Joshua PlourdePersonal and Academic Portfolio

e. joshua.plourde@gmail.comp. 1(415) 830-7060

Projects

Personal

Cristina’s world Brooklyn Loft I Ceci est une pipe Brooklyn Loft II

Academic

Thesis Rome - Largo Argentina New Orleans House South Street Seaport Performance Hall Sarah Lawrence Kindergarten Spatial Studies

Personal Project: ‘Cristina’s World’ by Andrew Wyeth & Farnesworth house by Mies van der Rohe. Cristina has polio and is dragging herself towards Modernism. A comment on the idealism of Modernist architecture.

Personal Project: Joshua and his then roommates, Larry Dennedy and Alex Gryger built out a loft apartment.

Personal Project: ‘C’est une Pipe’

Project: Brooklyn LoftOffice: PersonalDuration: Fall 2012Status: Design DevelopmentArea: 1250 sqft

Project Description:

Done as a personal project for a friend, Brooklyn Loft envi-sions an open yet flexible intervention as a retrofit to an exist-ing open plan studio apartment that was a former mattress factory. The client wanted a highly flexible and open space that could serve multiple purposes over time, as the client entertains regularly, the spatial arrangement was conceived a single armature which wraps the periphery of the space and combines vertical circulation with storage and seating, leaving a gallery like space for gatherings in the center. Using the 15ft high ceilings of the former factory allowed the separation of public and private space to be done via a vertical stratification of program, as opposed to using a more traditional partition space planning.

Image Courtesy: ‘Dam’ - Toshio Shibata

Project: Undergraduate Thesis, Pratt Institute 2007Advisors: Lawrence Blough, Daniela FabriciousDuration: Fall 2006 - Spring 2007

“New Jersey State Highway Dept.

That zero panorama seemed to contain ruins in reverse, that is – all the new construction that would eventually be built. This is the opposite of the ‘romantic ruin’ because the build-ings don’t fall into ruin after they are built but rather rise into ruin before they are built. This anti-romantic mise-en-scene suggests the discredited idea of time and many other “out of date” things. But the suburbs exist without a rational past and without the “big events” of history. Oh, maybe there are a few statues, a legend, and a couple of curios, but no past – just what passes for a future. A Utopia minus a bottom, a place where machines are idle, and the sun has turned to glass, and a place where the Passaic Concrete Plant (253 River Drive) does a good business in STONE, BITUMINOUS, SAND, and CEMENT. Passaic seems full of “holes” compared to New York City, which seems tightly packed and solid, and those holes in a sense are the monumental vacancies that define, without trying, the memory traces of an abandoned set of futures.”

-Robert Smithson, Monuments of Passaic

The American urban periphery is defined more by what it is not than by what it is.

The horizontal stratification of urban space into zones of singular purposes has forged pervasive intermediary tracts. Dubbed the ‘holey plane’[1], these zones facilitate control, separation and flexibility. Without inherent moral value, they are one outcome of processes whose effects also include a breakdown of public space, ecological destruction, banality, economic unfeasibility, and architectural homogeneity. Their role is to contain waste, hold matter, move through, and sep-arate uses. Bodily inhabitation is often impossible, displea-surable, and sometimes dangerous.

Liminality is ripe for rethinking. What would it mean to revise ‘drosscape,’ not as “waste”, but as opportunity for dense in-habitation?[2] Can we envision a re-grafting of domestic, in-frastructural and productive spaces into a symbiosis rather than a contravention? Rather than expanding outwards, can we expand inwards?

This project seeks to address these concerns by synthesiz-ing competing organizational logics. It envisions altering the architectural design process, contractual apparatuses, tec-tonics, and urban planning. As a break from static contempo-rary construction contracts, the design schedule is re-thought to conceptualize the architecture project not as a product, but as a series of interrelated interventions that both operate on, and are informed by, the site and use. Novel tectonics are employed as the physical armature that engenders cynosural change.

The frontier is literally in our cities.

Above: ‘The Three Magnets’ - Ebenezer HowardLeft: Works Progress Administration - separation of program

Site

Interchange 68 is the name of the confluence of interstate transport that is the transition between I-95 and I-80. As the junction for two of the longest and highest volume highways on the eastern seaboard [I-95 runs from Boston to Atlanta, and I-80 heads out from New York to Pittsburgh and eventu-ally Chicago and points west.], it’s proximity of 6 miles from Manhattan, and comprising an area roughly the size of Cen-tral Park, interchange 68 provides fertile testing ground for provoking liminal space.

Dividing Teaneck New Jersey to the north and Ridgefield Park to the south, the interchange, a threshold and connector by automobile, poses a huge physical barrier to any other form of terrestrial transport. To access and occupy the site, a new level of connective tissue is required at a finer scale. An arti-ficial topography, any new graft of armature must be reflexive and adaptive in time and space. It must intelligently respond to changes in elevation and proximity to the highway and neigh-bourhood fabric. The challenge becomes scalar. Is it possible to intelligently and productively mediate the local neighbour-hood space [designed for a sense of place] with interstate in-frastructure [designed for velocity]?

Field of operations

Intended use

Suburban context

Site plan / Phasing

Perhaps due to Alberti, perhaps due to gross misinterpreta-tions of Modernism, the contemporary architecture contract is always delivered as a fi nite product. As a break from this, iter-ations are proposed to enable dynamic responses to changes in program. This is less architecture as product and more ar-chitecture as ecological process. Being able to surgically alter, amend and adapt tectonics allows for massive increases or decreases in program over time, ensures a very limited waste of material and engenders architectural awareness.

Conceived as a fifty year project, the system allows for increas-es of housing as more workers and researchers are needed, and, reciprocally, more growing space to shelter the houses. The system and its output, trees, “grow” along the highway, in either direction. Essentially, domesticating plantsand planting the domestic.

Program

Inhabitation, Culture, Research, Production, Distribution, Con-sumption

In order to access and occupy the remote and harsh zone of an interchange multiple programs are necessary. No single program arranged in a monoculture could possibly survive on its own. Each program and use therefore has a reciprocal and integral relationship with each other. They rely on each other in a symbiosis that allows them to perform to their potential. Housing provides more permanent dwellings for the research-ers and farmers and transient accommodation for agro-tour-ists, which increases awareness on a visceral and experiential level. The tree farm and its infrastructure protects the housing with sound attenuation and carbon sequestration. Research areas develop strands of tree that grow straighter, are less prone to disease and sequest carbon at faster rates. Com-mercial space interfaces with the public, creating a sense of place while providing education thereby improving awareness, and contributing economic resources. Distribution facilitates growth of the system byproviding a collection point from which to transplant trees that are ready to be planted, whether along the highway or to points beyond.Cross programming, not only makes sense on economic and ecological levels, but is vital to the project’s existence. The separation anddivision of program is primarily what creates liminal space; it is fi tting that programmatic weaving offers the alternative.

Masterplan showing dwellings, growing space, circulation, distribution center, retail space and office laboratory.

Section showing program spanning and adjacent to site context of the interchange.

Autonomous Tectonics

Autonomous tectonics are intentionally designed in a vacuum. They are often conceived and created for a singular purpose, to be applied simply in various contexts and scales. In this model, pure engineering and fixed assembly line repetitive construction practices dictate forms and geometry regardless of place and time. In a Fordist ‘one size fits all’ mantra, the designed object in inherently placeless, as it ‘fits’ equally well or poorly with its context. Highway infrastructure, with the pri-mary goal of facilitating an automobile’s direction at a certain rate of speed, is placeless. Autonomous tectonics are imperi-alistic: they require that the site respond to them. As the model for infrastructure, and some urban planning, for the past 100 years, the coming challenge will be how to fi t into and mediate timeless and placeless, fixed geometries.

Co-adaptive Tectonics

Co-adaptive tectonics are defined by a shared reciprocity with their given context. They are intimately site specific. Also, termed ‘mass-customization,’ these Post-Fordist assembly methodologies enable a class or range of objects that fit to-gether to respond to contextual specificity. They are determi-nately non-linear, and intelligent and self-reflexive enough to respond to local conditions, geometries, and mandates. Toshio Shibata’s photography illustrates a flexible, adaptive organiza-tion that responds to specific needs. The conditions of the site, whether economic, ecologic, social, cultural or political inform the tectonics and then the tectonics enable strategic operation on the site.

Organizational Logics I

Any architectural or urban planning project is an exercise in organization. However, and particularly in architecture, there is often one or a few set of primary ideas that facilitate the proj-ect. Two or three logics often determine the over-arching orga-nization of the building. This is typically quite conducive for the process and is a mechanism to identify and solve problems. However, when jumping up in scale to the issue of wasted land, there are often many pre-existing organizing logics al-ready at play in the site. The challenge then becomes: how to dovetail with existing logics, whilst augmenting them in a ben-eficial manner. Some potential logics are not spatial [viz, some are better accessed through lists of data, than by geometry], however our purposes at the moment are only concerned with spatial logics, some of which are detailed to the left.

Organizational Logics II

Geodesic - greenhouse roof and water collection

Point cloud - tree nursery and dwellings

Fractal - individual plant beds

Phasing - context driven circulation

Geodetic - support space frame

Truss frame - primary structure

Layers

Rather than one over-arching logic, applied in a totalizing man-ner, the tectonics must be designed around many interrelated, mutually independent organizations. This allows them to per-form their unique functions while sharing a deep reciprocity with each other and the site conditions. This is material tecton-ics as spatial analogy for networked yet determined flows, as opposed to aesthetic metaphor.

Glazed green house roof - collects water while providing a green house for the younger plants.

Primary structure - Networked trusses.

Geodetics as both a tectonic system and organizational logic, are perhaps the most efficient means of achieving our aims. Standard stick frame construction, using slab, column and beam, is simply too clumsy and thick to engage the complex geometry of the site. While monocoques, though seemingly dynamic, are actually too static to change over time. Geodetics are built with standardized members use designed flexibility at their joints. Depending on assembly, the same pieces might serve intermittently as wall, floor or roof.

Growing Tray

Ecology-Contemporary vernacular thought regarding the relationship between ecology and ‘man made’ built space is still plagued by two interrelated misconceptions. The first is that the artificial and the natural are somehow differ-entiated. Environmental ecology is applied as a gloss over autonomous construction as an aesthetic or ‘green-washing’ manuever. This project approaches this relationship from the opposite angle, which is to say that eco-logical phenomena and man-made artifacts are codependent on social, economic and political levels.

The second fallacy is the distance between ecology [read: resource extraction and waste dispersal] and most people’s sphere of consciousness. Production, distribution and waste dispersal practices are all but invisible to most everyone in society, the only point of interaction, and consequently influence, is the point of consumption. By placing ecological process in close knit juxtaposition with inhabitation, it fosters consumer awareness and so yields more control over choices.

Here we see the growing trays which allow seedlings to be grown on an artificial surface. The trays are optimized for different spatial requirements at different stages in the growth cycle. They are pre-fabricated and stan-dardized to fit within the armature, allowing more or less of a particular type as needs require.

Housing

Prefabrication is not a new model, but its opportunities and limitations have yet to be fully explored as either single or multi family housing in the American market. The benefits of pre-fab are that as it is assembled in a con-trolled environment it can be constructed in a quicker, more accurate process, ultimately yielding a higher quality product for less investment. Detractors often cite it as a totalizing, one-size-fi ts-all construct, allowing for limited options and permutations. However, thought of as a range or class of designs, a typology or class of designs, pre-fab can create different organizations for specific conditions.

Retail

Not unlike the Italian ‘Autogrill’ the center, situated along the highway like a rest stop, provides an unexpected point of entry. Comprised of the research laboratories, a cafe, retail and education displays and a product collection point, the center serves as the public face of the site. It is here, along the highway, that people engage in social public space. One can park, tour the laboratories, pick up a young tree, sip some fair trade coffee, or venture further down the site to investigate the growing trays and a first hand experience of the process. Juxtaposition with eighteen wheelers rumbling by at 65 mph makes the center’s civic and cultural role more pertinent and poignant. It allows one to access, inhabit and escape from a ‘concrete island.’ An urban space that is most typically invisible.

Distribution

A commercial distribution center serves as the counter point to the cultural center. Since it is too dangerous, potentially requiring more on-ramp than is possible in the site constraints, trucks access the site from local streets rather than highway. This has the added benefit of serving as the entry from the local neighbourhood, which nullifies the separation between distributor and consumer. The system of the tree farm is organized radially around the distribution point to optimize transfer of material over area. The trucks align on an over large cul-de-sac, that staple of residential planning, to facilitate ease of access.

Viability

Given further economic development, detail refinement, and some thoughtful value engineering, this project could be entirely technologically possible.

However, due to current thought processes, design methodologies and legal constructs, it is unviable under the current status quo.What needs to change in order for liminal space to be dramatically reconceived from waste to opportunity?

One issue is the differentiation between design disciplines and the categorical mindsets that differentiation breeds. This project is not a work of architecture, landscape design, urban planning, agriculture, real estate speculation or civil engineering. Rather it is a confluence of these disciplines interrelated in a tightly woven and perhaps in-extricable way. To begin to think of the built environment as an ecology in dynamic equilibrium rather than as a series of adjacent plots, we must begin to author process-es rather than design objects. This frees us from tired debates of style versus substance, utility versus poetics, and ridiculous and false dichotomies between art and sci-ence or pure and applied teleogies. It allows us to activate and evaluate built space in a more objective fashion, based on performance and reason, rather than on style or subjective opinion.

The second criteria pertains to notions of ownership. Whether the area in question is owned by the municipality, the government, commercial or private enterprises, the owner must cease to conceive of these sites as their personal backyard and be willing to exploit their potential. This is in no way antithetical to real estate speculation or economic use patterns, rather it is the exact opposite as it opens up new and fertile ground for economic endeavors. This is the ‘waste equals food’ mantra applied spa-tially. The real estate crisis, coupled with rising costs of transportation and infrastructure means that a more dense urban space model is perhaps more economically sus-tainable than the status quo.

The third hurdle is the architecture contractual apparatus itself. The architectural contract, perhaps ultimately derived from Alberti’s notions on the division between thought and action, can only deliver a static object. A finite set of documents in finite delivery time, garnering a singular decisive act.

To be able to truly author processes, the contract must be drawn out to allow for future influence, operation, or even revision. This entails an increased intimacy between client and architect. It means a higher level of trust, and a prolonged relationship, the ideas of which most on both sides would probably blanch at. However, clients would benefi t from increased attention and higher quality of service, and architect’s would not mind the more stable work. Of course, this entails that the architect is capable of making and admitting mistakes, which can be precarious in the current model. However, altering the contract means that both the client and architect know more about the other’s intents and are therefore on the same page and ultimately the same team. A symbiosis rather than a partnership based on necessity.

Conventional professional relationships and traditional ideology have left us with a spatial construct many have dubbed ‘suburbia.’ It has become fashionable, or even traditional, to deride suburban sprawl as inherently evil, but there is a darth of constructive thought and intelligent action aiming to ‘fix’ it. We all know what the problems are, but few have posited viable solutions. Could it be that this is a problem that architecture, urban planning, and landscape design are too small to address? If ‘suburbia’ is outside the jurisdiction of those most suited to ‘fi xing’ it, then who is responsible?

Rather than utopian pipe dreams, or yet more negative cynical ‘junk-theory’, a series of intelligent, non-biased, design-as-research based projections could fill a void and fuel architectural thought for the next fifty years.

Project: Largo Argentina, RomeAdvisor: Fred BiehleDuration: Spring 2006

Project Description:

Rome is not about ancient or medieval or renaissance or futurist or rationalist or fascist or modern or contemporary ar-chitecture in their respective physical-spatial organizations. Rather, it is about their confluence and influence upon each other over time as an urban organization. Like geological strat-ification, each layer informs the other. In this sense, Rome is an utterly unique contemporary urban city.

This project seeks, through contemporary means, to exploit this uniqueness to form generating ends. Rather than an ad-dition to an already illustrious architectural history, this project strives to be a portrait of Rome as allegory.

What would it look like to imagine the eternal city as a contem-porary spatial palimpsest vis a vis a new intervention?

It may seem to the casual observer that using ancient or me-dieval or renaissance geometry to delineate a contemporary Roman building is fallacious. However, is it possible to create a new construct which is auto-didactic? A building that teaches one about the history of Rome, unseen, as one moves through it?

Site: Largo Argentina

Formal analysis: Trajan’s Market. An investigation of the urban armature

Formal analysis: Ordered systems

Formal analysis: superimpostion

Project: Post-Katrina New Orlean’s HouseAdvisor: Debbie GansDuration: FA 2006

New Orleans Existing Typology Study

New Typology Study

Axoi: Structural space frame with elements of program.

Project: South Street Seaport Performance HallAdvisor: Larry ZerothDuration: Fa 2005

Project: Sarah Lawrence KindergartenAdvisor: William MacDonaldDuration: Sp 2004

Facade: Each office level is shaded via a 10ft deep white glass shading canopy. The curved vision glazing comprises 10’ x 45’ single glazed panels.

Project: Spatial StudiesInstructor: Grit VltavskyDuration: Fa 2002