Dylan Herrmann-Holt

About Archive

house of...

Spring 2023
Prof. Jennifer Bonner
with Sabrina Madera

Chelsea, MA

Tasked with reimagining four abandoned industrial buildings in Chelsea, MA as housing this project, house of... asks the question, “Can housing be designed through pop culture, more specifically the still life?” Drawing from Daniel Gordon and queer ballroom culture, the project looks at reimagining family and housing structure through a queered lens, allowing for less strict definition of family structure to be explored in housing. Each floor and even the whole building can be reorganized to be one single interconnected unit or more typically as many many single cells for a prototypical individual family or anywhere in between through operable doors.

Queered Family Tree

Normative Family Tree

The four buildings are imagined as tables and shelves set on the larger table of the site. Rendered conceptually (and in construction) through wood (CLT clad in stylized aluminum paneling) and wire frame metal (Steel and glass) the shelves are then populated with conceptual fruits, vegetables, plates, dishes (program, such as housing, market spaces, community rooms and the runway, a space integral for community gathering and to ballroom culture.

A conversation around estranged furnishings was also produced utilizing neural networks to produce averaged ‘norm core’ furniture then remapping the images back onto a generic 3D model of the furnishing.The outputs were used to populate both the digital and physical models while culminating in a catalogue.

Dylan Herrmann-Holt
Email
Instagram
Linkedin

Dylan is a designer from rural Appalachia. His work centers rural spaces, construction tectonics, community development and exploring visual representation. He did his BS in Architecture at Kent State University and M.Arch I at Harvard GSD. He typically finds inspiration in the architecture of his youth in Southern Ohio and whatever pop culture he is presently immersed in.