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P o r t f o l i o Architecture 2015

Hana Nihill

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Paper LanternsSubject: Virtual Environments 2012Skills: Rhino// Fabrication

This wearable lantern represents one of the first architectural project I completed at university. I soon came to

realise that it falls into a longstanding architectural tradition that concerns itself with the way architecture relates

to the human body. At the time trying to get the previously untried software to produce a model that would somehow

fit around my neck felt like impossible alchemy. Regardless, the design process took me through an exploration of

the natural errosive process -that recurrs throughout nature- and introduced a series of fabrication techniques that

enventually produced the lantern to the left. Intended to be worn aroudn the neck so the light falls directly onto the

face and becomes the definitive component of the wearers immediate context.

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Generating ChangeSubject: Air Skills: Rhino/Grasshopper/Vray

Studio Air sought to introduce new life and energy to a greenfields

site in Demark. The first introduction to grasshopper was a

particularly helpful one, if not hugely fruitful. Although Grasshopper

was introduced as a tool for generative ‘bottom up’ design, it was

hard in those early stages to move away from sketching and then

modeling an idea. As I have become more and more proficient

in Grasshopper, this approach has become less and less useful.

Instead the way that technology can be used to monitor and design

for energy production and performance has become more of a

focus.

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Seating

Mixed Storage/Food display

Food & Coffee Preparation

Mixed Storage/Food display

[ Multi-Use Bench ]

[ V-ray Renders ]

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Coffee CrazeSubject: Fire Skills: Rhino/Grasshopper/Vray

Studio Fire proposed a coffee shop, bookstore, gallery, apartment and office space on a constricted site at the

junction of Sydney Road and Albert Street in Brunswick, Melbourne. The proposal explored a flexible space

loosely defined by changeable shelving and furniture. The text Mutations was a key source of inspiration for

ideas about the necessities and functions of modern consumerism and consumerist environments. Voyerism

was actively encouraged from both inside and out, with the impenetrable front glass facade in direct contrast

with the openess of the albert street facade, inviting increased activity on the quieter side of the site.

[ Context Diagrams ]

[ Plans ]

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Translating the language

Creating a system

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The PharmakonSubject: Gift to the CitySkills: Rhino///Grasshopper///Fabrication

The studio that this model was created for called for the creation of four “gallery” proposals. These galleries sought

to respond to a soundbite selected from interviews the studio group had done with artists where they questioned how

architecture and art related to one another. Creating a space that channeled Fydor Dostoyevsky’s “sickness” as he described

in Notes from Underground, the galleries were exercises in irrational imagination. This gallery in particular was an

exploration of model architecture and how it could be just as valid, if not more valid than pictoral representations of a more

identifiable ‘architecture’. Initially, the quote and the artwork were laser-cut into perspex, along with a diagram of the gallery.

The perspex was then cut into the squares that became the pieces of a mnemomic, subjective architecture. Combined with a

joint that allowed for a flexible configuration, the model imagined an architecture as a system, being constantly reshaped by

the individual as they chose to interact with it.

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polypropelene “leaves”Connected via red thread to small DC motor driven in two

directions by an arduino board at intervals of 5 seconds

MDF “Ribs”Laser cut in segments and then connected using superglue

and added red thread for reinforcement. Initially the ribs kept snapping apart at the joints so the red string was subsequently added as reinforcement. An optimisation

would be to either cut the ribs all in one piece resulting in a large amount of material wastage, or design a more

efficient joint system that may include overlapping or tabs of some kind.

Copper “spines” Copper pipe was used as the ‘spine’ for the structure, off

which everything else hung. Holes were drilled in the pipe so that the thread could be fed through and then attached to the motors to lift and lower the “leaves”. The burrs on the underside of the holes kept fraying the string causing

it to snap. In retrospect the spine needed to provide a great deal more functionality than it did. If it were specifically

designed with grooves for the string and slots for the ribs it would have been a much more efficient structure.

MDF “Windows” These window frames were purposefully banal. Painted

white on one side, they were simply the frames for the perspex panes through which the user witnessed the

moving garden.

MDF “Legs” The legs that supported the rest of the structure were a

solution to the problem of hanging the sculpture from the delicate mesh of the exhibition space. Designed around my

eye height, they give a strange sense of proportion to the rest of the form.

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Crashing into theSubject: Gift to the City /// Studio CSkills: Rhino/Grasshopper/Vray/Fabriction/Arduino Scripting

This project is a failed machine for navigating the void. Much like the white cube gallery, it initiates a recursive process that can only arise out of an absence,

yet in trying to materialise that recursive process it destroys -whilst simultaneously creating- the absence from which it came. Much like the relationship

between the formal and the non-formal that Daniel Liebskind describes, the machine proposes a series of spaces that exist to prompt an exploration

of purely subjective non-space. In order to do this a series of paradoxes are proposed throughout. The delicate shimmering foliage with the mechanical

whirr of the motors, the rigidity of the external structure with the organic forms and delicate material draped between them. The constant questioning of

structure compels the subject to extrapolate correlates that create an internalised architectural/artistic experience that illuminates the true function of the

“pristine” gallery space as the sole facilitator of individualised artistic geometry/abstraction/interpretation.

The frames hang behind the main sculture exploring the

combination of the galleries that sit below them with monolithic

institutions such as Versailles, St Peters Basillica, Burlington House

and the Pompidiou Centre. In each case a particular exhibition is

explored in conjunction with the previously desined gallery in an

attempt to ascertain the extent to which architecture and art and the

subjective unconcious can dissemble and reasemble the fixed and

permanent. In each case this exploration is simplified to an extent by

the way the individual can rearrange the frames to create different

compositions and layerings.

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Details of the Machine

Much of the machine sought to create confusion in the viewer. It seemed as though as soon as the possibility of movement was introduced to the structure, the assumption was that

the ‘ribs’ with their skeletal formation and rounded joints would assume still more anthropomorphic qualities and begin to pivot around the frame. Instead it was the plastic, haniging,

seemingly impotent ‘leaves’ that were lifted up and down via a motor system that was hiden by invisible fishing line. The movement was further hiden by the white shroud that dressed the

undersides of the ribs on one side of the machine. Intended to create suspense, or rather gaps and questions, the loud whirr of the motors were the only thing that alluded to any added

function as one stood passively viewing the machine.

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Ten Essays on Estrangement

This project represents the ‘architectural’ precendent

which was Peter Eisenman’s House VI. The project

explores the movement from the ‘demotivation’ of

the architectural sign through to the possibility of

formlessness that Eisenman began to introduce in his

later housing projects. It traces houses I- X and places

them in a relational grid system that spreads between

two mounds. Completely uninhabitable, the grid entombs

Eisenman’s alienating house schemes within their own

logic. Finally entirely self referential. even as Eisenman

decides that self referential architecture is doomed to fail.

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Archives for Dying Ideas

The archive is an uncomfortable architectural proposition. They are places for secrecy and

storytelling. Places for safekeeping of things that are too precious to be subjected to the ravages

of time. Places for things, too precious to be useful. The archives imagined below are represented

and conieved on the back of Joseph Kosuth’s work One and Three chairs. Intended as archives for

Peter Eisenman’s House VI, Anri Sala’s Ravel Ravel Unravel, and James Corner’s Agency of Mapping,

the archives are collaged on top of a hypothetical island, inhabited by the disenchanted workers of

the server farm that sits below it. Pulled out of an intensive research process, each architectural

fragment delves into the historical implications of its precedent, aiming to bring to the surface

narrative strings that have been forgotten, or perhaps suppress those that have been remembered.

Ten Essays on Estrangement

2D A

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Bunk

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