R-3 Repository :: Browsing by Author "Vassallo, Jesus"

Browsing by Author "Vassallo, Jesus"

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Alternative Housing for Houston
(2023-04-19) Simpson, Edward Warfield; Vassallo, Jesus
Houston’s status as an affordable and diverse city is being threatened by inadequate housing. An assessment of current housing trends reveals that speculative development models within Houston’s urban core, such as the proliferation of luxury townhomes in low-income neighborhoods, exacerbate the wealth gap in communities and produce a negative impact on the urban fabric. Meanwhile, large amounts of vacant land in these neighborhoods present an opportunity for imagining a new generation of more equitable housing. This thesis proposes an alternative infill housing typology for Houston’s Third Ward aimed at ensuring long-term social and economic resilience for the neighborhood. In doing so, the project presents an argument for embracing the inherent affordability in collective living and reconceptualizing our territorial relationship with the city.
Animate Length: The French Connection
(2016-04-21) Daurio, Patrick; Vassallo, Jesus; Wittenberg, Gordon
This project takes on the highway as its site of investigation by merging infrastructure and architecture to address and redefine this imposed urban edge. Situated along the Boulevard Périphérique in Paris, which forms the municipal boundary of the French capital, this project proposes a single building of nearly one mile in length to unite the city with its suburb. At this scale, architecture leverages the potential of duration to address the dispersed audience of the car passing beneath the building. Thus, this project activates the filmic potential of the car; by attaching length to speed, an architecture of animation begins to emerge as one that produces a new reading of the architectural object through the movement image, creating a phenomenal engagement with architecture only previously possible in film.
Commoning on the Ring Road
(2021-01-28) Carr, Brendan; Vassallo, Jesus; Finley, Dawn
This thesis synthesizes two decaying typologies on the periphery of Houston, the office block and low-rise mass housing, with the ambition to distill different uses and scales of space into a multivalent collective form. The outer edges of Houston house an unexpected degree of density. Largely built during the first oil boom of the late 1960s and 70s, a patchwork of low-rise high-density developments are the naturally-occurring affordable housing stock of the city. However, these developments are reaching the end of their useful life at a time when the city faces a critical need for housing. Contemporaneous to these mid-century low-rise housing projects, the suburban office block faces a different kind of decay. Though physically durable, these sites face increasingly high vacancy rates, only exacerbated by the on-going pandemic. Rather than continue a model of development predicated on unlimited availability of land, these under-utilized sites can be given a new life through the expansion of their use and spatial composition. Operating on a scale somewhere between city and building, the mega-parcels that constitute the exurban environment offer a unique opportunity to reimagine the privatized landscape of the urban periphery.
Cultivate Collective
(2014-04-25) Yi, De; Wittenberg, Gordon; Vassallo, Jesus; Colman, Scott
Ant tribes are a social phenomenon of young college graduates that group together in large Chinese cities, defined equally by their dreams of upward mobility and their precarity. They have achieved a critical mass and identity that has fueled widespread media coverage, and the combination of reality and utopianism that fuel their motivations make them a viable subject for an architecture that cultivates a contemporary collective. Throughout the twentieth century, architects have used mass housing as a testing ground for new forms of collective living, resulting in archetypical buildings such as Ginzburg's Narkomfin and Corbusier's Unite. While the necessity of such a project remains, the mode of operation has shifted. To defy the dense processes of privatization that govern housing today, architecture needs to operate from marginalized points of society, and create archetypes from which ideas can be distilled for the mainstream. Such a position allows architecture to pursue utopian ambitions through pragmatic causes. The Soviet Constructivists, operating in the utopian-pragmatic moment of realizing a socialist state, redefined the program (or life) embodied in housing and gave the resultant collective a representational form. Contemporary China is undergoing an equally radical social transformation, and while the dominant political structure is far too complex to reinterpret directly, there are many isolated moments of social marginalization that allow for architectural opportunism. This project proposal adopts the ant tribe as the prompt for a new archetypal housing block that cultivates a way of life for this multi-various collective. In addressing the human mass that comprises a contemporary subject, this project takes a new approach to its architectural equivalent - the mass of housing units. Here, the potential of mass unit aggregation in its organizational and symbolic capabilities is pushed to new limits and possibilities - straddling the same line as the ant tribe itself - between dreams and reality.
Discontinuous Monument
(2018-04-11) McNamara, Kalen Winchester; Vassallo, Jesus; Wittenberg, Gordon
As a series of waypoints for touring musicians traveling between major music cities across the United States, this project links disparate sites into a cultural infrastructure. Sited in the no man’s land between the interstate highway and adjacent small towns, it creates a neutral field for interaction between traveling urbanites and rural residents. Within the compound, an ice house acts as a more fixed programmatic element to draw visitors from the nearby town, while lodging areas provide shelter to musicians who are just passing through. An outdoor performance space brings the two programs together, configured flexibly to host small shows as well as large festivals. The compound is anchored by a massive roof structure that gives visibility from the highway and projects an ambiguous monumentality with implicit vernacular resonances. The architecture is expressed in a new language that is neither urban nor rural, suspended between the purity of abstraction and the grit of reality.
In Our Backyard
(2019-04-17) Peterson, Grey; Colman, Scott; Vassallo, Jesus
As of 2018, Los Angeles has a growing homeless population of over 55,000 people, representing a fifth of the United States homeless population. As development and gentrification occur, densifying the city, people with variable economic statuses and lack of a support system are left in the position of leaving their homes. This thesis aims to create a common space for the growing homeless population of Skid Row and the gentrifying neighborhoods surrounding it, by integrating a network of community gardens with transitional housing and basic amenities, while creating visibility, conversation, and collaboration between two disconnected populations.
LAYERED OSCILLATION
(2014-04-25) Smirnova, Varvara; Wittenberg, Gordon; Vassallo, Jesus; Colman, Scott
The following thesis sets out to create an oscillating reading between two types of space: universal and compartmental. In this project, an existing cast-iron building in SoHo, Manhattan, takes on a program of a spa. The cast-iron structure stands in for open plan and the notion of continuity. The building has a total of 8 levels and is defined by an even rhythm of cast iron columns that delineate its perimeter. In contrast, the spa deals with inherently private and compartmental space. Enclosure and separation of unique environments associated with the spa are contrasted with the openness and continuity of the existing building in SoHo. In order to produce a simultaneity of reading, the project utilizes a striated structural system that originates from the logic of the existing building. This layered system incorporates a multitude of readings based on its orientation. From one angle a solid wall blocks the viewer’s perception of the space beyond, providing only a hint of what’s to come through an arched aperture of the snaking hallway; from another angle it produces an unobstructed view of a space that is physically separated from that which the viewer occupies. At all times, the system plays up the repetitive nature of the existing bays producing an enhanced reading of the existing building’s depth. The oscillating perception of a spatial juxtaposition produces a continuous sense of expectation which is interrupted by moments of intrigue. The fluctuation between expectation and intrigue generates a high degree of perceptual awareness in visitors of the spa.
Levee Otherwise
(2015-04-23) Marrin, Elizabeth Glass; Vassallo, Jesus; Colman, Scott; Wittenberg, Gordon
Within the fluvial landscape of Louisiana, the levee is the means by which absolute lines are drawn upon unstable territories. A natural landform in origin, the levee historically operated as the high ground and collective refuge in times of flood. Through artificial fortification, the levee has become a normalizing and militaristic construct, protecting one place at the expense of another. Morgan City, Louisiana operates in the shadow of a regional infrastructure engineered to support a global economy. Located at the terminus of the Atchafalaya Floodway, Morgan City is surrounded by a 17-foot concrete levee wall that segregates an industrialized riverfront from the city as a whole. While currently these infrastructural constructs produce limits without formal or cultural intent, this thesis aims to reclaim the levee wall as an urban device, civic interface, and common ground. This ambition is explored through a riverfront master plan for Morgan City. The architecture is articulated as a system of elevated streets, vertical residential towers, and horizontal vocational campus blocks. While these elements operate as an infrastructural system to protect the existing city from seasonal floods, the architecture generates a tension between monumental expression and the everyday. The programmatic organization repositions the citizens of Morgan City in relationship to the region’s bureaucratic and corporate institutions. The plan’s formal relationship to the cartesian grid generates an edge condition that operates as an integrated element within the existing city form. These architectural moves aim to reintroduce the river into cultural consciousness.
Mass Timber Construction
(Rice University, 2015) Vassallo, Jesus; Shell Center for Sustainability
property Conveyor
(2015-04-15) Weiss, Louis J; Wittenberg, Gordon; Vassallo, Jesus; Colman, Scott
The innovative and entrepreneurial drive are constructs that inform the collective American psyche, and a balance between exclusive, limited rights to knowledge and the free conveyance of knowledge within the public realm constitutes the balance which the patent system should strive to achieve. However, the over-privileging of some with exclusive rights to ideas often works to the detriment of the American public, accentuates our individual subjective desires, and suppresses our collective conscience. Property Conveyor re-imagines the United States Patent Office. It houses all office programs related to patent review and introduces three new, distinctly public programs: an education forum, courtrooms for patent infringement cases, and a café, all providing the opportunity for discourse on patented information and technology. By refashioning the patent office with a mix of private office programs and related public programs, it becomes a new kind of institution in which the machines of bureaucracy and its effects on public life are brought into a productive relationship. Spiral forms suggest nested relations between interior and exterior, public and private. The spiral begins and ends at distinct points, but along its route, every part is related to all others. In this project, a spiral datum provides the primary horizontal circulation space for all users of the building. In so doing, the spiral coheres a thicket of public and private functions into a single form which produces relations not only between adjacent programs, but across the spectrum of programs within the building. The spiral is an orienting device, coordinating and opening up the functions of a bureaucracy to the city. It is a form through which the public is invited, leading them to express their affirmations and doubts about the patent process and the nature of intellectual property at large.
The Secret of the Zoo Exposed
(2017-03-29) Guan, Yingying; Vassallo, Jesus
The zoo has always been an institution that simultaneously functions as a garden of escape and a miniature city. Starting off with this observation, the thesis investigates the zoo’s urban and architectural implications and proposes an urban model that works with nature in a seamless manner. It explores the possibilities of a homogeneous field in light of contemporary architectural practices and challenges the discipline of architectural composition through its critique of a long-lasting figure-ground tendency. The project operates within various scales: the flexible urban system is further defined through a series of specific architectural interventions. By proposing to substitute all captive animals with sound and digital projections, the thesis ends with a search for the zoo’s potential role in the era of an ongoing mass extinction. The absence captured by the imagery aims to draw attention to this fragile reality through the juxtaposition of temporary structures and permanent landscape.

Browsing by Author "Vassallo, Jesus"

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