JOHNMARS

RISD was accepted as a competitor in the Solar Decathlon Europe 2014, along with our partners Brown University and FHE in Erfurt, Germany.

The house’s circular section allows mechanical equipment to store beneath the floor plate. Textile curtains hang from the ceiling to break up spaces and bring a human scale to the tall room.

The building’s skin is designed to perform uniquely in different parts of the structure. Its construction is that of a spacesuit; different layers of materials build up to create a hybrid textile with different functions and uses.

TECH STYLE HAUS

My advanced studio “Computing Drawing” is an introduction into generative drawing techniques utilizing the scripting language Python as well as RhinoScript, HPGL, and other languages.

I’m particularly interested in agent- and particle-based drawings where lines and points have intelligence and memory.

COMPUTING DRAWING

1234 Hawthorne Place is a quiet sanctum at the heart of Boston’s West end. Creating more than two-hundred apartments and hotel rooms, the complex supports a grocery market, public plaza, and convenience store, while providing ammenities to the condos and hospital nearby.

Modular apartments suspended by a concrete frame make up the structure and facade of the building. The south face is covered with four-bedroom apartments, and the north with a homogenous mixture of studio, one-bedroom, and two-bedroom apartments. The hotel is composed similarly.

1234 HAWTHORNE PLACE

A color changing ticket booth lights up to act as a beacon, visible from all surrounding public transit stops, intersections, and ends of the street.

Subtle angled lines in the sidewalk direct the natural perpendicular movement of through-traffic towards the ticket windows.

The specific location of the ticket booth and ground pattern selectively directed the slow, wandering flâneurs of the city.

Much like an eddy along the banks of river, the undulating walls and ceiling of the carved-out facade retains visitors and passersby.

CINEMA JEWEL

Con Artist’s castle was my final project for Design Principles 2011 at RISD.

All of the vertical surfaces are constructed of interlocking strips of octagons. Rotated squares with varying sizes of aperture cut through the center fill in the voids left by the octagons.

The horizontal surfaces use the same octagonal strips, but do not interlock. They are held up by variations of the rotated squares used in the walls.

Vertical circulation is accomplished by spinning a stack of two-octagon strips around a pinned axis.

CON-ARTIST’S CASTLE

Like a sea-bound river twisting and turning down through the landscape, the Water Research Center is an ever-growing ribbon folding through the sky, over the ground, and emptying into the mouth of the river lingering at its feet. Between these folds life clings to the shoreline, pulling away and expanding outward from its safety only where it must.

The building follows the slope of the ground down across the site, down the river bank, and into the water. A classroom floating below is connected by a bridge to the main structure.

FOLDS

This shapeshifting lamp, known as a jitterbug, converts from an icosahedron to an icosidodecahedron with the push of a button. Run with an Arduino, this lamp was my first foray into electronics.

The red button fully opens or closes the lamp, depending on current state. The white and black buttons control fine-tuned opening and closing, respectively. The silver knob controls the color of the LED inside.

Movement is controlled by a servo. The triangle faces are pinned in pairs at their centers and connected with flexible hinges at their corners. When one pair of triangles rotates, the entire form expands or contracts.

JITTERBUG LAMP

Woven Cup Prism is the first project in a four-project series, followed by a hybrid model that combines my prism with another student’s work, the Paper Castle, and the Con Artist’s Castle.

Three red plastic ‘Solo’ cups are woven together to form the basic pyramid building block. Eight pyramids are then connected using more cups and a variation of the weaving technique to form a prism.

The structure is my attempt at creating a new material, with it’s own inherit structural and material properties, from a found object, while still maintaining the basic essence of that object.

CUP PRISM

My take on the classic design project, a cardboard chair, is one that utilizes modules that can be rearranged into multiple configurations.

There is no glue or any other type of fastener; the structure is held together from strategic slotting of the components and the friction between them. It is capable of holding upwards of three-hundred pounds, and is actually very comfortable.

Each piece of the chair is formed from identically cut and creased pieces of single-ply cardboard; whether that component becomes a support, connector, or cushion depends on how you fold or combine the pieces.

CARDBOARD CHAIR