Jarod D. Redfield

This was a Second-Year project that was located near the Chestnut Hill Reservoir in Boston, MA.

Upon visiting the site and developing site analysis I found myself spending the majority of my time circulating through the existing trails multiple times, trying to really understand the topography and the different environments it creates. The trail system has a much longer loop that brings users towards the east side of the site on top of the hill before bringing them back towards the reservoir and other trail heads. I became very fond of the western edge of the hill that provides views of the reservoir through pockets of trees, and designed my building to be an extension of longer loop bringing users right over to the hill’s edge before bringing them back to the other trails. The program is divided mostly into public and private spaces, with one trail slicing between the two masses and another taking users along the roof of the much more public mass. With the public mass being enclosed by glass and the private mass being a strong concrete form, a strong inside/outside relationship is created for users passing through.

This project was based in Caracas, Venezuela as a continuation of my studio professor Manuel Delgado’s award winning entry for a 2012 International Design Competition to redevelop the existing La Carlota Airport into a metropolitan park to reshape the culture and quality of life in Caracas. As students, we focused on the surrounding quebradas that run north and south that transport water through the city from the Avila mountain to Rio Guaire. The existing quebrada conditions create flooding hazards for many of the surrounding neighborhoods and do not take advantage of possible design solutions that could be incorporated around the several quebradas that run throughout the city.

The semester consisted of both group and individual work, where we worked together to develop a master plan and then had individual interventions that followed the ideas represented in the masterplan. My partner and I were selected to work on Quebrada Sebucan and Torres, one of the unique scenarios where two quebradas came together. The drawing to the left shows our goals for treating buildings that are impacted by the new quebrada as well our intentions for modifying the quebradas themselves. Currently, the quebradas are too narrow and shallow, so when heavy rain water comes from a storm there isn’t enough capacity to properly treat the water. Our main goal was to solve the flooding issue first by adding width and depth to the quebrada, balancing cut and fill of land to create berms that help with flood protection for nearby buildings. The implementation of pedestrian access allows for the quebrada to become a multipurpose landscape creating a walkable north/south connection through the city. Additionally, there are flood pools along the quebrada within the urban fabric to help sustain water levels during a storm that act as recreational areas during the dry seasons.

For fall semester of junior year, we were tasked with our first partnered project which involved designing an apartment complex on a 550,000 sq. ft. site located adjacent to Central Square in East Boston. Acting as our first Urban Design project, we were instructed to work at all different scales of a project starting with a Master Plan, then individual units, and pulling it all together by getting into building design as a whole. Our Master Plan was developed around extending adjacent urban conditions onto the site and allowing existing conditions to dictate most of our design decisions, while also allowing the site to maintain its public dynamic. Both the units and the buildings were designed around having central common and amentity spaces, with a focus on natural light and sun-shading.

Group project taking place during spring semester of Junior year. The semester was disrupted by COVID-19 and there was no physical model required for the final due to remote learning.

We were tasked with a 23,000 sq. ft. site that is a current parking lot on Church Street in Cambridge, MA. The building program was based off requirements for a project incorporated with the Instructables, who focus on “maker spaces” for DIY projects. After initial site analysis, we determined the two main site conditions to be the relationships on the site’s edges. With the high-activity area of Church Street on the southern edges of the site, and the quieter, more intimate areas on the northern edges adjacent to the Old Burial Ground and a residential neighborhood; we translated these two conditions into ideas of Heavy (busy/loud) and Light (quiet/secluded). Our intent was to grasp these site characteristics and allow our building to reflect them in terms of structure, geometry, materiality, and programmatic organization. A central spine flows through the building take users on a progression from entry/workspaces (Heavy) into more communal and interactive spaces, with the final destination being the gallery spaces where work is displayed in the most intimate and secluded area of the site (Light). The term “gradient” became a priority and was emphasized with the Heavy end of the building being load-bearing walls with punch-out windows and the Light end of the building being columns and curtain walls. Glass masonry, discovered through precedent, was used within our atrium spaces with the intent to create a somewhat-transparent building facade acting as the “middle” of our gradient; while also highlighting the circulation spaces throughout the building.

This was a partner project where we participated in Bee Breeders 2020 Micro Home Competition for our Animated Architectural Volumes course at Wentworth

Partner: https://crmok.net/architecture

This was a project within our Technology course that instructed us to draw and model a typical floor and wall section with a certain insulation rating

A sequence of hand-crafted process models from the summer or 2019

Visualization drawings for new construction of the town barn in Pittsburg, NH

The second design project of my spring semester of freshman year, no digital software

This project provided us with more opportuni-ty and a more flexible program with a similar palette. For this project, I used the filtering of natural light within the building to control the pace of the user.

The first design project of the second semester of freshman year, no digital software

We were provided with the opportunity of a simple site as well as a structural component palette to incorporate into our design for our first attempt at working with a program. For this project, I chose to use bearing walls as my structural component, and conceptually used natural light as a guiding action through the building for the users.

Constructing a house for my grandfather in Pittsburg, NH

Used Rhino 3D to create construction documents, worked on house from foundation to water-sealing as well as interior finishing

A couple different projects I have worked on in private for friends