Prompt: Design a new metro station and metro maintenance facility in Los Angeles’s rapidly changing Arts District.
A community of artists and non-profits claims space within this Los Angeles transit project.
At the urban scale, an elevated pedestrian pathway runs along the river, establishing a new vector of movement that challenges the prevailing grain of river crossings in the neighborhood. This pathway ties into local developments, provides cover for the transit station, and peels into a circular ramp that dives towards to the ground.
Artist studios and non-profit buildings are nestled beneath and atop this ramp, and alongside maintenance of way facilities. A back-of-house courtyard is shared by transit workers and artists as a space of production.
Overall, the project argues that infrastructural-scale projects present opportunities to integrate seemingly unrelated arts programs. In so doing, both transit and the spaces of creative production are elevated, together creating a community anchor.
Flatness Expanded: Infrastructural Speculations (MIT Option Studio Fall 2017)
Instructors: Michael Maltzan + Jeremy Ji
These maps were created during the intro GIS sequence for urban planning students at MIT. This course explored topics such as GPS-data collecting/mapping, using data to argue for policy recommendations, and decision-making models. My final project, developed with classmate Michael Pearce, expanded on these skills and took the form of a decision model for the City of Los Angeles that suggested locations to place homelessness prevention services.
Introduction to Spatial Analysis (MIT 11.250/520 Fall 2017)
Instructors: Sarah Williams + Eric Huntley
Wholedeck is a proposed voided slab and facade system for prefabricated midrise residential applications. Guided by a desire to reduce waste and material, the Wholedeck system eliminates concrete wherever possible by way of removable and reusable plastic molds. The modular molds click together in custom arrangements, allowing for slab and façade patterns to respond to variable structural, environmental, and programmatic demands.
In collaboration with Anran Li, Stephanie Lee, and Milap Dixit.
Architectural Assemblies (MIT Building Technology Spring 2017)
Instructor: John Klein
Space Us was a startup I ran with Stephanie Lee that took excess, underused space in cities — such as vacant storefronts — and transformed it into shared artist studios, retail stores, event space, and more. You can read more about the work we did in Boston here, here, and here.
The overarching aim of this workshop is to develop “housing” proposals, broadly defined, which embody design, research, placemaking, and disaster resilience.
This joint architecture and urban design workshop travelled to Chitravad, a “rurban” village located in Gujarat, India. Through in-depth fieldwork, interviews with villagers, guidance from the Aga Khan Agency for Habitat, and targeted design exercises, our group proposed a series of housing proposals for the village. The work on this page represents a sampling of the research and design work I produced over the course of the workshop.
Re-Designing Disaster-Resilient Communities And Housing In Saurashtra, India (MIT Workshop 11.S938 Summer/Fall 2017)
Instructors: Lorena Bello Gomez. Marie Law Adams, Brent D. Ryan, James Wescoat
Prompt: Transform a 13-acre former slaughterhouse into a cultural incubator for the city of Casablanca.
Operating as a community of arts, Ligament challenges the traditional relationship between artists and viewers by deploying a network of connective tissue across the former slaughterhouse site.
Architecturally, this is accomplished by introducing a suspended and occupiable scaffolding system that grafts onto the walls of existing buildings after rehabilitating them. The scaffolding network, composed of lightweight wood elements, weaves its way across the site, expanding and contracting in and out of existing buildings.
Overall, the project asks how architecture can be engaged to connect artist and visitor and suggest new and meaningful relationships between the former life of the site and its future.
Ground Up: Transfiguring The Abattoirs Of Casablanca (MIT Option Studio Spring 2017)
Instructors: Linna Choi + Tarik Oualalou
In order to offer an updated interpretation of the American Interstate system as something more complex than a token postwar modernist project, my undergraduate thesis examined those ubiquitous sites along its shoulders: tourist traps.
Specifically, I argued that tourist traps, during the golden years of automobile travel (1956-1970), owed their existence to the growing Interstate system, yet simultaneously opposed the logics it created. The thesis was concerned with the assorted ways in which the unique organizational formats of tourist traps utilized opposing conceptions of perspective and scale, and, ultimately, produced distinct experiences of place.
Completed at Princeton University, April 2013
Faculty Advisor: Prof. Christine Boyer (Primary advisor); Prof. Alison Isenberg, History Dept. (Second Reader)
Read more here and here. Portions of this thesis were adapted for publication in Pidgin 16.
This group studio developed architectural and furniture-scale proposals for our partner, Athens-based NGO HOME Project, an initiative that provides housing, education and support to unaccompanied minor refugees that arrive in Greece. Recommendations were made following fieldwork and partner engagement, including youth workshops that incorporated hands-on co-creation design methods such as interactive sticker and coloring books.
The Arrival Studio (MIT Option Studio Spring 2018)
Instructor: Marc Simmons
In collaboration with Alex Bodkin, Jaya Eyzaguirre, Hyerin Lee, Stephanie Lee, Kevin Marblestone, Daniel Marshall, and Emily Whitbeck.
A 70,000-square-foot public library for East Cambridge
Public libraries have long offered civic services, such as job training and tax assistance, alongside traditional book lending. Believing that these supplementary amenities are a central component of a library today, this building reimagines how the two programs—public services and book loaning—can be reconfigured to produce a civic hub.
The public service program of the library has been expanded to include a DMV field office, tax and loan services, job training, and passport services. These functions are arranged in a thin bar volume on ground level that opens up directly to the sidewalk. Library support programs, such as book loading, restrooms, and offices, are also nestled within this dense ground-story volume. Stairs lead from the individual offices to the second floor, a world of seating and shelves. Waiting for an appointment, or a number to be called at the DMV, takes place in this open, communal space.
Platforms for Exchange: Multitude, Media and Material (MIT Core II Studio Spring 2016)
Instructors: Ana Miljački, Cristina Parreño, Ryan Murphy
A 3,800 GSM winery in the Valle de Guadeloupe in Baja, Mexico, a region impacted by drought and climate change.
Gravedad Winery rebuilds the process of winemaking as it was: a willing cooperation with the laws of physics. As the gravity-fed process of winemaking descends and branches down the hillside, the visitor likewise begins their journey at the summit and winds their way downwards through each phase of wine production. This downward trajectory is interrupted by moments of anti-gravity—such as when the building compresses, opens up to its surroundings, and cantilevers out over the valley.
The visitor’s path through the winery marks several phenomenological changes: As the building’s perforated façade thins and opens, the cool and dark halls transition to the temperate, arid climate of the outside. Similarly, the building’s overall form attenuates as it branches outwards from a central trunk, shifting from the heavier, massive winemaking program to more intimate and lighter tasting rooms—akin to smaller tributaries flowing from a main stem.
Baja Winery: Architecture in a Time of Drought (MIT Core III Studio Fall 2016)
Instructors: Sheila Kennedy, Alex Anmahian, Carlos Banon, Caitlin Mueller, Andrea Love
Prompt: Design and craft the act of carefully lowering a mass in air with a parachute.
This project recreates the ill-fated parachute flight of Robert Cocking, a nineteenth century adventure seeker whose doomed decent was blamed on poor material choices. Particle-spring solver computation is employed to simulate the dynamics of the flight and test it against a lighter version of his original design.
MIT Geometric Disciplines II
Instructor: Brandon Clifford
Brief: Design a covered roof on the site of the current Lechmere station in direct relation to the existing T stop and bus station.
This study began with a reading of the occupiable territory of Lechmere for two types of users: those with money on hand and those without. The proliferation of monetized space in this neighborhood is palpable. Keycard access points define the boundaries of a host of spaces—residences, lobbies, gyms, even parks, bicycles, car sharing. Overlaying each hour of each day, the maps expose the incredible shrinkage of space for those without so-called keys to the neighborhood.
Stemming from this user’s manual, the proposed roof addresses the need for public territories—public rooms—and shapes these territories by varying only the z-depth of the structure. A rigid XY grid is held constant across the roof. Responding to program requirements and the particularities of the site and larger neighborhood context, beams are pulled up and pushed down at specific moments to create different thresholds and territories—from high-walled, narrow corridors for quick movement to single-person chambers, revealing only the feet of its inhabitants.
By manipulating this single variable—depth—the roof over Lechmere station becomes a series of distinctive territories accommodating both current and future use of the site.
Platforms for Exchange: Multitude, Media and Material (MIT Core II Studio Spring 2016)
Instructors: Ana Miljački, Cristina Parreño, Ryan Murphy
These pieces were created during a three-week workshop that explored the foundry process of sand casting, using a charcoal furnace to melt and pour aluminum. Reusable foundry patterns were shaped by hand and, later, by utilizing a CAD/CAM workflow to produce patterns using a CNC machine.
Materials and Fabrication for Architecture MIT IAP 2017
Instructors: Justin Lavallee, Chris Dewart, Jen O’Brien
Brief: Design a room that modulates its environment
This is room that modulates time. To do so, it pairs a ubiquitous domestic object—the pillow—with a recording device: a thermoresponsive fabric that leaves traces of the bodies that touch it.
The pillow’s immediate familiarity encourages touch and intimacy. We are used to squeezing and pressing these objects alone, without any recording of our actions. Pillows are private. The stitching of the room’s form also suggests privacy. One dons it like a garment, snaps it tight, and seems to disappear.
The thermoresponsive fabric undermines this sense of privacy, recording each ostensibly personal moment in color, the room functioning as an unwitting self-portrait and a fleeting memento of passing time.
MIT Core I Studio Fall 2015
Instructors: William O’Brien Jr., Brandon Clifford