Sarah C. Barrett

ARCHITECTURE

Portfolio

Graduate School Work, University of Michigan, 2009 -2012

The Soil Dis-Assembly Line - An Urban Agricultural Center

This project is a proposal for a community center located in downtown Detroit that also acts as a Seed Bank and a Phyto-extraction Plant. The purpose of this community center is to educate the urban population on urban agricultural practices. The Seed Bank is located in three towers that not only store seeds but also allow visitors to see inside at specific moments, namely the classrooms and the exhibition space. The building is designed around a large conveyor belt that holds boxes of local soil planted with phytoremediating plants. The belt moves very slowly, one step a week, so each box remains on the belt over a year. This allows both scientists and visitors to witness and study the process of phytoremediation - how long it takes to clean soil that has been affected by urban industry.

Soil Dis-Assembly Line

Chicago Sanctuary

Sanctuary/Library

This building is a proposal for a library in Chicago. The site is located in a loud section of town near an el-evated train line. There is also a raised path running through the site that is incorporated into the design. The footprint of the building covers the entire site while the interior layout addresses the different an-gles afforded by the site and gives unobstructed views of most of the surroundings, yet the glass walls are soundproofed to keep the interior quiet. The feeling of privacy becomes more apparent the farther back and up the building the visitor travels. Levels of increased privacy and silence are indicated by raised floors and vertical plantings placed in square patches on the ex-terior walls.

Quiet Areas

Stacks

Loud Areas

Support

Circulation

Synthetic Memory

The Synthetic Memory Museum

The Synthetic Memory Museum is a project that allows a person to move through and among media similar to the way infor-mation moves through the brain. A person can travel through this library the way one follows a train of thought.Using particular musicians as a vehicle for memory association, a person would begin his experience of the library in a large room where the music of the particular artists are kept and upon listening to the music, would be shown different paths or tunnels that lead to smaller rooms that house information referenced by the artist in his songs. As the person walked through the tunnels and into the rooms, images would be projected on the walls that either pertain or may be inspired by the original music or the particular reference room.The goal of this experience is for the visitor to create a vivid memory association with the song. Whether the visitor already knows the song well or is hearing it for the first time, he is able to have a totally new experience with it.The space and movement of the building is based on a type of growth found in nature known as the Fibonnacci Sequence. Be-ginning with 1, each following number in the sequence is derived from adding the 2 numbers that came before. If each num-ber in the sequence represents the side of a square, and each square is rotated 90 degrees from the one before, the arc of these squares forms the fibonnacci spiral. In the picture above, the fibonnacci spiral appears in the clenching of a human fist.

I said to Hank Williams, how lonely does it get? Hank Williams hasn’t answered me yet. He’s your favorite singing millionaire, the patron saint of

envy, and the grocer of despair. That was called love for the workers in song, probably still is for those of them left. Just take a look at your body now,

there is nothing much to save. And a bitter voice in the mirror cries “Hey prince, you need a shave.” If you want a driver climb

inside, or if you want to take me for a ride, you know you can, I’m your man.

Leonard Cohen

Tom Waits

Nick Cave

Charlie Whitman is holding

onto Dillinger’s wings at the corner of the Schwab’s

Drug Store. I got a telephone call from Istanbul, my baby’s

coming home today - she wears a hat that was signed by Tennessee

Ernie Ford. I’ve seen the Brooklyn Dodgers play at Ebbet’s Field and felt a Hong Kong drizzle on cuban heels. I’ve

seen the Wabash Canonball, all you’ve got to do is book me at Carnegie Hall. Get me to Reno and bring it in low - I left Murfreesboro, rode to Opelousas,

rode to Wounded Knee, rode to Ogalalla, home I’ll

never be.Bukowski was a jerk, Berryman was best! He wrote like wet paper-mache and went

the Heming-way. The hitman, Walt Whitman, John Wilmot penned

his poetry while riddled with the pox.

Luke 24, Dig, Lazarus

Dig!

Your Red Label and Marilyn

Monroe in the Marley Bone

Coach

Siamese Twins

The Twins

This group project (with Erika Lindsay) was an installation at the Grass Lakes Sanctuary in Chelsea, MI. The purpose of the studio was not only to design a fabric structure but also to build it on site. The was inspired by a picture of conjoined twins. Like the twins, each piece is dependent on the other yet it faces in different directions and interacts with the river banks in different ways. The installation is a fabric and cable structure, sewn in studio and put together on site.

The 1000 Year Wall

This group project (with Justin Mast and Caitlin Schroeder) is a live/work marine biology facility located on the island of St. Croix. The proposed building extends out into the ocean, positioning the scientists in extreme proximity to the organisms they are studying. Rather than outside observers, they become part of their own experiments. The building is made of three components—a 1,000 year wall, a mobile and performative roof-scape, and a series of programmatic spaces anchored to the wall. Vertical tanks begin at the sea floor and pierce through the building. The wall aspires to permanence through its thickness and material construction and is carved to service near term occupation and stage future possibilities. Its porosity is intended to produce multiple biological and social activities. Rather than fight the losing battle of preservation, this building and its program has to create new systems, landscapes, and ecologies—complete with the built environment and human technology. This building is self-sustainable, harnessing wave energy underneath and recycling organic matter through wet-lands on the roof.

1000 Year Wall

There is a high level of anxiety currently within the discipline of Architecture. There is an absence of cohesion in both practice and pedagogy. The discipline seems to be riding on to the coattails of technique as opposed to style or discourse – using tectonics to define and validate itself instead of looking to culture. Architecture seems wounded and vulnerable and is looking for anything to bolster its ego and use as a defensive weapon. Architecture can’t move forward from this defensive position until it faces its fears, but in order to face its phobias, they must first manifest.

When we suffer from stress and anxiety, it can often manifest in psycho-cerebral ways, such as headaches or bad dreams. What could constitute architecture’s manifestation of anxiety?

Archiphobia

In this project, I explore possible phobic or psycho-semantic manifestations in an anthropomorphized architecture. This consists of three interventions within three different apartments in a single apartment building. The spaces (pre-intervention) are domestic and normative. Each intervention is an evocation of an anxiety or disorder – making the entire apartment a spatial manifestation of its symptoms. The spatial interventions are both literal and allegorical, employing new materials, added partitions and cutouts.

Other Artwork