[ stephanie morgenthaler | architecture design ]

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stephanie morgenthaler | (630) 809-7716 | smorgenthaler@gmail.comb.s.a.s. university of illinois 2013 | m.arch university of illinois 2015

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Designing in conjunction with Savannah Technical College, the challenge for this studio project was to work for the National Parks Service at the site of Fort Pulaski. To this client, it was important to design in a historic manner, using traditional building techniques in a new construction. In groups, we took on the challenge to design a master plan for the area we were designing on, incorporating a main cabin-with gathering spaces and support for volunteers visiting the site, along with two lodging styles for volunteers working on the site can stay in. My challenge was to create a cabin which fulfilled a need for a “semi-private” lodging space. I chose to create three separate spaces within this, two on the first floor and a third lofted space, utilizing the high roof of the building, a traditional element of Savannah architecture. As a part of this project, we had the opportunity to work directly with the National Parks System workers at Fort Pulaski to create something they are in need of, in a manner that would be right for them here. We worked through siting challenges and programming with them in order to create a master planning formula, which was to be interpreted by each individual. We also had to create and design details, which were then built by students in historic preservation architecture at Savannah Technical College. This project had all parties in constant contact with each other throughout the design and implementation process.Our master plan was named the “Compact Plan” as all three cabin types shared a collective deck space, which uses metal basin-pans to filter and drain water into rain barrels below the deck. Using a grey-water system was something that was important to the National Park workers. This cabin was dubbed the “Barn Door” project, drawing the name from the large barn door that either opens the area way, which is a nod to the traditional “dogtrot” housing style that is so integral to Savannah culture. The barn door is an important, movable and changeable element which can be used to open up the cabin for air flow, or close down the cabin in case of poor weather, or when it is not in use, at the end of the volunteer season. It was also very important here to utilize passive climate-control techniques and to take advantage of the Savannah siting; the walls of this project are constructed of horizontal louvered walls so wind can flow through. When the cabin needs to be closed down, there are smaller moveable barn doors on the interior which can be adjusted by those staying in the cabins in order to change the air flow. To eliminate the need for any conventional heating, wood burning fireplaces in each cabin provide enough heat for the short, cooler season in Savannah.

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42 8

[“Barn Door” Cabin]

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Inspired by the quote from Native American author Trudy Griffin-Pierce, “The seasons divide the year into halves, each with its own characteristics. In hai, winter, the earth and the beings that live on its surface rest or die; in shi, summer, the earth and its inhabitants become active once more as they are restored to life. Changing Woman, who embodies the earth’s powers of rejuvenation, goes through the same cycle of old age and restoration to beauty and youth, while Sky goes through his own seasonal changes. Again, we see the concept of dynamic order, or order being continuously recreated through time, as well as the pairing of complements, both essential to the order of the Navajo universe.” This quote emphasizes seasonality and polarity which keeps nature in balance. Driven by this idea, I created a shape which embraces the duality of shape, swooping in two directions. This creates an opportunity to split the exhibit space between indoor and open-air spaces. The museum was to be designed to demonstrate traditional Native American House Architecture and to display modern research and works by groups of Indigenous peoples. The spaces would serve as a display and meeting space for Native cultural groups and also as learning spaces for others. The site is on Northerly Island in Chicago which is right in the heart of museum region of the city, but also located along Lake Michigan. This opens up the chance to use the Lake for more than just the aesthetic. I used traditional inspiration along with modern technology to heat and cool spaces using radiant floors powered by the lake water. Program design and arrangement were also a key component of this project. Half of the exhibit space is in the temperature-controlled indoor area, and half has an open-air element. Arrangement of the houses from regions across North America has been done according to the regional climate. Those climates most similar to Chicago have their housing example exhibited in the open-air region to create an authentic feel. Those which have climates much different than Illinois are located on the interior portion for temperature control purposes. The housing types chosen from each region have the common element of being insulated with the traditional mat-weaving technique which crosses each cultural group of indigenous peoples all over North America.

[Native American Architecture Museum]

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Drawing inspiration from the grasses used for insulation when woven together. Studying this technique gave me an appreciation for the polarity of nature versus control, and greatly inspired my ideas for the texture of the building. Rather than cover the exterior of the museum building with woven mats as was traditional, I chose instead to reflect the mat texture by using them as formwork for a massive rammed earth wall. Using modern technology to improve upon the traditional techniques, the rammed earth wall can be extremely beautiful, textured, and insulating for the activity inside. In order to protect the wall in extreme temperature, a thatch-framed style roof, made from engineered lumber covers beyond the walls. For the indoor portion, the roof has spans of glass between the lumber, where the open-air portion still has the gridded lumber, but without the glass paneling.

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[polarity of seasons]

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[designability][connectability][bu i ldab i l i t y ][ p o s s i b i l i t y ]

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“New Brutalism” focuses on creating a consumer-based prototype of panel products which can be applied to any facade by the users themselves, without the need for any specialized skills. This project came out of a need for an easy way to redo the facades of brutalist block housing in Latvia, without changing the buildings which are home to so many, making a panel system a perfect method to accomplish this goal. An endless variety of patterns and facades can be made from just a few mass-produced plastic panels. Like traditional Brutalism branching off of the Modernist Movement, “New Brutalism” focuses on an inexpensive material which is very formable and easy to manipulate. The panels created can also help to change the downsides of traditional Brutalism, like the wear and tear showing (updated with replaceable and completely interchangeable panels), as well as fixing the typically “inhuman” quality of traditional Brutalism, bringing the human quality in throughout the planning and creation stages of this new facade.

As one additional aspect of this project, we were to construct a component of our project in great detail, in order to learn the intricacies of our design being put into actual practice. For this component, I chose to build one panel frame and the panels within it in the same fashion as the conceptual design. This included refining the design as actual maneuverability was tested, as well as working with digital fabrication and modeling techniques to create each component needed.

[New Brutalism]

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An important piece of this project was the actual ability to design, create, detail, and refine the paneling system. I created each part of the system and manipulated it to create the best design possible to meet the criteria of my driving words for the project; designability, connectability, buildability, and possibility.

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Much of this design was about the process. Panel system ideas were created, tested, and manipulated until the final design evolved.

[testing panels on the facade]

[creating a panel][creating a pattern]

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[re-testing panels on the facade]

[manipulating panels]

[re-creating panels]

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The site for the Museum of Ancient Life was on the corner of Washington and Fremont in Champaign, Illinois. Currently, the site is a parking lot next to a theater-turned-children’s museum. Our project was to create a for-profit Museum of Ancient Life on the site, which would house a T-Rex skeleton within it, as the main exhibit, as well as support spaces to make this a fully-functional museum.

Much like Kahn’s Kimbell Art Museum, I wanted the focus of this Museum of Ancient Life to be on the natural lighting from outside. The walls and the roof of the building are bent in order to act as a filtration system for the sunlight coming in. A higher roof on the north side helps to change the direct southern sunlight into ambient light. The north side has more reveals of glass to let in the ambient lighting. The shape of the elevations of the building lets light in so that a hierarchy is created from the top of the T-Rex skeleton to the bottom. With the lighting filtered, this artifact also remains intact, not being destroyed by the Ultra-Violet rays. The interior of the building has been created to be a kid-friendly, learning environment. It contains many interactive displays and super-graphic walls as well as a sunken theater in the top floor.

[Museum of Ancient Life]

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This project had a funerary program to contain a burial chapel as well as a columbarium. Here, I had to study phenomenology and emotion, as well as traditional procession. Funerary architecture has to appeal to a variety of emotions to assist patrons in dealing with the death of loved ones. It must make an impact, but also provide a sense of comfort. My Chapel was designed around the dramatic procession and the emotion of texture. Sited at the end of a small cemetery, the building itself creates a processional path. Moving through the arcaded hall, there are private rooms which contain the columbarium. Loved ones can visit the deceased in a more intimate setting, away from the common path. At the end of the path, there is an indoor chapel with a high vaulted ceiling. The curling shape creates a center outdoor chapel as well. The building itself is a thick concrete wall formed with planks, and when the formwork has been removed, the plank texture remains. Between planks, an opportunity is created for a glass panel-window to allow controlled light in the space. In the chapel area, these windows are stained glass to filter in magnificently colored light.

[The Architecture of Death]

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This project statement instructed us to create a mid-rise tower for a site on LaSalle and Chicago streets in Chicago, Illinois. This was to include a commercial space on the first floor of the building as well as a residential area above. The apartments in this space were to range in size from studio up to 3 bedrooms.

My reaction to this project statement was to create a woven effect in order to take advantage of a natural shading using each floor of the building. This creates a division of spaces within the building using the exterior skin. The outward undulations are the private spaces within the building. These have wider screens to shield light and retain privacy, but come off of the building further, allowing the light in through the sides. Those spaces with inward undulations are public areas in each apartment. These areas of the exterior skin have very little screening to allow more light, since they are pushed into the building and shaded by the private spaces above.

[LaSalle Street Tower]

[concept models]

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The premise of this project was to create a Roadhouse which contains a biodiesel station, a hostel, and a restaurant to serve the people staying in the hostel as well as people passing through and filling up with biodiesel. The site for this project is Moab, Utah, right along the Colorado River. This was a collaborative project which began as a larger group project, where the group made decisions which would influence all of the pairs of designers within the group. For our group this included growing our own algae to be produced into biodiesel on-site.

After the initial stages of the collaboration amongst the larger group, the group broke off into partners for the remainder of the project design. For our efforts in Moab, we created a vast bridge structure over the single road through the area, to impose an intervention without altering the effect of the tall orange sandstone mountains of the area. Under this structure lies the hostel and restaurant, which is complete with storage for rafting and biking gear for those visiting. On top of the roof, cars can park and visitors have access to their hostel rooms through courtyards from the parking to the rooms. Leading up to this structure, there is a path of algae production along the road, leading you to the biodiesel stations with bioluminescent algae lighting the road at night. Being near the Colorado River, a major site of Whitewater Rafting, we wanted to make this roadhouse a hub for breaks from rafting, and a place to practice for bigger waves down the River with the Rafting Simulators we created.

[Riverfront Rafter’s Roadhouse]

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[masonry]

[blacksmithing]

[timber framing][traditional building workshops]27

In architecture, it is important to understand every aspect of design, including fabrication and construction. This helps the designer to understand techniques in a way you cannot learn without hands-on experience. For this reason, I feel it was important for me to have an experience in modeling, prototyping, and finally fabricating a piece of furniture. Through this process, the design of the table evolved from a vision into a constructible piece. Techniques for construction and tools available, along with my developed skill set ultimately merged with the original intent in a fluid process between thinking and construction. As a component of the Fort Pulaski lodging studio, we had an opportunity to learn how to construct building components with traditional building techniques. We did workshops for masonry construction, blacksmithing, and timber framing. Working with tools in hand really helped to mold the design process, thinking about the possibilities and the ultimate aesthetic of the possible schemes.

[construct]

[prototype]

[Fabrication & Construction]

[design]

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[animation slides]

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While working with hemingway+a/studio, I worked coordinating and creating graphics with a variety of software for different publications. We created an exhibit for a Meta-Modernism showcase at the University of Illinois’s Krannert Art Museum, as well as having graphics published in Global Architecture Houses and showcoased in GA’s annual show in Tokyo. Primarily, my responsibilities in these processes were modeling in Rhinoceros, Illustrator, and 3ds Max. Being able to digitally create an experience and video through a storyboarding technique helped these tasks to be completed successfully, in short periods of time.

[Digital Modeling]

[digital production] 30

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This research assignment began with a study of housing in New York City. Currently, New York is having a housing crisis, without ample housing to go around, but in my research I found that an abundance of potential housing real estate is being occupied by self-storage spaces. People’s junk is taking up the available space that could be used for housing. From this point, I started to look at the concept of the storage building spaces. They are broken up into different unit sizes to make a gridded pattern through the space. To me, this alluded to the idea of a modular housing type. What if we were able to convert the storage buildings into housing spaces, utilizing the idea of the storage modules as our base point? This led me to many studies about the endless patterning of spaces within storage buildings to make new housing. A formula began to develop which could be applied to all traditionally-designed storage buildings, where modules of specified sizes could start to fill in the spaces, creating a new housing environment for human inhabitants, instead of just “stuff.”

kitchen

bedroom

bathroomcloset

living area

+

[Modular Housing Research]

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The intent of this research project was to take a design and look at what it aims to do, then to take it apart and research the components of it. I chose a work called the “Bryophyte Building” done for a design competition by Thom Faulders. Faulders created this as a theoretical work which collects moss on the surface, that would utilize a system to keep the surface of the building damp, allowing the moss to flourish and grow on the undulations. For his design, the idea ended at this point. For my research, I delved deeper into the components of the system which would make this possible and detailed out the pieces of it. Detailing this system allowed me to think of each component and the control which it has over the design aesthetic. Parts of the system, such as the suction pump at the base (which functions much like a filter on a fish tank) can be changed to create areas of the building with different levels of dampness, allowing for a changing pattern of moss growth all around the building. This creates an interesting juxtaposition between the designer and the natural process of the moss growth. This research led me to physical experimentations with the filtration and movement of water through a space.

[suction pump]

[piston pump]

[helical screw rotor]

[sucker rod]

[Bryophyte Building Research]

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