Christopher Reznich designed and executed this materials research under the advise of Amy Whitesides of Stoss Landscape Urbanism at the Autodesk Build Space, Boston.
“Biodegradable, renewable, and non-toxic, mycelium (the underground structure of mushrooms, similar to the roots of a plant) grows into a foam-like material that can be made stable when dried.
As an experimental pursuit, we’ve undertaken a series of tests using 3D printed formwork and mycelium substrates to test materials for outdoor furnishings. Combining super precise digital workflows with mycelium’s semi-random growth patterns creates situations that are both inventive and challenging, grappling with the inherent contradictions of digital precision with growing media.” - Stoss Landscape Urbanism, 2018.
Christopher Reznich was on the design team for Stoss Landscape Urbanism.
York and Rees Street Parks Design Competition, 2018
https://yorkreesparkdesign.ca/proposals/stoss-landscape-urbanism/
“Rees Landing is a CoLaboratory: a collective testing ground for new forms of civic and ecological expression. Made from a flexible kit of parts, the park can be altered, edited, and re-arranged, adapting to how citizens engage with its spaces; how our public grows with it; and to how it might respond to known and unknown change in our urban and environmental context. Open surfaces can be peeled up or pushed down, using a range of permeable or impermeable materials to create a diversity of specific conditions — high/low, wet/dry, sheltered/exposed, hard/soft — while larger open areas, structures, and art walls allow for endless re-imagining and re-activating. Rees Landing offers possibilities for what could be, for what might come—a CoLaboratory for community invention, through rich and ongoing civic experimentation.
The collaborative process begins with the selection of the park concept, at which time a period of civic engagement and community input begins. To provide the community with an opportunity to shape the design, the Rees Landing team has developed the park through a series of topographic moves — pushes and pulls — laid out on a measured, striated version of the park site. This sets the stage, creating a framework for a park and developing the tools that allow for an evolving park that acknowledges the need for public input and change over time. The Park is inherently dynamic, always changing to meet the needs of the communities that inhabit it.
The Stoss + DTAH team is a cutting-edge design team that believes in the productive role of landscape in the making and re-making of cities and social spaces. Stoss leads together with Toronto-based landscape architecture, urban design, and architecture firm DTAH, bringing together a unique set of specialists taken from a wide range of fields and bring distinct set of disciplinary and cultural backgrounds and perspectives to the table — architects, landscape architects, designers, artists, curators, ecologists, planners, climate leaders, technologists, engineers. This think tank includes Höweler + Yoon, Daily tous les jours, Moses Structural Engineering, TMIG, Mulvey & Banani Lighting, PLANDFORM, Fadi Masoud, Bradley Cantrell, and RallyRally.” - Stoss Landscape Urbanism, 2018.
Christopher Reznich created renderings on the design team for Stoss Landscape Urbanism.
https://www.stoss.net/projects/resiliency-waterfronts/moakley-park-resiliency-waterfronts
“Moakley Park, a 60-acre community park in South Boston, floods regularly—even minimal rain events cause the playing fields to become unusable and unsafe. Coupled with the fact that this, Boston’s largest waterfront park, sits at a critical breach point for South Boston and with a projected 21-36” in sea level rise, the park becomes a major flood pathway inundating adjacent neighborhoods including two low income housing developments. With this reality in mind, City of Boston Parks and Recreation Department and the Environment Department commissioned a vision plan for the park that would not only address critical climate resiliency issues, but would turn Moakley Park into an exemplary 21st century open space with a focus on equity, diversity, community and of course enviable recreational amenities.” - Stoss Landscape Urbanism, 2018.
Christopher Reznich created renderings on the design team for Stoss Landscape Urbanism.
https://new-stoss.squarespace.com/projects/mixed-use-residential/l-street
The L Street Power Station is a unique opportunity to combine adaptive re-use of historically significant industrial buildings along with neighborhood creation in the context of a thriving working port and a growing residential neighborhood in South Boston. The Project will provide a range of public and community benefits to promote community welfare, new open space, environmental remediation, economic activity, improved circulation, and a mix of uses and housing options. It endeavors to integrate the Site’s industrial past within a neighborhood scale street grid and instill a unique and vibrant residential character. It is both a place that is part of an established neighborhood and a unique district open to new forms of retail, commerce and living.
Stoss is working with the private development team to create a site plan with an open space approach and develop comprehensive urban design guidelines including; public realm improvements, complete street plan, and enhancements to pedestrian access and circulation along the waterfront as well as, to and from the neighborhood. The design team intends to celebrate and retain historic remnants of the iconic building to imbue the site with an authentic sense of place.
“The first in the Studies in the Design Laboratory epub series produced by the Harvard University Graduate School of Design and the CCA, this publication finds an origin of computational design in the work of Ralph Knowles at the Natural Forces Laboratory at the University of Southern California, beginning in 1967. It features interviews with Knowles, a selection of images of solar studies carried out at the laboratory, and analysis of the laboratory’s work, with emphasis on the heliodon and solar envelope projects.” - CCA, 2018.
Christopher Reznich co-authored this publication with Andrew Witt.
Photos courtesy of Ralph Knowles.
Christopher Reznich was on the design team for Stoss Landscape Urbanism.
https://new-stoss.squarespace.com/projects/planning-urbanism/suffolk-downs
“HYM’s vision for Suffolk Downs, an underutilized horse racing facility closed in 2018, is to transform the land into a highly-resilient, transit-oriented, mixed-use development with commercial office, retail, housing, and open space. This 161-acre site has been separated from the community for decades and plans include reconnecting it to the adjacent neighborhoods. It is located in both the cities of East Boston and Revere, convenient to an MBTA station, two stops from Logan Airport and 10 minutes from downtown Boston. The powerful new economic hub will include hotels, street-front retail, and restaurants, generating new jobs, local tax revenues and will create a destination that is significant for the futures of both East Boston and Revere.
Due to the site being low-lying, plans for Suffolk Downs will rely on forward-thinking principles to effectively manage for climate change and sea-level rise. Stoss is leading landscape and open space design for the development, including resiliency planning—building on our experience and deep knowledge of Climate Ready Boston principles. The site includes protected wetlands and is situated on a low-lying plane subject to the impacts of sea-level rise, therefore master planning efforts incorporate integrated strategies to address climate change and mitigate flooding.” - Stoss Landscape Urbanism, 2017.
This project was realized by the Office for Urbanization at the Harvard Graduate School of Design for the Chicago Architecture Biennale 2017. Additional graphic products by Siena Scarff Design.
http://officeforurbanization.org/heliomorphic-chicago/
“Heliomorphic Chicago imagines the radical revision of Chicago’s urban form through optimized solar performance. The project makes new history by presenting a pair of counterfactual futures – two Chicagos that might have been. These alternative visions are modeled through specific parameters of solar access and ecological performance. The project presents alternative potentials for many of Chicago’s iconic buildings as opposing pairs, optimized in relation to either social equity or sustainable energy. Heliomorphic Chicago posits a pair of alternative histories for Chicago’s collective urban identity as derived from the simple, yet intractable, opposition of zero-sum economies – solar equity on one hand and solar energy on the other.” -Office for Urbanization, 2017.
Christopher Reznich created the renderings under the advise of Chris Reed for Stoss Landscape Urbanism.
"Part two in a two-part exploration of Los Angeles's aging freeway infrastructure by LA Times architecture critic Christopher Hawthorne. Published in July 2016, the proposal reimagines the 2 Freeway stub as it runs south from the 5 Freeway and descends into Silver Lake and Echo Park, northwest of downtown Los Angeles.
The southwest stub of Freeway 2 is ripe for re-thinking in ways that might serve as an incremental model for similar freeway stubs in the region, and eventually for longer portions of freeway. Our proposal does so without pretending it away—like many others, we acknowledge the appeal and heroism of these infrastructural monuments—but by turning the freeway on its head: re-making it as a social connector, a smog and carbon absorber, an important piece of sustainable hydrologic infrastructure, and a catalyst for civic, recreational, cultural, and economic activities. We re-imagine this monofunctional infrastructure as an environmental, social, and civic machine, cultivating life for local residents and for a regional (perhaps even global) constituency." -Stoss Landscape Urbanism, 2016.
First published in the Los Angeles Times by Christopher Hawthorne, "Imagine if the 2 Freeway ended in a brilliantly colored, eco-smart park."
Featured on the cover of Landscape Architecture Magazine, October 2017: landscapearchitecturemagazine.org
James Chesnut with LADG
https://theladg.com/The-Oyster-Gourmet
Oyster Gourmet is the new home to master escailler Christophe Happillon at the Grand Central Market in Los Angeles. The project is alive, opening much like an inverted flower to deliver the freshest product like the pearl of the oyster. Wood, canvas, and aluminum create the dynamic form and operation of this unique architecture. All materials and assemblies are strategically chosen to meet the very stringent LA code enforcement.
Christopher Reznich contributed to scripting and modeling with Sonny Xu for Stoss Landscape Urbanism’s exhibition at the Cooper Hewitt, Smithsonian Design Museum, 2016.
“The Detroit Strategic Framework Plan is a comprehensive, action-oriented roadmap for decision-making to improve the quality of life and business in Detroit. Stoss collaborated with a team of planners, designers, and community leaders on the Detroit Works Project, a city-wide planning framework for Detroit. The project identifies productive efficiencies by establishing links between social, economic, and ecological systems. These integrated solutions suggest new forms of urban living, new modes of production in the city, and newly productive green infrastructures for the city at large.
Stoss's work seeks to redefine and diversify the traditional notion of landscapes as only recreation by showing the multiple ways landscapes can improve the overall health of the city and its residents. Single-use, passive landscapes are resource-consumptive; but contemporary productive landscapes can generate resources. Through natural processes, they can reduce environmental health problems faced by city residents. Making landscapes productive is a guiding principle of Stoss's work. Landscapes and green infrastructures can clean air, water, and soil and improve the health of urban ecosystems. Innovative landscapes focus on multiple types of blue / green infrastructure, cleaning water and air and combine with productive types, including food and energy production, community engagement, and research. In this way, the plan encourages landscape infrastructure as a civic instigator for new city structures.” -Stoss Landscape Urbanism, 2016.
Christopher Reznich made the illustrations under the advise of Gareth Doherty.
http://www.sustainableexuma.org/
A series of diagrammatic illustrations to accompany anthropological field notes gathered by 52 individuals, one week at a time, for a year. Each image documents a range of complex social interactions unique to the varied cultural, ecological, and economic practices among the people of the Exuma archipelago.
“This multi-year ecological planning project is a collaboration among the Government of The Bahamas, the Bahamas National Trust, and Harvard University Graduate School of Design (GSD). The goal is to facilitate the design and management of a more sustainable future for the Exuma archipelago, and The Bahamas more generally.
The project has two parallel and mutually informing components: research and education. These components work to inform the development of proposals and interventions as well as the building of capabilities for local empowerment. An important part of the project are a series of Scholarships for the degree programmes as well as opportunities for Bahamians to engage in the summer Career Discovery Programme at the GSD. Furthermore, the project is integrated with the research and pedagogy of the GSD.
The project seeks to understand local issues through various forms of public engagement. Public forums, workshops, and conferences are part of the process, in addition to fieldwork that facilitates the connection of researchers with residents. The first year focused on fieldwork including participation in daily routines that created a better understanding of local issues particularly across Exuma and more generally across The Bahamas. The second year of the project focuses on proposal making, where we design and imagine projects that have the potential for a long-term spatial and economic impact, while the third year focuses on a plan for action and implementation.” - Sustainable Exuma 2015.
Christopher Reznich was on the design team for Stoss Landscape Urbanism.
“Part of a multi-disciplinary, multi-site master plan for the Grand Rapids Riverfront that focuses on reconnecting the Grand River with the community of Grand Rapids, the goal was to create new recreational opportunities along the water and a vision for a more energetic and resilient downtown. The resulting master plan addressed the Grand River’s outmoded flood protection system and casts a vision for accessible public amenities aimed, not only at protecting the city from an increasing flood risk, but also providing recreation, including floating boardwalks, kayak docks, yoga decks, biking trails, and wildlife habitat.
Stoss identified 16 sites at over 70 acres along 6 miles of the Grand River, each site tapping into larger issues of flood protection, public access, and ecology—bringing new interest, development, and activity to the city’s river. One of the areas, identified as a critical site to augment resiliency efforts, was Coldbrook Edge. The Stoss team designed a viewing deck that provided an overlook to the river while also providing critical access to an existing seawall. In addition, a series of tiered gabion walls were constructed to provide enhanced flood protection.” - Stoss Landscape Urbanism
Christopher Reznich was on the design team for Stoss Landscape Urbanism.
“In conjunction with British architectural firm Foster + Partners, Stoss designed the public spaces for a 43-story residential development at the northern edge of Toronto’s Yorkville neighborhood. The corner lot is conceived of as a public plaza, opening the site to activity, day and night. An undulating canopy of pleached trees provide shade to custom benches and an open market area that alternately can be used for public events or performances. The distinctive foliage’s changing palette of color mark Toronto’s dramatic seasons and private terrace gardens rise above the street as a series of native Canadian landscapes.” - Stoss Landscape Urbanism
Christopher Reznich was on the design team for Stoss Landscape Urbanism.
https://www.stoss.net/projects/resiliency-waterfronts/thames-riverfront
Ontario's Thames River Valley is the most prominent geomorphic feature in London with the confluence of two branches into a third at the Forks. A Canadian Heritage River, it makes outstanding contributions to cultural heritage, natural heritage and recreation. Past, present, or future, the Thames plays a central role in defining the social, cultural, civic, and economic possibilities for London's residents, workers and visitors. The City is experiencing a confluence of planning opportunities that will catalyze transformational changes in the fabric of London, Ontario.
But there is untapped potential, and significant issues that need to be addressed. Flooding is a big problem and must inform every strategy for renewal. Water quality is of equal import, it has a significant effect on the ecologies that can thrive in the corridor, and the social/recreational uses that can be supported. Today, transportation, utility, and flood infrastructure is single-purpose and negatively impacts quality of life. Adjacent urban fabric peters out toward the river, is disconnected, is inaccessible, and fails to link people to the Thames.
Back to the River re-embraces the Thames as the social and environmental lifeblood of the City. It re-knits the urban fabric of the city to the river, and uses the river itself—and the revitalized open spaces along it—as catalysts for urban regeneration within Downtown, SoHo, and nearby neighborhoods.
Christopher Reznich was on the design team for Stoss Landscape Urbanism.
James Chesnut and Christopher Reznich were on the design/build team for Akoaki.
"Imaging Detroit, equal parts international film festival and pop-up agora, aimed to spark a conversation about the many ways Detroit has been portrayed over the last decade. It staged public debate and open speculation on how representation contributes to our urban imagination. In assembling a varied collection of works and guests, Imaging Detroit revealed the possibility of an ephemeral urbanization: the 36-hour event transformed Perrien Park into a vibrant civic space, complete with screenings, conversations, exhibit, food, and leisure." -Akoaki
James Chesnut and Christopher Reznich were on the design/build team for Akoaki.
"We installed two monumental stars in a defunct tannery in Amilly, France. The structures, built in situ, spanned over thirty feet point to point. Using simple vernacular stud construction they delivered iconographic pow, encouraging visitors to take a fresh look at the spatial potentials of an industrial site in the process of transformation.
One seven pointed star hovers dexterously above the exhibition space clipped to the existing concrete structure. The second steps out between columns on the ground floor, balancing precariously over the tannery tanks. The two mischievous protagonists perform in dialogue with the idiosyncrasies of the industrial building as well as the landscape beyond.
The three dimensional super graphics, viewed from above, below, and at eye level, engage multiple and overlapping vantage points, suggesting that challenging geometries can be arrived at through simple, approachable techniques independent of costly contemporary fabrication facilities. All elements in the project were produced and assembled on site using tools germane to conventional construction: a mill saw, a table saw, a pneumatic stapler, and a few screw guns. The design and fabrication process was open to the public." -Akoaki
The exhibition also featured landscape and curation by Christophe Ponceau and photography installation by Marie Combes of Combes Renaud.
Christopher Reznich and James Chesnut were on the design/build team with Akoaki.
"Interrobang was a public event and temporary gallery staged on the rooftop of Detroit’s Packard Automotive Plant. Designed in response to the infamous building’s impending sale at auction, the project guided visitors through a precarious urban scenario sparking conversation about the sites possible, collective futures.
However briefly, Interrobang as a pop action, transformed the Packard site into a public space. For most the difficulty and mutability of the industrial complex made a visit feel risky, relegating an appraisal of this urban scenario to images disseminated in the media. Interrobang suggested that a series of simple design interventions can lend transparency and vivacity to a space typically associated with Detroit’s capital failures.
At core, the intervention was unassuming. First Interrobang cleared a path from the debris of Packard’s unhinged landscape. The resulting trail led visitors through the building and to a curated roofscape along East Grand Boulevard. Here they encounter an installation with interactive data cards and a 16 foot architectural model assessing the contemporary condition of each parcel on the 40-acre complex. At the center of the informal gallery space: an aggregate seating area that reconfigured to produce social clusters of variable scales.
As the title of the project implies, reactions to the site’s condition are both exclamatory and questioning. Interrobang suggested that beyond lament or fetishism in the face of such unmitigated ruination, public engagement might help project more inspired, collective ideas about urban space." -Akoaki
Interrobang was a collaborative project, completed in the course of the Taubman College of Architecture and Urban Planning's MS Conservation program.
Christopher Reznich was on the project team led by El Hadi Jazairy + Rania Ghosn.
https://design-earth.org/projects/drop-in-the-ocean/
Planetary Urbanism Competition, 2015
Christopher Reznich was on the design team led by El Hadi Jazairy + Rania Ghosn + Aziza Chaouni.
https://design-earth.org/project/flat-lot-cloud-cover/
Flint Public Art Project | Flat Lot Competition, 2013
Cloud Cover renders Flint Flat Lot a piece of aerial public art visible from Google earth. The cloud’s volume is formed by the aggregation of 729 biodegradable latex weather balloons tethered to division lines on the parking lot. In the logic of a tangram, the set of balloons are put together to form different shapes.
The cloud canopy has minimal necessary structure. Its simple assembly is designed for local volunteers to weave the rope grid in one day. Hovering above the lot, the canopy builds a microclimate that reduces the urban heat island effect for summer events. Local nurseries and greenhouses will contribute plants and trees for the period of the installation to further improve air quality. The furniture is made of recycled palettes transformed into rolling furniture: partitions, seats, stands, and planters. The structure-free ground plan allows flexible and adaptive arrangement of furniture: they will be deployed for the events and stacked up in pyramids to allow the regular use of the parking lot on other days.
At the end of the season, helium is put back to bottles. The balloons will be flattened into triangular-shaped panels, recycled into souvenir shoulder bags, and sold by local retailers as well as cultural institutions in Michigan. In its afterlife, the Cloud Cover, like pieces of the Berlin Wall, will carry Flint’s environmentalist icon to the world.
Christopher Reznich was on the design team team led by El Hadi Jazairy + Rania Ghosn.
https://design-earth.org/project/bab-bahrain/#
Bab Al-Bahrain Competition, 2012
“On March 18, 2011, the Pearl Roundabout, the hub of Bahrain's rebellion was destroyed in the wake of a month-long campaign of protests and civil disobedience,. After demolishing the Pearl Monument, the government announced that that its name would be changed to Al Farooq Junction and that the roundabout would be replaced with traffic lights in order to ease congestion in the financial district. In November 2011, Bab Al Bahrain Open Ideas Competition invited local and international architects to “propose a viable urban square” and in the light of recent political events that have taken place across the region, “question what a contemporary public space in the Arab World should look like.”
Design Earth submitted an entry entitled Sous les Pavés la Plage in reference to both the physical world of water beneath the reclaimed ground and to the Situationist International slogan used during the protests of May '68 in Paris. At the geographic scale, the project responds to the geographic condition of ground reclamation along the Bahraini waterfront, whereby over the last decades, large landforms were carved out from the sea surface to fashion valuable waterfront real estate. Such expansion of the land over the water physically and symbolically has progressively distanced the sea from older parts of the city all while deferring public interests to the economy.
Rather than piling up earth for the production of “real” value, the project excavates the ground to formalize a collective. The project consists of a series of artificial islands for collective life, each completely different yet each holds the others in balance on a shared plinth. The project seeks thus to embody the formal possibilities of a collective, not as an ideological homogenizing totality, but as a group form of embedded pluralism: an architecture for the political. The urban project embraces ground manipulation as an architectural strategy.
The ground folds up and depresses to articulate a series of surfaces: sunken beach, reading hammock-oasis, green ramp-seating, skate park, etc. Such outlines a central limestone platform, which opens up multiple programmatic possibilities of market stalls, soccer games, food carts, or music events. A series of figures assemble onto the plinth: immersive children museum, post office, a solar balloon, and archives-stacks.
The project shifting the ground of urban citizenship from being an identity to being an activity that articulates, claims, and renews group rights in and through the creation of lived and represented spaces in the city.” - Design Earth
James Chesnut for Andrew Holder of LADG
https://theladg.com/48-Characters
48 Characters is research and experimentation in the form-making of families. Using plaster castings in latex balloons and a variety of tools and jigs for slinging, 48 Characters is born. Character form can be registered as families yet no single character is alike. And yet in order to create a family the process of slinging, poking, and prodding strived for consistency. In the end 48 Characters aspires to render a language of form that produces space while registering as plump, bulbous, fatty, or pokey. The characters act out in space and on top of other characters: dancing, pushing, snuggling, and caressing. The form and space becomes mixed with emotion in its subjective gallery format.
James Chesnut with Akoaki
Electroformalism marries nineteenth century metal forming technique with contemporary design and fabrication methods. The commissioned works are preceded only by a prototype with each project presenting new material mixtures and applications. The design is developed in conjunction with the digital fabrication process. Each being in tune with the other and changing based on material selection and final installation strategy. Design and fabrication are refined simultaneously and each new work brings new challenges to both. In the end the tessellation of parts render a topography that disguise the nuance and detail of the process. Leaving a clean and beautiful material composition with texture, complexity, and patina.
James Chesnut for LADG
https://theladg.com/In-the-Garden-Grows-a-Lump
“In the Garden Grows a Lump” is an exhibition of illustrated manuscripts on picturesque gardens from the 18th and 19th century. This period of work created a new lexicon to describe an alternative to the rational geometry of classical gardens. The “Lump” became a category of form and is the major figure in the exhibit. Techniques for texture and color are applied to the lump in ways that reflect innovations in illustrating the picturesque. The furniture integrates with the lump on legs and skis, displaying the rare manuscripts. Visitors to the exhibit are asked to traverse the lumps walking on the landscape to view the work and they are invited into the underbelly of the lump through openings rendered in depth by the use of low light.
Ruin Porn @ Federal Screw was a series of small independent and collaborative installations at the defunct Federal Screw Works factory, orchestrated by Anya Sirota of Akoaki. The temporary event highlighted the sublime condition of the factory’s slow submission to the elements.
Christopher Reznich and James Chesnut were on the design and construction teams for Akoaki.
http://www.akoaki.com/federal-screw.html
“We lodged an immersive architectural environment into the boiler room of the 80,000sf abandoned Federal Screw Works plant. The installation, a response to the derelict context, provided a moment of surprise and punctuation to a choreographed event. A mysterious magenta void was carved from the perceived solid of the factory’s central space, generating a site of geometric complexity, chromatic contrast, and optical distortion. A series of precise cuts in the truncated spatial pyramids produced an effect of perspectival inversion, inviting the visitor to question the depth, dimension, and scale of this aberrant environment.
Inside the unsolicited pavilion, titled General Manifold, visitors encountered a 6-channel soundscape consisting of spatially localized and syncopated industrial sounds layered over readings of seminal ruin texts from the 18th and 19th centuries (John Ruskin, Viollet le Duc, Bernadin de St Pierre, Denis Diderot). The soundscape was produced in collaboration with Playboy cover model and radio host Brandie Moses. Viewing the installation from an exterior perspective, the space appeared turned inside-out - a poor man's homage to Anish Kapoor’s Leviathan.” -Anya Sirota of Akoaki
