Skip to main content

Students

 

 

Student Profile

Martin John Raub

A sense of arrival never happens, a visiting professor only indefinitely slows down. In this sense they are subject to a condition of placelessness. I purposed a dwelling for the pathos of such a life that not always has the possibility of giving root. Emplacement of a body within a sense of displacement.

A building for existing squash courts in Central Campus allowed for material and site precedents. The structure of the existing building is so grossly apparent it appears to be the bones of a building that was, the bones of what remains. Reducing the building to its structural posts and beams and using what remain of the remains as a point of departure for a series of passages that are fluid within the grid structure.

The passages are sensitive to the topography, in that they engage the void in front of the building by bridging it to the sidewalk and in effect to the public. The passages also acknowledge tree growth on the hill between the sidewalk and building. This creates individuality in the presence of the entrances to the passages.
(Arch 511 – Professor Jim Williamson)
View Work Detail

"Cornell has provided an ideal and exciting setting for working in architecture freely and uninhibitedly."

Martin John Raub

M.Arch.1 2010

Even after my first semester things look different. In Cornell’s M.Arch.1 program I have been challenged to question my assumptions of architecture, rethink the historical “canon” of the built environment, and communicate the acts of thinking, looking, and making into a work process.  

Prior to Cornell, I studied art at Vassar College. I complemented academic work with work of the hands at a Benedictine Monastery and with a team of archeologists. These two unique opportunities tangent to school allowed me to discover the Hudson Valley. I began to work outside of Poughkeepsie at Dia:Beacon as a docent while also as a photographer for the restoration of McKim, Mead, &White mansion near Rhinebeck.

In my thesis, A Hermitage for Robinson Crusoe, I found a cross section of understanding that provided me a cause and engagement with architecture. After Vassar, I began working at Barry Price Architecture which further provided framework and transparency into the workings of a small architecture studio. Fueled by such witness, I became too interested in different ways of seeing in an architectural milieu.

Cornell has provided an ideal and exciting setting for working in architecture freely and uninhibitedly. Asking questions in the allied fields has been an important operational strategy and viable tool for dealing with uncertainty within a complex discipline. The outlook is global, reflective in the international make-up of the school’s community. Cornell’s renowned culture of inclusiveness presents a foothold to explore different perspectives, in order to develop a meaningful dialogue to unfamiliar problems and their various conclusions.

Our first project was to plan a dinner as a studio. As new, eager architecture students ready to tackle any problem, we explored the constituents of a dinner party, replete with all their associations. It was a memorable gathering and a communal event that became the initial adhesive for the studio. The project allowed for one to render an event into an architectural interface.

In the summer of 2008, I will be traveling down to Concepcion, Chile to work with Pezo von Ellrichausen, a small studio that works in a cross production between art and architecture.

The first project of the M.Arch.1 studio was to design and plan a dinner and through various modes of documentation, look at how a real-time event could be apprehended into a dynamic architectural event. A series of drawing and models ‘of’ the dinner began to communicate to me that space can be seen more actively than merely an enclosure. 

The setting for the dinner was a 130 year old house renovated by William Miller, Cornell’s first AAP graduate.  A major actor in the dining room is a bureau that houses artifacts from the Miller’s as well as later occupants. 

I interrogated how an event can outlive the perceived boundaries that contain it. I constructed a drawing that unlearns from traditional orthography by manipulating a single point of reference from which an elevation is seen, to create a parallax view.  Instead of overhauling the convention of orthographic drawing, I worked within its choreography.
(Arch 511 – Professor Jim Williamson)
From drawings that negotiated several views into a field of vision, I proposed a model that would be an instrument for seeing that suggests boundaries are no-where.

The model demonstrates how managing a way of seeing can create multi-dimensional spaces by breaking down the system into basic components and reassembling the parts.
(Arch 511 – Professor Jim Williamson)