Ceci n’est pas un livre
DATE
JUL 2025
CONTACT
brv2105@columbia.edu
SUBMITTED TO TYPEFACES
WXY UNDISCLOSED
COLLABORATORS
DANA MOR [HOUSING, FA 23] BRANDON GIL [ CIVIC:SACRED , SP 25]
NOTE
THE FOLLOWING IS AN ABRDIGED PORTFOLIO ONLY MEANT AS A SAMPLE.
ELABORATION AVAILABLE UPON REQUEST.
DARK_UNDERBELLY
Linear Monument
[Un]Belonging Inheritances
[collab w/ Brandon Gil]
Poster Logics
MAKE
Tracing Shifting Contact
Element
[collab w/ Dana Mor]
Performance Zoning
GSAPP Housing Lab
MEDIA MANIPULATIONS // URBAN EXTRACTIONS APPENDIX
SCHOLASTIC ENGAGEMENT
GSAPP Wood Shop
GSAPP Adjacent
Joseph Zeal Henry
Esteban de Backer
Karla Rothstein
Giuseppe Lignano + Ada Tolla
Christoph a. Kumpusch
Adam Lubinsky + Calvin Brown
myself + others
“Oral Infrastructures” “Civic-Sacred”
“Contested Territories”
“Damage Control”
“Make”
“Broadway Stories”
“Housing”
“Performance Zoning”
“Housing Lab”
“Shop Monitor”
“Vice President”
project symbol [all pp]
Adv V: Oral Infrastructures
Prof. Joseph Zeal-Henry Fall 2024
DARK_UNDERBELLY speculates four possible cultural uses for the underbelly of the BQE in Brooklyn, a stretch that otherwise decimates the landscape for human use. Permanent interventions include excavation for a skate half-pipe and movie theater to raise the low 12.5’ ceiling of the highway to feel more expansive and cathedral-like.
Alternatively, a long ADA ramp leads users up to a highly-compressed nightclub space, in which the regular rhythm of cars 2 feet overhead join the club’s soundscape, making for an ecstatic celebration of the music’s direct return to its machine origins. A fourth space is a fashion runway, painted with car traffic markings dictating models’ movement through space.
[1] physical process diary, 100 p, spiral-bound [2] diary spreads
Adv IV: Contested Territories
Prof. Esteban de Backer
Spring 2024
LINEAR MONUMENT is a connective bike and pedestrian infrastructure for Staten Island.
Drawing a 3-mile-long line across the landscape of Freshkills Park, it connects communities around the park physically, visually, and socially.
A continuous 50’-tall advertising billboard occupies the north side of the structure — carrying images across the landscape like the ancient aqueducts of Rome carried water.
[1] “landscape signals”
[2] “transmission towers”
[3] “billboard bridge”
[1] “oppressive interiority” [2] “stereotypes” vs. “reality”
Adv VI: Civic-Sacred
Prof. Karla Rothstein
Collaborator: Brandon Gil
Spring 2025
As New Yorkers, we are handed down all the layers of physical infrastructure built by previous generations of citydwellers.
One such common inheritance is the subway system — belonging to both no one and everyone.
This liminal status informs our perception that the subway is something to be passed through, skipped over, a means to an end, Rarely allowing for a chance to pause.
But in a system and city that belongs to us all arises a growing need for a new type of reflection. A dignified, visible procession of mortality woven into the everyday, where the frenetic energy of the city collides with moments of stillness as an urgent reminder that we are all mortal.
Make
Profs Ada Tolla + Giuseppe Lignano Fall 2024
MAKE is about MAKING and DOING before THINKING and allowing this to be the starting point of an unraveling creative process.
I found various discarded objects common to New York City’s streets — a hi-vis jersey barrier, a steel NYPD barricade, construction netting, etc. — and performed simple operations expressive of these objects’ basic materiality.
How can highly-recognizable objects be warped, cut, re-contextualized, etc. to create simultaneous awareness of their former identity and their openness to wholly new forms and functions?
MEDIA MANIPULATIONS + URBAN EXTRACTIONS
Core II: Damage Control
Prof. Regina Teng Spring 2023
No one is regulating new media’s communicative power. We receive the images all around us fluidly and without interruption.
POSTER LOGICS intervenes on this seamless transmission of meaning. Through a series of physical experiments with wheatpaste posters — compared to screens, a tangibly material medium — it exposes cycles of image generation, destruction, and re-appropriation within high fashion advertising.
An array of speculative architectural fragments suggests an expanded application and spatialization of the affects discovered in the physical material manipulations.
[1] decay logic speculative fragment [2] material research studies
MEDIA MANIPULATIONS + URBAN EXTRACTIONS
Core I: Broadway Stories
Prof. Christoph a. Kumpusch Fall 2022
Speaking generally (thesis):
The city is an accumulation of humans and manipulated earth continually wearing on one another, push and tug.
Tracing the contact point between humans and the city enables us to see the contested, evolving nature of the built environment, technology, and the human itself.
More specifically (Core I):
Columbus Circle is a nexus of accelerated turn speeds and disorientation, incessantly cycling cars and trucks around its vast circumference, relegating humans taking alternative modes of transit to wary interlopers waiting for a chance to cross.
How will humans negotiate their relationship to this urban landscape that seems to disavow their very existence?
[1] traffic marking research photographs [2] process photobook w/ tire marking, 100p
Core III: Housing
Prof. Galia Solomonoff
Collaborator: Dana Mor Fall 2023
Element is a simultaneous housingand-rainwater-retention-infrastructure hybrid.
Seeking to tap into the communal and therapeutic aspects of water bodies, it collects, funnels, and re-circulates water throughout the site.
Trickling through open courtyards that puncture each of three buildings, the water also supports plant life, cools and cleans the air, and informs users’ site circulation through a series of motes at the street level.
Also serving as public infrastructure, the complex would retain millions of gallons of water during major rain events, relieving this load from NYC’s combined sewer system.
[1] Roofline // Massing Diagram
[2] Outdoor Core Diagram
[3] Air + Water Concept Diagram
[1] close-ups — unit-on-core model
[2] overall — unit-on-core model
Professors Adam Lubinsky + Calvin Brown
Spring 2025
Performance Zoning is an interdisciplinary clinic of Planning, Real Estate, Urban Design, and Architecture students seeking to devise an alternative to traditional zoning.
Through the course, we devised a performance zoning framework — translating at-times qualitative measures like “facade design” into quantitative metrics that could be played out through a card game.
The point of the game would be to enable all three stakeholder groups — the city, local community, and developer — to engage in a development process that balances all three of their needs equally.
[1] graphic design – stakeholder engagement playing cards
[2] cards of various uses
[1] final schematic design render — performance zoning scenario w/ seven card uses played
