Space-Igoe
Entry for the Competition Pruitt Igoe Now: The Unmentioned Modern Landscape Space-Igoe Team: Angel Rafael Marrero, Jesus Aponte Fontanes, and Carlos Vigo Torres From Pruitt-Igoe to Space-Igoe: Promoting an urban renaissance of the city of St. Louis The Pruitt-Igoe site, abandoned for the last 36 years, is a perfect example of the urban condition of St. Louis beyond its Downtown border and a testament to the city’s “urban renewal trauma.” We believe that any proposal for the redevelopment of this site must serve as a catalyst for the renewal of urban life and for the redevelopment of northern St. Louis. Our proposal, Space Igoe, is a science fiction themed facility dedicated to the study of…
Isla del Diablo Pavilion
This project serves as an expansion of a small community market-garden in a urban context. This garden grows and harvests crops to sell them to the community and local businesses. Children go to the garden after school to help with the garden shores and finish up their homework. As an intent to offer better learning experiences for children of the community, this expansion adds multiple learning spaces for supervised study groups and specialized mentoring. The expansion lies in the threshold between the garden and a urban forest that was formerly occupied by squatters. This marks the entrance to a natural environment, contrasting the urban character of the surroundings. The basic design idea is a slanted roof that protects two…
Undergraduate Portfolio
While looking around for inspiration in other portfolios, I found that there are many great designs that become unreadable with suffocating layouts that include too much information. So I made sure that my drawings had some breathing space. Also, I love drawings that speak for themselves, so I arranged the text in a single column, on the left side of the spread, so that it does not “intoxicate” the drawings, and let them breath, freestanding and uncluttered. Now the drawings can relate to each other, and if you need descriptive information, you can look for the text on the left. I want a clean layout with detailed drawings and hi-quality renders, along with brief, to the point…
El Caño High School
El Caño Martin Peña is a waterway canal that travels through the center of San Juan, Puerto Rico. During the early 1900s, a community of impoverished squatters settled in its surroundings, polluting the canal and creating a hazardous environment. With plans to dredge the canal, a revitalization of the area is in the works. El Caño High School is designed to educate and integrate this community with the adjacent areas. Located parallel to a main transit avenue and perpendicular to el Caño Martin Peña, its form has to be inclusive to the community, but exclusive of the noise and distractions of the transit avenue, while maintaining a good relationship with nature and the canal. El…
From Music to Architecture
The music of Edgard Varèse is described as organized music, a concept he developed, which refers to the grouping of certain timbres and rhythms to create new definitions of music. Intégrales, one of Varèse’s masterpieces is analyzed to create an architectural concept for a recreational pavilion. Intégrales contains a very perceptible motif that represents the datum of the composition. It is expressed as an inexact repetition and it suffers different types of transformations: reduction, elongation, metric displacement, re-orchestration, etc. The sonar masses represent the polyphony of the composition. Sounds are divided in three groups: wood, bronze, and percussion. Each of these contain differ in characteristics such as: interval, registry, contour, timbre, dynamic, and attack. The…
Captus: Mixed-Use Housing
Captus is a Mixed-Use Housing Project designed to meet the contemporary housing needs by combining a series of smart design decisions and sustainable strategies, creating an economical and eco-friendly housing alternative for people that want to live in the city. As an initial strategy, the location was carefully selected to maximize the interaction with public services such as the Train Station, located adjacent to the project. The organizational concept was to designate three special areas, two atriums and a courtyard, which are going to define the circulation strategy in the project’s triangular site. The ground floor has four commercial spaces for rent to activate the special areas that will integrate with the Train Stations traffic,…
Brise-Soleil, Rio Piedras
The Río Piedras Police Headquarters suffers from a poorly designed west façade. A brise-soleil was designed to remedy some aspects of the building, such as its general aesthetics, interior light quality, interior protection from sun, definition of entrance, and its integration with context. Steel was chosen as the main material for the brise-soleil as it inspires security and protection. The design consists of a series of horizontal metal planks that are bolted on to a truss structure that takes the form of a wave pattern. This enables it to have an outward protrusion that can be seen from the street. It’s divided in 48 sections with different protrusion angles that regulate sun, wind, and rain…
Seating Apparatus
The design of a seating apparatus using as a starting point a detail of an object that uses tension and compression as a system. A butterfly latch was selected and analyzed in section drawings to understand its function and generate a design idea. The latch uses a spring that compresses a rotary element to snap into a secure state when closed, and requires force to open. This principle is applied in a seating apparatus as a mechanism for comfort in the act of seating. Two opposite L-shaped pieces are designed to work with the mechanism to create an apparatus that resembles the latch in form and function. As downward force is applied in the act of seating, the…
