This project portrays a story of an architecture that is deeply inspired by the landscape, and uses technology, built material, and human intervention to enhance the resources of its site with the overall human experience. Based in central Texas, this design strives to rejuvenate the sites’ natural aquifers as a response to the harsh environmental conditions of drought and flooding.
Material intervention is utilized as a means of reactivating the existing resources and connecting human interaction for awareness to the entire process. Despite the specificity of this location, this project displays a broader purpose, responsibility, and potential of architecture that must be adopted in order to revive the eroding relationship between the built and unbuilt landscape and conceivably set forth a better trajectory for our planet.
AWARDS: 2021 One Drawing Challenge by Architizer Project “Aquifer of Hope” in collaboration with Ruqaiyah Bandukwala selected in Top 100 Finalists
ARC 208: Syracuse University: 2021 Porosity Studies|
This proposal seeks to explore the question of whether it is possible for humans and insects to cohabit in an urban context and whether the connotations of living in proximity to nature and wildlife can be reconsidered.
Having been tasked with a retrofit project, we examined Baynard house in downtown London as our proposed site. Baynard house, in its current condition, has harsh materiality, lacks pedestrian or public access, and remains only within private use, which blatantly rejects all its surroundings. This site however offers a few opportunities, such as an existing data center that produces heat, along with its proximity to the river Thames, which could be used to promote both social engagements among humans and the encouragement of animal habitats. Focusing on the facade, we propose a wood and eco-plastic system encouraging bees and pollinators to nest within the proximity of a new proposed program of 65 pre-fabricated housing apartment units, which repurpose the heat created from the existing data center in Baynard.
This new design for living seeks to explore new symbiotic relationships that can potentially even take place in a densely populated city such as London.
ARC 408: Syracuse University: 2022 In Collaberation with Olivia Porrill and Ruqaiyah Bandukwala
[Black: existing Blue: added]
Being a project with a facade meant to be occupied, changed, and rebuilt by its residents both bees and humans, it has many temporal aspirations. To try and represent this effectively, we created an augmented reality experience in which anyone with a smart phone or tablet can interact and move around a 3D animated model of our proposal projected onto a physical foam core scale model.
These images show a sequential study of historical urban spaces cumulating in an urban project derived from a utopic manifesto. Relationship to context, to the site and the street, is key with an interest of public v private space showing up in every project. The final project influenced by these studies and diagrams is a utopic community of my own imagination. The manifesto for this community is highly influenced by the existing intentional community by the name of The Esalen Institute. Where Esalen is located on a remote, scenic pacific shore site in California, my utopia is located in Washinton DC on what is currently Stead Park. This design utilizes the beauty of the surrounding urban fabric to best suit the needs of the community proposed in my manifesto.
This utopia, a utopia of human potentiality, creates an environment where psychological and moral experiments can take place in an effort to allow individuals to work towards self actualization. Many of these practices and experiments are countercultural as they go against ascetic forms of spirituality and religion that are so prominent and influential in Western culture. Instead, indulgence, exploration and immediate experience are greatly encouraged as a means to gain better understanding of the desires and potentials of the mind and body as well as the ways in which they are interrelated and how they interact with the exterior environment. The ordinary circumstances of daily life for most Americans are conducive of isolation, emotional and intimate repression, and indulgence in distracting, dehumanizing media. A level of detachment from emotion is necessary to function effectively in modern society however when these afformented conditions are the only one humans live in, the potentialities of the mind (mind as self) remain unmanifested.
Elevation showing housing semi-private entrance |
This first set of images is of a 1/4 scale model created for Daisy Ames of a proposed retrofit housing project/community center (Housing Project, Poughkeepsie, NY, Unbuilt. 2020 - 2022 by Studio Ames). This model was based on schematic plans and sections provided by Daisy and is made of foam core, colored Strathmore, trace paper, fine metal mesh, and metallic paint. More info about this project can be found at studio-ames. com
The following set of images is a Strathmore sectional study of Peter Zumthor’s Therme Vals created for studio at Syracuse University (2020).
Full model showing roofscape and facade strategy |
When tasked with creating an urban-scale project for the neighborhood of Edgemere Queens, in the Far Rockaways, my studio partner Jeanelle Cho and I discovered a community of engaged, resourceful, and resilient people trying to preserve their community and way of life after the devastating effects of hurricane sandy and as well numerous other challenges including lack of certain amenities and infrastructure.
When conducting our research, we first examined ideas of mobility, proximity, and accessibility. We considered these aspects through the lens of existing built amenities, public transportation, and their relationship to one another. Further examining the spatial conditions of Edgemere, we were drawn to the high percentage of vacant
land and space between buildings as potential for creating environments for shared experience and exchange of ideas, culture, and art.
ARC 308: Syracuse University: 2022 Architecture of the People
Online interviews of community leaders affiliated with RISE (Rockaway Initiative for Sustainability and Equity) determined values, aspirations, worries, existing resources and community goals
www.riserockaway.org/rise/
Areas of interest/potential including vacant sites caused by hurricane Sandy as well as sites intersecting with the often overlooked NYCHA housing
We were lucky enough to find a study that revealed that regarding places in which people participate in arts and culture in Edgemere, an overwhelming majority answered that they do so outdoors, in streets and parks. This revealed to us an existing culture of outdoor gathering and participation in Edgemere.
Inspired by this culture as well as a strong existing structure of community leadership, we decided that a kit of parts proposal presented as a design catalog of possible outdoor arts and culture promoting interventions would be most fitting. Shown are two of many different proposed interventions.
This project is a response to anthropogenic effects on the environmental conditions of coral reefs in the North Jakarta region, where 95% of all local coral are at risk from human activity. Through it’s program it takes on two narratives, one of cleaning and reclaiming (pollution collection), and the other of growth and replanting (coral growing raceways). These two ambitions reveal both the immediate and long term ambitions of the project. The implementation of our project would provide coral reefs near Jakarta threatened by excessive humanintervention the initial support needed for the corals to begin the long process of regrowth in the hopes that these once flourishing sites would once again host the natural magnificence and biodiversity they once did.
ARC 208: Syracuse University: 2021
This project explores the idea of circulation as program as a strategic means of connecting different community enriching spaces both visually and spatially. It largely stemmed from a conceptual collage that placed different activities as taking place in nodes along a continuous, winding space. This spatial logic creates two enclosed courtyard spaces visible only from the circulation path of the project. It also extends beyond the building envelope creating circulation that connects with the public street corner inviting community members to enter into one of two entrances, which emphasize the exploitive qualities of this design used to promote community interaction and visibility.
