Harvard Graduate School of Design
Master’s in Architecture I ‘21
with Commendation
Master’s of Design Studies ‘21
History & Philosophy of Design + Media
Sarah Lawrence College
Bachelor of Arts ‘14
svasseur@alumni.harvard.edu
ig: @samt_wasser
MAO Torino: Le Son de la Pierre
Le Son de la Pierre is a piece conceived by Lee Mingwei and designed in collaboration with Samantha Vasseur.
The stone sits in anticipation of its collision with the plate, which subsequently shall be repaired by Mingwei via the technique of kintsugi. An ode to the satellitic magnetism of things, and the mended trace of their contact.
Prototype: Wood
Final: Granite
On Display at Museo d’Arte Orientale Torino, Italy
Novemver 4th 2023 - June 2nd 2024
Le Son de la Pierre is a piece conceived by Lee Mingwei and designed in collaboration with Samantha Vasseur.
The stone sits in anticipation of its collision with the plate, which subsequently shall be repaired by Mingwei via the technique of kintsugi. An ode to the satellitic magnetism of things, and the mended trace of their contact.
Prototype: Wood
Final: Granite
On Display at Museo d’Arte Orientale Torino, Italy
Novemver 4th 2023 - June 2nd 2024
S K Y L I N E: New York Review of Architecture
DISPATCHES
5/31: Matters of Form
Those of us who packed into the subterranean auditorium of the Center for Architecture on the most ultimate of May days seemed to affirm the noble invocation with which THOMAS DE MONCHAUX began his dialogue with ERIC HÖWELER: “the power of people and the power of place.” Höweler, who runs a design studio with MEEJIN YOON out of Boston, was on hand to discuss Verify in Field (University of Chicago Press), a book he argued was about praxis, one that prints construction details, one that advocates for a method: “Measure twice, cut once.” In describing the statics of the Collier Memorial at MIT—a five-way granite vault constructed inversely to an arch (i.e., keystones first)—he spelled out the principle of arches: “the rock tries to fall; it can’t fall because there’s other rocks holding it together.” To this material politics of interdependency, de Monchaux rejoined with an au courant theory about Stonehenge. If it was previously believed that Stonehenge must have in and of itself presented a tenable reason for fetching stones all the way from Wales, the causality is now reversed, where its builders are believed to have asked themselves “wouldn’t it be great if we got stones all the way from Wales?” Evidently, the underlying motive was a camaraderie borne of the ambition to achieve something great.
As the talk progressed from form to matter—which it inevitably would in the current consciousness of labor and extraction—de Monchaux pointed to the conservatism of Winston Churchill’s famous dictum “We shape buildings and thereafter they shape us,” which assumes that our munificent surrounds are proudly obstinate, perhaps even eternal. This prompted Höweler to cite the research of his students at the Harvard Graduate School of Design and its attentiveness to adaptive reuse. When the Q&A became bogged down by questions of plasticity, Höweler offered some wisdom he and Yoon accrued from their experiences working on the Memorial to Enslaved Laborers at the University of Virginia. “One thing we learned,” he said, “is [that] meaning is not something you put in, meaning is something you take out.”
— Samantha Vasseur
DISPATCHES
5/31: Matters of Form
Those of us who packed into the subterranean auditorium of the Center for Architecture on the most ultimate of May days seemed to affirm the noble invocation with which THOMAS DE MONCHAUX began his dialogue with ERIC HÖWELER: “the power of people and the power of place.” Höweler, who runs a design studio with MEEJIN YOON out of Boston, was on hand to discuss Verify in Field (University of Chicago Press), a book he argued was about praxis, one that prints construction details, one that advocates for a method: “Measure twice, cut once.” In describing the statics of the Collier Memorial at MIT—a five-way granite vault constructed inversely to an arch (i.e., keystones first)—he spelled out the principle of arches: “the rock tries to fall; it can’t fall because there’s other rocks holding it together.” To this material politics of interdependency, de Monchaux rejoined with an au courant theory about Stonehenge. If it was previously believed that Stonehenge must have in and of itself presented a tenable reason for fetching stones all the way from Wales, the causality is now reversed, where its builders are believed to have asked themselves “wouldn’t it be great if we got stones all the way from Wales?” Evidently, the underlying motive was a camaraderie borne of the ambition to achieve something great.
As the talk progressed from form to matter—which it inevitably would in the current consciousness of labor and extraction—de Monchaux pointed to the conservatism of Winston Churchill’s famous dictum “We shape buildings and thereafter they shape us,” which assumes that our munificent surrounds are proudly obstinate, perhaps even eternal. This prompted Höweler to cite the research of his students at the Harvard Graduate School of Design and its attentiveness to adaptive reuse. When the Q&A became bogged down by questions of plasticity, Höweler offered some wisdom he and Yoon accrued from their experiences working on the Memorial to Enslaved Laborers at the University of Virginia. “One thing we learned,” he said, “is [that] meaning is not something you put in, meaning is something you take out.”
— Samantha Vasseur
Mixed Doubles:
Sensed Symmetry and Other Others
Symmetry doesn’t always occur in plain sight: it may, instead, exist as the sense of another, both fundamentally equivalent and different. One has been exhausting the women’s locker rooms’ spatial relationships for a number of years until one suddenly—perhaps as a child whose parents divorce—incidentally spends a stray minute in the men’s locker rooms and viscerally grasps the symmetry that was true all along. The projected reciprocal space occurs in the mind and is triggered by a wall. A façade is, according to Alois Riegl, a wall that implies that a room is behind it. The opposite of a wall, then, is the ground: a plane with nothing beneath it but earth. The retaining wall inside of a hole in the earth is then effectively a ground, whereas a floorplate is effectively a wall. The thesis imagines the negative of the room we are not in.
Mixed Doubles proposes a public racquet club. Sensed Symmetry & Other Others is about our projection of the other, invisible behind a wall or unpredictable beyond markings on the ground. It draws from the history of Central Park as a constructed hole in Manhattan, the face that is the racquet—from the Arabic rahat, “palm of the hand”—and the opening gesture given by tennis, from the French tenez, “take heed” at the projectile that is coming your way.
Sensed Symmetry and Other Others
Symmetry doesn’t always occur in plain sight: it may, instead, exist as the sense of another, both fundamentally equivalent and different. One has been exhausting the women’s locker rooms’ spatial relationships for a number of years until one suddenly—perhaps as a child whose parents divorce—incidentally spends a stray minute in the men’s locker rooms and viscerally grasps the symmetry that was true all along. The projected reciprocal space occurs in the mind and is triggered by a wall. A façade is, according to Alois Riegl, a wall that implies that a room is behind it. The opposite of a wall, then, is the ground: a plane with nothing beneath it but earth. The retaining wall inside of a hole in the earth is then effectively a ground, whereas a floorplate is effectively a wall. The thesis imagines the negative of the room we are not in.
Mixed Doubles proposes a public racquet club. Sensed Symmetry & Other Others is about our projection of the other, invisible behind a wall or unpredictable beyond markings on the ground. It draws from the history of Central Park as a constructed hole in Manhattan, the face that is the racquet—from the Arabic rahat, “palm of the hand”—and the opening gesture given by tennis, from the French tenez, “take heed” at the projectile that is coming your way.
19 December 2019
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Open Letters
If we draw a continuous arc for the path of a swinging door, you ask us, “What is a door swing? Bring me a door swing please.”
If we draw a continuous arc for the path of a swinging door, you ask us, “What is a door swing? Bring me a door swing please.”
1 May 2020
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VVV
Crowds seeks to address plurality in both its absorptive and exclusionary capacities, as a grouping of people more or less anonymous to one another, as an accidental entity just as much as a politicized community, and even as aggregates such as swarms, rashes and confetti. Crowds seem to resist definition yet be most visible a symptom of society. From an architect's perspective, crowds are a force to be controlled through the funnel of egress. Crowds are an emergency. As indeterminate as they are, crowds are an incentive for movement.
Crowds seeks to address plurality in both its absorptive and exclusionary capacities, as a grouping of people more or less anonymous to one another, as an accidental entity just as much as a politicized community, and even as aggregates such as swarms, rashes and confetti. Crowds seem to resist definition yet be most visible a symptom of society. From an architect's perspective, crowds are a force to be controlled through the funnel of egress. Crowds are an emergency. As indeterminate as they are, crowds are an incentive for movement.
