[email protected]

Alexander Bodkin Portfolio 62 pages, PDF (RGB) Exported - 2019 Curriculum Vitae 2

Thesis 4 Americanaaaaaaa! Project 01 22 A Museum of Art & Environment near Reno Project 02 32 Four Houses in Athens Project 03 42 Iceland Boat Party Previous 54 Employment 01 Lateral Office, , Canada Previous 58 Employment 02 Uno Tomoaki, Nagoya, Japan Curriculum Vitae 2

Education abodkin @mit.edu 2016 MIT School of Architecture and Planning, Cambridge, USA - 2019 Master of Architecture, Advanced Placement Awards: Department of Architecture Merit Fellowship, MIT Sandbox Innovation Fund, MISTI Travel & Research Fund, Bill Mitchell ++ Fund Award, Harold Horowitz Student Research Fund Award

2009 School of Architecture, Cambridge, Canada - 2014 Honours Bachelor of Architectural Studies, Co-op (With Distinction)

2013 University of Waterloo Rome Program, Rome, Italy Awards: Ontario Professional Engineers Foundation Undergraduate Scholarship, J.R. Coutts International Experience Scholarship, President’s Scholarship, 3B Outstanding Design Award, 1B Outstanding Design Award, Dean’s Honour List, Excellent Academic Standing, Summer Works Government of Ontario Grant

Independent Initiatives

2017 Group Project, MIT School of Architecture and Planning - 2019 Co-Founder, Organizer, Designer We are working with a nonprofit in rural North Carolina to transform a decommissioned prison into a community center and agricultural hub. www.groupproject.us

2016 Group Chat, Toronto, Canada Co-Director, Curator Monthly speaker series and discussion, with Sarah Gunawan. www.groupchat.info

2012, BRIDGE Centre for Architecture and Design, University of Waterloo 2015 Founding Member, Web Developer, Designer, and Contributor Building community through a website and gallery space for students. www.waterlooarchitecture.com

Some Tools that I am Learning: Revit, Cinema4D, Trimble RealWorks, HTML, CSS, Python, JS Alexander Bodkin 3

Professional Experience

2015 Lateral Office, Toronto, Canada April Designer, Researcher - 2016 Project Lead, Architecture Biennial, “Making Camp” Aug Project Lead (Design Development), Winter Installation, “Impulse” Awards: Azure Jury Award, Azure People’s Choice Award, RAIC National Urban Design Award, IES Montreal Prix Lumiere Project Lead, Montreal Street Revitalization Competition, “Gathering Lines” Project Lead, RIBA Competition, “Renewing the Remote” Designer, Salivik Elder Care Facility

2014 MJM Architects, Toronto, Canada Jan Architectural Intern - May Environmental Graphics, Various Projects Fabrication Drawings, Great Plains Arena, Custom Furniture Feasibility Study, University of Arena

2013 Uno Tomoaki Architecture Office, Nagoya, Japan Feb Architectural Intern - Aug Lead Model Maker, Hoshino House, Hitotsuyama House, Kojima House Construction & Fabrication Drawings, Various Projects On-site Construction Labour, Various Projects

2011 KPMB Architects, Toronto, Canada Sept Architectural Intern - Dec Design Development, Arts Court Complex

2011 Gluck+ (formerly Peter Gluck & Partners), , USA Jan Architectural Intern - April Graphics, Various Projects Design Development, Nonprofit Client Information Booklet

Some Tools that I Know: Rhino, Grasshopper, VRay, Adobe PS/ID/AI/PR, AutoCAD, Lasercutter, CNC Mill, MIG Welder Thesis 4 Americanaaaaaaa! or: A Welcome Home in Lowell, Massachusetts 2018 Thesis Advisor: Mariana Ibañez

Thesis Readers: This thesis studies how nostalgia Timothy Hyde and the envelope of the private & Hashim American home have been used to Sarkis construct a collective with shared spatial and social expectations in Lowell, Massachusetts. It critiques The Welcome Home is proposed as the preservation agenda established a hub for newcomer services and by Lowell in the 1970s, which recalls amenities that provides locals with the city’s past as a prosperous 19th new community space as well. The century textile mill town by flattening site is a residential block with five legible architectural characteristics existing gable front homes whose into familiar façade compositions envelopes are manipulated and viewed from the street. distorted to form a larger, connected whole with multiple street-facing It then uses Lowell’s extensive history approaches. As the symbolic legibility of immigration as an opportunity of these familiar architectural to interrogate the city’s collective languages is challenged, the envelopes nostalgia and its implications through begin to suggest alternate internal the lens of the newcomer. In doing so, organizations which have the potential this project challenges and expands to shape the social relationships, what the American home is, what it activities, and negotiations of a new means, and who gets to live in it. collective within.

Ultimately, the Welcome Home 6 explores the poetic possibilities in the tensions between nostalgia and invention, between domestic and institutional, between local and newcomer.

Its final design is presented primarily through a four-part model, with each part corresponding roughly to a zone (or “house”) of the Welcome Home. The model is 1:25 scale, large enough to achieve the feeling of a dollhouse or a model train set and thus potentially slip into a viewer’s own cloud of memories and nostalgia. 7 8

In the School House, classrooms for after school programs and language exchanges are packed inside two of the existing homes. This pressure shifts the floorplates off of their expected heights, thus confusing and challenging the expected vertical order.

Food House

School House 9 10

In the Hangout House, one of the existing home’s volumes is enlarged until it hits another existing home, creating a large double pitched hall on the upper floor, and a series of small living rooms on the ground floor, all of which could be used for socializing, game nights, and performances.

Hangout House

School House

The Work House is the only zone 12 that does not contain an existing house within its footprint. As such, it extends the roofline and foundation from elsewhere, and omits the “middle floors” to connect basement with attic. Offices for civic services, coworking spaces, and a small workshop are all under one roof here.

Work House

Hangout House 13 14

In the Food House, the layers of the existing house are delaminated to make space for an oversized shared kitchen and greenhouse. The balloon frame of the old house sits in and supports these new uses.

Food House

Work House

Additional photos of the Food House.

The outer clapboard layer becomes a screen that bends down towards the street, obstructing the glass walls behind. The staircase slips between wall layers.

A wood burning cooking stove pipes warm air up through the glass chimney.

The sunken kitchen fills the ground floor and uses foundation walls as counter space. Additional photos of the Hangout 17 House.

The covered walkway faces onto the central lawn.

The ground floor living room connects two existing home footprints and is broken up by large scale furnitures. Hangout House

Work House School House

Food House

Project 01 22 2017 A Museum of Art & Environment near Reno

The museum is located near a desert The experiments are documented in industrial park 25 miles outside five videos that construct narratives of Reno, Nevada. It riffs on the within the museum site. As fictions, architecture of prospector towns, these narrative videos explore how generic industrial buildings, and humans, animals, plants, etc. might Burning Man tents to create a desert occupy and transform the museum mirage of an encampment in flux. over time.

This project thinks through themes Dirt and sand are swept up by the of control and contingency, the role wind and caught in deep, textured and effects of time in architecture, façades. Landslides gradually bury a and how a project can establish a set tax-haven freeport at the bottom of a of parameters (form, detail, material, steep hill. The loose canopy flops and organization, etc.) that anticipate and blows in a storm, eventually weighed register environmental change while down by rain that drips through to also supporting the emergence of feed vegetation piles below. An annual novel environmental conditions. ritual of gathering dry brush from around the museum and burning it A 3.5m x 3.5m physical model of the in the chimneys overlays a cyclical, museum at 1:100 acts as a platform for human-managed act of maintenance on experiments relating to these themes. the site.

Plan. 24 Aerial render of the museum in the 25 sloping Nevada desert as the chimneys are burning dry brush from the site. It is a desert mirage of an encampment in flux. Plan fragment of reception, 26 groundskeeper shop, and administration offices. Video stills of experiments relating The loose canopy flops and blows in a to slow environmental change and the storm. Rain weighs the canopy down emergence of novel environmental and drips through to feed a compost conditions. pile below. Plan fragment of archive, indoor/ 28 outdoor labs, education spaces, and workshop. More video stills. 29

Dirt and sand swept up by the wind and caught in the textured facade, while landslides down steep topography bury the tax-haven freeport below. Video stills depicting an annual ritual 30 of gathering dry brush from around the site and burning it in the chimneys. It overlays a cyclical, human-managed 31 event on an otherwise unpredictable existence. Project 02 32 2018

Project Four Houses in Athens completed w/ Daniel Marshall

This studio was organized in The houses are designed using a partnership with The Home Project, a collection of room-blocks which are Greek nonprofit that provides shelter stacked and offset around shared and support for unaccompanied living rooms and generous circulation minors who have arrived in Greece space. We addressed the challenge and will either temporarily or of 80 youths living in close quarters permanently live there. Typically, by using the room-blocks to shape the Home Project rents three-storey various scales of personal and shared apartments and converts them into space, and then providing soft shelters for 16 to 30 children. With the elements that could either close or Home Project, we developed a brief open the space further. for a new construction that would house 80 children. Typical Athenian CMU and concrete slab construction is paired Our proposal is for a collection of with colourful metals, ornamental four houses that are each designed balustrades, and sun-shading vines. for 20 children. The houses sit on top of a shared ground floor with a large It’s strange to do a design studio in kitchen, school/dining/event space, this context for a lot of reasons, but and gym, which all sits within the I also think it’s important to test perimeter wall of an old building in what architecture and the academic Athens. institution can offer.

Shaded and illuminated rooftops can 36 be used for movie screenings, herb gardens, or cooking and grilling. The four classrooms can be closed off 37 by soundproof curtains or opened up into a large dining hall and event space. Each child has their own bed, storage, 38 desk, and changing area. The bedroom and bathroom blocks 39 shape the generous hallways and living rooms on each floor.

Project 03 42 2017 Iceland Boat Party

Iceland Boat Party is an (invented) position and length of their walls, and annual festival of northern Icelandic how open or closed their operable arts and culture, which takes place heavy mesh curtains are. on the Eyjafjarðará river during the spring melt season. The boats can be connected via hinges into casual compositions, but they Boat Party’s unfixed architecture can also float unattached. It’s glamping relies on the river’s rhythms and meets lazy river. cycles, from the winding banks upstream, to the tidal flats and fjord As a whole, the project builds on downstream. old and new elements of Icelandic identity, such as seafaring, the seasonal The Party occurs on a series of celebration of environmental events, generic boat types, which are and tourism. differentiated by their size, the

Initial design studies on defamiliarizing 44 boat forms and tourist infrastructures in Iceland through grouping, scaling, and ornament. One of three toy architectural models. 45 The overlaid images show how aluminum hinges allow the wooden boats to rotate about one another.

Aluminum hinge sandwiched between two layers of wood Scenario 1: Boat Launch 46 (Free + Chain Conditions)

Private boats touch tangentially, or float solo. 47 Scenario 2: Large Stage 48 (Theatre-in-the-Round Condition)

An occupiable wooden band is created when the boats cluster tightly. 49 Scenario 3: Small Stage 50 (Low Tide Condition)

Boats are loosely arranged around, and oriented towards, a central stage. 51 Scenario 4: Nighttime Dancing 52 (Bay Condition)

An illuminated and protected temporary bay is formed by the arrangement of boats. 53 Previous 54 2015 April Employment 01 - 2016 Aug Lateral Office Toronto, Canada

Lateral Office, led by professors Through these projects, I further Mason White and Lola Sheppard, developed my skills as an independent is a highly collaborative practice, architectural investigator – creating embracing research-driven design design briefs, building a body of processes and experimental work in a research, and synthesizing that team-based setting. research within new design proposals.

At Lateral, I led multiple research and design projects across various scales, from remote island master plans to public space installations in Montreal.

Impulse 56

I was project lead during the competition and design development Tasks: Design. Rendering. Preliminary phases for Impulse, a public space fabrication drawings. installation in Montreal comprised of Site install. thirty oversized see-saws.

The two-point fulcrum allows the see- saws to stabilize horizontally when not in use. When in use, the see-saws brighten and play sounds. They shift along the length of the plaza in plan, and their vertical motion creates a light and sound wave in perspective. Making Camp 57 Tasks: Design. I was also project lead for Fabrication. Drawing. Lateral’s entry to the 2015 Site install. Chicago Architecture Biennial.

Making Camp proposes five new models for collective camping, and asks how a minimal architecture might enhance camping experiences, reduce environmental impact, and open up alternate landscapes for occupation. Previous 58 2013 Feb Employment 02 - Aug Uno Tomoaki Architecture Office Nagoya, Japan

Uno Tomoaki Architecture Office Working 80 hours per week allowed is a five-person architecture and me to spend a considerable amount construction management firm in of time both on the job site and in Nagoya, Japan focused primarily on the office. This led to an intimate residential projects. understanding of Uno’s projects and their respective construction I worked with the team on tasks processes. ranging from drafting and model building to construction management, on-site labour, and component fabrication for five homes. 59

Tasks: Detail drawings for steel connections, doors, and windows. Physical model.

Kawayanama House Kojima House

Tasks: Millwork drawings. Steel fabrication drawings. On-site construction labour. Physical model. Hitotsuyama 61 House

Tasks: Millwork drawings. Preliminary structural models and construction documents. [email protected]

Alexander Bodkin Portfolio 62 pages, PDF (RGB) Exported - 2019