Vertical Hierarchy of Spaces

6 7 8
9
10
11 12
1
2
3
4
5
6
7
-
Rc_A.02
Ov_C.06
Ex_E.02
Ex_E.01
Ex_D.04
Ex_C.01
Concourse to Subway
Main Lobby Ramp
Collection Storage Vault
Contemporary Art Hall East
Contemporary Art Hall South
Modern Art Foyer
South Hall Exhibition Space 1
-
338 m2
844 m2
617 m2
908 m2
185 m2
73 m2
8
9
10
11
12
13
14
Ex_C.02
Ex_B.03
Ed_A.01
Ed_C.03
Ed_B.07
Ov_B.02
Sp_B.0
South Hall Exhibition Space 2
Republican Art
Lecture Hall
Educational Storage
Large Classroom
Conservation Workshop 1
Loading Dock
40 m2
251 m2
423 m2
21 m2
127 m2
231 m2
143 m2
1:200
Connor Gravelle Portfolio 2012-2015 35

36 Lima Museum of Art Thesis Studio Model Photograph: Galleries

Connor Gravelle Portfolio 2012-2015 Model Photograph: Glass Screen
37

5 6
8 9 7
3 4
2
1
1 - Concourse to Subway
-
2
3
4
Rc_A.03
Rc_A.09
Ov_C.06
Main Lobby Landing
Storage Foyer
Collection Storage Vault
215 m2
191 m2
844 m2
5 Ex_E.04 Contemporary Art Hall North 1025 m2
6 Ex_E.01 Contemporary Art Hall South 908 m2
7 Rc_A.10 Administration Lobby West
157 m2
8 Ov_C.07 Museography Storage Room 105 m2
Section: Vertical Procession 9 Ov_C.08 Museography Storage Office
14 m2 1:200
7
4 5 6 8 9
10
14 13 12
15
11
2
3
1
1 - Concourse to Subway
- m2 9 Ex_D.02 Modern Art Hall
148 m2
2 Rc_A.02 Main Lobby Ramp
338 m2 10 Ex_B.03 Republican Art
251 m2
3 Cr.15 Education Main Hallway
238 m2 11 Sp_B.03 Equiptment Room
48 m2
4 Ex_E.03 Contemporary Art Hall West 687 m2 12 Cr.23 Administration Access Ramp 63 m2
5 Ex_E.02 Contemporary Art Hall East
617 m2 13 Ov_C.10 Conservation Storage Room 1 16 m2
6 Ex_B.04 Photography
113 m2 14 Cr.24 Conservation Area Access Hallway 34 m2
7 Ov_C.121 Contemporary Art Gallery Storage 17 m2 15 Rc_A.11 Administration Lobby East
233 m2
Section: Contrasting Centers 8 Ex_B.02 Colonial Art
149 m2
1:200
38 Lima Museum of Art Thesis Studio Sections

to one’s recognition that it is a strange,
unfamiliar or otherwise distinct column.
Speaking economically, to what extent
does this undermine or substantiate the
value claim for expensive design? Political
stances would presume that luxurious
design is unsavory, but to what extent
do expense and luxury as uncommon
characteristic to an architecture deviate
it from the norm? Where is the border
between a normative, but expensive,
building by Annabelle Selldorf and one
is both abnormal and expensive, such
as the more innovative sides of Zaha
Hadid’s work?
Where Subtlety Places Us
We often think of architecture as paradoxically
lodged between immediate and
hinesight states of perception, creating
totalizing environments and yet obfuscated
to the pedestrian act providing inhabitable
space. Always either battle cry or
whisper, architecture seldom ‘just barely’
positions itself within the world. This unexplored
territory could be described as
a subtle posture towards existence. While
clearly demarcated identities are productive
in their distinguishability, subtlety
allows the simultaneous existence of two
conditions within immediate self-adjacency
to the extent that they engage a
delicate contrapposto without flattening
or laminating into a new whole.
Rejecting forthright coherence, this tension
between dichotomy and sameness
allows architecture to stage conversions
between things about identity and comparative
value. This methodology undermines
the simplicity of mere binary juxtapositions
to acknowledge the complexity
and ambiguity in conditions of subtle
difference, arguably more attuned to our
contemporary perceptions of identity. As
early explorations employ slight adjustments
on a grid to problematize conditions
of joinery and coincidence between
parts, the subsequent prerogative of this
thesis shifts focus towards an interrogation
of new readings found in the
resultant subtleties of the forms through
abstractions inherent to the process of
representation, such as lighting exposure
and blurriness.
These new almost-wholes obfuscate singular
reading to refute the demand that
they assemble into cathartic objects —
that is, they refuse to provide the viewer
the traditionally clear or uncluttered
comprehension in how they perceive the
object. Part-to-part relationships taper to
precarious tangencies rather than clear
resolutions so that the reading of the object
itself is constantly held at a distance,
just beyond immediacy but within a
blurry margin of error for ossifying one’s
understanding of the object.
Pondering the Lima Exposition Hall
What is it? The current exposition hall
that houses the Lima Museum of Art is a
standard, rather generic late nineteenth
century structure. It’s architecture is
one positioned midway between sheer
industrial efficiency and late neoclassical
ornamentation, as evidenced in the
strange coexistence of its rigid (yet heavily
ornamented) iron column structural
grid alongside a series of more traditional
gallery spaces secured between
the columns by permanent yet mostly
superfluous, in terms of structural capacity,
dividing walls. This condition produces
an odd relationship in the existing
structure between underlying structural
strategies and more architecturally considered
spaces. These two languages are
not quite indifferent from one another yet
retain a certain kind of ambivalence. Iron
columns puncture dramatically through
spaces typically reserved for a higher
degree of spatial independence, such
as circulatory hallways and entrance
lobbies. For the most part, columns fail
to align to walls not in an act of sheer
ambivalence but remain uncomfortably
nearby, as if set to a grid accidentally
placed in slight disposition. More aptly
described as siblings than mere neighbors,
the two systems function as if they
were Spanish and Italian, retaining a certain
degree of mutual intelligibility while
pronouncing distinct characteristics
that are, in themselves, defined by their
almost-but-not-quite perfect adjacency.
Where is it? This mutual condition of
strangely contingent ambivalence is in no
way unfamiliar to Lima, a city startled between
a series of seemingly oppositional
forces. Such dichotomies as mountains
and sea, wealth and poverty or Pre-
Columbian and Colonial are the innate
foundations of cultural identity for the
city, predisposing its urbanity to become
a cacophony of qualities, much akin to
various other Latin American cities. Unlike
its counterparts, Lima’s urbanistic
history produces a variety of adjacency
between different eras that runs horizontally,
rather than along the vertical axis.
While a place of considerable wealth and
influence, Pre-Columbian settlements
throughout the valleys currently woven
with Lima’s sprawling suburbs primarily
relied on irrigation systems to feed wide
swaths of crops, focusing urban development
less on clustered places of inhabitation
than on singular religious sites to
unite people located somewhat sparsely
across farmlands. The city that became
the Lima one currently understands
was established among, not above, this
situation in 1535. Because the city came
to contend for space horizontally, rather
than through the more typical process of
vertical overlay witnessed in Mexico City
or Paris, Lima retains a certain degree
of heterogeneous sprawl. Ancient sites,
both those celebrated culturally and
neglected, dot the city’s landscape and
intertwine between more recent architectural
interventions. Many of the original
Pre-Incan waterways were either filled
in or forgotten historically to become
geological ghosts in a forgotten lineage
of seemingly prehistoric conception.
What does it want to be? You’re unsure
what space you’re in… so what? How
does this spatial experience correspond
the contemporary art gallery in a way
that undermines the less progressive tendencies
of the commercial art endeavor
in a gallery context?
Learning from Grammar
Grammar absolves language from the
burden of structure, leaving it instead to
address purely the production of meaning.
That is, a grammatical set of inflections
defines for the speaker the precise
intention of every word in a sentence.
A particular examination of the nominal
declensions of the Indo-European variety
exemplifies this point:
Ich sehe den Mann.
Der Mann sieht mich.
Above, the German language specifically
annotates the declension of the noun
“den Mann” (“the man”) as to be object
of the sentence by changing its definite
article from “der”, which denotes the
nominative, or subject, of the sentence, to
“den”, marking the accusative, or object.
Thus, the sentence subtly differentiates
the meanings of “I see than man” from
“the man sees me” using, among other
things, acute inflections of the grammatical
syntax and vocabulary to deliver
a point to be understood. Consider the
Latin sentences for “I see the girl” and
“the girl sees me”:
Ego puellam video.
Puella me videt.
Inflecting the noun itself, Latin annotates
the girl’s position as either direct object
or subject through an inflectional morphing
of the very noun itself. Nonetheless,
the root word retains its legibility as “girl”.
We might say that “girl”, in an abstractly
distant sense, linguistically stands ready
to take on its meaning. It is a kind of
empty signifier awaiting its delegated
Connor Gravelle Portfolio 2012-2015 39

40 Lima Museum of Art Thesis Studio Render: East Façade from Park

Connor Gravelle Portfolio 2012-2015 41

(animation)
vimeo.com/
215492926
42 Lima Museum of Art Thesis Studio

Connor Gravelle Portfolio 2012-2015 43

position within the semiotic context of
a sentence. This pattern of inflectional
morphologies permeates all languages,
be they Indo-European, Sino-Tibetan or
Semitic. Their significance relies on the
simultaneous recognization of basic abstract
units (“girl”) and complex morphological
alterations (“puella” to “puellam”).
Far from foreign to the production of
cultural meaning in architecture, art and
This quality resounds rather akin to the
semiotic implications of both architectural
elements (doors, windows, thresholds)
and their derived spaces. The arousal of
the architectural diagram and projective
space alike over the past few decades
only further elude this point. Descriptive
geometry is its own kind of grammar,
a conceptually subterranean structure
to which the justification of a space is
beholden.
Precisely for this reason, a grammatical
understanding of architecture’s creation
benefits the discourse of the profession
by loosening the perhaps selfish will
towards intuitively and by advocating
for the establishment a framework of
abstract bases (think “girl”) from which
more complex and appropriate spaces
can be derived. Each of these qualities
inherently equip architecture with a
political stance by which to address the
challenges of design and building in the
early to mid 21st century.
Addressing the first condition, we must
accept that we have arrived at this
period of architectural discourse in the
wake of a violent acceleration in design.
The skyrocketing success of a minority
of practitioners in the second half of
the 20th century fueled a fantasy of the
“starchitect”, specifically rooted in the
notion that he was one who had reached
the apotheosis of his work. The pronouns
of this exclamation are italicized to contest
the patriarchal tendencies that this
incredulous behavior lauded.
With a handful of exceptions, the rise of
the starchitect’s intuitive and individualistic
approach to design, the notion that
only he could deliver a project of such
caliber and expertise, benefitted merely
a class of privileged male architects who
represented overwhelmingly the at times
oppressive majorities of their respective
nationalities. Their projects found themselves
equally at home under oppressive
regimes across vast swaths of humanity
and in the high fashion boutiques that
service the elite few with unaffordable,
albeit well designed, luxury commodities.
Starchitecture is parallel to the will of
enforcing one’s vision onto others. The
branding of architecture by firms’ recognizable
brand identities and myopic prerogatives
has lead the field unknowingly
into the esoteric grumbling of irrelevance.
Though these characteristics specifically
indict neither intuitively nor artistry in design
as the perpetrators of these trends, it
casts them as willing accomplices to the
criminals. There is therefore a political
necessity to move away from the “finding
one’s voice” model of architectural practice
towards a more abstract, universal
theology, if we might call it that, of design
that stresses nuanced intention and
restrained evocation on the part of the
designer. Subtly is the design language of
humility, and a grammar of architecture is
the method by which this is calibrated.
These injunctions against architecture
seek the foundation of a new architectural
project aligned with the universalist
attitudes once exulted by the industry’s
foremost figures. An inclination towards
a grammatical understanding of the
construction of space is the first step in
the proposition of this framework. It is a
provocation to democratize the conception
of space into a process-based series
of morphological permutations on basic
elements (as any grammar does to its
constituent parts) so that neither the basal
unit nor its derived offspring wander
too far from familiar comprehension.
Both “puella” and “puellam” function
to deliver their meanings to the reader
or listener, yet both respect the basic
premise that those who understand the
language ought to hold the tools for
deriving the meaning of the sentence. A
stance towards grammar for architecture
sees the developments of the past few
decades as less of a language and more
of a barbaric shouting match between
unfamiliar adversaries. Unfortunately,
architecture has foregone the semiotic
commonalities of previous eras’ styles for
a cacophony individual expression.
The communities of design expression
that we find in turn-of-the-century Chicago
or postwar Japanese metabolism
are indicative of collaborative practices
establishing grammars of their own.
These syntactical playbooks are thus
introduced as items of cultural production
for which a common understanding
among both architects and the public
can be established. This is their primary
mode of communication.
It is therefore absolutely parallel to an
architecture affronted by its own impotence
that it work steadfastly to reform
its mode of expression. The grammatical
understanding of basic forms and their
repetitively ruled abstractions posits less
of a formal answer to this dilemma than a
provocation towards one. It is at once the
call for an architecture that seeks to matter
rather than to express, an architecture
that exudes nuance rather than singularity
and an architecture that emerges in
lieu of cultural production rather than
individual recognition.
44 Lima Museum of Art Thesis Studio

400% 300%
200% 100%
Connor Gravelle Portfolio 2012-2015 Halftone Studies
45

46 Lima Museum of Art Thesis Studio Model Photograph: Façade Articulation

Connor Gravelle Portfolio 2012-2015 Model Photograph: Circulation to Gallery
47

PASEO PENASCO HOUSE
4A Studio
Fall 2015, Ramiro Diaz-Granados
This project was specially selected to be
featured in SCI-Arc’s Spring Show 2016.
Our relationship with the architecture of
the home has often been one of selfafirmation.
Man becomes master of his
domain, his property, his home. It is with
more than a mere etymological bond
that entangles architecture (the “domus”)
domesticity. Domesticity is an explicit
problem of Architecture. It’s about time
that architecture decenter, destabilize
and decouple the numbly comfortable
proximity between our expectations of a
space and its realization through material,
form and content. This is an argument
for an architecture which prolongs the
sensorial exposure between the subject
and a space, which draws out our comprehension
of what’s before us in order
to suspend the complacencies we have
come to expect of a home. More than the
mere quest for an unfamiliar building, this
excavates the possibility of a space that
challenges domesticity and the presumptions,
malices and addictions that come
along with it.
We sometimes presume that a house
exists to attend to us. We subordinate the
architecture to a certain kind of servitude
to our latent cultural expectations.
Foyers are for collecting the many shoes
we’ve bought for our family, bay windows
are for gazing across the lawn onto our
colleagues, who by chance inhabit an
identical but differently painted version
of our dream. We are Behr Premium Plus
#M270-3 Cream Custard, they are Benjamin
Moore Opal Essence 680 – no more,
no less. Perhaps, a house might aspire
not be the backdrop to our homely fantasies
but to engage us as people, subjects
capable to thinking as they establish
independent, experience-driven positions
within the world.
This is therefore a problem of displacing
the centrality of a space and our
anticipations for it. This is about creating
a space for living that protracts the
immediacy of what we expect. Edges,
corners and cusps draw back just as they
capture our attention to invert the affinity
in legibility between a form and its contours.
While a clear, geometric foundation
provides a framework for us to nurture
an understanding of what we encounter,
the rules of the game quickly unravel at
the very moment we presume they have
exhausted their explanatory potential –
a wall torts into a ceiling and then into
a floor, a rectangular opening on one
side of a partition squirms around into
a figural yet ambiguous slice along the
other. The typical repertoire of architectural
elements defy obedience in order to
confront the form-function connotations
we have confined them to.
Every moment of this house is calibrated
to its ability at performing these tasks. A
winding driveway cuts slowly between an
artificial ground and an existing topography,
prolonging the full perception of the
building’s tilted bars and supple tangencies.
The individual perspective is constantly
made incapable of gathering the
totality of what we encounter. Even once
we do manage to confront the it, a series
of tightly choreographed moves fracture
our capacity to understand the house
in its whole from any one angle. The
alignment of windows across masses,
the conic stitching of their intersections
and unexpected seam languages these
produce all obscure concrete readings.
What appears to be two bars from one
perspective dissolves into two in another.
Where we thought we found an edge, we
move only slightly to reveal that it is actually
a smooth transition along two faces.
In doing so, this project posits that the
line between form and shape is not tensile
and crisp but swerving and blurred.
The legibility of any “proper” shape is
thoroughly withheld to the extent that
we never manage to assemble a singular
reading. Clearly defined bars entangle
with one another such that we are incapable
of enumerating exactly how many
bars there are. On the interior, rectangular
voids slice through deep poché to
emerge as figural profiles. The encounter
between the subject and the house
becomes a cinematic experience. One is
provoked to reorient oneself, to crosscheck
constantly a fluid understanding of
the house’s nature, and thus also of the
nature of its modes of inhabitation and
its content. In the place of social center
like the fireplace or the living room, one
instead finds circulation.
The home becomes a realm of withheld
expectations, a space which continually
displaces itself at the very moment we
believe we have come truly to perceive it.
These methods recast the typified roles
of a house and thus liberate its inhabitants
from the overwrought narrative that
domesticity asserts on the home. We
explore a space of uprooted expectations,
uneasy forms and non-conventional programming
in the hopes that we productively
disorient ourselves, that when we
do come to realize what our home might
be, we see anew its resistance to be defined,
its refusal to be dogmatized.
(Above) Conceptual process of geometry
joinery between intersected bars
(Right) Rendering of building on site
showing the dialectic of the groundplane,
where the surrounding site represents
untouched nature, the natural growth
curated in the slots portrays a fake nature
of sorts, and piles of chrome spheres
complete the triad with total artificiality.
50

Connor Gravelle Portfolio 2012-2015 Large Scale Physical Chunk Model
53

Connor Gravelle Portfolio 2012-2015 Elevations
55

56 Paseo Penasco House 4A Studio
Large Scale Physical Chunk Model
Details

Connor Gravelle Portfolio 2012-2015 57

1
3 2
4
Drawing Key
1 Guest Bedroom 1
2 Central Foyer Hallway
3 Central Foyer Landing
4 Parking
1 : 60
2
1
3 4
Drawing Key
1 Kitchen
2 Central Foyer
3 Parking Entrance
4 Footpath Entrance
58 Paseo Penasco House 4A Studio Sections

7
6
2
3
5
4
1
11
8
10
9
Drawing Key
1 Central Foyer 613 ft 2
2 Dining Room 225 ft 2
3 Kitchen 157 ft 2
4 Pantry 50 ft 2
5 Den 403 ft 2
6 Den Full Bath 65 ft 2
7 Guest Bedroom 1 481 ft 2
8 Guest Bath 25 ft 2
9 Guest Bedroom 2 439 ft 2
10 Master Bedroom 608 ft 2
11 Master Bath 47 ft 2
3113 ft 2
Connor Gravelle Portfolio 2012-2015 Main Plan
59

60 Paseo Penasco House 4A Studio Slitscan of Center Staircase

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62 Paseo Penasco House 4A Studio Center Void Construction Geometry

Connor Gravelle Portfolio 2012-2015 Cener Void Model Photos
63

64 Paseo Penasco House 4A Studio Abstract Core Physical Model

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66 Paseo Penasco House 4A Studio Structural Strategies

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68 Paseo Penasco House 4A Studio Center Stair

Primary Ring Structure
7”X7” Steel Tube members
Tertiary Supports
6.5”x2” W-Section members
Ceiling Covering
Corian Skin Primary Support
Laterally spanning Unistrut P2000 channels
Corian Skin Secondary Support
Longitudinally spanning Unistrut P2000 channels
Corian Skin Primary Support
Laterally spanning Unistrut P2000 channels
Vertical Secondary Support to Upper Support Connectors
Corian Panel to Secondary Support Connectors
Laterally spanning Unistrut P2000 channels
Hung Corian Panels
Interior Wall Covering
Interior Partitions
8” Standard Stud Walls
Skin slits
3/16” tubes or milled indentations
aligned at 1” on center
Skin panels
8”metal panels
Aperture Strategy
Skin slits gather around apertures, arbitrating the reading
of the conic geometries in the surface treatment around
apertures. While other areas of the skin have a more subtle
reflection, the slits accentuate the curvature of the massing
around the apertures.
Skin Panelization
Major divisions subdivide along edges to produce
new figuralities along the envelope, sometimes
seaming between corners and folds to unite the
mass while at other times dividing it or accentuating
interior apertures.
Primary Ring Structure
7”x7” Steel Tube Members
Primary Corss Bracing
7”x10” Steel Tube Members
Tertiary Vertical Structure
6.5”x2” W-Section Members
Connor Gravelle Portfolio 2012-2015 Exploded Chunk
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70 Paseo Penasco House 4A Studio 3D Printed Center Void and Staircase

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72 Paseo Penasco House 4A Studio

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74 Paseo Penasco House 4A Studio Aperture Construction Geometry

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ODD BLOCKS
4A Studio
Fall 2015, Ramiro Diaz-Granados
This project explored a seriesof possible
bar aggregations as the platform for
further development into an architectural
project.
Initial explorations dealt specifically with
the issue of the center. How might abstract
aggregations of geometric primitives
begin to speak to the architectural
ramifications of displaced or misregistered
centers? Given the eventual typological
goal of the project to be a single
family home, how could inferences into
the center begin to offer programmatic or
formal manipulations on our understanding
of centerhood which might speak to
the political and social ramifications of
altering the default condition of how we
arrange our homes?
For each object, a ground plane was also
developed which furthered the concepts
at hand in the massing. Throughout the
series, a theme of awkwardness and
misfitting came forward as a means by
which the formal legibility of the bar
typology could be read against the static
nature of a ground. Filleted edges and
strange alignments prompted questions
of legibility. Does one see three intersected
bars which avoid one another or four
bent bars that entangle?
Explorations of multiple centers began
to entice a displacement of the center.
Rather than a singular void, the multiple
involution of the massing onto itself allows
a distinctly difficult reading of the
overall form. Filigree adjustments in filletting
and massing allow further difficulties
in immediate reading to be introduced.
These techniques combined to produce
a kind of lexicon of formal maneuvers
which could be introduced in the process
of refining aggregatory systems. How
does one differentiate one particular iteration
as more ideal than another when
the terms of engagement are as abstract
as pure geometry? Such questions
became pivotal in the development of a
personal position on centerhood, as the
geometric result gradually merged with
the theoretical hypothesis throughout the
maturation of the process.
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79

Deformation continues to propagate
New, less axial org
80 Odd Blocks 4A Studio Object 1, Plan Diagrams

anization emerges
Slight estrangement of highly standard organization
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Horiztonal striation of masses along normative groundplane
Masses set slightly askew, deforming ground with them
Reorientation of masses provides void space
Conic interventions recalibrate void space
82 Odd Blocks 4A Studio Object 1, Section Diagrams

84 Odd Blocks 4A Studio Object 1, Axonometric Diagrams

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86 Odd Blocks 4A Studio Object 1, Model Photos

Connor Gravelle Portfolio 2012-2015 Object 2, Model Photos
87

Masses organize into coincident intersections,
center of volume emerges
Masses rotate in three-dimensional space,
breaking clear interpretation of center
Masses blend on roofplane through extension of adjacent surfaces,
promoting a new organizational reading
Surface articulation further breaks down heirarchy,
leaving system precariously close to multiple readings
88 Odd Blocks 4A Studio Object 2, Plan Diagrams

Intersected masses with bipolar centers
Groundplane deformation reorients systems
Further deformations force reactions on masses’ orientations
Masses estrange from groundplane condition, each retains partial autonomy
Conics question heirarchy of overall mass profile and ground relationship
Connor Gravelle Portfolio 2012-2015 Object 2, Secion Diagrams
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92 Odd Blocks 4A Studio Object 3, Axonometric Diagram

Masses rest atop normative ground plane
Sectionally distorted ground plane reorients objects’ bouyancy,
negaitve space forms from discrepency between objects and ground
Connor Gravelle Portfolio 2012-2015 Object 3, Section Diagrams
93

Overlapped masses
Strong and r
interior
94 Odd Blocks 4A Studio Object 3, Plan Diagrams

ecognizable
figure
Conics articulate interior, reconfiguring
heirarchy but leaving exterior legible
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96 Odd Blocks 4A Studio Object 3, Model Photos

Connor Gravelle Portfolio 2012-2015 97

Dual systems aggregate around shared center
Center as void
Conics defer reading of center, question massing heirarchy
Connor Gravelle Portfolio 2012-2015 Object 4, Plan Diagrams
99

100 Odd Blocks 4A Studio Object 4, Model Photos

Connor Gravelle Portfolio 2012-2015 101

SP CHINATOWN DEPOT REDEVELOPMENT
5A Vertical Studio
Fall 2016, Elena Manferdini
Synopsis
Chinatown in Los Angeles is an uncertain
ground. Its history is one simultaneously
composed of displacement and
development. It therefore stands that in
order to approach the creation of anything
new in Chinatown, one must first
comprehend the myriad forms which
preceded.
This project sought the creation of a
large, 600+ unit, residential development
in the heart of Chinatown, between two
sites spanning a major thoroughfare. The
very creation of it, and part of its creation
is the instantiation of an architecture
capable of annunciating these historical
understandings. To create this history is
to engage in a form of cultural filtering
that necessarily takes on as its responsibility
the curation of an identity.
It thus becomes a key prerogative of this
project that the architecture become
capable of receiving the various pasts
of Chinatown, curating their presentation
and, in their projection forward,
posing critical questions that engage
the process of history-making such that
Plinth-Ground Operations
Indifference
Ground as truth
Object as fiction
Ground as fiction
Object as truth
Ambiguous Ground
Ground-Ground Operations
Absolute Mono-Hierarchical Dually Refuted Otherness
When does the ground itself become a plinth?
careful study the relationships among
plinth, ground and building allowed a
thoughtful curation of what it might mean
to establish a new ground on such a
contested site. This new ground, itself
an engagement of the strange privatepublic
infrastructure so pervasive in the
large developments of late capitalist Los
Angeles, allowed a series of contemplations
on belonging and civil space in the
American West.
Project Scheme
This endeavor in turn begs the contemplation
of historical meaning in the
context of Chinatown’s development
both from retroactive and progressive
perspectives. That is to say, part of
understanding Chinatown’s history is the
Moveable
Mass
Maleable
Ground
New Authenticities
Performative
Conceptual
the resultant building stand as a cultural
bookmark in the conception of a place’s
identity.
About Chinatown
Old Chinatown is dead. A 1926 ballot
measure assured its flattening below
the then newly proposed Union Station.
102 SP Chinatown Depot Redevelopment 5A Vertical Studio

Connor Gravelle Portfolio 2012-2015 Render: Posture along College Street
103

Static
Of the Earth
Plinth emerges from ground
≈
Ground as origin
Plinth recedes into ground
≈
Ground as receptor
Plinth lifts, second ground delaminates
≈
Ground as invalidated
Second ground laminates to plinth
≈
Ground as holder
104 SP Chinatown Depot Redevelopment 5A Vertical Studio Ground Relationships

Wobbly
Sunken
Plinth deforms ground bidirectionally
≈
Ground as uncertainty
Plinth rests into ground
≈
Ground as pliant
Second ground bifurcates
≈
Noncathartic Ground
Connor Gravelle Portfolio 2012-2015 105

106 SP Chinatown Depot Redevelopment 5A Vertical Studio Figural Plinth Studies

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108 SP Chinatown Depot Redevelopment 5A Vertical Studio Elevation

Connor Gravelle Portfolio 2012-2015 109

110 SP Chinatown Depot Redevelopment 5A Vertical Studio Plans

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112 SP Chinatown Depot Redevelopment 5A Vertical Studio Plan Details

Connor Gravelle Portfolio 2012-2015 113

Apartments
Held above plinths and
circulatory columns
144 Starter Apartments
81 Studios
81 Deluxe Studios
239 1-Bedrooms
51 Large 1-Bedrooms
33 Bedrooms
Plinths and Circulatory Columns
Provide parking, commerical space
and vertical access to apartments
629 units total
Raised Ground
Circilation across street, up to Metro,
Sports-related amenities for public such
as basketball and tennis court
Public Ground Level
Pool, lecture space, commerical areas, restaurant
116 SP Chinatown Depot Redevelopment 5A Vertical Studio Exploded Axonometric of Elements

Amid a series of possible alternative
sites, the Los Angeles Times successfully
stirred public resentment of the city’s
Chinese-American population towards
the eventual citing of the development
along Alameda Street, declaring that the
new station would “forever do away with
Chinatown and its environs”.
This is not to indicate that Old Chinatown
was by any means a site of truth
or viture. What emerged from the early
Pueblo’s “Calle de los Negros” [“Street of
the Dark Ones”] — initially inhabited by
a collection of Pre-Columbian families
living within the administrative bounds
of the ramshackle settlement — was a
space that transcended multiple generations
to continuously house the marginalized
populations of young Los Angeles.
From the confined indigeneous groups
of North America to stigmatized Chinese
laborers and those drawn to the red light
district that called it home, Calle de los
Negros was a space of demographic
displacement.
This does not mean that these people
were allowed to inhabit the street without
disturbance. Quite the opposite, Old
Chinatown was the scene of America’s
most deadly mass lynching, in which a
crowd of some 500 white men viscerally
murdered 18 Chinese workers. Although
conditions improved between the 1870s
(when Chinese immigrants began to
settle along Calle de los Negros) and the
1920s, the neighborhood always stood for
the marginalization of a population within
the city core such that its vital labor
potential in other parts of the city could
be leveraged alongside the containment
of its population within a confined urban
setting.
Connor Gravelle Portfolio 2012-2015 117

Chinatown’s History
Following the 1926 ballot measure,
Chinatown was subsequently located
slightly north in its current location.
Alternative sites, such as one across the
river in Boyle Heights, proved unsuccessful
against the perceived benefit of
disbanding the local Chinese population.
A secondary effect of the measure was
to evade the construction of a series of
elevated railways. It is therefore impossible
to extricate Chinatown’s displacement
from the creation of what would
become the cultural ethos of Los Angeles
towards suburban sprawl and automotive
fetishization.
Chinatown then was an urban statement
that propagated racism and population
de-densification. Chinatown today is an
urban canvas that might either come
to stand for gentrification — undoubtedly
at the expense of the children of
those displaced in 1926 — or for a new
understanding of what it means to have
placehood in contemporary Los Angeles,
depending on the course of its current
actions.
(Above) Possible sectional
exploits from ground gestures
(Right) Axonometric of complete
site showing relationship with
park, street and metro station
120 SP Chinatown Depot Redevelopment 5A Vertical Studio

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122 SP Chinatown Depot Redevelopment 5A Vertical Studio Model Photograph: Chunk Model

Connor Gravelle Portfolio 2012-2015 Model Photograph (Detail)
123

124 SP Chinatown Depot Redevelopment 5A Vertical Studio Parking Plinth Constructive Geometries

Connor Gravelle Portfolio 2012-2015 125

126 SP Chinatown Depot Redevelopment 5A Vertical Studio

Connor Gravelle Portfolio 2012-2015 127

BERKELEY MUSEUM OF ART
3B Studio
Spring 2015, David Freeland
With Johan Wijesinghe
This project fundamentally questions the
immediate legibility of a piece of architecture
through subtle manipulations in
formal organization, surface treatment
and circulation. To these ends, it takes
up the contemporary project of the art
museum as a platform to question the
project of iconicity, reducing the legibility
of the work of architecture itself beyond
the immediate ability of perception. By
withholding reading rather than privileging
it, the project becomes impossible to
understand through one human vantage,
geometrical orientation or specific depth.
This invites certain tactility to the subject
hood one experiences when encountering
the building. Those who gaze across
the façade are practically required to
adjust their position towards the building
in order to gain a more complete comprehension
of its geometry.
Unable to be perceived in a singular
vision, the multiplicity of readings
produced by the façade initiates a deep
questioning of geometry. An intentional
set of choreographed overlaps between
the building’s seven “objects” employ
shifting material definitions and incongruent
geometrical principles alongside
architectural tropes such as a shadow or
corner to provoke an uncertainty about
what one perceives. While one surface
may have a diagonal hatching, rendered
in deep slices along its run, an adjacent
surface might have another orientation
while matching the slice direction. This
dichotomy between surface identification
and what we have come to expect
from architecture (in terms of the façade,
ground and roof) combine less than conjunctly
in order to estrange the individual
from their egocentric perspective onto
the building. Explicated on the interior,
this takes host in an intertwined procession
of spaces that at times celebrates
the difference between objects and at
others obfuscates such understandings.
(Right) Details from elevations
(Next Page) Roof plan
128 Berkeley Museum of Art 3B Studio

Connor Gravelle Portfolio 2012-2015 129

+ 15'
Men's WC
UP
Lockers
199
Women's WC
Gallery 00
Cleaning Room
424
Office 4
127
Marketing
303
Office 1
192
Office 3
153
Gallery 02
+ 23'
DN
Gallery 17
+ 23'
+ 0'
Gallery 01
+ 23'
UP
DN
Gallery 03
+ 23'
DN
Gallery 04
+ 23'
Gallery 15
+ 23'
+ 0'
Visitor WC 2
Mechanical
UP
DN
UP
UP
UP
Gallery 06
+ 15'
DN
DN
Gallery 11
Gallery 05
+ 17'
130 Berkeley Museum of Art 3B Studio Plan of Galleries

Elevations and the Politics of the Art Museum as a Contemporary Medium for Architecture
After a decade of high profile competitions
for art museums which, for the
most part, have amounted to little other
than esoteric spectacles, it is time to take
the art museum to its task as the staging
ground for architectural intervention,
exploration and permutation. Taking the
typology as a platform, this project questions
the legibility of the object, denying
a clear reading part to whole relationships.
This is achieved through subtle
manipulations in formal organization,
surface treatment and circulation.
Along the building’s elevations, a series
of tectonic bands (see Façade Detail)
confuse the legibility of a single entity. In
response to the highly spectacle-driven
business that museum architecture has
become, this invalidates the “money
shot” as a method for curating phenomenology
in architecture. This political move
is intended to invigorate visitors and
other constituents of the site (students
and passersby, in particular) to move
around the structure in order to pull apart
the experiential trickery unfolding before
them.
Bands cross between objects on a system
curated specifically to question the
distinction between formal and “graphic”
(when seen from a distance) differentiations
in the surface. What might appear
in one view as one object is in fact two,
or what might appear as two distinct
faces is in reality a graphically divided
single swatch. Because the bands were
indeed tectonic and not purely graphical,
their response to changing conditions of
light throughout the day further intensifies
the multiplicity of readings possible.
An animation was employed to explore
this property in greater depth.
132 Berkeley Museum of Art 3B Studio Elevation along Bancroft

Connor Gravelle Portfolio 2012-2015 Elevation along Durant
133

Cafe
Circulatory Strategies
Circulation is a continuous sequence
of intertwined gallery spaces, Sectional
enfilades, and particular thresholds that
negotiates the differences between objects
and at other moments obfuscates
their relationship.
These thresholds and lines begins to
carry through as circulation, taking host
as intertwined processions of gallery
spaces, sectional enfilades, that at times
celebrates the fragmented difference between
objects and at others obfuscates
their relationship.
Gallery 02
1682
Lockers
Sec. Office
199
222
Office 5 Office 6 Office 7
283 225 219
Gallery 01
1350
(Right Top) Plan of upper gallery
level. Circulatory pathways begin to
breakdown distinction of objects as
read from the exterior. Vertical lightwells
provide opportunities for circulation
as well as natural illumination.
Gallery 09
3619
Gallery 03
1318
Visitor WC 2
(Right Bottom) Plan of ground
concourse. A public “alley” of courtyard
space weaves through the building,
connecting public spaces like the shops,
lecture hall, library and café. These
remain open and accessible while three
stairs offer varied entrances into the
ticketed areas of the galleries above.
Gallery 08 (Tiered)
992
Gallery 07
1016
Gallery 10
1243
Gallery 12
993
(Next Page) Axonometric of circulatory
pathways. A public concourse cuts
through the building and between
the objects to provide access up
into galleries. From there, stairs also
provide the main entrance into the
lobby from the parking garage, as well
as opportunities to exit the building
onto a series of curated terraces.
Lobby
Admin
Learning Center
Shop
Theater
136 Berkeley Museum of Art 3B Studio Plans +2 and +0

OBJECT 3
Level 1: Lobby
Level 2: Galleries
Level 3: Artists’ Studios
OBJECT 5
Level 1: Lobby
Level 2: Galleries
Level 3-4: Artists’ Studios
AFT ENTRANCE
OBJECT 1
Level 1: Theater
Level 2/3: Galleries
OBJECT 7
Administration
OBJECT 2
Level -1: Loading Dock
Level 1: Media Lounge
Level 2-4: Galleries
OBJECT 4
Level 1: Shop
Level 2/3: Galleries
OBJECT 2
Level 1: Café
Level 2/3: Galleries
MAIN ENTRANCE
Connor Gravelle Portfolio 2012-2015 Circulation and Vertical Cores
137

About the Façade
The volumes which are unable to be
perceived in a singular vantage point create
a multiplicity of readings. Legibility of
the object is further complicated by the
façade, with lines that are amplified by
varied shade and shadow that both bind
the objects together and introduce new
distinctions.
How do you interweave the form and
demands of conventional architectural
systems of a museum (floor plates, stairs,
walls to hang art) of a museum into a
decentralized object.
How do we keep something separate by
nature(of the shells), coherent and whole,
with demands of convention floor plates,
stairs, walls to hang art, and procession,
while simultaneously adapting a the language
and intention of fluid but distinct
spaces?
Fiber-Reinforced Panels
FRP panels of standard 4’ by 8’ dimension
Horizontal bracketing
along horizontal members
Seams allow FRP panels
to abutt structure while
being tied to L brackets in
the horizontal direction
and T brakcets in the
vertical direction
Vertical fin attachments to
every other vertical member
140 Berkeley Museum of Art 3B Studio Façade Detail

Floorplates
Generic connections between
floorplates and façade employ
balloon framing logic to structuralize
floorplates when available. Formal
interests direct towards articulated
interior voids rather than superficial
disjointing between envelope and
inhabital planes.
45” dropped ceiling cavity
for total 4’ flooplate depth
Generic 6” poured
concrete decking
Standard 18” by 6”
i-beams along floorplate
Structural Frame
Mitered conditions arbitrate
adjacencies along FRP
panels and structure
Constant 14” void runs along
envelope, standardizing connections
between FRP panels and interior
structure. Bidirectional members fill
in space to support both exterior
clading and interior elements.
Secondary Horizontal Members
8’ Increment, 6” by 8” Profile
Thin seam language leverages
tectonic reading towards a legibility
of the bands cut into the FRP
panels, concealing expressions of
inner structure and jointing
Primary Horizontal Members
16’ Increment, 6” by 18” Profile
Secondary Vertical Members
4’ Increment, 6” by 8” Profile
Primary Vertical Members
12’ Increment, 12” by 14” Profile
Assembled Façade
1” Seaming
Connor Gravelle Portfolio 2012-2015 Structure Detail
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Aft Courtyard
LEVEL +1
Galleries and Administration
LEVEL +2
Auxiliary Galleries, Admin, Lower
Artist Studios and Art Storage
LEVEL +3
Upper Artist Studios
UPPER LEVELS
Gallery spaces and artist studios
gather in large chunks around the
courtyard. A circulatory corridor
cuts through (and sometimes
blends) into these, winding
to-and-fro about the level,
sometimes connecting to the
exterior geometry and sometimes
cutting across to create bridges
over the courtyards. Lightwells
project down from the roof to
naturally illuminate three central
spaces.
GROUND FLOOR
Large spaces of public outreach
gather around two courtyards.
Other public programs not directly
related to the infrastructure of the
museum (café, bar and shop)
cluster around, accessing intimate
outdoor areas and main circulatory
pathways.
Main Rooms
Artists
Maintenance
Administration
Storage
Facilities
GROUND
Public groundplane pulls visitors
either into forward / aft courtyards
or subtly diverts those crossing the
site diagonally up the hill to the
other ends of the Berkeley campus.
Ground manipulations and
landscaping create back-and-forth
ciruclation which engages the
building from a multiplicity of
scales and vantages.
ARTIST STUDIO 05
855 ft 2
ARTIST STUDIO 04
VERTICAL CIRCULATION
COMMUNITY ROOM
834 ft 2
LIGHTWELLS
962 ft 2
ARTIST STUDIO 03
789 ft 2
GALLERY 03
ARTIST STUDIO 08
3030 ft 2 GALLERY 09
X.
854 ft 2
GALLERY 05
1526 ft
EQUIPTMENT 2
2
2423 ft 2
559 ft 2 P.
V.
O.
W.
VISITOR WC 3
325 ft 2
N.
T. U.
VISITOR WC 3
GALLERY 16
318 ft 2
M.
1260 ft 2
S.
ARTIST STUDIO 09
Z.
ARTIST STUDIO 02
900 ft
732 ft 2
2
GALLERY 17
GALLERY 11
1409 ft 2
ARTIST STUDIO 10
Y.
L.
R.
1096 ft 2
592 ft 2
GALLERY 18
Q.
ARTIST STUDIO 01
K.
1791 ft 2 968 ft 2
GALLERY 13
GALLERY 06 ART STORAGE 1
STAFF WC 4
1434 ft 2
1690 ft 2 1492 ft 2 414 ft 2
GALLERY 14
690 ft 2 GALLERY 12
933 ft 2
GALLERY 02
GALLERY 19
4512 ft
GALLERY 08
1531 ft 2
2
1806 ft 2 GALLERY 04
2382 ft 2
GALLERY 01
CORRIDORS
3924 ft 2 G.
E.
F.
D.
C.
A.
TICKETING
B.
1996 ft 2 MEDIA
LOUNGE
H.
1917 ft 2
WORKSHOP 1
J.
WKSP. 2 1241 ft 2
983 ft 2 COATS
SHOP I.
706 ft
WC 1
2
1368 ft 2
246 ft 2 LEAERNING CENTER
2347 ft 2
CAFÉ / BAR
1879 ft 2
THEATER /
SUPPORT SPACES
3162 ft 2
Organization
The museum composed of seven
volumes that roll and shuffle down the
hillside from Bancroft (the University in
the North) to Durant (The dormitories in
the South).
The volumes choreograph a meandering
path between the seven asymmetrical
carved conically developed masses.
The volumes fold, shear, over-hang, and
overlap each other, producing interstitial
courtyards syncopated by light wells.
Program takes a more horizontal approach,
respecting the authority of the
floorplate in the contemporary art gallery.
Subsidiary galleries and public spaces
(courtyards, shops and a café) align
along the bottom level above a parking
garage and loading dock. Moving up,
staff spaces and the main galleries fill
the next two levels. Artist spaces nestle
above along the roofline.
Public $ (Ticket-Purchasing)
Private (Institutional)
Public
Private (Artists in Residence)
SCULPTURE
GARDEN
TOWER 7
TOWER 6
TOWER 5
Freight
(Left) Rendering of main entrance
(Following Spreads)
Diagrams and sections
Campus
Entry
TOWER 4
Forward
Courtyard
3164 ft 2 CAFÉ
TOWER 3
GARDENS /
TOWER 1
TOWER 2
LANDSCAPING
6035 ft 2 AMIPTHEATER /
MULTIUSE AREA
5093 ft 2
Dorms
Entry
Parking
1879 ft 2
LABEL KEY
A. Media Lab ........................ 573 ft 2 Q. Artist Studio 12 ............... 737 ft 2
B. Artists’ Library .................. 584 ft 2 R. Art Storage 2 .................... 1519 ft 2
C. Marketing ......................... 347 ft 2 S. Artist Studio 15 ............... 474 ft 2
D. Cleaning Room ................. 541 ft 2 T. Material Storage ............... 249 ft 2
E. Locker Room .................... 285 ft 2 U. Meeting Room .................. 334 ft 2
F. Equiptment Room 1 ......... 502 ft 2 V. Staff WC 3 ....................... 170 ft 2
G. Computer Room ............... 257 ft 2 W. Office 10 ........................... 231 ft 2
H. Pre Ticket Sales ................ 374 ft 2
Office 11 ........................... 224 ft 2
I. Kitchen and Freezer ......... 700 ft 2
Kitchen ............................ 205 ft 2
J. Staff WC 1 ....................... 115 ft 2 X. Director’s Office ................ 397 ft 2
Secretary’s Office ............. 198 ft 2
K. Gallery 07 ........................ 2117 ft 2 Office 12 .......................... 291 ft 2
L. Gallery 13 ........................ 1434 ft 2
M. Staff WC 2 ....................... 106 ft 2 Y. Artist Studio 11 ............... 733 ft 2
N. Office 4 ............................ 207 ft 2
Artist Studio 13 ............... 925 ft 2
Office 5 ............................ 208 ft 2
Artist Studio 14 ............... 603 ft 2
Office 6 ............................ 208 ft 2 Z. Artist Studio 06 ............... 556 ft 2
O. Office 1 ............................ 196 ft 2
Artist Studio 07 ............... 823 ft 2
Office 2 ............................ 206 ft 2
Office 3 ............................ 240 ft 2
P. Office 7 ............................ 165 ft 2
Office 8 ............................ 270 ft 2
Office 9 ............................ 288 ft 2
Connor Gravelle Portfolio 2012-2015 Distribution of Program
143

Perpendicularily set wall frames running in
opposite directions align into a corner.
Floorplate thickness necessitates a
four-foot offset between.
Floorplate space trims between forms to
unite inhabitable areas. Conical distortions
in plan skew the corner relationship,
producing spatial slippage.
Conical distortions along surface edges
redefines the previously two-dimensional
intersection of the forms into a dynamic,
three-dimensional torque.
144 Berkeley Museum of Art 3B Studio Conical Strategies

Connor Gravelle Portfolio 2012-2015 Model Photo of Conical Intersection
145

+55'
+45'
+23'
+9'
+0'
-14'
146 Berkeley Museum of Art 3B Studio Section down Slope

Connor Gravelle Portfolio 2012-2015 147

148 Berkeley Museum of Art 3B Studio Photos of Modeled Lightwell

Void form punches through
volume of object to outline
lightwell.
Conical distortions begin to
question the inherent
relationship between vertical
surfaces of form and horizontal
spaces of inhabitation.
Stairs cut back-and-forth along edges of void
envelope, twisting into and out of of the void itself.
Connor Gravelle Portfolio 2012-2015 Lightwell Strategies
149

(animation)
vimeo.com/
126487089

152 Berkeley Museum of Art 3B Studio Oblique Section across Courtyard

Connor Gravelle Portfolio 2012-2015 153

154 Berkeley Museum of Art 3B Studio Massing Models

Circulatory Vignettes
Circulatory spaces became a primary
interest in this project because of the
way they orient and focus the human
perception. In regards to both the architectural
experience and the perceptions
of individual people to others within the
museum, the circulatory pathways were
specifically curated to employ the formal
assets of architecture to experiential
ends. Deepened and distorted spaces
between otherwise regular floorplates
established vantages from which the circulation
posits visitors to experience others
in the museum. These spaces flatten,
elongate and skew the typical perceptual
abilities of the human eye to estrange
those within them. This is with the hopes
that it entices people to reconceptualize
how they experience architecture, the
world and thus their selves.
Connor Gravelle Portfolio 2012-2015 Circulation and Spatial Disorientation
157

BAM DESIGN DEVELOPMENT
Design Development
Fall 2015, Pavel Getov and Scott Uriu
With Thomas Ferrer, Adrian
Wong and Jinwen Yu
The objectives of this class centered
around continuing architectural processes
from the previous semesters studio
projects, running a conceptual proposal
of an art museum in Berkeley, California,
through a natural set of refinements
though design development (DD).
At the core of the class’ visual repertoire
was the construction of a single “mega
drawing” which encapsulated not only
many smaller drawings but an overall
aesthetic conglomeration.
At the same time, a notebook set was
gathered to simulate the typical planning
procedures that would accompany the
submission of a prospective design to
the relevant permitting authorities. This
coincided along with a series of lectures
from various offices around Los Angeles,
including representatives from Gehry
Partners, detailing the normal regulatory
parameters surrounding items such as
ADA, egress and cost estimation, among
others. More than a mere repository for
drawings, the notebook set became a
new way to conceptualize the presentation
of the project within the rigid legal
framework that surrounds architecture.
Though the design was rather speculative
at conception, this development
process acted as a rigorous exercise in
the execution of progressive architecture
within the confines of the normative contemporary
sphere of building.
160 BAM Design Development Design Development 1 : 4 Mega Drawing Samples

Connor Gravelle Portfolio 2012-2015 Mega Drawing
161

162 BAM Design Development Design Development Mega Drawing Detail

Ring Members
Steel Structure
Structural grid sandwhiched
between Gypsum board interior
walls and exterior paneling
Exterior Courtyard Paneling
Poured concrete panels
conceal geometry and provide
tame interior expression
Ring Members
Tube steel members run along edges
of masses to connect larger sections
of primary and secondary structure
Primary Members
W-sections running vertically through
structural void between interior and exterior
paneling
Secondary Members
W-sections running horizontally and at
perpendiculars to primary members
Dialgonal Bracing
Bracing connects between primary
and secondary members
Floorplates
Standardized steel sheet decking with
poured concrete, underlaid by standard
steel substructure
Direction 1 Panels
Panels angled at ~60° from
ground.
Direction 2 Panels
Panels angled at ~240°
from ground (~ –120°)
Direction 3 Panels
Panels angled at ~45° from
ground.
Panel Seams
Seams express themselves tectonically,
but combination with slotting produces
graphic effect
Base Panels
Panels of all directions extend onto the bases,
topped eitherwith circulation, landscaping or outdoor
gathering spaces, such as the outdoor auditorium
20” x 20” steel tubes
Skin System 1
~60° slots
Skin System 2
~240° slots
Primary Members
14” W-sections
Secondary Members
10” W-sections
Core 1
Structural Strategy
Each object stands structurally independent,
leaning on one another. Cores in
two objects provide vertical circulation.
Interior Courtyard
6” x 5’ x 10’ precast concrete panels
Core 2
Circulatory Surfaces
6” poured concrete panels
Skin System 3
~45° slots
Basement Retailing Wall
12” poured concrete
Skin Composition
Slots tilted in multiple directions,
sometimes aligning along
physical seams and other times
producing purely graphic seams
through tectonic articulation.
Basement Columns
2’ diameter concrete columns
Foundations (Caissons below)
5’ x 5’ poured concrete members
Foundation Beam Structure
3’ x 3’ concrete beams below
Connor Gravelle Portfolio 2012-2015 Overall Structural Strategies
163

Secondary Steel Member
L Brackets
Bracket Bolting
Primary Steel Member
Primary Steel
20” rolled steel members
run along edges of masses
Secondary Steel Direction 1
16” W-section members running along primary
direction of surfaces
Secondary Steel Direction 2
14” W-section members running
along secondary direction of surfaces
Structural Joint
Generic 6” Poured Concrete
over Metal Decking
Hung Ceiling Connectors
Primary Structure
Secondary Structure
Floorplate Edges
Vertical Clips
Façade Panels
Façade Clips
164 BAM Design Development Design Development Façade Structures

ADA / Accessible Path of Travel
Return Vents
Supply Vents
Air Handling Units
Several locations house multiple
air handling units, each of which
separately serves each object
OBJECT 7
OBJECT 7
Level 1-2: Galleries
3260 sqft
Type B
Factor: 100
Load: 32
2582 sqft
Type B
Factor: 100
Load: 25
OBJECT 6
Level 2-4: Galleries
3892 sqft
OBJECT 5
Level 3-4: Studios
2037 sqft
Type E
Factor: 35
Load: 58
OBJECT 5
Level 2: Galleries
2192 sqft
Type E
Factor: 15
Load: 146
Type A3
Factor: 15
Load: 259
OBJECT 4
Level 2: Galleries
2421 sqft
Type A3
Factor: 15
Load: 161
OBJECT 4
Level 3: Galleries
1816 sqft
Type A3
Factor: 15
Load: 121
OBJECT 3
Level 4: Studios
2490 sqft
Type E
Factor: 35
Load: 71
OBJECT 3
Level 3: Studios
2456 sqft
Type E
Factor: 35
Load: 69
OBJECT 3
Level 2: Galleries
3555 sqft
Type E
Factor: 15
Load: 237
MAIN ENTRANCE
AFT ENTRANCE
OBJECT 2
Level 2: Galleries
2394 sqft
Type A3
Factor: 15
Load: 159
OBJECT 2
Level 3: Galleries
2300 sqft
Type A3
Factor: 15
Load: 153
OBJECT 1
Level 3: Galleries
5618 sqft
Type A3
Factor: 15
Load: 374
OBJECT 1
Level 2: Galleries
5120 sqft
Type A3
Factor: 15
Load: 341
Egress / Circulation
Connor Gravelle Portfolio 2012-2015 (Above) HVAC, (Below) Egress and ADA
165

166 BAM Design Development Design Development Mega Drawing Excerpts

Pre Cast Concrete panel
Interlockng Joint
Primary Steel
Water Sealent
End Mullion
Poured in Place Concrete
Steel Rebar
Rain gutter
Low-E Coated Glass
Air Gap
Interior Glass
Mullion
Clip-On Fin
Precast Concrete Pan
Interlocking Joint
Topping Slab
Structural Slab
Metal Decking
Drop Ceiling
Silicone Seal
Secondary Seal
Primary Seal
Moisture Barrier
Steel Stud Blocking
Connor Gravelle Portfolio 2012-2015 3D Details
167

PROPOSED ELEVATION ALONG BANCROFT STREET
Scale: 1/32”:1’ @ SIZE, SCALE @ SIZE
PROPOSED ELEVATION ALONG DURANT STREET
Scale: 1/32”:1’ @ SIZE, SCALE @ SIZE
Fiber-Reinforced Panels
Seams allow FRP panels
to abutt structure while
being tied to L brackets in
the horizontal direction
and T brakcets in the
vertical direction
FRP panels of standard 4’ by 8’ dimension
Vertical fin attachments to
every other vertical member
Horizontal bracketing
along horizontal members
UP
DN
Gallery 03
+ 23'
Gallery 04
+ 23'
DN
Gallery 05
+ 15'
Gallery 02
+ 23'
Gallery 06
+ 15'
+ 0'
Constant 14” void runs along
envelope, standardizing connections
between FRP panels and interior
structure. Bidirectional members fill
in space to support both exterior
clading and interior elements.
Gallery 01
+ 23'
Structural Frame
DN
Secondary Vertical Members
4’ Increment, 6” by 8” Profile
UP
UP
Gallery 11
+ 17'
+ 0'
Gallery 00
Gallery 15
+ 23'
UP
DN
Mechanical
Visitor WC 2
Primary Vertical Members
12’ Increment, 12” by 14” Profile
UP
Men's WC
Lockers
199
Women's WC
Marketing
303
Gallery 17
+ 23'
UP
DN
DN
Floorplates
Generic connections between
floorplates and façade employ
balloon framing logic to structuralize
floorplates when available. Formal
interests direct towards articulated
interior voids rather than superficial
disjointing between envelope and
inhabital planes.
45” dropped ceiling cavity
for total 4’ flooplate depth
Standard 18” by 6”
i-beams along floorplate
Mitered conditions arbitrate
adjacencies along FRP
panels and structure
Secondary Horizontal Members
8’ Increment, 6” by 8” Profile
Primary Horizontal Members
16’ Increment, 6” by 18” Profile
Cleaning Room
424
Office 1
192
Office 4
127
Office 3
153
Assembled Façade
1” Seaming
Generic 6” poured
concrete decking
Thin seam language leverages
tectonic reading towards a legibility
of the bands cut into the FRP
panels, concealing expressions of
inner structure and jointing
Group 8 Design Development
Gravelle, Connor
Ferrer, Thomas
Wong, C.W. Adrian
Yu, J.W. Iris
Revisions:
No. Date Description By
Notes:
Do not scale from this drawing
Berkeley Museum of Art (BAM) and Pacific Film Archive
Status:
Drawn:
Date:
Title:
DESIGN DEV.
Group 8 Design Development
Gravelle, Connor
Ferrer, Thomas
Wong, C.W. Adrian
Yu, J.W. Iris
Revisions:
No. Date Description By
Notes:
Do not scale from this drawing
Checked:
Scale:
JW
1/32”:1’ @ SIZE
07 DEC 2015
SCALE @ SIZE
PROPOSED
TYPICAL UPPER FLOOR PLAN
All Rights Reserved
These drawing, concepts, designs and ideas are the property of
G+FWY. They may not be copied, reproduced, disclosed to others or
used in connection with any work other than the specified project for which
they are prepared, in whole or in part, without the prior written authorization
of G+FWY.
Group 8 Design Development
Gravelle, Connor
Ferrer, Thomas
Wong, C.W. Adrian
Yu, J.W. Iris
Berkeley Museum of Art (BAM) and Pacific Film Archive
Status: DESIGN DEV. Checked:
Drawn: CG
Scale:
Date: 07 DEC 2015
Title: FAÇADE DETAIL
CG
Revisions:
No. Date Description By
Notes:
Do not scale from this drawing
Berkeley Museum of Art (BAM) and Pacific Film Archive
Status: DESIGN DEV. Checked:
Drawn: CG
Scale:
Date: 07 DEC 2015
Title: PROPOSED
PRIMARY ELEVATIONS
CG
1/32”:1’ @ SIZE
SCALE @ SIZE
All Rights Reserved
These drawing, concepts, designs and ideas are the property of
G+FWY. They may not be copied, reproduced, disclosed to others or
used in connection with any work other than the specified project for which
they are prepared, in whole or in part, without the prior written authorization
of G+FWY.
CG
1/32”:1’ @ SIZE
SCALE @ SIZE
All Rights Reserved
These drawing, concepts, designs and ideas are the property of
G+FWY. They may not be copied, reproduced, disclosed to others or
used in connection with any work other than the specified project for which
they are prepared, in whole or in part, without the prior written authorization
of G+FWY.
Pre-cast Concrete Panels
4”x6” Studs
Scilicone Seal
4”x6” Studs
W18 Steel
Gypsum Board
Moisture Barrier
Batt insulation
Moisture Barrier
Gypsum Board
Group 8 Design Development
Gravelle, Connor
Ferrer, Thomas
Wong, C.W. Adrian
Yu, J.W. Iris
Revisions:
No. Date Description By
Notes:
Do not scale from this drawing
Status: DESIGN DEV.
Drawn: JW, CG
Date: 07 DEC 2015
Title: PROPOSED
SITE PLAN
Checked:
Scale:
CG
1/64”:1’ @ SIZE
SCALE @ SIZE
All Rights Reserved
These drawing, concepts, designs and ideas are the property of
G+FWY. They may not be copied, reproduced, disclosed to others or
they are prepared, in whole or in part, without the prior written authorization
of G+FWY.
Group 8 Design Development
Gravelle, Connor
Ferrer, Thomas
Wong, C.W. Adrian
Yu, J.W. Iris
Revisions:
No. Date Description By
Notes:
Do not scale from this drawing
Berkeley Museum of Art (BAM) and Pacific Film Archive
Status:
Drawn:
Date:
Title:
Group 8 Design Development
Gravelle, Connor
Ferrer, Thomas
Wong, C.W. Adrian
Yu, J.W. Iris
Revisions:
No. Date Description By
Notes:
Do not scale from this drawing
Berkeley Museum of Art (BAM) and Pacific Film Archive
Status:
Drawn:
Date:
Title:
DESIGN DEV.
Checked:
Scale:
CG, JW
1/32”:1’ @ SIZE
07 DEC 2015
SCALE @ SIZE
PROPOSED
TRANSVERSE SECTION (OBLIQUE)
All Rights Reserved
These drawing, concepts, designs and ideas are the property of
G+FWY. They may not be copied, reproduced, disclosed to others or
used in connection with any work other than the specified project for which
they are prepared, in whole or in part, without the prior written authorization
of G+FWY.
Group 8 Design Development
Gravelle, Connor
Ferrer, Thomas
Wong, C.W. Adrian
Yu, J.W. Iris
DESIGN DEV. Checked:
AW
Scale:
07 DEC 2015
SKIN PANEL DETAIL
CG
Revisions:
No. Date Description By
Notes:
Do not scale from this drawing
Berkeley Museum of Art (BAM) and Pacific Film Archive
Status:
Drawn:
Date:
Title:
DESIGN DEV. Checked: -
CG
Scale: 1/32”:1’ @ SIZE
07 DEC 2015
SCALE @ SIZE
SKIN PANELING
All Rights Reserved
These drawing, concepts, designs and ideas are the property of
G+FWY. They may not be copied, reproduced, disclosed to others or
used in connection with any work other than the specified project for which
they are prepared, in whole or in part, without the prior written authorization
of G+FWY.
-
1/32”:1’ @ SIZE
SCALE @ SIZE
All Rights Reserved
These drawing, concepts, designs and ideas are the property of
G+FWY. They may not be copied, reproduced, disclosed to others or
used in connection with any work other than the specified project for which
they are prepared, in whole or in part, without the prior written authorization
of G+FWY.
Ring Members
20” x 20” steel tubes
Primary Members
14” W-sections
Secondary Members
10” W-sections
Core 1
Gallery 09
3619
Gallery 07
1016
Gallery 01
1350
Gallery 02
1682
Gallery 08 (Tiered)
992
Gallery 03
1318
Gallery 10
1243
Visitor WC 2
Gallery 12
993
Steel Structure
Structural grid sandwhiched
between Gypsum board interior
walls and exterior paneling
Exterior Courtyard Paneling
Poured concrete panels
conceal geometry and provide
tame interior expression
Lockers
Sec. Office
199
222
Office 5 Office 6 Office 7
283 225 219
Core 2
Ring Members
Tube steel members run along edges
of masses to connect larger sections
of primary and secondary structure
Primary Members
W-sections running vertically through
structural void between interior and
exterior paneling
Secondary Members
W-sections running horizontally and at
perpendiculars to primary members
Dialgonal Bracing
Bracing connects between primary
and secondary members
Floorplates
Standardized steel sheet decking with
poured concrete, underlaid by standard
steel substructure
Basement Columns
2’ diameter concrete columns
Foundations (Caissons below)
5’ x 5’ poured concrete members
Foundation Beam Structure
3’ x 3’ concrete beams below
ground floor decks above
-14'
Direction 1 Panels
Panels angled at ~60° from
ground.
Direction 2 Panels
Panels angled at ~240°
from ground (~ –120°)
Direction 3 Panels
Panels angled at ~45° from
ground.
Panel Seams
Seams express themselves tectonically,
but combination with slotting produces
graphic effect
Base Panels
Panels of all directions extend onto the bases,
topped eitherwith circulation, landscaping or
outdoor gathering spaces, such as the outdoor
auditorium
+55'
+45'
+23'
+9'
+0'
Group 8 Design Development
Gravelle, Connor
Ferrer, Thomas
Wong, C.W. Adrian
Yu, J.W. Iris
Revisions:
No. Date Description By
Notes:
Do not scale from this drawing
Berkeley Museum of Art (BAM) and Pacific Film Archive
Status: DESIGN DEV. Checked:
Drawn: JW
Scale:
Date: 07 DEC 2015
Title: PROPOSED
GROUND FLOOR PLAN
CG
1/32”:1’ @ SIZE
SCALE @ SIZE
All Rights Reserved
These drawing, concepts, designs and ideas are the property of
G+FWY. They may not be copied, reproduced, disclosed to others or
used in connection with any work other than the specified project for which
they are prepared, in whole or in part, without the prior written authorization
of G+FWY.
Group 8 Design Development
Gravelle, Connor
Ferrer, Thomas
Wong, C.W. Adrian
Yu, J.W. Iris
Revisions:
No. Date Description By
Notes:
Do not scale from this drawing
Berkeley Museum of Art (BAM) and Pacific Film Archive
Status: DESIGN DEV. Checked:
Drawn: JW, CG Scale:
Date: 07 DEC 2015
Title: PROPOSED
LONGITUDINAL SECTION
All Rights Reserved
These drawing, concepts, designs and ideas are the property of
G+FWY. They may not be copied, reproduced, disclosed to others or
used in connection with any work other than the specified project for which
they are prepared, in whole or in part, without the prior written authorization
of G+FWY.
Group 8 Design Development
Gravelle, Connor
Ferrer, Thomas
Wong, C.W. Adrian
Yu, J.W. Iris
Group 8 Design Development
Gravelle, Connor
Ferrer, Thomas
Wong, C.W. Adrian
Yu, J.W. Iris
Revisions:
No. Date Description By
Notes:
Do not scale from this drawing
Berkeley Museum of Art (BAM) and Pacific Film Archive
Status: DESIGN DEV. Checked:
Drawn: CG
Scale:
Date: 07 DEC 2015
Title: EXPLODED STRUCTURE
DRAWING
CG
1/32”:1’ @ SIZE
SCALE @ SIZE
Revisions:
No. Date Description By
Notes:
Do not scale from this drawing
Berkeley Museum of Art (BAM) and Pacific Film Archive
Status:
Drawn:
Date:
Title:
DESIGN DEV. Checked:
CG
Scale:
07 DEC 2015
METAL STRUCTURING
-
1/32”:1’ @ SIZE
SCALE @ SIZE
All Rights Reserved
These drawing, concepts, designs and ideas are the property of
G+FWY. They may not be copied, reproduced, disclosed to others or
used in connection with any work other than the specified project for which
they are prepared, in whole or in part, without the prior written authorization
of G+FWY.
-
1/32”:1’ @ SIZE
SCALE @ SIZE
All Rights Reserved
These drawing, concepts, designs and ideas are the property of
G+FWY. They may not be copied, reproduced, disclosed to others or
used in connection with any work other than the specified project for which
they are prepared, in whole or in part, without the prior written authorization
of G+FWY.
Berkeley Emerging
Art Foundation (BEAF)
Berkeley Museum of Art (BAM) and
the Pacific Film Archive
Connor Gravelle
Thomas Ferrer
Adrian C.W. Wong
Jinwen (Iris) Yu
Berkeley Emerging Art
Foundation (BEAF)
001-A-001
Berkeley Emerging Art
Foundation (BEAF)
001-A-010
Berkeley Emerging Art
Foundation (BEAF)
Berkeley Emerging Art
Foundation (BEAF)
Berkeley Emerging Art
Foundation (BEAF)
001-A-011
001-A-101
001-A-102
Skin System 1
~60° slots
Skin System 2
~240° slots
Structural Strategy
Each object stands structura ly independent,
leaning on one another. Cores in
two objects provide vertical circulation.
Interior Courtyard
6” x 5’ x 10’ precast concrete panels
Circulatory Surfaces
6” poured concrete panels
01
Berkeley Emerging Art
Foundation (BEAF)
001-A-201
Skin System 3
~45° slots
Basement Retailing Wall
12” poured concrete
Skin Composition
Slots tilted in multiple directions,
sometimes aligning along
physical seams and other times
producing purely graphic seams
through tectonic articulation.
Berkeley Emerging Art
Foundation (BEAF)
001-A-301
Berkeley Emerging Art
Foundation (BEAF)
001-A-302
02
Berkeley Emerging Art
Foundation (BEAF)
Berkeley Emerging Art
Foundation (BEAF)
Berkeley Emerging Art
Foundation (BEAF)
001-A-303
001-A-304
001-A-401
168 BAM Design Development Design Development Notebook Set

End Mullion
Poured in Place Concrete
Steel Rebar
Image courtsey Sanaa
Secondary Steel Member
L Brackets
Bracket Bolting
Primary Steel Member
Hôtel Tassel image courtesy Prestel Publishing, glass image courtsey FinePoint
Structural Joint
Vertical Clips
Façade Panels
Façade Clips
Primary Steel
20” rolled steel members
run along edges of masses
Secondary Steel Direction 1
16” W-section members running along
primary direction of surfaces
Secondary Steel Direction 2
14” W-section members running
along secondary direction of surfaces
Generic 6” Poured Concrete
over Metal Decking
Hung Ceiling Connectors
Primary Structure
Secondary Structure
Floorplate Edges
Image courtesy Snøhetta
Image courtesy Architectural Record
Water Sealent
Rain gutter
Low-E Coated Glass
Air Gap
Interior Glass
Mullion
Clip-On Fin
Pre Cast Concrete panel
Interlockng Joint
Primary Steel
Group 8 Design Development
Gravelle, Connor
Ferrer, Thomas
Wong, C.W. Adrian
Yu, J.W. Iris
Revisions:
No. Date Description By
Notes:
Do not scale from this drawing
Berkeley Museum of Art (BAM) and Pacific Film Archive
Status:
Drawn:
Date:
Title:
DESIGN DEV. Checked: -
CG
Scale: 1/32”:1’ @ SIZE
07 DEC 2015
SCALE @ SIZE
ASSORTED SKIN DETAILS
All Rights Reserved
These drawing, concepts, designs and ideas are the property of
G+FWY. They may not be copied, reproduced, disclosed to others or
used in connection with any work other than the specified project for which
they are prepared, in whole or in part, without the prior written authorization
of G+FWY.
Group 8 Design Development
Gravelle, Connor
Ferrer, Thomas
Wong, C.W. Adrian
Yu, J.W. Iris
Revisions:
No. Date Description By
Notes:
Do not scale from this drawing
Berkeley Museum of Art (BAM) and Pacific Film Archive
Status:
Drawn:
Date:
Title:
DESIGN DEV. Checked: -
TF
Scale: 1/32”:1’ @ SIZE
07 DEC 2015
SCALE @ SIZE
DETAIL: GLAZING TO SKIN
All Rights Reserved
These drawing, concepts, designs and ideas are the property of
G+FWY. They may not be copied, reproduced, disclosed to others or
used in connection with any work other than the specified project for which
they are prepared, in whole or in part, without the prior written authorization
of G+FWY.
Group 8 Design Development
Gravelle, Connor
Ferrer, Thomas
Wong, C.W. Adrian
Yu, J.W. Iris
Revisions:
No. Date Description By
Notes:
Do not scale from this drawing
Berkeley Museum of Art (BAM) and Pacific Film Archive
Status: DESIGN DEV. Checked: CG
Drawn: CG
Scale: 1/32”:1’ @ SIZE
Date: 07 DEC 2015
SCALE @ SIZE
Title: MATERIAL REFERENCE PALATE
All Rights Reserved
These drawing, concepts, designs and ideas are the property of
G+FWY. They may not be copied, reproduced, disclosed to others or
used in connection with any work other than the specified project for which
they are prepared, in whole or in part, without the prior written authorization
of G+FWY.
Retaining Wall
Drainage Mat
WPM
Protection Board
OBJECT 1 OBJECT 1
Level 3: Galleries Level 2: Galleries
5618 sqft
5120 sqft
Type A3
Type A3
Factor: 15
Factor: 15
Load: 374
Load: 341
OBJECT 3
Level 4: Studios
2490 sqft
Type E
Factor: 35
Load: 71
AFT ENTRANCE
OBJECT 3
Level 3: Studios
2456 sqft
Type E
Factor: 35
Load: 69
MAIN ENTRANCE
OBJECT 3
Level 2: Galleries
3555 sqft
Type E
Factor: 15
Load: 237
Precast Concrete Panels Structural Steel Cores
Foundation Beams and Columns
HVAC
Foundation and Retaining Walls
Parking Asphalt
OBJECT 5
Level 3-4: Studios
2037 sqft
Type E
Factor: 35
Load: 58
OBJECT 5
Level 2: Galleries
2192 sqft
Type E
Factor: 15
Load: 146
OBJECT 2 OBJECT 2
Level 2: Galleries Level 3: Galleries
2394 sqft 2300 sqft
Type A3
Type A3
Factor: 15 Factor: 15
Load: 159 Load: 153
OBJECT 4 OBJECT 4
Level 2: Galleries Level 3: Galleries
2421 sqft 1816 sqft
Type A3
Type A3
Factor: 15 Factor: 15
Load: 161 Load: 121
Primary Steel
Secondary Steel
Dual Glazing
FRP Panels
Gypsum Wall
PFR Panels
OBJECT 6
Level 2-4: Galleries
3892 sqft
Type A3
Factor: 15
Load: 259
Metal Edge Angle
HVAC Supply
HVAC Return
C-Channels
Metal Decking
Gypsum Ceiling
W-18 Floor Structure
OBJECT 7 OBJECT 7
Level 3-4: Offices Level 1-2: Galleries
3260 sqft
2582 sqft
Type B
Type B
Factor: 100 Factor: 100
Load: 32
Load: 25
ADA / Accessible Path of Travel
Egress / Circulation
Group 8 Design Development
Gravelle, Connor
Ferrer, Thomas
Wong, C.W. Adrian
Yu, J.W. Iris
Revisions:
No. Date Description By
Notes:
Do not scale from this drawing
Berkeley Museum of Art (BAM) and Pacific Film Archive
Status:
Drawn:
Date:
Title:
DESIGN DEV. Checked:
JW
Scale:
07 DEC 2015
BUILDING CHUNK
-
1/32”:1’ @ SIZE
SCALE @ SIZE
All Rights Reserved
These drawing, concepts, designs and ideas are the property of
G+FWY. They may not be copied, reproduced, disclosed to others or
used in connection with any work other than the specified project for which
they are prepared, in whole or in part, without the prior written authorization
of G+FWY.
Group 8 Design Development
Gravelle, Connor
Ferrer, Thomas
Wong, C.W. Adrian
Yu, J.W. Iris
Revisions:
No. Date Description By
Notes:
Do not scale from this drawing
Berkeley Museum of Art (BAM) and Pacific Film Archive
Status:
Drawn:
Date:
Title:
DESIGN DEV.
Checked:
Scale:
CG
AW
1/32”:1’ @ SIZE
07 DEC 2015
SCALE @ SIZE
PROPOSED
ADA AND EGRESS DIAGRAM
All Rights Reserved
These drawing, concepts, designs and ideas are the property of
G+FWY. They may not be copied, reproduced, disclosed to others or
used in connection with any work other than the specified project for which
they are prepared, in whole or in part, without the prior written authorization
of G+FWY.
Group 8 Design Development
Gravelle, Connor
Ferrer, Thomas
Wong, C.W. Adrian
Yu, J.W. Iris
Revisions:
No. Date Description By
Notes:
Do not scale from this drawing
Berkeley Museum of Art (BAM) and Pacific Film Archive
Status: DESIGN DEV. Checked:
Drawn: CG
Scale:
Date: 07 DEC 2015
Title: COST ANALYSIS AND
ESTIMATE
-
1/32”:1’ @ SIZE
SCALE @ SIZE
All Rights Reserved
These drawing, concepts, designs and ideas are the property of
G+FWY. They may not be copied, reproduced, disclosed to others or
used in connection with any work other than the specified project for which
they are prepared, in whole or in part, without the prior written authorization
of G+FWY.
Group 8 Design Development
Gravelle, Connor
Ferrer, Thomas
Wong, C.W. Adrian
Yu, J.W. Iris
Revisions:
No. Date Description By
Notes:
Do not scale from this drawing
Berkeley Museum of Art (BAM) and Pacific Film Archive
Status: DESIGN DEV. Checked:
Drawn: TF
Scale:
Date: 07 DEC 2015
Title: DETAIL: INTERNAL
FLOORPLATE TO SKIN
All Rights Reserved
These drawing, concepts, designs and ideas are the property of
G+FWY. They may not be copied, reproduced, disclosed to others or
used in connection with any work other than the specified project for which
they are prepared, in whole or in part, without the prior written authorization
of G+FWY.
Group 8 Design Development
Gravelle, Connor
Ferrer, Thomas
Wong, C.W. Adrian
Yu, J.W. Iris
-
1/32”:1’ @ SIZE
SCALE @ SIZE
Revisions:
No. Date Description By
Notes:
Do not scale from this drawing
Berkeley Museum of Art (BAM) and Pacific Film Archive
Status:
Drawn:
Date:
Title:
DESIGN DEV. Checked:
CG
Scale:
07 DEC 2015
HVAC DIAGRAM
-
1/32”:1’ @ SIZE
SCALE @ SIZE
All Rights Reserved
These drawing, concepts, designs and ideas are the property of
G+FWY. They may not be copied, reproduced, disclosed to others or
used in connection with any work other than the specified project for which
they are prepared, in whole or in part, without the prior written authorization
of G+FWY.
Precast Concrete Pan
Interlocking Joint
Structure Joinery
Topping Slab
Silicone Seal
Structural Slab
Secondary Seal
Metal Decking
Primary Seal
Drop Ceiling
Moisture Barrier
Steel Stud Blocking
Berkeley Emerging Art
Foundation (BEAF)
Berkeley Emerging Art
Foundation (BEAF)
Berkeley Emerging Art
Foundation (BEAF)
Structural Joint
001-A-402
001-A-501
001-A-502
Exploded Façade
Return Vents
Supply Vents
Berkeley Emerging Art
Foundation (BEAF)
Berkeley Emerging Art
Foundation (BEAF)
Air Handling Units
Several locations house multiple
air handling units, each of which
separately serves each object
Berkeley Emerging Art
Foundation (BEAF)
001-A-503
001-A-601
001-A-602
Shell and Façade
Exterior Façade Paneling
Fiber-reinforced panels (FRP),
broken down in modules of
roughly 5 by 8 feet, attached to
underlying steel structure.
These are to be painted white
and milled with as crisp edges as
possible, enticing sharp shadows.
Precast Concrete Panels 413276 Ft 2 $ 75 / Ft 2 $ 30995700
Rolled Ring Steel Members (14”x14”) 11046 Ft $300 / Ft $ 3313800
Primary Steel Direction 1 (14”x10”) 6851 Ft $ 150 / Ft $ 1027650
Primary Steel Direction 2 (14”x10”) 9994 Ft $ 150 / Ft $ 1499100
Secondary Members (14”x7”) 17664 Ft $ 150 / Ft $ 2649600
Glass Panels 12921 Ft 2 $ 65 / Ft 2 $ 839865
Interior Cores and Finishes
Cores 15577 Ft 2 $ 120 / Ft 2 $ 1869240
Floor Finishes 71815 Ft 2 $ 50 / Ft 2 $ 3590750
Gypsum 123175 Ft 2 $ 2.5 / Ft 2 $ 307938
Fire Sprinklers 71815 Ft 2 $ 5 / Ft 2 $ 359075
HVAC 71815 Ft 2 $ 40 / Ft 2 $ 2872600
Additional Architectural Elements
Flooring and Ceilings
Polished concrete with minimal but still
noticeable reflectivity creates deep spaces
with subtle, blurred reflections that place
the visitor between two bare, abstract planes
of experience when within the galleries.
Comparable to Sanaa’s 21 st Century Museum
of Contemporary Art Kanazawa, this
austere approach should constantly hold in
juxtaposition to itself the boldness of the sky,
constantly referenced by the various cores’
skylights and open courtyard.
Interior Courtyard Façade
Stark cast-in-place concrete
panels line the interior courtyard,
providing a space of articulation
which is minimal and without the
exuberance of the outer envelope.
Transitions occur in seams
between objects.
Interior Concrete Slabs 71815 Ft 2 $ 120 / Ft 2 $ 8617800
Interior Partition Walls 6781 Ft 2 $ 30 / Ft 2 $ 203430
Floorplate Steel (W-24) 21191 Ft $ 100 / Ft $ 2119100
Basement Retaining Wall 9318 Ft 2 $ 180 / Ft 2 $ 1677240
Parking Garage Asphalt 46326 Ft $ 4 / Ft $ 185304
Concrete Foundation 15384 Ft $ 200 / Ft $ 3076800
Foundation Columns 12691 Ft 3 $ 100 / Ft 3 $ 1269100
Foundation Beams 61464 Ft 3 $ 100 / Ft 3 $ 6146400
Subtotal $ 67878652
Overheads
Architect’s Overhead 15% $ 10181798
MEP Overhead 1% $ 678787
Structural Overhead 3% $ 2036360
Contingencies
Estimating Contingency 5% $ 3393933
Construction Contingency 10% $ 6787865
Total $ 90957394
Filigree Detailing
Fine metal elements should have a hard, sturdy but elegant feeling,
accentuating the space as if lines in space.
Berkeley Emerging Art
Foundation (BEAF)
001-A-701
Berkeley Emerging Art
Foundation (BEAF)
001-A-801
Cast iron railings in lieu of Victor Horta’s Hôtel Tassel and details
around the stairs (backed by a reflective layer of dark glass) should
make a screen of sorts which follows circulation throughout the
building.
Connor Gravelle Portfolio 2012-2015 169

SCI-FA
2B Studio
Spring 2014, Heather Flood
This project was specially selected to be
featured in SCI-Arc’s Spring Show 2014.
Synopsis
SCI-Fa (The Southern California Institute
of Fashion) is an exploration in programmatic
and formal ambiguity of space.
This formal production applies a logic of
transformational conics in order to eschew
primitive geometries to the ends of
producing simultaneities of program and
formal rarifications of space which suppose
an entirely unconventional architecture
both outwardly experiential and
esoteric to the medium of Architecture.
Of specific importance to the project are
its representational qualities, especially
in relation to the formal agendas at hand.
Regarding the bent form of the building,
the conventions of typical plans and sections
were invalidated as meek in their
explicative possibilities for the inherently
three-dimensional nature in the spatial
instantiations of bending. This fundamentally
shifted the project’s presentation to
rely both on an animation and a series
of peelings or slicings (entitled “Scoop
Drawings”) of the building’s components
(skin, massing et cetera) as more adequate
methods for the description of its
assets in terms formal, programmatic and
representative.
Thoughts on Program
As briefed, SCI-Fa longs to be a sweatshop
of production value, stuffed mostly
with compartments accessed indirectly
from distant corners of a primarily
medium-space-filled building shrouded
in privacy. Clearly, sheer adherence to the
provided programmatic distributions will
be ineffectual in procuring unique intersections
of space and constituencies.
Particularly of interest, given the diverse
site and nearby orgy of demographics,
it seems strange that an educational
institution would allot spaces overwhelmingly
geared towards production,
nearly altogether forgoing more traditional
roles of education. It is clear that
the prerogative of the institution is not
situated within the momentary incidents
of academia, but rather centered on the
necessitated production of fashion materials
and the like. The facility is effectively
established on the grounds of its own
labor, the individual meaningless and the
collective but a mere tool in this aesthetic
machinery. What becomes ironic about
such institutions, generally speaking,
seems to be their often reclusive nature,
as if to boast solely within granted circles
their accomplishments of material and
craft. Why shouldn’t such a factory be in
your face? What withholds an institution
like SCI-Fa to the state of secondary or
tertiary status in a vibrancy to the likes of
Downtown Los Angeles?
Thus, the institution’s interactions with
the public sphere, both theatrical and
revealing in nature, are of the utmost
importance for demonstrative value in its
architecture. Its architecture should read:
this is not a place of observation, rather
a directly confrontational experiment
of empirical phenomenology. Melding
perfectly with the clear delineation of
“middle spaces” (those medium-sized
areas of interstitial importance, the
organization of the program outlined in
the project’s brief ought to engage and to
stimulate the barrier between the public
and the institution (the exo and the eso,
that is to say) both from outside-in and
within-out.
Also inherent to this observation is the
unique structure of power invested
elsewhere in the provided spaces. Of
noteworthiness is the second largest
allocation of area, divided between the
building’s facilities and the institution’s
administration. This combined mass
is still to be deemed more spatially
important in the reading of the brief’s
interpreted agendas than straightforward
instruction, vested half-heartedly
in fleeting seminar rooms and secluded
studio plots. Thus, a hierarchical relationship
is established wherein a metaphorically
panoptic distribution of importance
oversees the highly controlled (and thus
only secondarily conditioned) spaces of
traditional “education”. Again, the powerhouse
of production overtakes this
positioning, as if to engage a mutated
beast, the purpose of which borders
between the refinements procured by
a disciplined body of pupils below an
overseeing administrative caste and the
let-wild machinery of production.
How might this architecture, and in particular
its programmatic distributions and
spatial accordances, enable this loosely
defined pedagogy to foster in a method
conducive to the interaction between
this subculture and a larger context (Los
Angeles, herself). In so doing, spaces
otherwise perceived as afterthoughts or
prerequisites might take prominence in
facilitating such interactions. Id est, the
institution’s shop or auditorium might be
recast as crucial political arenas throughout
which a diagrammatic goal of integration
and discourse carries itself out,
both captive and parasitic to the institutional
framework which has spawned.
Thoughts on Institution
The strange thing about polemic intuitions,
once realized in architecture as
built things, seems to be their resistance
towards syndication in their perspective
environments. That is to say, it prevails
that the integration of the institution is
perceived as counterintuitive to its core
radicalism, which, quite paradoxically, it
seeks to interject into a larger context.
Thus, it is as if a cognitive membrane
of glass exists to separate an institution
from its surroundings. Whatever
the purpose of that institution might be,
it might appear that this disconnection
has severed critically unexploited links
which could foster between those exo
and those eso to these alternative definitions
of otherwise complacent notions so
intrinsic to an avant-garde practice.
The result of these tendencies manifests
Thus, the institution’s
interactions with the
public sphere, both
theatrical and revealing
in nature, are of the
utmost importance for
demonstrative value
in its architecture.
itself several perplexingly convoluted
circumstances:
Truly innovative approaches to the practices
respective to these institutions are
rendered temporarily null in their eras.
Appreciation is acquired ex post facto as
a kind of post-rationalization by the larger
community. While the immediacy of the
avant-garde does in fact leave beneficial
scars on the functions of whichever
discipline in question, it rarely becomes
170 SCI-Fa 2B Studio

A.1.Y
P.1
P.2
E.S.1
A.1
S
A.1.X
R
1. 2. 3.
A.2.Y
P.1
E.S.1
E.C
B
V.R
H.C
N°
V.R
A.2
A.1.X
A.2.Y
4.
5.
6.
P.1
D.1 C.1 C.2
D.2
R.2
R.1 E.S.3
E.S.2
P.2
7. 8. 9.
172 SCI-Fa 2B Studio Transformation Diagram

Of specific importance to the
project are its representational
qualities, especially in relation
to the formal agendas at hand.
Regarding the bent form of the
building, the conventions of plans
and sections were invalidated
as meek in their explicative
possibilities for the inherently
three-dimensional nature in the
spatial instantiations of bending.
173

174 SCI-Fa 2B Studio Transformation Process

Connor Gravelle Portfolio 2012-2015 175

acknowledged by the greater society
until it is either extinct or festering on its
deathbed. What might occur if leading
thinkers in avant-garde practices were to
engage society? Obviously, this cannot
be enforced in any authoritarian manner
onto personal agendas, but, instead,
architecture may offer us a method by
which to shift the performances both of
such practices and prospective members
of societal constituencies to the ends that
their brief scraping one another would
produce magnificent intersections.
The actualized objectives of these institutions
suffer such significantly lengthened
realizations within a culture that neither
their creators nor their intended audiences
are able to partake in the spoils of
progression. Thus, Ikea is the effectual
gravestone of a once beloved Bauhaus.
Beleaguered bachelors and strapped
students alike were punished by history
to endure a semicentury before innovative
spatializations of Modernist design
reached their grasps within reason. Of
course among other circumstances, part
of this is must be attributed to stagnant
time and prolonged distancing between
innovators and their audiences. Obviously,
many factors contribute to this snailpaced
progression, and few of these can
be addressed by architecture. Still, the
spatial division between those pushing
forward the intensification of culture
and their constituencies as manifest by
architecture can be reduced not only to a
negligible level but perhaps can even be
promoted and appropriated.
Both those within and outside institutions
seem to be completely ignorant of each
other’s existence or importance. While
some have posted this as both an inherent
elitism of the avant-garde and an
ignorance of the masses, it is the distinct
hypothesis that in at least some circumstances
a purely architectural inefficiency
may be of responsibility to the symptom.
How might it be if these two groups were
to be compressed within one atmosphere?
Their entanglement, rendered as
the dissolution of divisitory space could,
in effect, render each obsolete by mutual
ingestion. An enlightened citizenry could
engulf the ostracized radicals just as
these societal separatists might return to
a world forever changed by their esoteric
contemplations.
Unfortunately, architecture to this point
has to these ends remained rather unhelpful.
Bauhaus became a household
name only long after its dissipation, The
Institute for Architecture and Urban Studies
evades the common New Yorker (a
being so thirsty for unsettlement) to this
day, and SCI-Arc remains unbeknownced
even to those living beside it, to name a
few situations inherent to the discipline of
architecture. These circumstances must
implode, rendering in their wake the
complete disruption of previously held
ideals about the agency and impotence
of the avant-garde. Though largely untested,
the results or perspective failure
of such an action is far too great a possibility
of which to continue a distasteful
avoidance.
The Fourth Wall as Societal Device
The Fourth Wall is a term pertaining to
the theory of theater, constituting not
in material but in perception the final
enclosing “wall” of a stage set which
metaphysically divides the performances
occurring with the audience spectating.
In more traditional roles, this division is
not to be engaged. The theater-goers sit
before their spectacle in complete compliance,
idly engrossing themselves in
only the representation of an event. This
has come under considerable challenge
in more contemporary works, whereby
the wall itself is rendered variously null,
enabling the fluid interaction between
audience and actor. Not always with
consequence to the reiterated production
before them, this at the purest state
encapsulates a constituent engagement
with results dramatic in their repurcisions
for understanding and experience alike.
It seems that much of contemporary life,
no less of that in a city, rests behind a
fourth wall. Especially in regards to architecture,
much is left behind our grasp,
a mere representation of intentions and
actions. Our persistence (and, thus, reliance)
in the Fourth Wall is unequivocal
to all else. We cling to its protection from
the realities, effectively ammounting to
a schism between our sensorial contact
with the world itself sui generis and its
ramifications towards our lives.
Thus, it appears, much of the institutional
and societal frameworks we have
established seek to sustain this buffer
between the rawness of contemporary
existence and the comfort prerequesite
to a sustainable life. We wretch in fear as
these boundaries crumble in rare occasions.
Take, for example, a crash of an
airliner. We look to this object as a whole,
a sort of container for people – passengers.
Few engage this as a mechanized
system, instead relying wholy on the
perception of its geometric essence as
one body. In the event of a crash, we are
often times presented with a failure of
the object to sustain the singular form
we expect of it. We see its entrails spewn
about as if to signify before us that our
creation has failed. Once the skin of the
beast is lifted from its framing, we find
ourselves disgusted by the estrangement
pronowned. An assembledge of heterogeneous
parts, it repels our notions of
truth and verity to see the actuality that
is the machine, a loosly composed set of
bolts and panels.
We might look at the Lockerbie bombing,
in a brief detour, to illustrate this point.
After the bombing of Pan American Flight
103 over the small Scottish village, a media
extravaganza presented the populace
with a face-to-face depiction of tragedy.
In regards to airline travel, the fourth wall,
in its division of the passenger from the
ramifications of both political wills related
to the subject and the delicate structural
systems of a Boeing 747 during flight,
was utterly decimated. Surreal images of
a ruined cockpit strewn about a bucolic
field in the rural enclave, especially with
the cause of the crash taken into consideration,
irrevocably altered the relationship
between the passenger and the
machine. To see an image of the jetliner
before the crash is to reengage the territorialized
notions we had attained in
the immediate foreground to the disaster.
These are forever shattered by the
presentation of images after the matter,
and it may be said that we can never
truly gaze onto the condition of the object
before the event without irresistibly
allowing our minds to venture onto the
tragedy of which we have been informed
by the reciprocal interchange of information
they share.
That, of course, was an example with
rather morbid associations. Rather, the
Fourth Wall might function in society in
a strata of roles and circumstances. Critically
speaking, its existence buffers the
life of the individual from the myriad of
complications presented by the outside
world. The theatergoer, in this function, is
in many instances in need of the division
between the representational aspects
of the performance and the perception
occurring in his or her psyche. When this
is removed, a new relationship is transfigured
by the space between the stage
and the seating. Obvious ramifications of
grand importance rest in the presence or
avoidance of this tactic within theatrical
theory.
In most other circumstances, the Fourth
Wall’s persistence causes riffs in the
understandings between constituencies
of society. Specifically to a political end,
these allot for much of the estrangement
we face in a Postindustrial legacy.
Our clothing, furniture, our buildings and
any other manufactured good rest firmly
behind a differentiation of metaphysical
separation. Often, it seems, the dilution
of this barrier results in consequences
either disturbing or disruptional.
The Fourth Wall in Architecture
In the case of architecture, its function
inherent as a container of program, constituencies
and functions thereof bounds
the capacity of most structures to the
roles of uniform boxes. Even with formal
experimentation, the Fourth Wall is hard
broken even by the most radical of strategies.
A cliché has thus formed around
the solution to this problem, centered
around a knee-jerk reaction of complete
spatial implosion. It is rather inneffectual
in many circumstances to demolish all
walls. Instead, a myraid of other spatial
strategies and media can be uptaken
in the progression towards integrated
space.
Particularly in the sense of institutional
architecture, it seems pervasive that a
Fourth Wall exists between those exoand
esoteric to the organization. This
division is perhaps most often manifest in
the form of a wall, but otherwise its forms
can be seen in various architectural
tropes.
Recently, much has been made in the
real of connecting those outside the institution
to those within, but, under closer
examination, it is possible to deduce that
these relationships are superficial at best.
Furthermore, they often involve the interplay
of constituencies in a linear manner.
That is to say, either those from within
experience those outside or vise versa,
but rarely does the situation present
itself that a complete orgy of interaction
occurs. Such an event might be labeled
preemptively as counterproductive to
the ends of an institution, but it can also
be interpreted that the explicit function
of such an organization is to create this
kind of interaction. Thus, it effectively
176 SCI-Fa 2B Studio

Connor Gravelle Portfolio 2012-2015 Study Models
177

2.1
18.2
12.2
VLLY
35.2
13.2
34.2
VLLY
VLLY
VLLY
39.1
26.1
37.2
38.2
36.2
39.2
VLLY
40.1
34.1
42.1
41.1
UP, R = 49.25
33.2
32.2
32.1
33.1
35.1
36.1
Central Mass (Main)
Urban Lobby (Main)
VLLY
37.1
UP, R = 9.13c
20.1
20.2
19.2
17.2
23.2
VLLY
19.1
UP, R = 32c
16.2
3.1
14.1
17.1
18.1
(Cut and Join Seamlessly)
3.2
28.2
UP, R = 6.67c
DOWN, R = 28.28c
4.1
DOWN, R = 28.28
16.1
MNTN
MNTN
21.2
4.2
15.2
23.1
42.2
27.2
26.2
Central Mass (Void)
Central Mass (Main)
5.1
Urban Lobby (Insert)
Urban Lobby (Main)
5.2
UP, R = 20.00
29.2
30.2
31.2
24.2
22.1
15.1
21.1
6.2
41.2
25.2
MNTN
DOWN, R = 13.33c
MNTN
DOWN, R = 39.75c
UP, R = 29.58
UP, R = 7.35c
UP, R = 16.58
13.1
12.1
UP, R = 34.58
11.2
UP, R = 5
14.2
40.2
38.1
VLLY
25.1
27.1
VLLY
28.1
10.2
24.1
DOWN, R = 5
UP, R = 28.28
DOWN, R = 10
9.2
11.1
2.2
8.2
10.1
9.1
UP, R = 7.5
1.2
UP, R = 10
VLLY
8.1
DOWN, R = 28.28
7.2
22.2
30.1
31.1
29.1
DOWN, R = 35.92c
7.1
DOWN, R = 29.05
6.1
Urban Lobby (Main)
Auditorium
DOWN, R = 36.55
1.1
178 SCI-Fa 2B Studio Unrolled Massing

avoids the trope of being cut off from the
outside world.
Especially in the case of a fashion school,
it is integral that those inside experientially
partake in the interactions of those
outside, and that, conversely, those outside
are changed fundamentally in their
perspective by those within. Obviously,
this cannot be predicted to the point that
one consequence is available. In some
cases, the events might even end poorly
by a traditional sense of success. Events
such as the flood of homeless into the
Seattle Public Library come to mind, but
are these really that bad?
Often, the case is that our realities are
highly curated by our statuses within the
complex structures of society. This predetermined
interaction establishes a narrow
framework that functions quite actively to
remain fairly static. Within this, a backlogged
cycle seems to have occurred by
many accounts in which those who have
climbed the ranks resist the ascension of
contemporaries below. Without the necessity
to explicate this in further detail, it
is clear that its ranks pertain to those of
the fashion industry in particular.
Urbanity
Circulation as Runway for
Newly Purchased Dress
Commerce
Dress becomes External Representation
Internal Production to Product
Dress becomes Product at Store
Libraries
Raw Material to Assembly
Sewing Room
Dying Room
Academia
Knowledge to Application
Craftwork to Display
Dress is Complete
Dress is Begun
Printmaking Lab
Toy Room
Runway
Therefore, with a site as ontologically
compromised in such a diverse fashion
as that at the corner of Olympic and
Main, it is paramount to the success of
any institution there that architecture
arbitrate the contemporaneously choreographed
and unimpaired interaction
among the subsets of society. Even
within the institution, an obvious hierarchy
is bound to form. This has, in other
cases, been the demise of a truly radical
establishment, a fermented sign of complacency
and presumption. In a place like
Especially in the case of a fashion school, it
seems integral that those inside experientially
partake in the interactions of those outside, and
that, conversely, those outside are changed
fundamentally in their perspective by those within.
Los Angeles, who can ever say what is
above or below anything else? The hierarchies
otherwise established the guard
the ramparts of our social structures have
utterly fallen within this city, at least as far
as explicated by the physical world.
What if an architecture profoundly
changed the manner by which these
various groups of people, both those
internal and external to the institution, interacted
with one another? Were they to
be removed from their typical frames of
reference, they might find before them an
entirely reshuffled perception of reality.
F***, the Spline
This design is arrived to by the effective
bending of space. Whereas typically
Cartesian geometries preclude the
three-dimensional transoformation of
their domains, the action of being has
been employed to the ends of creating
a space of pulled and distorted proportions.
Still, it remains ever valient that
those within this capsule are cognizant
of their surroundings. The ghosts of a
Cartesian past are pervasive throughout
both interior and exterior moments
across the scheme. Such is the overarching
use of the grid, a persistent reference
which begs those within its grasp to read
the transformative logic of its application.
This is achieved through a conic/circular
dimension which is controposed to
the otherwise orthagonal reliance of the
building.
Of particular interest is the emergence
of complex spatial relationships with a
series of typical geometries. We have
become so complacent with our technological
surfaces and morphologies that
Connor Gravelle Portfolio 2012-2015 179

Education Bar
Studios
Seminar Rooms
Urban Lobby
Store
Lounge
Auditoria
Street
Media Core
Libraries
Computer Lab
Offices
Cafe
Sewing Room
Dying Room
Production Spiral
Printmaking Lab
Toy Room
Runway
Urban Fabric
180 SCI-Fa 2B Studio Circulation Diagram

Studios / Printmaking Lab
Libraries
to Urban Lobby
Sewing Farm
Tiered Toy Room
Dyes
to Rooftop
to Runway
Student Entrance
Connor Gravelle Portfolio 2012-2015 Circulation Detail: Production Spiral
181

182 SCI-Fa 2B Studio 3/8” : 1’ Model

we often forget the nacent abilities of
primitive geometries. While a spline can
only engage the fairly recent discourse of
form through a reference to complexity
and surface, the culmination of primtitive
geometries which we set our eyes so
often upon in buildings throughout the
history of architecture prove their capacity
to more effectively attain contemporary
discourses.
Passing through these spaces, an inhabitant
of the environment is placed in constant
relation both to him or her self and
to his or her piers. Ipso facto, a dialogue
of perceptions is established. Vantages
provided by the undulations in the stairs’
trajectories or the interior’s bends, among
other things, present new perspectives
onto inhabitation through an abstraction
of the borders of program. The visual and
the spatial intertwine to procure a sort
of blurred reality in which the user is to
heighten an engagement of the architecture
through the conscious intensification
or nullification of the senses. Auditory
and visual references are eschewed at
unexpected points, allotting a experience
utterly reliant upon the recognition of
the subject to his implications within it.
It is his, her or their acknowledgement
of their experience which validates this
space. Never does the building become
obtrusive, as it works at deep levels
to relay in each breath agency to the
spectator. The aforementioned Cartesian
systems, juxtapositions between complex
and primitive geometries and decisive
choices in placements of irregular spaces
allow a fluid existence of space wherein
references against what the typical user
is accoustomed to offer opportunities for
defamiliarization.
A Mechanized Pool for Fashion
In Koolhaas’ “The Story of the Pool”, we
find a derelict avant-garde, cast from
its disconcerting motherland adrift to
a Land whose image exceeds its own
reality. Inasmuch as this transformation is
through the foreseeable future tangential
to other mass emigrations from Europe
during its time of diaspora to the New
World, its architectural foundations lie in
the mechanization of this metamorphosis
(or rather, in the Constructivist Pool’s
case, stasis) facilitated by the pool and its
human literalism. This is to say that both
the pool and its swimmers are mutually
ineffectual. Likewise, the arrival of an
institution for high fashion in Downtown
Los Angeles might produce a series of
programmatic interactions unexpected
and both repulsive yet productive for
each party involved.
We see in the migration a radicalism
inherent to the world of fashion as
removed from the social realities and
economic contemporaneity as were the
Constructivists in the fledgling Soviet
Union. This Constituency, encapsulated
within the object of their institution, are
to arrive into the greatest dichotomy of
metropolitan America, a slice of urbanity
in an otherwise suburban wasteland, a
riffing drag of Congestion between the
weavings of a bucolic superficiality. What
it once knew, the welcome of Paris or
the citadel of New York, are sure to be
demolished. Realistically speaking, DTLA
is unlikely to integrate well a conventional
(or complacent) ideal of the interaction
between the typical institution of haute
couture and its constituencies, be they
financial, creative or laboral.
It is in this rejection of the conventional
that SCI-Fa must sustain itself, and, in
this essence, its architecture might manifest
itself into a spatial sequence which
seeks to dynamically displace all those
involved.
Los Angeles, or Epileptic Shock
Los Angeles presents before us a temporal
disconnect between the subject and
his object to the ends that our perception
of reality is inexorably estranged
from any frame of reference. A transient
landscape crumples beneath our feet
the erudition of all certainty and conclusion,
a waypoint in the quest towards an
impermanent state of urban liquidity.
This blurred urbanity serves to free us
from the choking complacency otherwise
ridden across our lives. In effect, such a
complete ostracization from the typical
is achieved through the eradication of
the normative perspective. Like the films
so famously composed by Hollywood,
Los Angeles has effectively become a
compiled set of shots. As we pass across
the city, this ludicrous reversal of roles
flips the stale humanism so pervasive in
other places. The continuity of the human
eye having been substituted by something
more akin to an induced epileptic
shock, we discover a place constituted
by misfit puzzle pieces or a whole from
mutilated parts – specificity by complete
unspecification. Primarily, this tactic
explicates itself through the juxtaposition
of Angeleno constituencies in a manner
completely unique from any other form of
urban composition. It is by the very fact
that boutiques and homeless exist within
meters of one another that we begin to
lust the irrationality of LA.
Whereas other cities have with both the
utmost complacency and unwise joviality
taken for granted their definitions, we
experience a city who refutes the very
existence of a trope. That is to say, no one
part is allotted the subsistence required
to compel a singular reading. A mishmashed
tangle of parts reads before us,
Spectators, a string of non sequitur arguments
against rationality. By doing this,
we ourselves are in effect empowered
We see in the migration a radicalism
inherent to the world of fashion as
removed from the social realities and
economic contemporaneity… This
Constituency, encapsulated within
the object of their institution, are to
arrive into the greatest dichotomy
of metropolitan America…
as the actors in this deranged production.
Both at once those on the stage and
those before it, we foremost see performed
a surreal entanglement of human
wills and urban serendipities. The mere
existence of the Fourth Wall is inconsequent
at a theater where one can say
with neither certainty nor authority who
is the actor and who the witness.
Where do we stand within this irreconcilable
interplay of constituencies? Without
much remorse, Los Angeles has fatefully
removed the linear narrative to this problem
of perception, founding superordinate
to its imposition a world of theatrical
transitions. Inasmuch as this approach
foregoes the prescription of a generic
definition for the city, it enables an infinite
possibility of existences to propagate.
This is the exponentially confusing LA we
must learn to foster, a rampant urbanity
which preemptively eludes all the
Connor Gravelle Portfolio 2012-2015 183

(animation)
vimeo.com/
92414158
In addition to drawings, renderings and
other conventional representations,
an animation was produced to detail
the experiential procession attained by
the building’s circulatory systems. In
particular, the staircase was explored as
a productive means by which to explicate
distinctly posthuman encounters between
individuals, constituencies and various
media within the building. This was by
no means a purely presentational game,
but rather a tool by which to guage the
experiential characteristics of the stairs
and forms which assembled to conduct
the flow of the building’s spaces. Nor
does the animation deal only with
rendered images of experience. A series
of diagrams supplant the visuals as
demonstrations of the formal intentions
behind the spaces. Likewise, a calibrated
soundtrack and series of vignettes
portray the building as conducive to
more than purely optical sensations.

to Entrance
ENGAGES STORE
M
R = 9.5
ENGAGES VOID
R = 3
R = 11 R = 1.5
to Auditorium
R = 1.5
R = 9.5
M
R = 8
T
R = 1.5
M
R = 1.5
R = 9.5
OBSERVES MAIN STREET
R = 9.5
OBSERVES OLYMPIC BOULEVARD
186 SCI-Fa 2B Studio Regulating Geometry of Stairs (Right)

Connor Gravelle Portfolio 2012-2015 Scoop Drawing: Vertical Core
187

188 SCI-Fa 2B Studio Interior Renderings

numbed complacency of quotidian life.
Escape is Futile: LA Live
As DTLA gentrifies, the oppressive invasion
of new commerce can be felt weighing
on nearly every square inch of the
otherwise pure ground. Although some
reluctance comes at labeling it either
good or evil, it can certainly be said that
one of the most imminent factors in the
experiential forces involved within this
change can be felt in the Fashion District,
where the constant presence of LA Live
seems to clutter the air with a thickened
sense of disdain.
As if constantly within reminder, the
flicker of this phallic monument to
consumption can be seen at the most
unexpected times, glimmering between
the buildings at the most advantageous
moments in Los Angeles’ gridded wasteland
of urbanity. One cannot help but to
feel as if he has been observed, judged
and subsequently overtaken by the sheer
theatricality with which LA Live perches
itself in the neighborhood. Allies and
street corners which would in any other
situation be of the most mundane nature
become battlegrounds for a display of
purely hierarchical glory on the part of
the Ritz Carlton.
This seems to be the unfortunate partition
of gentrification reserved for the
most putrid corner of the New Downtown,
a gleaming symbol of both equal
parts commercialism and façadism. As
aforementioned, it cannot be purely
ironic bathos that the building most
resembles perhaps the most contentious
piece of male anatomy, long accused
itself of having imposed its presence in
various places unwelcome.
It feels very much as if this development,
wallpapered by glitz of Coca-Cola, has
become an urban Bastille, forever the
ultimate representation of the rampantly
overt capitalization of the distraught
American urbanism. As is such, it can be
purposed that the citizens of Los Angeles
gather and ‘brick by brick’ (or sheet
of glass by sheet of glass, in any case)
disassemble this oppressive symbol of
architectural subordination. After all, the
destruction of the Bastille, it being important
to note that a mere seven prisoners
were freed in its liberation, is inherently
an architectural spectacle by the people
of a begrudgingly and long-accepted
hierarchy. In many ways, architecture can
come to represent something, irrespective
of the wills of architect, client or
community. This brings the only acceptable
conclusion: LA Live is a parasitic
imposition by larger commercial initiates
which effectively renders itself an enemy
of the urban subset of Our Los Angeles.
What can be done to cure such an ailment?
Perhaps, the best action (having
accepted the futile nature of any plan to
dismantle the complex democratically)
is to counter it with better architecture.
If we come to the logical conclusion
about the project’s representational
consequences, then it stands by inverse
logic that other architecture could work
to reverse its effects. What, in the place
of LA Live could help to impose a better
urbanity on DTLA? Could, in fact, there
be such a scenario as Architecture and
Revolution?
Beginnings and Ends in Architecture
Contemporary architecture seems to
have a complete fetishism with a dissolution
between interior and exterior.
Ambiguous spaces abound, and those
currently at the helm seem pervasively to
recommend such gradients. This is well
within reason, but is there no value left to
the dramatic juxtaposition between that
which is inside and that which is outside?
Perhaps, a most successful architecture
might take on an interplay between these
states. Humanistically speaking, the phenomenological
experience ascertained
from such an endeavor might produce
effects which would make those involved
even more cogniscent of their positions
within the power of architecture. For example,
when someone enters a building,
they are subconsciously subscribing to
a world. This goes to conclude that they
are actively partaking in an experience
which exists both external to and integrated
within an extant reality. Their actions
taken within such a space would, by
logical consequence, have then to both
establish and contest their relationship to
the prior reality. At beast, this metamorphosis
of the individual might produce
an entirely novel perception of what once
was and what might be. Reality is by the
best accounts such a fluid experience,
so haphazardly shaped by the mundane
complacencies and parameters of our
lives.
An architecture must grasp this, presenting
us with both versions: that which
directly confronts us with reality by way
of total estrangement (“there is outside,
here is inside”) and something more fluid
(“Where am I? Where are We”?).
This can become particularly troubling
when faced with such a heterogeneous
environment as Los Angeles. What is the
agency of a both a juxtaposition and an
integration in a landscape where nothing
really exists? That is to say, everything
in LA is in a state of complete disarray.
Though the condition aforementioned is
no catastrophic presistence, necessarily,
it causes an interesting predicament
when it comes to the flow of space.
To break from a city’s fabric, there has to
be an established order against which
first to work. The Guggenheim defies the
gridded logic of orthagonal Manhattan
for a more organic presentation of reality.
Likewise yet opposite, many works of
contemporary Parametricism purport
completely to become extensions of realities
already extant, deeply tied to both
cultural and logical coherencies to the
ends that the building almost vanishes.
[We] are LA
Los Angeles holds a monopoly on the
Connor Gravelle Portfolio 2012-2015 189

190 SCI-Fa 2B Studio Scoop Drawing: Runway

The sheer urbanity of the city
has presumed the potential for
serendipitous human interaction,
instead forging a vortex of
complications, entanglements
and overlaps. In these ephemeral
crossings, the citizenry of
the city coincide, their lives
scraping one another in the
most minuscule of strokes. To
amplify this scar is to heighten
their awareness of the transient
nature which they cohabitate.
191

Connor Gravelle Portfolio 2012-2015 Model Photos
193

infinitely variable situations of humankind.
Woven into its fate-set tapestry
is a simple mechanism which denies
the possible creation of new scenarios.
Blankly put, nothing new can emerge.
Every variable has been fulfilled; every
possible interaction has already been
satisfied. We are therefore bound to an
endless encore, a chain of repeat performances
to the ends only that the monster
prevails. The actors are unimportant,
minor expendables under the shade of
the theatricality.
Canonical Images in Fashion
and Architecture
Fashion has an inherently representational
agenda, a trait too often ignored by
both those within and outside the field.
Such a facet of its dichotomy parallels
conditions of architecture. To expose
through serendipity these dichotomies is
to critically engage fashion and architecture
alike as fascinations of contemporary
culture through material manifestations.
Alphabetical organizations arbitrate these
juxtapositions, establishing at times new
comparisons and at others reinforcing
existing understandings.
Dior’s New Look vs. Audrey Hepburn
Twiggy vs. Tinker v. Des Moines
Punks vs. Corporate Businessmen
1950’s Housewife vs. Bra-Burning
Case Studyvs. Skid Row
James Dean vs. Drag Queens at Stonewall
Jacqueline Kennedy Idealic vs. Jacqueline
Kennedy Mourning
Bridget Bardot vs. Pamela Anderson
Haute Couture vs. Everday
Marilyn Monroe vs. Herself
Woodstock vs. Army
Tribe (via Riefenstahl) Fashion vs. Western
Fashion
Authoritarian Uniformity vs. Rejective
Individuality (Nuremburg vs. Punks)
Pertaining Quotes
“I just use fashion… to talk about politics.”
– Vivienne Westwood.
“Give me time, and I’ll give you a revolution.”
– Alexander McQueen.
“I don’t want art for a few…” – William
Morris.
“Fashion is not just about trends. It’s
about political history.” – Daphne Guinness.
“Clothes are but a symbol of something
hid deep beneath.” – Virginia Woolf
Skin
The following is a series of excerpts from
Alejandro Zaera Polo’s “The Politics
of the Envelope: A Political Critique of
Materialism”; highlighted text below each
quote explicates its relationship to the
issues at hand:
“The building envelope is possibly the
oldest and most primitive architectural
element. It materializes the separation of
the inside and the outside, natural and
artificial and it demarcates private property
and land ownership (one of the most
primitive political acts). When it becomes
a façade, the envelope operates also as
a representational device in addition to
its crucial environmental and territorial
roles.” (77)
Especially in the context of Downtown
Los Angeles, a disparaging set of economic
and political factors have facilitated
dramatic dynamics between social
strata. In the same stretch of sidewalk,
some of society’s most affluent walk
beside some of their most (socioeconomically)
downtrodden counterparts.
Unfortunately, while urban planning may
have allowed for (or at least functions
complacently with) this estranged human
operative, architecture has been less
forthcoming in allowing such overlaps.
Traditionally, it has merely fortified the
horrid divisions of a society all-too-willing
to forget the discrepancies it creates at
full joviality among its ranks. Perhaps,
this could be rectified by an architecture
that fosters adjacencies.
“The envelope exceeds the surface by
incorporating a much wider set of attachments
within the issues of construction
and representation that converge in the
design of the physical limit of a building.
It includes the crust of space affected by
the physical construction of the surface,
by the scale and dimension of the space
contained, by its permeability to daylight
194 SCI-Fa 2B Studio

Connor Gravelle Portfolio 2012-2015 Scoop Drawing: Sectional Bifurcation
195

196 SCI-Fa 2B Studio Model Façade Detail

Corporate Conformity vs. Punk Individualism
Midcentury Domestication vs. Bra-Burning
Marilyn Monroe vs. Herself
Nonwestern Ideals of Beauty vs. Western Canonizations Thereof
Rebellious Self Expression vs. Mass Dogmatization
In its dogmatic intake of trends, fashion introduces a series
of dichotomies which speak to larger conditions of its
socioeconomic contexts. Left as the media aftermath of its own
existence – that is to say, in the form of newspapers, blogs,
videos et cetera – this can be explicated as a set of didactic
images. Across the façade, these are mapped to letters which
themselves correspond to larger quotes. The randomization of
this correspondence produces serendipitous adjacencies of
these images. By selectively filtering light, this both produces a
meaningful and affective quality of the building. From within, the
effects of the light in terms of shadow and texture entice charged
environments, while the macro legibility of the panels instigates
discourse. From outside, a connection with urbanity is fostered.
Connor Gravelle Portfolio 2012-2015 On Fashion’s Dichotomies
197

The set of the
Viktor & Rolf show
Saturday afternoon
in the Tuileries
looked like the
inside of a
white-tiled
bathroom at some
The set of the
Viktor & Rolf show
Saturday afternoon
in the Tuileries
looked like the
inside of a
white-tiled
bathroom at some
The set of the
Viktor & Rolf show
Saturday afternoon
in the Tuileries
looked like the
inside of a
white-tiled
bathroom at some
The set of the
Viktor & Rolf show
Saturday afternoon
in the Tuileries
looked like the
inside of a
white-tiled
bathroom at some
The set of the
Viktor & Rolf show
Saturday afternoon
in the Tuileries
looked like the
inside of a
white-tiled
bathroom at some
The elaborate sets
favored by Marc
Jacobs, Mr.
Ghesquière’s
predecessor as
artistic director
of Louis Vuitton,
were nowhere to be
The elaborate sets
favored by Marc
Jacobs, Mr.
Ghesquière’s
predecessor as
artistic director
of Louis Vuitton,
were nowhere to be
The elaborate sets
favored by Marc
Jacobs, Mr.
Ghesquière’s
predecessor as
artistic director
of Louis Vuitton,
were nowhere to be
The elaborate sets
favored by Marc
Jacobs, Mr.
Ghesquière’s
predecessor as
artistic director
of Louis Vuitton,
were nowhere to be
The elaborate sets
favored by Marc
Jacobs, Mr.
Ghesquière’s
predecessor as
artistic director
of Louis Vuitton,
were nowhere to be
This is why events
unnerve me,
They find it all,
a different story,
Notice whom for
wheels are turning,
Oh, I'll
break them down,
This is why events
unnerve me,
They find it all,
a different story,
Notice whom for
wheels are turning,
Oh, I'll
break them down,
This is why events
unnerve me,
They find it all,
a different story,
Notice whom for
wheels are turning,
Oh, I'll
break them down,
This is why events
unnerve me,
They find it all,
a different story,
Notice whom for
wheels are turning,
Oh, I'll
break them down,
This is why events
unnerve me,
They find it all,
a different story,
Notice whom for
wheels are turning,
Oh, I'll
break them down,
Two popular color
trends brightening
this drawn-out
winter are
sapphire blue,
which popped up
last fall and came
into full flower
Two popular color
trends brightening
this drawn-out
winter are
sapphire blue,
which popped up
last fall and came
into full flower
Two popular color
trends brightening
this drawn-out
winter are
sapphire blue,
which popped up
last fall and came
into full flower
Two popular color
trends brightening
this drawn-out
winter are
sapphire blue,
which popped up
last fall and came
into full flower
Two popular color
trends brightening
this drawn-out
winter are
sapphire blue,
which popped up
last fall and came
into full flower
On the evidence of
the fall collections
that wrapped
last week, you
might suppose that
fashion had
decided to return
the favor, offer-
On the evidence of
the fall collections
that wrapped
last week, you
might suppose that
fashion had
decided to return
the favor, offer-
On the evidence of
the fall collections
that wrapped
last week, you
might suppose that
fashion had
decided to return
the favor, offer-
On the evidence of
the fall collections
that wrapped
last week, you
might suppose that
fashion had
decided to return
the favor, offer-
On the evidence of
the fall collections
that wrapped
last week, you
might suppose that
fashion had
decided to return
the favor, offer-
Architecture, soft
or rigid, was an
overarching theme
for fall, as an
influential
handful of designers
experimented
with lines and
Architecture, soft
or rigid, was an
overarching theme
for fall, as an
influential
handful of designers
experimented
with lines and
Architecture, soft
or rigid, was an
overarching theme
for fall, as an
influential
handful of designers
experimented
with lines and
Architecture, soft
or rigid, was an
overarching theme
for fall, as an
influential
handful of designers
experimented
with lines and
Architecture, soft
or rigid, was an
overarching theme
for fall, as an
influential
handful of designers
experimented
with lines and
For many in the
crowd, it was the
return of the
prodigal son after
his sudden and
bitter departure
from Balenciaga
and its parent
For many in the
crowd, it was the
return of the
prodigal son after
his sudden and
bitter departure
from Balenciaga
and its parent
For many in the
crowd, it was the
return of the
prodigal son after
his sudden and
bitter departure
from Balenciaga
and its parent
For many in the
crowd, it was the
return of the
prodigal son after
his sudden and
bitter departure
from Balenciaga
and its parent
For many in the
crowd, it was the
return of the
prodigal son after
his sudden and
bitter departure
from Balenciaga
and its parent
Minutes after the
Chanel fall 2014
show ended at the
Grand Palais on
Tuesday morning,
many in attendance
converged on the
set — a faux
Minutes after the
Chanel fall 2014
show ended at the
Grand Palais on
Tuesday morning,
many in attendance
converged on the
set — a faux
Minutes after the
Chanel fall 2014
show ended at the
Grand Palais on
Tuesday morning,
many in attendance
converged on the
set — a faux
Minutes after the
Chanel fall 2014
show ended at the
Grand Palais on
Tuesday morning,
many in attendance
converged on the
set — a faux
Minutes after the
Chanel fall 2014
show ended at the
Grand Palais on
Tuesday morning,
many in attendance
converged on the
set — a faux
The most surprising
thing about
the new Dries Van
Noten exhibition,
which runs through
Aug. 31 at the
Musée des Arts
Décoratifs here,
The most surprising
thing about
the new Dries Van
Noten exhibition,
which runs through
Aug. 31 at the
Musée des Arts
Décoratifs here,
The most surprising
thing about
the new Dries Van
Noten exhibition,
which runs through
Aug. 31 at the
Musée des Arts
Décoratifs here,
The most surprising
thing about
the new Dries Van
Noten exhibition,
which runs through
Aug. 31 at the
Musée des Arts
Décoratifs here,
The most surprising
thing about
the new Dries Van
Noten exhibition,
which runs through
Aug. 31 at the
Musée des Arts
Décoratifs here,
Mr. Van Noten, 55,
has been designing
his namesake label
since 1986. He has
28 years of
collections to
draw upon, even
more if you count
Mr. Van Noten, 55,
has been designing
his namesake label
since 1986. He has
28 years of
collections to
draw upon, even
more if you count
Mr. Van Noten, 55,
has been designing
his namesake label
since 1986. He has
28 years of
collections to
draw upon, even
more if you count
Mr. Van Noten, 55,
has been designing
his namesake label
since 1986. He has
28 years of
collections to
draw upon, even
more if you count
Mr. Van Noten, 55,
has been designing
his namesake label
since 1986. He has
28 years of
collections to
draw upon, even
more if you count
“First of all,
packing the
clothes was
already quite
something,” he
said. “Quite often
there were people
on my creative
“First of all,
packing the
clothes was
already quite
something,” he
said. “Quite often
there were people
on my creative
“First of all,
packing the
clothes was
already quite
something,” he
said. “Quite often
there were people
on my creative
“First of all,
packing the
clothes was
already quite
something,” he
said. “Quite often
there were people
on my creative
“First of all,
packing the
clothes was
already quite
something,” he
said. “Quite often
there were people
on my creative
But what is as
notable about the
show is how much
of it is not by
Dries Van Noten.
There are garments
by fellow designers
who have
But what is as
notable about the
show is how much
of it is not by
Dries Van Noten.
There are garments
by fellow designers
who have
But what is as
notable about the
show is how much
of it is not by
Dries Van Noten.
There are garments
by fellow designers
who have
But what is as
notable about the
show is how much
of it is not by
Dries Van Noten.
There are garments
by fellow designers
who have
But what is as
notable about the
show is how much
of it is not by
Dries Van Noten.
There are garments
by fellow designers
who have
Arranged by loose
themes, the show
charts the vertiginous
twistings of
Mr. Van Noten’s
imagination, and
the way he absorbs
and digests source
Arranged by loose
themes, the show
charts the vertiginous
twistings of
Mr. Van Noten’s
imagination, and
the way he absorbs
and digests source
Arranged by loose
themes, the show
charts the vertiginous
twistings of
Mr. Van Noten’s
imagination, and
the way he absorbs
and digests source
Arranged by loose
themes, the show
charts the vertiginous
twistings of
Mr. Van Noten’s
imagination, and
the way he absorbs
and digests source
Arranged by loose
themes, the show
charts the vertiginous
twistings of
Mr. Van Noten’s
imagination, and
the way he absorbs
and digests source
198 SCI-Fa 2B Studio Alphabet of Stylistic Dichotomies

A room arranged
under the rubric
“Foppish” juxtaposes
a Giovanni
Boldini portrait
of Count Robert de
Montesquiou
borrowed from the
More than half of
the 400-plus
pieces on display
were borrowed from
other museums and
private collections.
The challenge
was not only
The Sturm und
Drang of four
weeks of international
collections
ended Wednesday on
a gentle note as
Hermès closed the
autumn/winter 2014
“I’ve been here
since 5,” said Tom
Ford, his hands
encircling Anne
Hathaway’s slim
waist at the
entrance to the
Vanity Fair Oscars
This collection,
if shown during
the Paris haute
couture season,
would illuminate
the fading calendar
and underscore
the meld of
And a desire-provoking
one. “When
I saw it at the
show, I said ‘I
want this dress,’
” said Wendy
Goodman, the
design editor of
Perhaps the most
captivating
fashion statement
this season in New
York was not on
the runway or the
street, but at the
Winter Antiques
Striped tube socks
moved from the
soccer field to
the runway when
Miuccia Prada
showed footless
tube-sock leg
warmers for
The designer
Christophe Lemaire
has finally moved
into this gentle
pace, sending out
a fine collection.
It started with
double-face
Last month, Mr.
Weir, 29, and Ms.
Lipinski, 31, were
a pair of retired
figure skaters,
memorable for
their sequined
outfits and
If you want to be
in vogue next
fall, you had best
start saving now,
for there was fur
on the runway in
show after show,
especially in
Through the fire
and through the
flames, You won't
even say your
name, Only "I am
that I am", But
who could ever
live that way? Ut
When I was 12, I
worried that I
might never grow
breasts. There I
was, all of 80
pounds, nothing
but skin and
bones, bruised
A room arranged
under the rubric
“Foppish” juxtaposes
a Giovanni
Boldini portrait
of Count Robert de
Montesquiou
borrowed from the
More than half of
the 400-plus
pieces on display
were borrowed from
other museums and
private collections.
The challenge
was not only
The Sturm und
Drang of four
weeks of international
collections
ended Wednesday on
a gentle note as
Hermès closed the
autumn/winter 2014
“I’ve been here
since 5,” said Tom
Ford, his hands
encircling Anne
Hathaway’s slim
waist at the
entrance to the
Vanity Fair Oscars
This collection,
if shown during
the Paris haute
couture season,
would illuminate
the fading calendar
and underscore
the meld of
And a desire-provoking
one. “When
I saw it at the
show, I said ‘I
want this dress,’
” said Wendy
Goodman, the
design editor of
Perhaps the most
captivating
fashion statement
this season in New
York was not on
the runway or the
street, but at the
Winter Antiques
Striped tube socks
moved from the
soccer field to
the runway when
Miuccia Prada
showed footless
tube-sock leg
warmers for
The designer
Christophe Lemaire
has finally moved
into this gentle
pace, sending out
a fine collection.
It started with
double-face
Last month, Mr.
Weir, 29, and Ms.
Lipinski, 31, were
a pair of retired
figure skaters,
memorable for
their sequined
outfits and
If you want to be
in vogue next
fall, you had best
start saving now,
for there was fur
on the runway in
show after show,
especially in
Through the fire
and through the
flames, You won't
even say your
name, Only "I am
that I am", But
who could ever
live that way? Ut
When I was 12, I
worried that I
might never grow
breasts. There I
was, all of 80
pounds, nothing
but skin and
bones, bruised
A room arranged
under the rubric
“Foppish” juxtaposes
a Giovanni
Boldini portrait
of Count Robert de
Montesquiou
borrowed from the
More than half of
the 400-plus
pieces on display
were borrowed from
other museums and
private collections.
The challenge
was not only
The Sturm und
Drang of four
weeks of international
collections
ended Wednesday on
a gentle note as
Hermès closed the
autumn/winter 2014
“I’ve been here
since 5,” said Tom
Ford, his hands
encircling Anne
Hathaway’s slim
waist at the
entrance to the
Vanity Fair Oscars
This collection,
if shown during
the Paris haute
couture season,
would illuminate
the fading calendar
and underscore
the meld of
And a desire-provoking
one. “When
I saw it at the
show, I said ‘I
want this dress,’
” said Wendy
Goodman, the
design editor of
Perhaps the most
captivating
fashion statement
this season in New
York was not on
the runway or the
street, but at the
Winter Antiques
Striped tube socks
moved from the
soccer field to
the runway when
Miuccia Prada
showed footless
tube-sock leg
warmers for
The designer
Christophe Lemaire
has finally moved
into this gentle
pace, sending out
a fine collection.
It started with
double-face
Last month, Mr.
Weir, 29, and Ms.
Lipinski, 31, were
a pair of retired
figure skaters,
memorable for
their sequined
outfits and
If you want to be
in vogue next
fall, you had best
start saving now,
for there was fur
on the runway in
show after show,
especially in
Through the fire
and through the
flames, You won't
even say your
name, Only "I am
that I am", But
who could ever
live that way? Ut
When I was 12, I
worried that I
might never grow
breasts. There I
was, all of 80
pounds, nothing
but skin and
bones, bruised
A room arranged
under the rubric
“Foppish” juxtaposes
a Giovanni
Boldini portrait
of Count Robert de
Montesquiou
borrowed from the
More than half of
the 400-plus
pieces on display
were borrowed from
other museums and
private collections.
The challenge
was not only
The Sturm und
Drang of four
weeks of international
collections
ended Wednesday on
a gentle note as
Hermès closed the
autumn/winter 2014
“I’ve been here
since 5,” said Tom
Ford, his hands
encircling Anne
Hathaway’s slim
waist at the
entrance to the
Vanity Fair Oscars
This collection,
if shown during
the Paris haute
couture season,
would illuminate
the fading calendar
and underscore
the meld of
And a desire-provoking
one. “When
I saw it at the
show, I said ‘I
want this dress,’
” said Wendy
Goodman, the
design editor of
Perhaps the most
captivating
fashion statement
this season in New
York was not on
the runway or the
street, but at the
Winter Antiques
Striped tube socks
moved from the
soccer field to
the runway when
Miuccia Prada
showed footless
tube-sock leg
warmers for
The designer
Christophe Lemaire
has finally moved
into this gentle
pace, sending out
a fine collection.
It started with
double-face
Last month, Mr.
Weir, 29, and Ms.
Lipinski, 31, were
a pair of retired
figure skaters,
memorable for
their sequined
outfits and
If you want to be
in vogue next
fall, you had best
start saving now,
for there was fur
on the runway in
show after show,
especially in
Through the fire
and through the
flames, You won't
even say your
name, Only "I am
that I am", But
who could ever
live that way? Ut
When I was 12, I
worried that I
might never grow
breasts. There I
was, all of 80
pounds, nothing
but skin and
bones, bruised
A room arranged
under the rubric
“Foppish” juxtaposes
a Giovanni
Boldini portrait
of Count Robert de
Montesquiou
borrowed from the
More than half of
the 400-plus
pieces on display
were borrowed from
other museums and
private collections.
The challenge
was not only
The Sturm und
Drang of four
weeks of international
collections
ended Wednesday on
a gentle note as
Hermès closed the
autumn/winter 2014
“I’ve been here
since 5,” said Tom
Ford, his hands
encircling Anne
Hathaway’s slim
waist at the
entrance to the
Vanity Fair Oscars
This collection,
if shown during
the Paris haute
couture season,
would illuminate
the fading calendar
and underscore
the meld of
And a desire-provoking
one. “When
I saw it at the
show, I said ‘I
want this dress,’
” said Wendy
Goodman, the
design editor of
Perhaps the most
captivating
fashion statement
this season in New
York was not on
the runway or the
street, but at the
Winter Antiques
Striped tube socks
moved from the
soccer field to
the runway when
Miuccia Prada
showed footless
tube-sock leg
warmers for
The designer
Christophe Lemaire
has finally moved
into this gentle
pace, sending out
a fine collection.
It started with
double-face
Last month, Mr.
Weir, 29, and Ms.
Lipinski, 31, were
a pair of retired
figure skaters,
memorable for
their sequined
outfits and
If you want to be
in vogue next
fall, you had best
start saving now,
for there was fur
on the runway in
show after show,
especially in
Through the fire
and through the
flames, You won't
even say your
name, Only "I am
that I am", But
who could ever
live that way? Ut
When I was 12, I
worried that I
might never grow
breasts. There I
was, all of 80
pounds, nothing
but skin and
bones, bruised
Connor Gravelle Portfolio 2012-2015 199

and ventilation and by its insulation values
and solar-shading capacities.” (78)
An irresponsibility has arisen in contemporary
architecture which allows for
the simplification of a building’s skin to
mere millimeters. This must be adverted,
under proper circumstances and wills,
so that, when desired, the interactions
procured by decisive design choices enable
greater levels of both permeability
and closure. This is not to attack literally
the depth of these skins, but to propose
the hijacking of their phenomenological
affects politically to both the reward and
the power of the architecture (thus, the
architect) and its constituencies.
“Is architecture socially constructed, or is
it a faithful representation of reality? Or
is it rather the missing link between the
community of humans and the community
of things as political entities?” (79)
As Zaera Polo goes onward to note,
either definition may prove limiting to the
aspects of architecture’s true capabilities
in the world. Of this, it may be difficult in
a short manner to pontificate. Rather, the
inadequacies of either approach can be
outlined as a preemptive assumption of
their roles and strengths. Firstly, socially
constructed architecture depends on
social consensus, which has, as proven
throughout human history, resulted in the
necessity of politics, the ends of which
do not always benefit all those involved.
Maybe, compromise is impossible. In any
case, the ramifications of these actions
can cause collateral of both natures, and
such consequences must be considered,
whatever their difficulty in foresight or
planning pertains. Secondly, the presumption
of architecture to a faithful
representation of reality is problematic in
its formalistic overtones. To limit architecture
to the understandings of architects
is to forge an elite group, forging delineations
between those in and those outside
“the know”. This is an absolutely horrid
afterbirth of architecture, and must be
avoided at all costs. It is purely formal
snobbery, estranging the public and driving
away interest by outside constituencies.
Although internal investigations are
helpful to the field, there should be no
reason that they are to be thrust unknowingly
unto the populace as an unknowing
whole. This is mere oppression, in and of
itself representing the God Complex so
pervasive with architects qua fascists.
“It is at this level [in a building’s façade]
that the discussion of the qualities and
structure of material organizations —
such as different and repetition, consistency
and variation, flexibility, transparency,
permeability, local and global and the
definition of the ground — that architecture
becomes political. The politicization
of architecture may also be induced by
virtue of representation — and not just by
synthesizing physical expressions of political
concepts, but by literally redesigning
typical living conditions or lifestyles
— or by disrupting political norms or
assumed environmental imperatives.
It is vital that we bring more than a
phenomenological understanding to the
affects of architecture. Too pervasively,
these aspects are pontificated on purely
experiential levels. What does the experience
mean? In a particularly political
context which is unavoidable throughout
so many high-profile projects of late,
these comprehensions must be leveled
against the agencies of architecture at
play, lest we fall behind our own game
and unwittingly engage a dichotomy of
esoteric values and grand misunderstandings.
“Political expression and identity are
particularly important in the dynamics of
the envelope as regulators of exchanges
between inside and outside. The fenestration
pattern in a building’s façade has
psychological and symbolic connotations
and has been historically attached to
political representations.” (87)
When the interconnections between the
experiential and political substances of
architecture are left without proper contemplation,
the field easily oscillates into
a form overtaken by ephemeral instances
of wills on the part of the individual or
oligarchical constituency. Architecture
which does not shout loud enough is
easily overwritten by those willing to
speak for it. Specifically, how are these
in their relationships with those involved
with a building? It would seem that much
contemporary architecture either ignores
or subordinates its users. That is to say,
theirs is a role usually reserved to that of
being spectator, prisoner or accomplice.
What is their agency in the projects? It
would seem detrimental to any contemporary
architecture if it were willing to do
such crimes to its own users, yet such
behaviors shine as pervasive.
200 SCI-Fa 2B Studio

Connor Gravelle Portfolio 2012-2015 Scoop Drawing: Production Spiral
201

202 SCI-Fa 2B Studio Final Model

Connor Gravelle Portfolio 2012-2015 Interior Model
203

NELSON ATKINS MUSEUM PRECEDENT STUDY
3B Studio
Spring 2015, David Freeland
With Johan Wijesinghe
We encounter at the Nelson-Atkins
museum a middle ground of human
experience. Neither monumental nor
rather quaint, materially rich yet sterilely
abstract, the project rides a certain
division between the strata of spatial
reactions architecture might elicit. In so
doing, the project conceptualizes contemporary
architecture as something
resolutely non-iconic, all the while unique
in its cultivation of space as voluminous
entities through and around which we
flow, explore, obfuscate and discover.
The borders between different conditions,
innate to the situation around
Steven Holl’s Nelson-Atkins Museum of
Art in Kansas City (Missouri) are sensibilities
of architectural coherency, pliable
geometries and manipulated boundaries.
Holl challenges the often awkward and
problematic issue of museum expansion,
confronting coexistence through contrast.
Holl, subverts the typified approach, confiscating
the immediate architectural joint
of the expansion below grade tying the
Beaux Arts wing to the present through
de-materialization of both landscape and
weightless translucent boxes (Lenses).
This initiates a series of consequences in
the massing of the landscape and gallery
spaces alike, bending and folding in a
manner both referential to the natural
slope of the site and defiant in their
relegation of the understanding of the
existing architecture.
Where Holl eschews complete comprehension,
allowing formal reading
neither exclusively in terms of exterior or
interior experience at any one time, the
architectural prerogatives of the project
create deep interior cavities into which
the scheme infills gallery space. This
mutual xclusivity entitles two distinct
experiences: Between the path and the
galleries, drawn to punctuations Gallery
spaces awash in diffused light within
and, beyond their walls, a distinctly playful
stance of the project’s massing. The
ambitions of the project, choreographs
light as both a way to view the art in
a full spectrum and a methodology of
circulation. There the translucent boxes,
as Steven Holl refers to “lenses”, the most
visible part of an underground world,
risingfrom the landscape enveloped by
a park and framing sculpture courts in
the in-between confronting the issue
light. Experienced from the galleries, Half
vaulted walls funnel the a mixed spectrum
of the more blue northern light and
red southern light.
(Right) Situation, bordered to the North
by the existing museum complex, to
the South and West by the park and to
the East by Middle America suburbia.
(Next Spreads) Plans and sections
detailing the distribution of spaces
between the galleries, below
grade, and the boxes which
allow in light from above.
206

208 Nelson Atkins Museum Precedent Study 3B Studio Basement and Roof Plans

B
B
A
A
Connor Gravelle Portfolio 2012-2015 Plan with Regulating Geometry
209

Section showing relationship to existing
museum. By connecting the two
underground, gallery space is allowed to
be function as if continuous even though
the outward reading of the buildings
would suggest two autonomous
organization. While this operation is
typically taken under in plan, part of the
eloquence of the Nelson Atkins’ design
is to carry this out effectively in section.
210 Nelson Atkins Museum Precedent Study 3B Studio

Read along its gallery length, the project
establishes a clear dichotomy between
vertical spaces of light infiltration,
serving little programmatic function
aside from a main building to the North
of the site, and more shallow spaces of
horizontal circulation and gallery space.
Connor Gravelle Portfolio 2012-2015 211

212 Nelson Atkins Museum Precedent Study 3B Studio

Connor Gravelle Portfolio 2012-2015 213

(Previous Spread) Within vertical
spaces, a careful abstraction of the
archetypal vault breaks the solidity of the
architectural trope and splits its authority
along two distinct sides, allowing light
to enter the gallery spaces. Punches
through this form provide circulation
across, while the walls themselves
provide space for artwork to be hung.
(This Spread) A play of axial shifting
and misalignment occurs across
the site in order to formally drive the
composition and “bending” of the
boxes. While a major alignment strikes
the street running alongside to the
East, most others are formal measures
taken in without consideration to site
or context, rather conceptualizing the
geometrical organization of the museum
as something of its own world. From
ground level, this evokes something
reminiscent of follies, allowing guests
to stumble between each box as they
explore the gradual change in landscape
between the park to the South and
museum complex to the North.
214

215

Explicated within the boxes, this system
of axial torquing defines both the formal
organization of the vaults (above) and
the overall geometry of the boxes (right).
216 Nelson Atkins Museum Precedent Study 3B Studio

217

218 Nelson Atkins Museum Precedent Study 3B Studio Torqued Boxes

Connor Gravelle Portfolio 2012-2015 219

EL ROSARIO MARKET REDEVELOPMENT
4B Vertical Studio
Spring 2016, John Enright
(Above) Map showing location of
the site (red) within the lager Unité
scheme (yellow) and adjacent industrial
or warehouse zones (purple)
(Below) Otto Wagner, Majolica
House, Vienna, 1899
(Next Page) Axonometric showing
the contextual fitting of the building’s
mass between the existing bars
of the site’s housing blocks
With Kevin Ng
This project was specially selected to be
featured in SCI-Arc’s Spring Show 2016.
The Situation in El Rosario
Situated on the outskirts of Mexico City,
the social housing development at El
Rosario has a mixed character. Occupied
to full capacity as one of the largest
Unité-model residential schemes in Latin
America, the neighborhood has been
rattled with gang-related crime and high
rates of drug addiction. The Mexican
state reports rates upwards of 44% in
terms of drug addiction among the area’s
inhabitants.
At the same time, a thriving crafts market
exists, filling a void left by the departure
of manufacturing jobs from the area. This
impromptu bazaar is so prominent that
the government has gone so far as to
implement programs to instruct locals on
marketing and sales.
These are the contradictory conditions
with which the redevelopment of El Rosario
must content. At once appropriate
and outdated, adequate but insufficient,
the conditions of the area hold both the
promise for improvement and the threat
of further degradation. Responding to
the conditions of this urban collision, the
project proposes a facility containing a
large open-air market, a drug rehabilitation
facility and a job center.
Engagements of the Façade
In realizing these typologies, the building’s
façade becomes engaged as an
architectural element capable of pliantly
adjusting its identity to fit the conditions
of its need. In large swaths of the site,
this takes the form of two specific material
conditions, each tuned specifically
to its scale, constituency and context.
Larger portions of the envelope are
colored in abstractions of Hudson Valley
School paintings, while lower level areas
around the base have an applied floral
texture with a slight degree of abstraction.
Beyond the phenomenological
implications these attain upon encounter,
each engages a specific dialogue around
its reference and constituency. While the
abstract colored panels above have little
legibility in terms of their precedent, the
floral patterns retain a high degree of
fidelity even after their abstraction. These
characteristics account for the scalar difference
in experience between them and
the more distant, larger painting-based
areas. They are specifically designed to
be interacted with at a humanly scale
and, thus, hold a certain referential
iconography that enables them to be
recognized as such.
Further implications deal with a conversation
around the idea of a market place,
which is indeed the program holding
the vast majority of the lowest level. By
contrast, the larger areas of the upper
colored panels are never interacted with
directly, therefore holding a more restrained,
urban situation. As the Hudson
Valley school became the first Western
conceptualization within the artistic
cannon of the aestheticization of the
North American continent by those who
inhabited and raised its lands, it seems
appropriate that the building’s sheathing
would similarly deal with the aesthetic
questions around expansiveness and
landscape. As with Otto Wagner’s Majolica
House in Vienna, both approaches
touch on the concept of what we might
call “Urban Wallpaper”, positing that an
encounter with an architectural object
might become the possibility for a graphic
engagement with cultural, sociological
or formal qualities a constituency shares
with its architecture.
Contextualities
Rather than resisting the tendencies
of the site, this project supposes that
legitimate architectural moves can be
achieved within complete relegation
to extant qualities of its surroundings.
This approach begins with the building’s
massing, which slenderly wiggles
between the existing structures. Further
engagements begin to implement
programmatic changes even beyond the
scope of completely new construction.
As the ground floors in many of the site’s
structures have already been converted
ad hoc to commercial spaces, the project
formalizes the programmatic distinction
by renovating these areas to appropriately
address their designations. Other sitebased
approaches include an appreciation
for the existing amount of trees and
pedestrian traversability, as seen in the
building’s large public walkway, navigating
sectionally from across the street to a
nearby park.
Rather than antagonizing existing conditions,
the redevelopment of El Rosario
attempts to imbue itself with a certain
palimpsestic quality, challenging the dichotomy
between new and old as fertile
grounds for architectural intervention.
220

222 El Rosario Market Redevelopment 4B Vertical Studio Photographs of Circulatory Inadequacies

Connor Gravelle Portfolio 2012-2015 Study of Existing Tree Coverage on Site
223

Flower Still-Life
Rachel Ruysch, 1726
Hydrangea Camomile Floral Wallpaper
Laura Ash
Floral Vintage Wallpaper
FreeCreatives
Signature Country Floral FRL004-02-01
Ralph Lauren
Clem
Sand
Floral on a Black Background
Unknown artist
Floral on a Black Background
Recolored
Floral on a Black Background
Recolored, intensified and blurred
Bloem Wallpaper
Clementine 223298
Bloem Wallpaper + Clementine 223298
Bloem Wallpaper + Clementine 223298
Cropped and reformatted
Cropped and reformatted
Imagery overlaid
Lower layers blurred
224 El Rosario Market Redevelopment 4B Vertical Studio Initial Floral Investigations

entine 223298
erson
Bloem Wallpaper
Unknown artist
Floral on a Black Background
Misregistered grayscale halftone
Floral on a Black Background
Misregistered grayscale halftone, colorized
Bloem Wallpaper + Clementine 223298
Halftoned using averaged reference colors
Urban Wallpaper
The concept of urban wallpaper can be
found in many well attested sources, from
MVRDV’s market in Rotterdam to Otto
Wagner’s Majolica House in Vienna. To
choreograph an encounter with the urban
object is to entice the experience between
a constituency and an architecture which
may or may not be specified for their use. On
these terms, an urban wallpaper posits the
potential for an experiential endgame for all
passersby. Rather than forgoing a building
as an anonymous object, an engaged façade
with an embedded wallpaper, realized either
graphically or tectonically, allows an association
to form with both place and culture to
emerge.
Connor Gravelle Portfolio 2012-2015 225

226 El Rosario Market Redevelopment 4B Vertical Studio Floral Print Intensifications

Connor Gravelle Portfolio 2012-2015 Resultant Collages
227

228 El Rosario Market Redevelopment 4B Vertical Studio Abstracted Floral Prints

Connor Gravelle Portfolio 2012-2015 229

232 El Rosario Market Redevelopment 4B Vertical Studio Variable Fritting

Connor Gravelle Portfolio 2012-2015 Render: Result of Fritting on Shadow
233

234 El Rosario Market Redevelopment 4B Vertical Studio Section: Marketplace and Walkway

Connor Gravelle Portfolio 2012-2015 235

236 El Rosario Market Redevelopment 4B Vertical Studio Ground Plan

238 El Rosario Market Redevelopment 4B Vertical Studio Section: Market, Housing and Rehab

Connor Gravelle Portfolio 2012-2015 239

240 El Rosario Market Redevelopment 4B Vertical Studio Façade Patterning

(Left) Thomas Moran,
“Mosquito Trail”, 1874
(Right) Frederic Edwin
Church, “Cotopaxi”, 1855
Connor Gravelle Portfolio 2012-2015 Façade Pattern Studies
241

242 El Rosario Market Redevelopment 4B Vertical Studio Chunk Model

Connor Gravelle Portfolio 2012-2015 243

244 El Rosario Market Redevelopment 4B Vertical Studio Chunk Model Façade Panels

Connor Gravelle Portfolio 2012-2015 Chunk Model Conic Surfacing
245

(animation)
vimeo.com/
165098864
246

247

248 El Rosario Market Redevelopment 4B Vertical Studio Market Interior

Connor Gravelle Portfolio 2012-2015 Market Entrance from Park
249

LOWER 4TH STREET MASTERPLAN
Smart Sustainable Systems
Fall 2015, Jamey Lyzun
Synopsis
This project speculates on a masterplan
for the extension of the campus for the
Southern California Institute of Architecture
(SCI-Arc). Programmatically, the plan
calls for an expansion of roughly 72,000
square feet, divided between two existing
buildings on site. Particular emphasis is
placed on the ecological responses of the
building with its Los Angeles context.
Site Ecology as Building Parameter
Rather than formally molding a scheme
to match regulatory demands such as
LEED, this project presupposes a kind
of design guidance which might exist
inherently in any site or context. Beyond
cliché green design tactics which project
unrealistic expectations such as green
roofs onto inappropriate sites, this is an
approach which takes into account the
inherent limitations of its surroundings.
In doing so, we can highlight specific
architectural responses that speak to
chosen factors of ecological engagement
in order to lessen the impact of the building
and its masterplan on the environment.
These tactics include deep consideration
of orientation and sun exposure,
facilitating a series of direct architectural
responses in the forms of double skins,
air shafts and calibrated apertures.
On the exterior, the project purposes a
pedestrianization of an otherwise unnecessary
cross street. Slight redirections in
traffic actually streamline the experience
of driving through the neighborhood and
allow the creation of a large, public plaza
spanning the distance between the two
buildings. Covered by a series of variably
shaped fins, this becomes an enhanced
public space that entices connection
between institution and public.
252 Lower 4th Street Masterplan Smart Sustainable Systems

Connor Gravelle Portfolio 2012-2015 253

1 Santa Fe
1 Santa Fe
SCI-Arc
SCI-Arc
Annex
Bldgs. 1 & 2
Annex
Bldg. 2
Annex Bldg. 3
Annex Bldg. 3
254 Lower 4th Street Masterplan Smart Sustainable Systems Circulation Strategy Diagrams

Connor Gravelle Portfolio 2012-2015 Exterior of Gym and Café
255

256 Lower 4th Street Masterplan Smart Sustainable Systems Situation Plan

WC
Lecture Steps
1530 Ft 2
Open Flexible Space
8889 Ft 2
203 Ft 2 +3, Dormitories 7 to 13
WC
203 Ft 2
Classroom 2
1257 Ft 2
Breakout Space
3577 Ft 2 Classroom 1
1816 Ft 2
+0, Ground Floor Concourse
+1, Flexible Classroom Space
WC
Dorm 03
203 Ft
Dorm 02
2 589 Ft 2
835 Ft
Dorm 01
2 Dorm 04
700 Ft 2
WC
Dorm 09
203 Ft
Dorm 08
2 589 Ft 2
835 Ft
Dorm 07
2 Dorm 10
700 Ft 2 609 Ft 2 Dorm 11
609 Ft 2 Dorm 05
609 Ft 2 Dorm 12
609 Ft 2 Dorm 06
449 Ft 2 Dorm 13
Communal
Space
371 Ft 2
449 Ft 2 +5, Flexible Rooftop Space and HVAC Plant
3888 Ft 2
Communal
Space
4069 Ft 2
+2, Dormitories 1 to 6
Flexible Rooftop Space
8052 Ft 2
WC
Dorm 16
203 Ft
Dorm 15
2 589 Ft 2
835 Ft
Dorm 14
2 Dorm 17
700 Ft 2
HVAC Plant
2367 Ft 2
609 Ft 2 Dorm 18
609 Ft 2 Dorm 19
449 Ft 2 Dorm 20
Communal
Space
425 Ft 2
3151 Ft 2
+4, Dormitories 14 to 20
Connor Gravelle Portfolio 2012-2015 Axonometric Plans
257

258 Lower 4th Street Masterplan Smart Sustainable Systems Daylight Hour Studies

Connor Gravelle Portfolio 2012-2015 Fins from Above
259

ZONE 1
Dorms, bathrooms, classrooms and the core, all
requiring heavy access to climate control and other
systems, are kept away from direct sunlight and
within easy access of operable windows.
ZONE 2
Circulation and communal
spaces. Ventilated to lobby
void but within access of
some HVAC.
ZONE 3
Large lobby with most spaces not habitated. Due to
these factors, it is largely ventilated naturally
through a stack effect along a void on its Northern
edge, which itself doubles to block direct light.
CALIBRATED CLIMATE ZONES
Circulatory and communal spaces can remain warmer
while retaining comfort levels, so these are kept immediately
adjacent to the air shaft, to which they naturally
ventilate in order to lessen intensive HVAC expenditure.
OPERABLE WINDOWS
Living spaces are intentionally
placed directly along the North
façade with easy access to
operable windows for natural
ventilation and cooling
Dorms, Level +4
Circulation
Open Rooftop
DOUBLE SKIN
The Southwest and Southeast façades ar
a double skin, blocking direct radiation to
on the interior. Much of the heat that doe
is rendered null passing through an air b
the lobby which borders the envelope.
Dorms, Level +3
Dorms, Level +2
Communal Spaces
STACK EFFECT
The shaft between the inner
layer of the envelope and the
edge of the lobby’s wall
passively cools the space
with a stack effect
FINS PROVIDE S
Fins block a large
light from entering
allowing some diff
ample natural illum
Classrooms, Level +1
Lobby / Public Lecture Hall, Level +0
SOUTH FAÇADE OFFSET
Offsetting back the
programmatic core of the
building conceals it from
direct sun exposure.
GRAYWATER HARVESTING
The geometry of the fins inherently
siphons water into collected channels,
which in turn feed larger collection
tanks on site for graywater reuse.
ANNEX BUILDING 1
Dormitories for 60-100 students (in 20 dorm rooms),
public lecture hall, flexible use lobby space, classrooms
in both flexible and enclosed configurations
and an open publicly accessible rooftop
MATEO STREET PLAZA
Large open plaza made by pede
functionally insignificant cross s
public and private events, open
general circulatory space
260 Lower 4th Street Masterplan Smart Sustainable Systems Section with Green Strategies

e conditioned with
reduce heat loads
s enter the building
arrier in the void of
HADE
deal of direct
the plaza, still
use light in for
ination.
VARIABLE LIGHTING CONDITIONS
To allow maximum flexibility in terms of
programming and climatizing the plaza, the
fins run along variable sweeps, producing a
diverse set of lighting conditions.
FINS CHANNEL RAIN
The fin’s profile is designed to collect water
by channeling it to particular streams, thus
dually sheltering from rain and harnessing
it for graywater collection.
OFFSET FAÇADE
The offset façade along the plaza perimeter of Building 2
allows consistently shaded areas to border the building.
When opened, the operable panels of the façade allow a
chimney-like stack effect to naturally cool the interior.
Gym / Food Hall
ACCESS TO PLAZA FROM INTERIOR
Operable exterior panels along the envelope
of the buildings’ lowest floors allows optional
access directly to the courtyard. Programs
such as the café, gym and lobby can spill
out into the plaza for events for during
particularily active days.
strianization of a
treet to be used for
air markets and
INTERSTITIAL (BREAKOUT) SPACE
Open shaded areas between the buildings and plaza
allow for spill out of program into the plaza when
needed
ANNEX BUILDING 2
Café for student body, gym as well as service areas
and all-purpose kitchen; operable envelope panels
along café and gym perimeter allow significant
breakout into the plaza
Connor Gravelle Portfolio 2012-2015 261

SCI-Arc
Rainwater
collection
pools
Annex
Building 1
Mateo Street Plaza
Annex Building 2

Connor Gravelle Portfolio 2012-2015 (Left) Plan, (Above) Northeast Façade
263

Cathedral of Our
LOS ANGELES MALL OFFICE TOWER
Julius Shulman Competition
Spring 2016, Tom Wiscombe
With Deborah Garcia and Adrian Wong
This project done as a submission on behalf
of SCI-Arc for the 2016 Julius Shulman
Emerging Talent Award, hosted by the LA
Business Council. Tom Wiscombe served
as a faculty advisor.
The Education of a Neighborhood
The proposal put forth will approach
community betterment through an
emphasis on both health and education.
The civic offi ce buildings of Downtown
Los Angeles are home to a vast amount
of employees and occupants. The surrounding
areas are crucial in providing
services that better the quality of life for
the inhabitants of the area. For many
years Downtown has faced a challenge
of meeting these necessities within the
urban fabric of the city. The Los Angeles
Mall is located at the center of this area,
and its placement is integral to the connection
of various important landmarks
and city buildings. Not only does it provide
a link between important locations,
but it is the heart of a neighborhood.
Our proposal introduces various elements
which will promote connectivity
and vibrance within the Downtown
community. The Los Angeles Downtown
Trail - This meandering path functions
not only as a recreational track but as a
flexible space that simultaneously exists
as promenade and urban walkway. Occupants
of the surrounding buildings are
provided with a much needed area to
exercise and revitalize the spirit of pedestrian
activity in Downtown. The city-trail
makes its way from the ground level and
up onto the elevated ground level. At this
elevation the path begins to unfold as an
architectural, historical, and topographic
journey, making its way around, below,
and even through the buildings on the
site. The formal windings of the track pull
visitors along a carefully choreographed
path that highlights views of City Hall,
frames the streets of Downtown, and
gently introduces a new physical terrain
within the heart of Los Angeles.
Public Amphitheater/ Community
Learning Spaces - As the walking track
makes its way through the site, it leads
to various open spaces that have been
designed
LA DWP Building
Ahmanson Theatre
LA County
Doathy Chandler
Treasurer
Pavilion
Disney Concert Hall /
Frank Gehry
Stanley Mosk
Courthouse
Lady of the Angels /
Rafael Moneo
LA County
Planning
High School #9 /
Coop Himmelb(l)au
Hall of Justice
LA Superior
US Courthouse
Court
The Broad /
LA Law Library
DS+R
Grand Park
MOCA
US Courthouse
City Hall
LA Times Building
Police Headquarters
Olivera Street
Chinese American
Museum
US Department of
Homeland Security
US Bankruptcy
Court
Union Station
(Left) Map of prominent locations
and destinations around the mall
site, itself reconceptualized as an
ideal hub for future urban growth
in Downtown Los Angeles due to
its extremely central location
(Right) Rendering from inside the East
Tower’s communal staircase, looking
towards the respective circulatory spaces
on the West Tower. Spatial adjacencies
and similar materialities connect both
spaces and foster a bond between
the differently programmed towers.
(Next Spread) Solar analysis simulations
to determine massing and orientations,
as well as envelope treatments,
based on shading from both City
Hall and its neighboring annex, as
well as the adjacent court building.
Caltrans District 7 /
Morphosis
MOCA Geffen
The Cathedral of
Saint Vibiana
Japanese American
National Museum
266

Solar Radiation on Plazas
21 December
Solar Radiation on Plazas
21 June
Sunlight Hours on Plazas
21 December
Sunlight Hours on Plazas
21 June
268 Los Angeles Mall Office Tower Julius Shulman Competition Solar Analysis Simulations

Solar Radiation on Towers
21 December
Solar Radiation on Towers
21 June
Sunlight Hours on Towers
21 December
Sunlight Hours on Towers
21 June
Connor Gravelle Portfolio 2012-2015 269

for community use. These range from a
large amphitheater at ground level, to
smaller meeting spaces on the elevated
ground level, and stepped seating areas
that are ideal for audiences. For example,
the Triforium sculpture by Joseph Young
sits at the center of one of these outdoor
spaces. The design of specific and deliberate
viewing areas encourage public art
and community activities that may range
from local meetings to per formative
events. The neighborhood is given the
opportunity to foster its own educational
and cultural environment.
Furthermore, elements of sustainability
addressed in the project are maximizing
daylight to reduce use of power for
retail spaces and facade design focuses
on best orientation for advantageous
exposure.
Preservation and Cultural Identity
This proposal seeks to retain and support
the current landmarks of the Los Angeles
Downtown area. The height restriction
set to the elevated ground plane does not
excessively remove the pedestrian from
the urban fabric, instead by lifting the occupant
off the ground to a calibrated and
carefully situated distance the pedestrian
will experience the surrounding buildings
from various vantage points being able to
at once understand the immediate neighborhood
in connection to a much larger
context. There is an interplay between
immediate scale at the individual level, as
well as at the scale of the city as a whole.
This proposed scheme would provide the
ideal way to experience the landmarks
of Los Angeles and would encourage
the preservation of that history for many
more generations to come.
Urban Dichotomies
The Recreational Fitness Track, also
known as the Los Angeles Downtown
Trail winds around the complex’s roof.
The concept of an ‘urban trail’ fi ts well
in city that needs to return the focus to
the pedestrian. This proposed walkway
will encourage pedestrian activity as well
as introduce an experience that is fully
based on the human scale. The track is
large enough for various activities to take
place simultaneously. Inclines are kept
within an average slope, and handicap
accessibility is provided where necessary.
Learning to Walk Again
The history of the downtown area of Los
Angeles is one filled with a rich timeline
of innovation, construction, and development.
Like many other fast-growing
cities, Los Angeles too has faced the
unavoidable disengagement that occurs
between pedestrians and the city around
them. Busy intersections, speeding highways,
and winding freeways have come
to mark Los Angeles as a bustling center
of energy and action. Los Angeles is
always in flux, and so are its inhabitants.
This proposal seeks to satisfy the
Angele-no’s desire to reclaim the ground
beneath their feet. This new city center
introduces the concept of an urban trail,
providing a new topographical experience
in a city of uncharted topographies.
It is here that Los Angeles will learn to
walk again.
(Above) Rendeirng demonstrating
siting of project with massings and
relationship between communal
staircases winding along each tower
(Right, Top) Roof plan with track
and pathways highlighted
(Right, Bottom) Ground plan showing
communal plaza areas and entry lobbies
270 Los Angeles Mall Office Tower Julius Shulman Competition

Connor Gravelle Portfolio 2012-2015 Roof Plan (Top), Ground Plan (Bottom)
271

272 Los Angeles Mall Office Tower Julius Shulman Competition Section along Los Angeles Street

Connor Gravelle Portfolio 2012-2015 273

10
15
134
55
85
85
190
RANCHO SAN JUAN REHABILITATION CENTER
4B Vertical Studio
Spring 2016, John Enright
With Kevin Ng
Synopsis
Tasked with repurposing a derelict public
housing development on the suburban
outskirts of metropolitan Mexico City,
this proposal engages a notorious federal
penitentiary which exists immediately adjacent
to the site as a method for reframing
the prerogatives around housing and
redevelopment, in effect interrogating the
prison typology.
Much like that of social housing, the
basic demands of program for prison
facilities approach an equivalence with
large scale residential blocks that allow a
productive conversation to be had. Rancho
San Juan Federal Penitentiary puts
pressure on the typical presumptions
of iconicity, visibility and inhabitability
through which we often phrase discussions
about housing, the welfare state
and societal views on justice.
A New Federal Penitentiary No. 1
Like other suburban developments
propagated by recent administrations
of the Mexican government, Rancho
San Juan performs severely below its
expectations. Crippling rates of vacancy,
perceived safety issues and unrequited
commercial investment have produced a
delinquent suburbia strangely supplanted
within the agrarian farmlands outside of
Toluca, itself defined primarily in periphery
to the capital.
Perhaps most intriguing about the site
is the strange resonance with its surroundings.
Within a kilometer, one comes
across highway access, a major recycling
plant for the nearby metropolises and
abundantly fertile fields. Nonetheless,
it is the extreme adjacency of the site
to Federal Prison No. 1 which suggests
a productive point of commencement
for an architectural project. Beyond the
obvious correspondence between the
site’s vacancy in the prison’s overcrowding
(now at around 130% capacity),
the juxtaposition of incarceration and
suburbia posits the possibility for a series
of interventions onto both architectural
typologies to the ends that we might reexamine
not only the exploitation of their
mutually beneficial shortcomings but
that we could begin to construct a firm
statement about the current state of both
excess residential housing and societally
untimely perceptions about the penitentiary
system.
This project reinterprets the notions of
confinement and surveillance within the
context of housing. A series of horizontal
bars drift across the landscape of the
site, spewing out from the interior of the
prison. Treading Northwards as they
cross the development, their gradual
transition from a typology of dense, vertical
hosing to that of a horizontal scaffold
provides the impetus for an architectural
form-making with immediacy between
physical limitation, housing prisoners in
traditional cells ostracized from the world
by their lifted positioning far above the
ground, and more contemporary understanding
of electronic means for control,
such as ankle bracelets and ubiquitous
digital surveillance from the large, overhanging
scaffold at the freest end of the
project.
The programmatic transformation of
Rancho San Juan combines these methods
to reinterpret the failed suburbia as
incarceration center, redeploying the site
as a place of reintegration for prisoners
into Mexican society. Given the current
dilemmas facing the Mexican prison system,
such as debilitating stigmatization,
prisoner overcrowding and high degrees
of recidivism, the project demands the invention
of both new architectural typologies
and corresponding formal developments
to tackle the intricate sociological
problems of incarceration and housing.
Tilting the Unité Model
There is a strange reciprocity between
social housing and prisons. Both adhere
to a believed relationship between
government intervention, in the form
of spatial confinement, and projected
behavioral improvement on the part of
those contained. Too often, these processes
become mere static boundaries
within which a set of proscribed interactions
are sanctioned. In each case, these
aspire to better the lives of those within.
(Top) Le Corbusier, Unité
d’Habitation, Marseille, 1952
(Above) Diagram of the greater Mexico
City region, including neighboring
Toluca. With over one million residents
and a planned high speed train
connection (diagrammed on next
spread), the expansion of which might
one day pass directly beside the site,
the situation of Altiplano Prison finds
itself in close proximity to series of
intriguing contextual hubs. Likewise,
55
Toluca
15
Where a prison employs walls and bars
presumably to enforce retribution for
social deviance, a social housing development
equivalently wagers that government
sanctioned living conditions will
entice economic prosperity.
In both conditions, the connection
between architectural realization and political
intention becomes rather abstract.
There exists material evidence for the
correspondences between neither solitary
meditation and self-betterment nor
enforced habitation and economic betterment.
When one studies the discrepancies
in success between notable social
housing projects, such as that between
Robin Hood Gardens and the Barbican
Centre, it becomes clear that architecture
has little power over the inevitable
57
68
95
50
Mexico City, D.F.
this collision of constituencies renders
the extant facilities as incapable of
addressing contemporary Mexico.
(Right) Harold Fisk’s 1944 “Geological
Investigation of the Alluvial Valley of
the Lower Mississippi River”, showing
the plethora of identites that one linear
stream of material can contain (in
this case literally manifest as such).
The new Federal Penitentiary No. 1
replays this formal logic to reform the
process of in-prison rehabilitation.
57
36
278 Rancho San Juan Rehabilitation Center 4B Vertical Studio

Connor Gravelle Portfolio 2012-2015 Harold Fisk’s Mississippi River Drawings
279

340 KM
Guanajuato / Celaya
595,740 (+2.7 Hr.)
7,649
300 KM
330 KM
Tarimoro
59,571
La Moncada
4,130
310 KM
Michoacán / Acámbaro
169,900 (+2.2 Hr.)
290 KM
260 KM
250 KM
240 KM
230 KM
220 KM
210 KM
200 KM
190 KM
180 KM
Estado de México / El Oro
278,264 (+1 Hr.)
170 KM
(León)
(1,578,626 ) (+115 KM) (+2.9 Hr.)
(Guadaljara)
(1,495,189) (+250 KM) (+5.3 Hr.)
San Nicolás de los Agustinos
6,878
San Pedro de los Naranjos
4,365
San Andrés de Salvatierra
34,066
Maravatío del Encinal
3,262
San Miguel Eménguaro
1,526
CELAYA
468,469
Santa María del Refugio
2,453
320 KM
Panales Jamaica
2,073
Urireo
Chamácuaro
1,298
Parácuaro
25,582
Jaral del Refugio
724
280 KM
ACÁMBARO
55,082
270 KM
San Ramón
629
La Encarnación
1,423
Santa Inés
347
San José de Porto
429
Tarandacuao
11,583
Maravatío
70,170
Tungareo
3,931
EL ORO
31,847
280 Rancho San Juan Rehabilitation Center 4B Vertical Studio Proposed High Speed Rail Link

México, D. F.
4,174,928 (+10 Min.)
3600 M
1800 M
5400 M
0 KM
TLALNEPANTLA DE BAZ
Gustavo A. Madero
664,225
1,185,772
Azcapotzalco
10 KM
425,298
Tlalnepantla de Baz
664,225
Naucalpan de Juárez
872,320
20 KM
Miguel Hidalgo
353,534
Huixquilucan
9,554
160 KM
150 KM
Santa María Citendeje 140 KM
5,641
Atlacomulco de Fabela
San Miguel Tenochtitlán
22,774
San Felipe del Progreso
5,280
4,001
140 KM
San Juan Jalpa Centro
2,209
San Cristóbal los Baños
Dolores Hidalgo
4,099
54,843 La Concepción los Baños
6,498
130 KM
San Bartolo del Llano
11,421
San Juan de las Manzanas
3,128
120 KM
Ixtlahuaca de Rayón
126,505
110 KM
Valle de México / Toluca
1,717,747 (+20 Min.)
SITE
100 KM
San Cayetano Morelos
4,439
Almoloya de Juárez
126,163
San Pablo Autopan
35,141
90 KM
30 KM
Huixquilucan de Degollado
242,167
40 KM
50 KM
Santa María Atarasquillo
Ocoyoacac
13,769
61,805
60 KM
Cerrillo Vista Hermosa
6,444
San Pedro Cholula
113,436
San Miguel Totoltepec
4,572
80 KM
San Marcos Yachihuacaltepec
5,917
TOLUCA DE LERDO
819,561
Santa Cruz Otzacatipan
4,191
San Mateo Atenco
66,740
70 KM
San Gaspar Tlahuelilpan
7,397
Metepec
206,005
(In Planning)
~3.9 Mil. (38 Min.)
Connor Gravelle Portfolio 2012-2015 281

Security Designation Data
Point Total
Public Saftey Factors Security Level
Severity of Current Offense
Criminal History Score
Type of Detainer
Age
Education Level
Drug / Alcohol Abuse
No (0)
Yes (-3)
Voluntary Surrender Status Deportable Alien
Lowest (0)
Low Moderate (1)
Moderate (2)
High (5)
Greatest (7)
1-2 (0)
2-03 (2)
4-6 (4)
7-9 (6)
10-12 (8)
13+ (10)
None (0)
Lowest / Low Moderate (1)
Moderate (3)
High (5)
Greatest (7)
55 and over (0)
36 through 54 (2)
25 through 35 (4)
24 or less (8)
High school or GED (0)
Currently attaining GED (1)
No degree (2)
Never or >5 Years (0)
10 Years
Sentence Remaining > 20 Years
Sentence Remaining > 30 Years
Non-Parolable Life Sentence
Serious Escape
Disruptive Group
Prison Disturbance
No Public Saftey Factors
Serious Escape
Sentence Remaining > 10 Years
Sentence Remaining > 20 Years
Sentence Remaining > 30 Years
Non-Parolable Life Sentence
Disruptive Group
Prison Disturbance
No Public Saftey Factors
Disruptive Group
Prison Disturbance
Sentence Remaining > 30
Non-Parolable Life Sentence
No Public Saftey Factors
All Cases
Minimum
Low
Medium
High
None (0)
History of Escape
Minor History of Escape
>15 Years (1)
10-15 Years (1)
5-10 Years (2)
15 Years (3)
10-15 Years (3)
5-10 Years (3)
15 Years (1)
10-15 Years (1)
5-10 Years (3)
15 Years (2)
10-15 Years (4)
5-10 Years (6)

286 Rancho San Juan Rehabilitation Center 4B Vertical Studio

prospects of a government initiative.
Rather, a choreographed intersection
of policy, enforcement and, finally, built
form are necessary to achieve success.
This quality far from belittles architecture,
instead freeing the architectural response
to work broadly on its own terms.
This project resists the temptation to
deliver a single, ossified solution to the
problem of incarceration in Mexico in
a built form. Although the result of the
investigation is indeed a built urbanity,
easily recognizable as such, its premise
revolves less around the adherence to
a singular type of confinement than the
proliferation of variable living conditions.
To these ends, the project adopts the
Corbusian model of Unité housing as a
point of departure. The aforementioned
reciprocity between social housing and
imprisonment, both of which are encountered
on site before any intervention,
binds these concepts to access a variety
of living conditions that avoid the belief
that various individuals should find moral
salvation when subjected to a series of
monotonous spaces.
A set of theoretically minor interventions
into the Unité model permit this diversification
of conditions. These include a
unique set of façade geometries which
assure each cell corresponds to uniquely
individual levels of interior visibility,
exterior accessibility and light penetration.
As the form tilts to its side, this set of
variables doubles, further engaging the
possibility of novel modes of incarceration.
Finally released into the retained
suburbanity of the Rancho San Juan
facility below, prisoners are taken along
a gradient of confinement, encountering
along the way various typologies of access,
solitude and exposure.
(Left) Exploded axonometric drawing
showing the various layers of
functional bands combined to form
the various structures, pathways and
security features of the prison.
(Above) Program diagram showing
the existing facilities and the initially
planned expansion of the prison. Though
greatly expanded upon in the final
scheme, preliminary explorations easily
demonstrated both the programmatic
response to prevalent prison
overcrowding and the comparative
dual expansions in cell sizes and
employee-related facilities to ameliorate
the inhumane spatial parameters
currently used in prison design.
Connor Gravelle Portfolio 2012-2015 Program Compositions
287

288 Rancho San Juan Rehabilitation Center 4B Vertical Studio Plan Details for Junctions and Objects

Healthcare Facility
Administrative Center
and High Speed Rail Link
Education Building
Community Center
Courthouse Complex
and Parking
Connor Gravelle Portfolio 2012-2015 Object Buildings
289

290 Rancho San Juan Rehabilitation Center 4B Vertical Studio Cutaway Axonometric

Connor Gravelle Portfolio 2012-2015 Sections in Block 1
291

Iteration 1.1
Iteration 3.1
Iteration 3.2
Iteration 5.2
Level Shift:
False Cell Randomization: False
Level Shift Minimum: - Randomization Level: -
Level Shift Maximum: - End Preservation: -
Level Shift Randomization: 0
Level Shift:
True Cell Randomization: False
Level Shift Minimum: -10 Randomization Level: -
Level Shift Maximum: +20 End Preservation: -
Level Shift Randomization: 0
Level Shift:
True Cell Randomization: False
Level Shift Minimum: -10 Randomization Level: -
Level Shift Maximum: +20 End Preservation: -
Level Shift Randomization: .15
Level Shift:
True
Level Shift Minimum: -10
Level Shift Maximum: +20
Level Shift Randomization: .15
292 Rancho San Juan Rehabilitation Center 4B Vertical Studio Façade Variation Studies

Iteration 5.3
Iteration 6.2
Iteration 7
Cell Randomization: True
Randomization Level: .003
End Preservation: .025
Level Shift:
True Cell Randomization: True
Level Shift Minimum: -10 Randomization Level: .005
Level Shift Maximum: +20 End Preservation: .025
Level Shift Randomization: .15
Level Shift:
True Cell Randomization: True
Level Shift Minimum: -10 Randomization Level: .007
Level Shift Maximum: +15 End Preservation: .025
Level Shift Randomization: .1
Level Shift:
True Cell Randomization: True
Level Shift Minimum: -10 Randomization Level: .008
Level Shift Maximum: +15 End Preservation: .03
Level Shift Randomization: .07
Connor Gravelle Portfolio 2012-2015 293

294

(animation)
vimeo.com/
165098217
295

296 Rancho San Juan Rehabilitation Center 4B Vertical Studio

-68.5°
Panel B1.2_6_78
Panel B1.2_4_46
65°
58°
42°
13°
-18.2°
0.268
0.711
0.374
0.854
Connor Gravelle Portfolio 2012-2015 Aperture Geometry Parameters
297

298 Rancho San Juan Rehabilitation Center 4B Vertical Studio Section in Block 2

Connor Gravelle Portfolio 2012-2015 299

37.2°
31.0%
11.1°
9.2%
+25.9°
0.0°
-11.3°
-4.3°
-15.4°
33.2°
20.0%
9.5°
5.9%
300 Rancho San Juan Rehabilitation Center 4B Vertical Studio Prison Cell Geometry Parameters

7.8°
4.8%
+26.7°
28.1°
23.4%
-1.4°
0.0°
-2.6°
27.6°
23.0%
-30.2°
7.6°
6.3%
Connor Gravelle Portfolio 2012-2015 301

302 Rancho San Juan Rehabilitation Center 4B Vertical Studio Light Variations in Cells and Objects

Connor Gravelle Portfolio 2012-2015 Sections in Block 4 and Scaffold
303

End
Thank you for taking your time
to look at my portfolio!
For contact information, please
refer to the information pages at
the beginning of the book.