Selected Work2025 – 2026
Marijke
Cohn
First-year studio work · School of Architecture, Florida Southern College
Lakeland, Florida · a Frank Lloyd Wright campus
First-year studio work · School of Architecture, Florida Southern College
Lakeland, Florida · a Frank Lloyd Wright campus
First year at Florida Southern College, where the view from the studio is the largest single-site collection of Frank Lloyd Wright's work in the world — his only built design for a college campus.
Three projects: an analysis of the Wright building across the lawn, a house worked out in section, and a garden inserted into the campus between three of its buildings.
Method
Hand drafting in ink · watercolour and marker · SketchUp · Procreate · chipboard, basswood, cast plaster, painted foam and static grass
Above. The Garden, 1/4" = 1'-0". Cast and carved forms set into a planted ground.
Contact
[ email ] · [ phone ] · Lakeland, Florida
Portfolio 15 pp · available [ dates ]
A garden for the Wright campus, between Ordway, Student Life and Financial Aid · 1/4" = 1'-0"
Model detail. Carved and cast forms, painted; planted ground in static grass and lichen.
The garden is made of curved walls that never quite close. Each one holds a room; the gaps between them are the paths.
Circulation was drawn first, as a single continuous line, and the enclosures grown outward from it. Planting follows the same rule — dense where the walls thicken, thin where the route runs through.
Wright ran a mile of covered esplanade across this campus to make walking the subject. The garden takes that instruction and answers it in curves rather than angles.
Sequence
parti → site diagram → plan → elevations and section → model
Parti, 29 March 2026. Movement in red, planting in green, enclosure in black. Drawn in Procreate before any plan existed — the petal forms and the sunken drums are already there, and survive into the model unchanged.
Site diagram, 30 March 2026. The existing buildings, the tree canopy and the two desire lines the garden had to accept. Ink and marker on vellum.
Plan, 1/4" = 1'-0". Ink and watercolour, 13 April 2026. Cobbled water channels in blue, planted mounds in olive, seating walls in black. Each circle is a room you can stand in without being seen from the path.
Model from above, matched to the plan.
Drawn by hand
Every line on this sheet was drafted in ink and painted wet-in-wet. No part of it is digital.
Site diagram and plan, 13 April 2026. The garden set against Ordway, Student Life, Financial Aid and the parking lot, with the summer and winter sun paths and the two points where noise enters the site.
Elevations and section, 13 April 2026. West elevation, south elevation, and a section looking east — the walls read as a row of leaves in profile.
What the section showed
Drawn flat, the walls looked like separate objects. In section they lean toward each other and the garden reads as one room.
Moulds. The curved walls were cut as negatives first, then cast and released — the only way to get a consistent radius across eight different arcs.
Model at eye level. Photographed low, on the table edge, to test whether the walls actually hide what they are meant to hide. They do, at about five feet.
Final review
Three drawn sheets at left — plan, site, elevations and section — with sketch studies, precedent photographs and the perspective studies pinned alongside.
Pinned 15 April 2026.
A house worked out in section · chipboard, basswood and card
Sectional model. Floor plates cantilever past the core in three directions; the stair is the only element that touches all three levels.
Floor plans, 19 February 2026. First, second and third. The square footprint below breaks apart as it rises; by the third floor only the stair core and two rooms remain.
Sections and elevation, 19 February 2026. Two sections cut across the stair, then the elevation — drafted in ink, dashed lines carrying the volumes behind the cut.
Drafting
All four sheets hand-drafted on the board: parallel rule, triangles, and a single line weight held across the set.
Axonometric. Modelled in SketchUp to check the drawings against themselves — two of the cantilevers on the second floor had no support in plan, and the model found it.
Corner view. The stair runs straight through the middle of the house and lands outside it.
Materials as information
Chipboard for anything structural, white card for anything added. The distinction was a drawing convention first; it made the model readable at a glance.
Two weeks of massing studies came first, at a scale small enough to build three a day and throw two away.
It began as a woven paper pattern. Pushing the weave into relief produced the shifted plates; the card studies tested footprint and void; the chipboard ones tested stacking. The final house takes the plan of one and the section of another.
Kept
Every study was shot on the same board from the same height, so the series could be compared rather than remembered.
Where it started, 1 February 2026. A woven paper colour study, then the same weave built out as relief — flat pattern pushed into depth.
Massing study in card. Solid and void only — no floors, no stair.
Stacking study in chipboard. The shifted plates that survive into the final scheme first appear here.
Frank Lloyd Wright, 1952. A stone's throw from my studio window — measured, then redrawn until it could be argued with.
Site plan · December 2025
Ink and watercolour. The Wright buildings are held white and unpainted so the ground reads first — on this campus the landscape and the esplanades are as designed as the walls.
Analytique, 8 December 2025. One building, four readings: exterior (what the envelope does), geometry (the bays it is made of), circulation (how a body moves through it), private space (what it keeps back). The same plan redrawn four times, hatched only where the diagram needs it.
The exercise was to stop describing a building and start arguing about it.
Ordway is two parallel arms around a courtyard with a circle pushed into one end — the Fletcher Theatre, the only theatre-in-the-round Wright ever built. That circle is the pivot in all four diagrams: it breaks the geometry, gathers the circulation, and is the one volume that gives nothing away to the outside.
Redrawing one plan four times forces a decision each time about what to leave out. Circulation is the only diagram with arrows; the rest make their point with weight and hatch alone.
Technique
Ink on vellum, hand lettering to a 1/8" guide. The watercolour site plan opposite was painted over the same base drawing.
An invented order, built on Corinthian proportions and then given over to its god: grape vines through the capital, a minotaur in the frieze, fruit and vegetation running the fluting.
Drawn in two passes — the order in red at full precision, the growth in black over the top, deliberately loose. The vine is the only thing on the sheet that ignores the axis.
March 2026 · Procreate
Ornament that grows out of the structure rather than sitting on it is the argument this campus is built on. This drawing is where I first tried it myself.
[ email ] · [ phone ] · Lakeland, Florida · available [ dates ]
Education
Experience
Drawing & software
Hand drafting in ink · watercolour and marker · SketchUp · Procreate · [ add: Rhino, AutoCAD, Revit, Illustrator, InDesign as they come ]
Model & shop
Chipboard and basswood · plaster casting from cut moulds · painted foam · static grass and lichen planting · [ add shop certifications ]
Also
[ languages · other skills · activities ]
References
[ Studio critic, term ] · [ Studio critic, term ] — contacts on request
All work by Marijke Cohn. Sheets photographed and digitally flattened; names, titles and dates transcribed from the drawings' own title blocks.
Rebuild with ./build.sh · print with chromium --headless --print-to-pdf=portfolio.pdf book.html