alex ackerman-greenbergPORTFOLIO

architectural designStanford, 2010

alexag06@stanford.edu510.928.0850

photography

artwork

design

folly chapel treehouse

norcal visitor’s center greenhouse on folsom east palo alto community high school

contents

Flock of Sheep (Segovia, Spain) - 2008

photography

photography

View from Tate Modern to St. Paul’s Cathedral (London) - 2008

photography

View from Santiago Bernabeau (Madrid) - 2008

Segovian aqueduct (Segovia, Spain) - 2008

photography

photography

Portraits

Of

Singapore

With a team of two other students, I took a trip to Singapore to study the suc-cesses of their public housing system. With over 80% of the population housed in towns developed by the Housing and Development Board, our research aimed at understanding more clearly how their system worked and what we might be able to learn from them.

artwork

Drawing of a Bridge (Charcoal) - 2007

artwork

Arches of a bridge (Charcoal) - 2008

artwork

Tree over water (spray paint on photo paper) - 2009

CAMERA TOSSAn experimental art form, camera toss is just what it sounds like. Releasing the shutter at the moment the photographer tosses the camera in the air captures light and motion in a wholly unique way.

artwork

Scrabble (etched glass and slate tile) - 2009

Stone Free (Sharpie on basketball) - 2006

artwork

TerriblyClever LED lamp - gift for the founders of TerriblyClever, an iPhone application develop-ment company (laser-cut bass wood) - 2009

design

Folly

Intro to Archictecture through Drawing

For my first project, I was asked to design a folly. No purpose, no guidelines, no rules. I focused my design on exploring land versus water. I created a landscaping plan with natural dirt paths sloping up into a grass hill that overlooks the building. The roof is habitable, with sloping wooden ramps leading up to a grassy roof. The building itself sits on piers in a pond, making minimal contact with the land. Inside of the structure, granite walls divide the space. Secluded in the rear of the building is a square depression in the floor with wide stairs leading down to the pool created by the pond below.

design

Chapel

design Intro to 3-D Modeling

Objective:

Design a non-denominational chapel in a suburban neighborhood

Design Solutions:

Develop dynamic, multi-purpose space

Create a protected outdoor environment

Emphasize circulation and movement within the space

Create a barrier between the serene chapel space and the bustling street

design

For Father’s Day, my friend gave his dad an IOU for a project that would “in-

crease the property value of the house.” So, over the summer, we designed and

built a treehouse, using a combination of Douglas Fir and Ipe. We did our best

to design a structural system that was not only stable, but sustainable as well.

Treehouse

design

Norcal Visitor’s Center

Intermediate Architecture Studio

What is Norcal?

Norcal is San Francisco’s privately contracted waste management service provid-er. While they currently divert 70% of the city’s waste from entering the landfull, they are committed to eliminating waste entirely by 2020.

Why design the Visitor’s Center?

Norcal is a world-renowned institution that attracts visitors from all over to learn about their sustainable waste management practices. Guided tours and an artist-in-residence program are staples of the Norcal campus, and a high-quality visitor experience is vital if Norcal wants to accomplish its goal of zero waste.

What are the key features of the design?

The Visitor’s Center focuses on circulation. The experience begins as visitors ap-proach the building by walking through artist’s hill, a display of the artwork cre-ated from garbage by the artists-in-residence.

The building incorporates a rainwater catchment system that channels the water into a slow-sand filtration system surrounding the lobby. The disagregation of space around a solid core gives visitors a strong sense that they, too, are being filtered through the building.

Its verticality sets it above the rest of the campus, creating an iconic structure vis-ible from US-101, which runs along the West side of the campus.

The design explores the innate juxtaposition of the industrial and the natural. Its angularity stand in stark contrast to the natural flow of the landscape, yet the building also acts as an extension of the hill.

design

design Intermediate Architecture Studio

design

design

I designed this project for the Bank of America Housing Challenge, a competition among California schools in which teams devise a proposal for a low-income housing development. The team is responsible for site selection, development of programmatic guidelines, a financing plan, and a schematic design. Each project team is also expected to enlist a development partner, a contractor, and an architect, as well as letters of community support. I acted as the project architect, developing the schematic design based on the necessary programming elements given our housing goals. The design of the building was driven by financing concerns, sustainability factors, and special considerations with regard to our tenants, given our goal of a 100% supportive housing complex.

Bank of America Housing Challenge

design

design Bank of America Housing Challenge

Commercial Communal Residential

design

In a town as ravaged as East Palo Alto, it’s first ever high school must stand as a beacon for the community, providing hope and sta-bility for it’s residents. Of course, the ultimate goal for this campus design is to promote and facilitate learning for it’s 800 students. The classic organization for this campus acts as a strong foundation, while the landscape design, materials use, and organization of space give the students a campus that is uniquely their own. While I utilized Revit and SketchUp during the design phase of this project, the focus of the studio was on hand-drafting and model making as opposed to computer-rendered imagery.

East Palo Alto Community High School

design Intermediate Architecture Studio

design

Third FloorSecond FloorFirst Floor

Academic SectionLibrary Section

Landscape Charrette

design Intermediate Architecture Studio

South Elevation

After determining the massing of the site, I worked with desire line diagrams and studied building use to understand how stu-dents, teachers, and community members would inhabit the space between the buildings. The campus plan lends itself to three zones of activity, which I filled with an amphitheater, a se-ries of cascading grass panels, and a depressed deck structure. The lanscape design speaks to the axiality and angularity of the site massing while still introducing a bit of chaos into a highly structured, formal approach to the buildings themselves.

design

Site Perspectives

Site Model1/16”