W O R K S 2 0 1 2 - 2 0 1 4

Caleb Negash

cnegash@princeton.edu

calebnegash.com

C O N T E N T S

Capsule Park

Porta Burle Marx

Tour de Fraud

Disc Pavilion

Labyrinth Park

Surface Chair

Unfolder

AC Green Loop

Cavern Tower

Sydney Crab Shell

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This is a representative sample of my academic work in architecture and graphic design over the last three years. Many of these projects are not fully documented here: for more material, please see my web portfolio at www.calebnegash.com.

37.57 in

C A P S U L E P A R K

Billings Reservoir, São Paulo, Brazil

This project expands on concepts of enclosure and affected environments from an installation developed in an earlier project for the studio. The park is a system of floating plastic capsules ranging in size from 10 ft to 50 ft across, which are connected by flexible plastic tubes 5 ft in diameter. Both the capsules and the tubes are made from 4”-thick polyurethane.

Each capsule is initially tethered to the basin of the reservoir and slowly collects water in an upper compartment. As the sun causes the water to evaporate, filtering out all contaminants, the distilled vapor condenses along the inner surface of the capsule and trickles through a series of tubes down into the capsule’s lower compartment. Once each capsule fills to a predetermined capacity, its tethers release. Eventually all of the capsules float half-submerged in the water as a network of fully inhabitable pools.

Senior Independent Studio, F’14Mario Gandelsonas

The project is, in one sense, hyrdophobic—given the prohibitive cost and impracticality of treating the entire reservoir, this project instead seals participants off from the contaminated water in filtered chambers. Rather than disregarding the site, however, the capsules are programmed to foster an environment of ambiguous interaction with the water, playing on tensions between survival and recreation, clean and contaminated, contact and skins.

Ultimately, this project questions the notion that the sudden deployment of water infrastructure — especially for recreation — is always in the best interest of the community it serves. Given the susceptibility of the water park to neglect and disrepair, not to mention the potential of disrupting communities through heavy-handed formal expression, the capsules emerge from the water in conversation with both the street and the shoreline over several months or years.

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P O R T A B U R L E M A R XSenior Independent Studio, F’14Mario Gandelsonas

In search of storage for his extensive plant collection, landscape architect Roberto Burle Marx acquired the Sítio de Santo Antonio da Bica, on the outskirts of Río de Janeiro, in 1949. Burle Marx lived on the 365,000m² estate from 1973 until his death in 1994, taking expeditions into the Brazilian rain forest and around the world with botanists, architects and other researchers to gather plant specimens and artifacts. The Sítio Roberto Burle Marx, as it was renamed upon its donation to the Brazilian government in 1985, is home to over 3,500 species of plants, as well as Burle Marx’s eccentric collection of Brazilian folk art, pre-Columbian earthenware, paintings and antiquities.

At an auction in the Barra de Guaratiba in 1976, Burle Marx encountered and became enamored with an old wooden door. Ornate and towering, the door refused to be integrated into Burle Marx’s home; nonetheless determined, the architect built an additional anteroom to accommodate it, ultimately utilizing the space for his collection of art and artifacts.

This exhibit recreates and reinterprets the door, that privileged intermediary between Burle Marx’s living and nonliving collections. We explode its interior space to stage an interactive, sensorial threshold using sounds, smells and projections. In this liminal zone, imbued by Burle Marx with “poetic emotion,” plants and things come to life.

Team: Dalma Földesi, Michael Glassman, Nicolas Schmidt

9’-0” x 6’-0“ x 2’-0” installation from 1” MDF board and plywood Excerpts from a catalog produced to accompany the exhibit

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T O U R D E F R A U DSenior Independent Studio, F’14Mario Gandelsonas

Bernard Tschumi’s design for the Parc de la Villette (Paris, 1984-87) is quite opaque where the architect imagines it to be transparent. Intending the grid of ‘dots’ (follies) to be an anchoring force, a complement to the freedom of program enacted by the ‘surface’ and ‘line’ components of his plan, Tschumi isolates the park from its environs. The grid is never experienced as such by those who visit the park, resulting in disorientation. Tschumi’s park only exists in a virtual space, hovering over its site and lacking an organizing force.

A project situated in la Villette should fully integrate itself into the 19th arrondissement; further, it is obligated to confront the site’s historical marginalization, both physical and psychic. Conveniently, Tschumi’s follies are not without their successes; grotesque cadavres exquis, they are recognizable icons that recall la Villette’s origins as France’s largest slaughterhouse system and wholesale meat market. This proposal reforms, reprograms and redistributes the follies to serve as sculptural objects (and, in some cases, information kiosks) adorning BNP Paribas’ nineteen major Paris locations, disrupting the bank’s authoritarian narrative of public engagement.

Poster developed for a preliminary studio assignment on the history of gardens, parks and intertextuality.

Deconstructed folly

BNP bank exterior with sculptural additions

Recombinative analysis of Tschumi’s plan

Visceral memory of the site

Tschumi’s diagrammatic plan and follies

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D I S C P A V I L I O NJunior Independent Studio, S’14Hayley Eber

A proposed pavilion for temporary exhibition on the former site of the New Jersey Transit Princeton Station. This project treats the site as a fully-functioning train station, prior to its relocation: taking existing site conditions (trees, buildings, street furniture, the train, roads, select pedestrian paths) as discrete elements, the project casts the site in an eight-foot high disc of plaster, each element forming a void inside its outwardly uninterrupted surface. The pavilion develops over the course of its exhibition as visitors are provided with hammers and chisels to chip away at the disc’s edge, eventually tunneling through and connecting the voids within. Once the pavilion has eroded past a critical point, the performance ends and is ready to be swept away.

This project began with a reading of Herzog & de Meuron and Ai Weiwei’s 2012 Serpentine Gallery Pavilion, which inspired a series of material experiments:

Herzog & de Meuron’s pavilion was initially conceived as an abstracted landscape, exploring the use of unconventional materials to create affective environments. Employing this method as a means of analysis, I began similar experiments using wax, silicone, sugar, foam and other materials.

The 2012 Serpentine Pavilion, planned as a built dialogue between the entries of the previous 12 years

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E. SECTION

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+ 8’ - 0”

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D I S C P A V I L I O NJunior Independent Studio, S’14Hayley Eber

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L A B Y R I N T H P A R KJunior Independent Studio, S’14Hayley Eber

An exploration of the maze as a sculpture park. A “slow” pavilion that subverts the efficiency-based logic of the site, this project transforms a hurried crossing of paths into an exercise in aimless distraction.

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HEDGE

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L A B Y R I N T H P A R KJunior Independent Studio, S’14Hayley Eber

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L A B Y R I N T H P A R KJunior Independent Studio, S’14Hayley Eber

Transposing and subverting the logic of the x-path through combined methods of centralization and decentralization

1/8” MDF board

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An imprint of the body was carried through a series of design iterations, resulting in the final form and structure. The structure was designed and laid out using AutoCAD and Rhinoceros, then each piece was individually cut with a handsaw and assembled.

An exploration of the relationship between interrelated surfaces, especially in the context of the body and its interaction with these surfaces. By using the resting human body as a guide to define an initial surface and then developing a second surface by projection from key vertices of the first, I seek to confront the physical realities of the latter as a "chair". How is the sitting experience informed both by the structure of the original surface and by the initial body-surface relationship that defined it?

This piece explores the relationship between two interrelated surfaces and their interaction with the body.The lower shell provides structure and acts as a base from which the upper surface triangles are projected via compression springs.

S U R F A C E C H A I RJunior Independent Studio, F’13Jesse Reiser

3/4” MDF board5” compression springs

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U N F O L D E RComputational Design, F’13Axel Kilian

An architectural design proposal for a small-scale enclosure to test and develop computational design principles. Designed at the scale of several people, the structure is a network of 3 ft. square panels whose default behavior is to fold into simple enclosures, unfolding to allow entry as they sense figures approaching.

For this project, I was interested in exploring a design concept in which appearance and performance are opposed. This discrepancy between how a structure looks and how it exists in space, produces a whimsical effect: like a mischievous child, the deceptive structure taunts us and plays with the rules of spatial conduct. The primary question guiding this investigation was: in what ways can an enclosure “behave badly”?

Design developed through sketches in Rhino and Grasshopper; interface written in Processing; prototype modeled in Rhino, constructed from 1/8” MDF board using an Arduino Uno and laser cutter.

Projector screen

Force sensor

Panel

Physical component: four panels that the user can step on, allowing 'movement' in the four cardinal directions. Panels (in the animation) fold and unfold in response to user movements.

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An urban green loop designed to reconnect Atlantic City’s cultural and leisure centers with existing green spaces, and to integrate schools and the Boardwalk as a part of this system of slow infrastructure.

The loop was designed around highly-trafficked urban areas, as determined by patterns of movement in four arenas: public transport, commerce, environmental or natural leisure, and education.

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“Soft” bridges of vegetation alongside traditional ones

Primary and secondary schools as small gardens

Boardwalk integrated with city center

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A T L A N T I C C I T Y G R E E N L O O PAmerican Urbanism, S’13Mario Gandelsonas

NJ TRANSIT RAIL

NJ TRANSIT BUS

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LEISURE AND COMMERCE EXISTING GREEN SPACE PRIMARY+ SECONDARY SCHOOLS

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An exercise exploring sectional relationships, stacking, edge conditions, and massing. How do rooms relate to one another in a complex three dimensional volume? This project is also a vernacular one, exploring and implementing techniques from the geological form-finding that occurs in cave dwellings in Central Asia or the American Southwest, for example.

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C A V E R N T O W E RIntroduction to Architectural Design, S’12Michael Meredith

A. CARDBOARD + PLASTIC Natural creases in plastic create ridges to allow stairs

B. STONES + PLASTIC Large caverns requiring excavation

The tower was derived through a series of form-finding experiments with poured plaster:

C. PEBBLES + PLASTIC Bumpy, textured tunnels

D. POWDER + PLASTIC Smooth, elongated tunnels

E-H. LATEX BALLOONS Varies according to shape and degree of inflation

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1/8” = 1’ 1/8” = 1’

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1/16” = 1’

S Y D N E Y C R A B S H E L LIntroduction to Architectural Design, S’12Michael Meredith

A self-supporting volume derived from a single surface, examining the relationship between architectural form, structure and enclosure. It’s an elephant-crab, so to speak; materially gaudy and imposing, yet seeming to hover almost untethered over the site, ready to scuttle away at any moment.

Proposed site: over the Sydney Opera House. Where else could be more show-stopping?

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