Professor Nick Safley

Architects make many building scale aesthetic decisions based upon small-scale examples of materials and material assemblies. Inherently these small parts or models are not indicative of the overall built architectural work, yet they remain vital to decision making, ethical understandings of material production networks, and the aesthetic formation of the project. As designers and architects, we more often than not work to make decisions through mental images constructed from incomplete information utilizing samples and swatches. The material swatch might be the most extreme example of this as qualities are evaluated in isolation for deployment in the more extensive work. This studio will study the limited scale of the material swatch in relation to full-scale construction. Students will study swatch qualities as composed images and translate them into technical material assemblies. This studio will use and expand swatches to create larger architectural wholes and operate across a large variety of scales from site design to envelope detail.

Megan Saraniti

Kent Architecture School Expansion

Graphic color and pattern are directly related to building form and fenestration.

Toby Chame

Zook Crain

Jyae McWilson

Professor Luis Santos

Extension to the CAED building: The CAED has quickly outgrown its new building. Terrace Hall which sits at the edge of Kent State’s campus defines a public face of the university and was temporary studio space for during the covid 19 pandemic. It is slated for demolition and its footprint and site will serve as the new extension of the expanding college of architecture. The studio will address the design of new studio space in a new public-facing university building.

Trent Scheller

The Factory for Design

The Factory for Design is curated to benefit from passive solar heating, maximize ventilation, and capitalize off of site orientation. Formally, the building has two rectilinear wings that are connected by a central atrium. The large central atrium rises above the rest of the building to act as a smokestack and naturally ventilate the interior. The overall form of the building naturally divided each floor into four different segments. These different segments were utilized to divide the studio spaces into smaller sections. This programmatic decision will reduce noise traveling between studio sections, while still providing a collaborative environment with the connecting atrium. For the envelope of the building, a kinetic parametric facade, that changes throughout the day based on solar orientation, is utilized to capitalize from solar heat gains as well as create the proper interior visual environment. This kinetic facade allows for the interior conditions to be optimized every day throughout the year by simply rotating the panels to better control light penetration.

Tyler Turskey

123 "Fingers"

A focus on massing is further progressed with challenges of an environmentally and energy-efficient architecture building. My goal was to design spaces with continuous diffused light to supplement good design and morale no matter the location within the form. This proved successful as the cavernous, stepped interior / exterior webs of the fingers allowed for travel in and out of the building for humans, plant species, air, and sunlight.

Gerald Opferman

Tectonic Rotations

The main design strategy of Tectonic Rotations uses precise rotations of floor plates to create self-shaded, cantilevered elements. To support this, floor plate perimeters are fitted with a unified warren truss system, thus removing the need for a column grid. A vibrant daylit, stack ventilated atrium was curated using procedural subtraction that followed a grid guideline. A smooth blend between exterior and interior followed in the wake of this strategy. The program lies north, while the south serves as primary circulation. Working inside out, the envelope is fitted with glazing, warren trusses, and finally a façade. The triangular-shaped apertures of the envelope vary on density and size mediating and filtering daylight. Tectonic Rotations is a monolithic celebration of structure and tectonic expression. To that end, it uses multiple systems to organize space, express the distribution of structural forces, and modulate daylight to create either vibrant or diffuse daylit environments.

Joshua Lichty

The Quarry

The Quarry is a conceptual design for the new architecture building replacing Terrace Hall. The design is submerged in a hill and seeks to create an axial relationship through the hill, acting as a passageway from top to bottom. With this goal in mind, the building controls the views given to the people inside and creates an atrium space that has beautiful views into the interior and the outside. The form began by placing a “bounding box” into the site as a sculptural block that was being chiseled away. Then, by chiseling or subtraction, the form emerged from the box. These subtractions allow for light to enter spaces where it is needed and create outdoor spaces for students and faculty to enjoy.

Professor Jean Jaminet

This fourth-year studio cultivates independent student investigation of contemporary experimental architecture practice with a focus on materiality and component assembly.

Carl Barrett

Kent State Architecture Building

The relationship between accuracy and logic vs capturing a feeling and unrestrained emotion is ever-present throughout history. Seen in the relationship between neoclassicism and romanticism, Thomas Kincaid criticizes Jackson Pollock and Spock and Captain Kirks' relationship in the 1960s Startrek. This project is exploiting quick scans of neoclassical buildings using a free iPhone app for their spatial ambiance rather than the historical accuracy of replication. The objects captured are filled with inaccurate geometry, simplified meshed forms, and roughly collaged photos from each scan. The design is instituting a relationship to the buildings in front of campus’s aesthetic choice to pursue neoclassicism revival. The building offers an alternative to the authoritarian nature of these buildings by only subscribing to visual cues and grandeur of old artifacts much like the achievements of early romanticism.

Elisa Ibsen

Datamosh

Computer applications for architecture have simplified the process of constructing buildings; however, the functionality of these applications is dependent on the code. Once that is disrupted, unintentional interruptions emerge at various scales, which can be used as a new primary function. My inspiration came from the phenomenon of data moshing, which is defined as the process of corrupting video footage by replacing original I-frames with intermediary p-frames. Within my final building, these materials became plastic screen printed snap caps and chemically eroded concrete to represent the change in color and form. The exterior data articulations continue into the interior projection, with two grids intersecting and creating pixelated abruptions in the program. In site, linear movements interrupt the preexisting plane, morphing the hills into pixels. My building’s intentions are to challenge the way references like shapes and patterns are built within architecture by utilizing computer programs in an improper way.

Brennan Flory

Material Adaptation

The project Investigates the relationship between parts and how adjacent parts of a system can generate effects similar to those discovered through manipulations of non-traditional material studies. Initial investigation studied the organization of a single part within a system that operates as a volume but within the surface, subtle figurations can be deciphered. Gutter filters were used to explore the effects, material studies revealed that the porous, cell-like structure of the filter is a medium. Seams become seamless within the material and defining factors are lost within their own properties. When digitally augmented, single parts become apparent and greater effects can be generated computationally. Material effects were translated into architectural elements that align with contemporary experimental design through the fabrication processes pushing conventional techniques in material manipulation and assembly applications.