Leonardo Serrano Fuchs M.Arch II

Opera Guarany . The Opera of the past lies at the confluence of axial boulevards and remains inaccessible. Opera Guarany disrupts the hierarchy of the axis of power by being an anti-axial building. Site as a delicate piece at the tip of Ile de Vannes, it does not want to be central, it wants to be accessible. . The frame that contains the opera of the past is blurred and given to the public. Its core, the horseshoe shape, is freed and revealed to the exterior. This shape provides the best sightlines and acoustics. It allows a nomadic building to not require any amplified sound. Excellence remains the essence of opera. . The Marche and the Grand Foyer are given to the public through accessible ramps and become a platform for contemplation or simply rituals of doing nothing by the river. The event of going to opera becomes a collective experience that is transformative of the subject and engages people of all ages.

Advanced Design Studio: The Opera of the Future with George Knight, Ruth Mackenzie, Francine Houben, Isaac Kalisvaart. Spring 2020.

Martellona . The notion of the city as the primary ground for human living is usually taken for granted. This project investigates alternative forms of living which relate not to a sense of metropolitan urbanity, of production and consumption, but to the possibilities of commoning presented by the countryside.
. Martellona is located at a tripoint between the municipalities of Rome, Tivoli and Guidonia. The settlement has the potential to sustain its population to become, in a last stage, autonomous in terms of food supply, with harvesting ranging from agriculture to horticulture. In fact, gardens are strategic urban elements that serve as catalysts for social and cultural activities, as well as new forms of labor. . Wasteland Advanced Studio with Pier Vittorio Aureli and Emily Abruzzo. Critics: Esther da Costa Meyer, Angelo Bucci, Tatiana Bilbao, et al. Spring 2019. Collaboration with Sunny Cui. Spring 2019.

Martellona . A series of punctual interventions along the territory provide platforms for life in common. The Casali, which derive from the type recurrent in the Roman Agro, and the Cippi, deriving from the homonymous Roman milestones, are placed according to a structuring soft grid that is superposed to the settlement according to its pre-existing elements. The Casali host food storages, shared kitchens and dining areas, libraries, childcare facilities, clinics, and other public amenities. They become central communal spaces for each of the commoning units. . The Casale is designed in modules which enable its ad hoc expansion as the community grows. The Cippi, are spread along the fields as confetti, hosting agricultural and public uses or gravitate towards the river, marking a new ritualized relationship of the inhabitants of Martellona with the landscape. . Wasteland Advanced Studio with Pier Vittorio Aureli and Emily Abruzzo. Critics: Esther da Costa Meyer, Angelo Bucci, Tatiana Bilbao, et al. Collaboration with Sunny Cui. Spring 2019.

Ineffable Form . In the foothills of the Himalayas, pressed against the Tibetan skies, the building is conceived of as ineffable form. It emerges as a designed landscape object. As an object of emergence, incomplete in formal character, programmatic interactions and environmental change cause it to become fundamentally different objects that last for a season and then change into something new. The building continually recedes into itself. A pattern of high and low, bright and dark, open and closed spaces continually draw the beholder through the building which is never resolved in itself. The whole is complete in a trifold of building, landscape and aesthetic beholder. . There may be no place in the world where the sublime is more pervasive than in the Himalayas. To build on the mountains is to absorbed within the sublime. The building exists within this condition, being conceived of as an object of geologic assemblage. Through the collapsing of discreet objects, it reveals a tension between the object-form and its qualities. The movement of the building’s tectonic shifts becomes static, suspending the architecture on the verge of emergence. The edifice elevates the beholders against the sky and invites them into the ground. It offers a navigation between the ethereal and the telluric, the ideal and the concrete . Advanced Design Studio: The Architecture of Thought with Mark Foster Gage and Graham Harman. Critics: Catherine Ingraham, Arianne Louie Harrison, et al. Collaboration with Jerome Tryon. Fall 2019.

Deafscale: A Project for Gallaudet University . Deafscale proposes a gateway for Gallaudet University in Washington, D.C. Gallaudet is the most important institution specialized in the deaf and hard of hearing community in the Unites States and a world leader in deaf-related research. Rethinking the segregational functionalist masterplan of the University, the project fosters the clashing of public, institutional and private programs in order to create an exchange between the University and the surrounding urban fabric. The edifice hosts the planned expansion of the institution into a subtracted whole, with a new porous relationship of the campus with the city. . Post-Professional Studio with Sunil Bald and Joel Sanders. Critics: Anna Dyson, Marc Tsurumaki, Brigitte Shim, et al. Collaboration with Miguel Darcy. Fall 2018.

Some Paprika! contributions.

Structuring Intricacy: A Spatial and Material Reading of Sol Lewitt. Collaboration with Justin Tsang. Fall 2018.

Ten Thousand Lines in Space. Fall 2018.

Cortile del Bramante and Santa Maria della Pace . A fragmented and contradictory whole depicts the translation from Donato Bramante´s high Renaissance vocabulary to Da Cortona´s posterior intervention at Santa Maria della Pace and its cloisters. The diptych registers a shift in urban orientation, with a hinge between its parts marked by the central octagonal drum. .

Entering the church and deambulating along the axis of the 2-bay nave to the cubic courtyard, Da Cortona´s intervention carefully aligns its beholder with the center columns of the preexisting chiostro. There is a transition from a centered subject to a centered column. .

Drawn in ink and pencil, this piece investigates the relation between phenomena and abstraction for the transformation of the subject along the buildings, using a composite of reversed and regular axonometrics, one-point perspectives and section perspectives. . The Robert A.M. Stern Summer Program. Summer 2019.

The City of Legitimate Capital. Part of the Reframing Brazil Exhibition at YSoA North Gallery. Spring 2020. . Balneário Camboriú is a product of capital. Located in the south of Brazil, the city is not designed by a named architect, but its zoning allows for the market to resolve its shape: the result is the maximization of built density along the shore line and an expansion of the city that follows the waterfront. The variation in its phenomenal appearance is a product of the exact same abstraction: The logic of accumulation and maximization of value. . To that end, Balneário Camboriú can serve as a general model of a formless city, one in which there is no common form, but that is a materialized diagram of land value. .The logic of land value is embedded in the ground, working with the abstraction of land subdivision. The architect is the market and the project is profit. As a formless city, its territory of extraction reaches regions far beyond the area that it physically occupies. A city of consumption and accumulation, it functions colonizing land and erasing forms of living other than the ones it entails.
. Terra Incognita. Part of the Reframing Brazil Exhibition at YSoA North Gallery. Spring 2020. . On the way to the ápeiron one has lost its way without noticing. After kósmoi have been neutralized by the striations of a metric territory, cut across by a familiar infrastructure, the ethos becomes oîkos. A creative destruction. “The destruction, however, is not entire—the framework survives almost intact, but without ornaments; you could almost describe this as the bones of a body without the flesh. “ Lying on a hilltop and surrounded by gardens, the distance between the city and the freestanding object is in itself, symbolic of power. The Imperial Palace materializes power through the groundedness of its walls. Criticality is a key to reframe it. In 2018, an estimated 20 million artifacts from the National Museum of Brazil were lost to the flames, including the oldest human fossils ever found in South America.