Completed Construction 2009

PROGRAM:  2000 SF of New Residential Construction, San Francisco, CA

STRATEGY:

March 2011

PROGRAM:  1,000,000 SF Urban Center, Comprising a Children’s Museum, a Retail Center, a Planning Museum and a Bookstore, Shenzhen, China

Fall 2009

PROGRAM:  Innovation Commons, Cambridge, MA

ADVISER:  Eric Höweler

STRATEGY:

The project is an exploration of the space of social discourse between the academy and the public domain. The academy has surely earned its reputation as the ivory tower since it policies of exclusion are not relegated only to their admissions processes but also to their physical campuses which are frequently surrounded by walls and gates and comprise buildings which are set off from their contexts; deferring to the normative horizontal-vertical plane relationships.

And as progeny of the agora, the academy has enjoyed an historically divergent relationship with the public square, which has evolved into its own horizontal and barren form. Harvard square, with its history of academia and commons, and strict adherence to the normative boundary conditions which have come to define and reinforce them typologically is the site of this intervention.

Internally, this exploration is a reinvention of traditional academic program by locating diverse disciplines in the same space, and creating individual academic territories for depth of expertise, and collective academic territories for broad-spectrum, problem-based collaboration and exploration across those disciplines. Externally, Public Commons amenities, already in place on the site in the form of retail, transportation, points of historical interest and places of assembly, are impressed on the envelope of the building creating an involution of the normative boundary condition.

The first spatial strategy is the creation of a smooth condition to dissolve a discreetly defined horizontal and vertical as part of site circulation and create a continuity between the spaces of public transportation, street-level pedestrian circulation and the vertically organized spaces of academic production. Circulation moves vertically and obliquely a closed looping spiral, broken only to allow access. Staccato movements of the former site circulation yield to the legato openness of the public commons.

The second strategy is performing operations of exceptional differentiation in the friction zones where the public program encounters the collective spaces of the academic program which are enhanced though distillation. These ‘organs’ overlay functionality as disruption, horizontal with the oblique, and respite within instability. The shearing of the form into a klein bottle condition yields hierarchy and when experienced as a whole create an experience of programmatic ambivalence, which defy the normal relationships of these programs.

As an urban object, this ambiguity is further accentuated as the building is deferential to its contextual massing, appearing similar in its solidity from a distance, but also highly porous, cradling the bright center of its creative energy as public commons.

Options Studio, Fall 2009

PROGRAM:  Tuberculosis Clinic, Bahar Dar, Ethiopia

STRATEGY:

January 2011

PROGRAM:  500,000 SF Stadium/ Retail Complex, Chongqing, China

STRATEGY:

Options Studio, Spring 2010

PROGRAM:  100,000 SF School of Architecture in Toulouse, France

STRATEGY:

July 2011

PROGRAM:  300,000 SF Library, Datong, China

Honors Studio, Fall 2007

PROGRAM:  100,000 SF Materials Distribution Facility in San Francisco, CA

STRATEGY:

The Materials Distribution Facility is a re-imagination of the big box home-improvement retailer.  Using a unique programmatic strategy based on the Voronoi Algorithm, traditional organizational principles are rejected in favor of system which favors a multiplicity of adjacencies between products.  This new paradigm creates unlikely adjacency conditions between seemingly disparate products which in turn results in a user experience which is more amenable to creative appropriation of an existing system.

Consideration of the Voronoi as a system for which real world architectural solutions can be created, requires a clear premeditation of program nodes, an examination of the resulting adjacencies, and a treatment for each membrane condition between the nodes in space and external spaces.

The voronoi then is a tool for analyzing the relationships in program well beyond traditional diagrams that still maintains a logic of nested self-similarities throughout an internally comprehensible but still externally inscrutible artifact.

The formal project of the Materials Distribution Facility recognizes a central preoccupation of contemporary architectural discourse with computation in design and the use of natural genetic algorithms in the genesis of space and form, the voronoi being one of these (although admittedly comtemporary at the time of design, it has since fallen into disfavor as a momentary style).  What has been exciting about the voronoi in an architectural context is the potential for structural superiority since it is so frequently used in nature as an efficient structure, from radiolaria to foam.  And of course, the formal solution produces a visually and spatially engaging artifact that is not constrained by traditional forms as precedent.

Studio Work 2005

PROGRAM:  Parametric Bath House originating from the logic of Mondrian’s Broadway Boogie Woogie