The Upper Manhattan Empowerment Zone’s redevelopment of a through-block lot across from Harlem’s famous Apollo Theater positions itself in a rapidly changing social and architectural context. One half of the lot, fronting 125th Street, offers a series of office spaces for media non-profits and other cultural tenants, as well as a public screening room and a large restaurant. The other half, fronting 124th Street, offers 34 much needed affordable housing units, designed for aging jazz musicians.
Both sides of the site are designed around spaces meant to promote socialization and cross-pollination of ideas: communal living rooms and a generous fitness center in the affordable housing, and a series of shared meeting and production spaces on the cultural side. A public sequence pulls individuals--whether residents, commercial tenants, or the general public--into a central elevated courtyard, using daylighting and a strong organizing diagonal. This central courtyard, along with the smaller communal spaces on both sides, is meant to foster social interactions between otherwise distinct groups, capitalizing on the striking demographic change playing out in Central Harlem.
Critics Sara Caples, Everardo Jefferson, Jonathan Rose |
Fall 2015
The ten-thousand identical housing units of the Cañadas del Florido development contrast sharply with Tijuana’s vibrant culture of cross-border exchange: people, food, and notably, music. This project transforms Cañadas del Florido from an unrelenting monoculture of low-income housing to a music center for the city of Tijuana and neighboring areas. Municipal-scale intervention takes the form of three new public amphitheaters, which vary in size, play dual functions as performance spaces and needed public leisure space, and turn the site’s extreme topography into an asset.
Connected by a central pedestrian way, the amphitheaters aim to give the neighborhood a sense of identity and draw people and business. Proposed public policy facilitates the purchase, consolidation, and transformation of abandoned housing units by existing residents, recognizing the creative and entrepreneurial spirit that already exists. Together, the three scales of intervention propose organic diversification and formation of identity as a solution to Mexico’s epidemic of abandonment among social housing.
Critic Tatiana Bilbao | Spring 2015
Collaboration with John Keeley
This design for New York headquarters for the Center for Advancement of Science in Space sees diverse program as an opportunity for CASIS to display its people, operations, and products, and increase corporate transparency to the public. A large wall, containing service and structure, bisects the site, consolidating private program to the south, and public program to the north, oriented towards a large public park. A series of continuous projections push through this wall, carrying public program into the private zone, and private program into the public. Linked by a continuous circulation system of public ramps, culminating in a conference center and auditorium at the top, visitors are given constant opportunities to view and interact with the private workings of CASIS. A unified exterior shell encases the building, creating tension where projections break through to offer further transparency to the public.
Critic Joel Sanders | Fall 2013
Annually, students collaborate with a local housing agency to design and construct a single-family home through the Vlock Building Project. In addition to taking part in a full range of construction tasks at 118 Greenwood Street, my work focused on technical detailing of the building envelope, as well as design and fabrication of exterior elements and site. A visually porous envelope was a key part of making the compact, 1500 SF house feel gracious and spatially continuous with its exterior spaces, particularly those defined by decks. These decks were designed and detailed as floating continuations of the interior, spilling down to meet the ground as waterfall steps, and delineated by cable railings that carry through the shadow lines of the house’s shiplap siding.
Critic Adam Hopfner | Spring/Summer 2013
Collaboration with Raven Hardison, John Keeley
Photo credits: Neil Alexander
This prototypical design provides a unique solution for difficult-to-develop sliver lots that proliferate throughout New Haven and other urban areas. Extending the full buildable length of the lot, the house is organized around a series of courtyards that integrate narrow side yards fully into the home’s interior. Rooms, containing the main living spaces, alternate with joints, containing service space, and are paired with a small private courtyard. Glazing occurs only around these courtyards, and through the sides of bay windows that push out where courtyards push in. The interior is thus both visually continuous with the exterior, and buffered from adjacent lots.
Critics Alan Organschi, Trattie Davies, Peter de Bretteville, Herb Clark | Spring 2013
Collaboration with Leah Abrams, Michael Miller, Boris Morin-Defoy, Nicholas Muraglia, Lauren Raab, Jonathan Sun
Recognizing that challenges of privacy and adequate lighting are inherent to designing for a narrow lot, this prototype proposal inverts the traditional hierarchy of a two-story house and introduces a range of daylighting techniques. A continuous public space on the second floor elevates the majority of the house’s activity above the street, and rotates out to capture daylight and respond to a contextual privacy gradient in large bay windows. Where second floor spaces rotate away from the envelope, lightwells penetrate through to bedrooms on the first floor.
Critic Amy Lelyveld | Spring 2013
Consolidating the institutional, commercial, and 4,000 residential units associated with an Olympic Village along a single street creates a vibrant connection between disparate Boston neighborhoods. Hyper-concentrated development not only captures the festive atmosphere of the Olympics in an enduring, linking neighborhood, but also opens up the rest of the site to serve as large-scale ecological and social infrastructure.
A series of constructed wetlands and berms mediate between the surrounding neighborhoods and Boston Harbor for stormwater treatment, tides, and projected sea level rise. This wetland landscape connects back to the main street visually through a series of viewshed-creating building punctures, and physically where wetlands or smaller channels push into the main street. Elsewhere along the street, smaller zones are defined by athletic, water, and cultural facilities, creating local opportunities for identity as well as rich public program.
Critic Keller Easterling | Spring 2014
Collaboration with Ross McClellan
Cross Chair exploits the dual nature of steel sheet: 1/8th-inch thin when viewed from one angle, and a wide, almost graphic profile when viewed from another. Two plasma-cut steel profile pieces intersect and weld together at the chair’s center to create a rigid structure, with mahogany infill pieces floating in between as surfaces for seat and back. Steel bar stock is welded between the two profiles, to provide additional rigidity and allow for the mahogany pieces to notch in, using friction rather than any mechanical or chemical fasteners to hold the chair together.
Critic Timothy Newton, Evan Sabatelli | Spring 2015
This study uses various tools for fabrication and prototyping to explore how woven material and marks might be translated into monolithic panels. Moving back and forth between the digital and analog, a woven aesthetic is translated from pencil and wire, into milled wood and cast concrete. Ultimately, the marks of the CNC-mill bit are used to exaggerate particular grains, and the aesthetic of thickly layered marks.
Critic Kevin Rotheroe | Spring 2014
