RYAN ROARK

Exhibition at the Atlanta Preservation Center, 2021

Based on Georgia Tech Capstone Senior Studio from Spring 2021

Fabrication Team: Zaima Ahmed, Rich Fridy, Elissa Palmer, So Min Park, Hafsa Siap, Kevin Thompson

More info on studio project credits here.

This show at the Atlanta Preservation Center (Sept–Nov 2021) features a visual history of Mechanicsville and a series of proposals for both renovation and new construction along Whitehall Street, a two-block stretch adjacent to South Downtown Atlanta and straddling the neighborhoods of Castleberry Hill and Mechanicsville. Bounded by railroad tracks to the north and I-20 to the south, the area is currently comprised of many empty lots and a variety of formerly industrial buildings—some disused, some partially used, and some functioning as residential lofts and warehouses. Whitehall’s development has been speculated for decades but has not yet begun.

The work shown began with a senior Capstone studio at Georgia Tech School of Architecture and was subsequently edited, developed, and supplemented by my research team. The project examines the role of history in architecture and blurs the lines between renovation and “ground-up” construction: even what appears to be an empty site has history, often still evidenced in foundations, material fragments, or even the soil. Reuse, especially in formerly industrial districts, all too often goes hand in hand with replacement of culture and displacement of residents; mitigating this relationship is not simple but was central to the development of the proposals in Mechanicsville 2030, which began with an in-depth study of the neighborhood and interviews with residents.

In progress.

Project Team: Ryan Roark, Zaima Ahmed, So Min Park, Hafsa Siap

These are early in-progress images of collaged historic photography of what is now Woodruff Park, where Peachtree Street and Auburn Avenue meet—the symbolic intersection of Atlanta’s historic elite white downtown and the historic Black commercial and cultural district known as Sweet Auburn. Images have been collected from a variety of archives, including the Atlanta History Center, Atlanta Preservation Center, Georgia Tech, and Georgia State University.

Proposal, 2021, shown at the Atlanta Preservation Center

Project Team: Ryan Roark, Elissa Palmer, So Min Park, Hafsa Siap

Mechanicsville lacks local retail and outlets for community members to get small businesses off the ground. The Shops at Whitehall, which sit opposite each other across Whitehall, provide a few different kinds of shops. On the north side of Whitehall, the Shops convert an existing long and narrow warehouse into a series of small-scale studio-style shops which are oriented perpendicular to what is understood to be the building’s current axis. The pre-existing building shell is left unconditioned and treated as a sort of garage for the smaller studio storefronts, which are moved throughout the day on tracks and can be built mostly off-site and replaced as needed over time. These studio units roll back in and are locked up overnight and roll out as appropriate during the day.

To the east of this building, an environmentally enclosed and conditioned extension houses a couple of larger shops on the ground floor and smaller offices and studio spaces above.

To the south of Whitehall, the site already contains two buildings—one is currently disused but appears to have been a grocery or convenience store at one point, while the other is a currently operating facility for House Parts. 426 Whitehall, while modest in scale, has an unexpected deep basement, whose drama is revealed to the street in this adaptive proposal.

At 438 Whitehall, a corrugated metal lean-to at the back of the building currently serves as a small expansion of the space for storage of busts and other stuff, and this semi-conditioned space with its appealing ventilation and lighting became a jumping-off point for adding on to the existing former storefront and warehouse buildings.

The southern Shops include small flagships with prominent street-facing storefronts, as well as a more enclosed bazaar-style collection of stalls. The aesthetic material similarities of all of the introduced elements tie the multiple pieces together as one.

Project Team: Ryan Roark, Maya Assaad, Elissa Palmer, So Min Park

The Govalle-Ovalle proposes a community center to distribute supplies safely to those affected by the pandemic in East Austin, providing the neighborhood with a sense of continuity and support both in times of crisis and at other times.

This site is within a 5-minute walking distance of approximately 150 homes, the 50-unit Terrace at Oak Springs for formerly homeless individuals, and the 35-unit Jeremiah Program Moody Campus for single mothers. The site is also well served by bus lines and Airport Boulevard, making it a great location for distributing food and other resources. The area is currently underserved by grocery stores, making this an advantageous site for a food market outside of pandemic times.

The Ovalle program is broken up into multiple structures to mitigate crowding, including: a market which doubles as a distribution center; an urban farm attached to a teaching kitchen; and a daycare and playground. The complex has a shaded roundabout with unidirectional foot traffic to minimize the risk of contagion and three entry points, each of which has a sanitation station.

The focal point of the roundabout is the market. During the pandemic, the central open-air atrium accommodates multiple distribution windows and serves as a waiting area for people to pick up groceries while maintaining a safe distance from each other. After the pandemic is over, the interior space is used as a grocery store, while the atrium can host open-air market stalls.

The whole site is envisioned as a park, maintaining two of the existing soccer fields and adding enhanced amenities for the community. Visitors can stop by the teaching kitchen and farm to see what kinds of foods are being grown there; take a detour to a hike-and-bike trial around the nearby lake, which is outfitted with a floating stage to facilitate community events; or visit the playground, whose landscape is designed to encourage distancing during the pandemic.

The Govalle-Ovalle is designed to support the neighborhood through this time of crisis and to continue to bring the community together after the crisis is past.

Plants Beds proposes a versatile pavilion made of repurposed materials appropriate to the formerly industrial neighborhood of Harringay Warehouse District—mattress springs, construction scaffolding, and industrial plastic. These materials are assembled to create an exhibition and event space where neighbors can come together for games, exercise, farmers’ markets, garden parties, and more.

Nighttime gatherings are lit by colonies of photoreactive algae embedded in the bioplastic sheets, which also contain planting pockets for growing herbs and other small plants. The sheets slide along the scaffolding to create three loose bays which can be reconfigured as needed.

The pavilion evokes the form and materiality of early prefabricated buildings, like the Crystal Palace or the South Kensington Museum (shown here), which now sits in Bethnal Green as the V&A Museum of Childhood. These Victorian exhibition spaces brought people together to learn about new cultures and technologies; Plants Beds encourages visitors to learn about their ecosystem and about new biological technologies.

The pavilion itself is envisioned as a biological assemblage, like the porous cellulose wall of the plant cell which permits easy circulation but also provides the structure for more specific organization of space and bodies, in the form of the bioplastic membranes. The connective tissues between the scaffold and the membranes are the repurposed spring mattresses (a product which is rarely recycled), which act like an extracellular matrix allowing a variety of attachments and uses.

Ultimately, Plants Beds celebrates the industrial heritage of Harringay and the surrounds, as well as their potential role in a new, smaller-scale technological revolution.

Project Team: Ryan Roark, Elissa Palmer, So Min Park

Mirabilis RiverWalk proposes to reuse the Piscina Mirabilis, a ruined ancient Roman pool in Bacoli, Italy, as a contemporary art museum and central attraction for the region. Water is restored to the piscina floor. Visitors circulate on the flooded ground level and on two different mezzanine levels by following a floating and suspended walkway comprised of new lightweight modules that attach to and interact with the modular ancient masonry columns. The new levels allows for increased floor area and new views of the piscina from different heights and angles.

The highly regular grid of the piscina creates two dominant central axes, one long and one short. The bay of the pool running along the short central axis is deeper than the rest of the pool. Historically, it served as a trench for cleaning; today, the Trench is celebrated with underwater up-lighting. The piscina’s long central axis is well lit thanks to existing skylights which punctuate each bay along this axis; the new museum creates a Sculpture River along this axis, by adding a platform beneath each of the skylights where large-scale sculptures can be displayed.

The art museum makes use of the piscina’s roof as a sculpture park and as the starting and ending point of the museum’s prescribed route. Above ground, lightweight wooden modules echoes the massive vaulted geometry found underground with their own clad wireframe form. The roof houses both the museum’s cafe and its bookstore. Cafe seating is distributed within the covered part of the roof and within the ancient stalls at street level, where windows have been carved out for diners to peer down into the piscina.

All artwork shown is by 20th-century Lebanese painter and sculptor Saloua Raouda Choucair.

Submission to Folly/ Function 2018

In collaboration with Andrew Percival

Remnants Rebuilt was a proposal for seating in Socrates Sculpture Park, Queens, NY. This series of modules can stand alone as individual seats or be aggregated to make benches and multifunctional seating arrangements. These pieces are designed after the park-side façade of a demolished turn-of-the-century Fifth Avenue mansion once known as Clark’s Folly. When Clark’s Folly was demolished in 1927, to be replaced by a luxury apartment building, the dismemberment of its façades was featured in national newspapers. Remnants Rebuilt suggests an approach to the built history of the City which is an alternative to demolition and whole preservation. The façade of such a publicly presented private building, famously little used by its owners, is a cultural artifact for the city’s inhabitants. By turning the façade into park seating, we invite city dwellers to claim the artifacts and to see them up close.

What is “reused” here is not historic material, but history itself as material. Remnants Rebuilt may be nostalgic, but it stands firmly against the idea of restoration and recognizes nostalgia as a creative act of reflection. It asks park visitors to reflect upon the past of a specific building, the material past of the city at large, and the changes to that material over time. The lightweight materiality of the manufactured “ruin” is a nod to the impossibility of restoring the past.

Client: Samuel Newman, Little Red Box

Project Team: Ryan Roark, Hafsa Siap

Little Red Box is an initiative based in Houston with the goal of providing affordable healthy grocery delivery to food deserts, low-income communities with low access to retail outlets for food. In the words of Sam Newman, its founder, LRB is "a neighborhood bodega meets curbside pick-up, with a focus on community engagement and empowerment." LRB facilitates the use of SNAP and WIC food stamps and delivers fresh food to residents in reusable insulated “little red boxes.”

LRB plans to branch out from their first brick-and-mortar store to reproducible and easily deployed food delivery pods that could be used anywhere there's an open lot. In addition to providing a source of food, these boxes would convert empty lots into hubs of activity.

The food delivery “pod” is a reused refrigerated 40-foot shipping container with a small stall with a window and counter for distribution.

Generator Atlanta hosted an ideas competition to rethink the city’s loop highway, I285, in the spirit of the reuse of Atlanta’s Beltline. The competition prompt asked how reuse of this infrastructure could make I285 a “bigger, better loop” that would attract visitors and improve daily commutes.

Hydroloop ATL imagines changes in transportation needs in the mid-21st century and proposes to use the existing infrastructure of the loop highway as the foundation for an engineered lazy river with lanes both for commuters (faster) and tourists (slower). Alongside the Hydroloop, the communities surrounding Atlanta would be developed to draw on their existing characters and history—for instance, reopening the “Master of All Roller Rinks,” the historic Jelly Bean Skating Rink at Ben Hill.

In parallel to the lazy river, a linear park buffers the manufactured waterway from lanes of bicycles, electric buses, and food delivery robots.

Competition Entry to TUBE 8x8x300 Conceptual Design Competition

Honorable Mention (20 out of 2037 entries)

Project Team: Ryan Roark, Monica Rizk, Hafsa Siap

Re-Store Tube proposes re-purposing an existing evacuation passageway to create a connective tissue between the two halves of an underground mall in Kunming, China. To supplement the formal economy of the mall, the Re-Store provides the infrastructure for an informal economy of individually owned goods for rent.

Through an app and on-site digital kiosks, Re-Store allows people to make money off items they own but use only occasionally, from camping gear to ice cream makers to costumes, and more, while also freeing their homes of clutter. By the same token, Re-Store allows members to purchase less and more judiciously: they can borrow items they don’t need to purchase, allowing them to invest in more expensive goods and make money by leasing them out.

In addition, the new Re-Store Tube turns a once dark, back-of-house space into a bright and attractive central spine for the mall. Light-harvesting technology amplifies the sunlight entering off the sunken light wells and the skylights in its northern leg, to create an underground garden and restore some of the greenery that was once above ground here.

Submission to Corner to Corner Competition to rethink Grosvenor Square for the 21st century.

In collaboration with Andrew Percival.

Grosvenor Square has the potential to become a landmark transition space between London’s most prominent commercial district and its largest green space—a statement to visitors about the balance of city and nature in 21st-century London. The Square has a rich history and a collection of monuments to memorialize the history of Anglo-American relations, including the FDR Memorial, the 9/11 Memorial, the Eagle Squadrons Memorial, and the former US Embassy, designed by Eero Saarinen and under renovation by David Chipperfield.

Our proposal for Grosvenor Square removes the existing hedges which enclose the park and realigns the park along the axis of the former embassy, creating continuity between the public space of the building and the park itself. The current park is a field of undifferentiated green space, whereas this proposal strategically introduces hardscape for more diverse programming, all organized around the existing memorials to promote spontaneous contemplation of the associated history.

This proposal includes an augmented reality app with which visitors can visualize historic residents of the park, as well as vignettes associated with the various monuments.

Thesis, Princeton SoA, Spring 2017

Advisors: Monica Ponce de Leon, D. Graham Burnett

The Future of the Renwick Ruin at the Technion-Cornell Institute on Roosevelt Island

This project proposes a model of historic preservation which, instead of seeking to restore, preserve, or glorify an original building, uses the existing building as material for a new building in a way that neither privileges old over new, nor indeed the reverse. Instead, this model seeks to highlight the process of continual re-making and re-use—and therefore of history itself.

Here, the existing building is the Renwick Ruin, a former smallpox hospital and nursing school on Roosevelt Island. The new building proposed is a conference center and museum of medical history for the Cornell Technion Institute campus which is currently in construction north of the ruin. This project proposes tweaks to the ongoing master plan of the campus; instead of the current nuclear layout, the proposed new phase 2 plan uses the geometry of the demolished Goldwater Memorial Hospital to organize the as-yet-unbuilt buildings at the south end of the campus. This plan unites the heart of the campus with the southmost end of the island, including the ruin and the FDR Memorial.

The new building on the ruin site is intended as the campus’s public engagement building, bringing in visitors and fulfilling Cornell and Technion’s promise to educate the City about high technology and its vital role in the economy.

The ruin is comprised almost entirely of walls, including exterior stone walls and interior brick walls. The new building preserves the interior brick walls, which have already been stabilized, in their original location, to organize the circulation through the building and recall its history as a hospital. The exterior walls are stabilized in 9’x9’x2’ panels which are then recombined to construct a new exterior curtain wall and interior partition walls for a quadruple-height atrium which serves as the conference center.

Open House New York, Fall 2016

In collaboration with Andrew Percival, Kayla Manning, and Julian Harake

This interactive media wall was installed at Open House New York’s opening event in fall 2016. It contained over a thousand pencils and surveys for users to take and complete. Each end of the wall contained a pencil sharpening box, a box for survey collection, and a specially designed OHNY map and list of activities. Each survey “scroll” was bundled with a different suggestion for an OHNY event, giving it a “magic eight ball” quality and encouraging users to participate.

The wall panels could be taken apart for flat packing to facilitate moving and storage. Easily assembled custom milled aluminum joints allowed for different configurations and spatial divisions. The transparent shorter end walls encouraged visual interaction between users on either side, while the larger wall panels became increasingly visually porous as pencils and surveys were removed. The wall invited constant tactile engagement, as the depth of pencils could be shifted from either side creating silent communication across the two sides of the wall.

The holders for pencils and scrolls were designed loosely following the shape of the New York skyline, which changed constantly as materials were removed or moved around the wall. This was intended to convey the notion that the city and its form are constantly shifting and evolving with its inhabitants.

Design Studio, Princeton SoA, Spring 2016

Instructors: Sharon Johnston, Mark Lee

Art House is a proposal for a single-artist pavilion gallery for the work of Robert Rauschenberg on the Menil Campus, the neighborhood surrounding the Menil Collection, in Houston, Texas. The Campus includes dozens of pre-war bungalows, which are all painted “Menil gray.” This project takes the bungalows as found objects to be recombined, in the spirit of Rauschenberg’s Combines. 

Here, the recognizable domestic form is reproduced and estranged by coupling with structures and materials not typically associated with the bungalow. Where the walls of the traditional bungalow contain its structure, here the shells of the bungalows are supported by a central spine of reinforced concrete. This structural spine allows the roof to be separated from the walls to create a clerestory for daylighting the less sensitive artworks. 

The building shell is clad in oversized cement-board siding, drawing attention to the form of domestic detailing while also creating distance from it. Like the Menil gray paint, the change in materiality in the bungalow shells is intended to provoke a feeling of surrealism within the context of the neighborhood.

Featured in Plat 7.0: Sharing

Design Studio, Princeton SoA, Fall 2016

Instructor: Alejandro Zaera-Polo

CloudStore proposes an alternative to traditional self-storage, in which the useful life of objects is maximized. Users of the facility can opt to store all objects privately, or they can allow either physical or digital browsing of their items, as well as borrowing and bidding. Thus users can make money from their objects in storage, objects can continue to be used, and the store can rent out more cubic footage of storage than exists physically in the facility. All objects are stored in lockers opened by unique user-specific codes; one user may allow another user access if she chooses to loan out one of her items, and the facility can always track customers’ use of lockers. Floors are all organized to maximize storage per square foot, but the circulation patterns vary from floor to floor based on how likely items are to be rented based on in-store browsing.

Patrons are encouraged to create a digital copy of each object they put into storage. High-tech facilities are available on-site for this purpose, including high-throughput 3-D scanning technology first developed in the Smithsonian Mass Digitization Office. The CloudStore app, developed in parallel to the physical facility, allows users to navigate the store, to pull up reviews and information about objects as they browse in-store, to create public profiles for their own libraries, and to track how often they or any other users access their items physically or digitally. This provides information about how and when objects are used, to help customers make decisions about which things to keep, as well as collecting valuable research about how people access and use digital objects versus physical objects (for instance, in the case of memorabilia).

Featured in Lunch 13: Mischief

Design Studio, Princeton SoA, Fall 2014

Instructor: Michael Meredith

In collaboration with Laura Salazar and Weiwei Zhang

Traditionally, a piñata is a scaled abstracted figure of a real object, typically an animal, which is filled with objects, suspended, and broken open by blindfolded people as part of a celebration. A piñata may look like a donkey, but because of the abstraction, scaling, suspension from normal context, and celebration, the piñata is not a stand-in for the donkey. When children hit the piñata to break it, they are not performing an act of violence against the donkey, but simply trying to get at what’s inside of it.

Traditionally, architectural practice involves translation between buildings and drawings and between buildings and models.  Multiple iterations between media allows for productive misreadings that can produce new forms, new spaces, or new relationships. The insertion of a new representational object, previously foreign to architecture, into this chain creates new sites for misreading and draws attention to the strangeness of the conventions of the discipline which we otherwise may take for granted. Unlike a model, a piñata has function beyond representation, bringing an element of performance and unpredictability into the representational cycle.

The move from model to piñata is akin to the move from building to model. The translation from a building to a model or a drawing is always a move towards abstraction, including selective removal of large amounts of detail and content. The translation from a model to a piñata involves creating a functional object with specific materiality and is therefore a move towards realism. The piñata is not lacking in any detail; it is full-scale and fully functional. At the same time, with respect to the building, the move from model to piñata is a further abstraction which creates new reading. Without this translation, we might not think, for instance, to put fringe on a building, to fill a building with candy and streamers, or to crack open a building’s façade.

The insertion of the new piñata medium draws attention to assumptions we make about other media with which we are already too comfortable. It is certainly weird to see an object which represents a building hanging in the air at a 45 degree angle with no ground and no context, but many of us don’t bat an eye at a siteless worm’s-eye axonometric drawing. The knowledge that the most exciting part of the piñata is contained inside indicates the weirdness of a sculptural (non-sectional) approach to model-making. The process of piñata construction adds several more layers of estrangement: for instance, the paper mache process is the application of a continuous surface across multiple members and joints.

As this project addresses fundamental questions of materiality, structure, and architectural representational standards, the buildings selected for translation to the piñata medium by way of models should be architectural primitives. A Renaissance piñata project might take Palladian villas as its subject matter, while a mid-20th-century piñata project would likely look to Le Corbusier and Mies van der Rohe. Today, however, a fundamental manifestation of architectural zeitgeist does not present itself. The use of architecture educational institutions underscores the lack of a formal center of the discipline in the 21st century and proposes that the institutions themselves are the most stable center in modern day.

Finally, it should be noted that these piñatas are held in unstable equilibrium with each other by a visible relational system and by the weight of contents which are not visible until the exterior is cracked open. This assembly is intended to heighten the anticipation of revealing and releasing the contents, as well as to suggest the nature of the relationship between different representational media. When this piñata mobile is hit with an external force, the components will be thrown out of balance and take some time to reach equilibrium once again. The movement will be erratic and perhaps even a bit dangerous. At the very least it is expected to alleviate boredom.