LA PLAZA ESPERANZA

Completed while working as an employee of: Salazar Architect

Under the supervision of: Ernestina Fuenemayor, Alex Salazar, AIA

See resume for more information.

SCOPE:

• Salazar Architect had scope for Interiors on this project, from SD through CA. ZGF Architects of Portland, Oregon was the Architect of Record.

PROJECT GOALS:

• Meet client’s needs for the interior space planning of a mixed use building that includes a large assembly space, offices, and an educational space for the client’s Pre-School Program.

• Maintain expression of buildings CLT structure, which included CLT exterior walls, beams, floors, roof, and interior shear walls.

RESPONSIBILITIES:

• Primary production team member from approximately 50% CDs through Permit Issuance in June of 2023.

• Provided design coordination of finishes once final product selections were made. Designs of mine include acoustic panel layout, concrete floor joint layout, and ceiling fixture layout for Multi-Purpose space.

• Redesign portion of Level 1 to accommodate additional bathrooms following late-CD occupancy classification change with minimal effect on surrounding spaces.

• Currently providing CA services. Currently assisting in CLT coordination in anticipation of partial building completion by September 2023.

PROJECT DATA:

Using Lenses Of System And Scale To Rethink Public Water Infrastructures

PROJECT STATEMENT:

This thesis began with a seminar that built it’s interest around a framework of systems thinking; specifically, of “system” as an epistemological device for the organization, transmission, and evolution of knowledge. Two primary attributes of systems, scale and adaptability, form the foundation of resilience. Systems that can accommodate a number of interacting scales and adapt to changing conditions will prevail over those that can not. The greater the capacity of these attributes, the more complexity a system can manage.

Water infrastructures are one of the oldest forms of complex physical systems in society, and play an integral role in the social dynamics of a place. Today, some of the dominant forces influencing these systems are the availability of potable water, the accessibility of fixtures such as toilets, showers, and sinks, and stormwater management. Underlying many of these challenges, scale plays an outsized role; from an impetus for the shift away from shared, public bodies of water to piped networks with largely privatized fixtures as access points, to the inverse relationship of physical development and permeable ground surface that hampers urban stormwater management efforts.

In response to these conditions, this thesis proposes an addition to the public water infrastructure in the form of small, versatile structures that house public fixtures, act as rainwater collection systems, and provide new public amenities for water based cooling relief in the rapidly warming climate of Savannah, Georgia. The fixtures are housed in individual enclosures, enhancing adaptability to accomodate changes over time, and ensuring accessibility by opting to provide personal space for the indidual over shared banks of fixtures. In doing so, the proposal reconsiders social systems around public water fixtures while serving as a newly visible form of urban infrastructure, built for solving the unique challenges of Savannah and addressing the evolving politics of water access in the 21st century.

PROJECT DATA:

From the lens of system, scale, and adaptability, the urbanism of the National Historic Landmark District in Savannah, Georgia is unique, and offers much for consideration to the problems addressed in this work.

Built on a system of wards that provide the requisites of daily life within a human scale, the growth of population was accommodated by commensurate growth in support spaces, public and private.This proposal learns from these dynamics while responding to the district’s unique social conditions; in tension between that of a living city and that of a historic backdrop for a tourism industry that simultaneously preserves and feeds it, while limiting access to the value of it’s urban design logics.

PERSPECTIVE SECTION - PUBLIC SHOWER

Throughout the history of fixture related customs and codes, accessibility has been a potent issue. From segregated fixtures in the Jim Crow South, the role of wheelchair accessibility in the passage of the Americans with Disabilities Act, and most recently as a battleground of transgender rights, water fixtures have played an understated but important role as a setting in the evolving social dynamics in the United States. Building codes have adapted to the shift to piped networks in the form of minimum fixture counts based on occupancy load and occupancy type. However, in public spaces devoid of building enclosure, fixture requirements are a matter of city or state law, of which there are few. Providing public fixtures offers dramatic upsides though, from improvements in public health to building an infrastructural safety net for those experiencing housing insecurity or personal health challenges requiring frequent fixture access.

Housing Design For Intergenerational Living

PROJECT STATEMENT:

We believe that privacy, autonomy, and a sense of community are vital for all generations, but especially for children and the elderly. Therefore, in the case of intergenerational housing, if you design for children and the elderly, you can accommodate everyone in between. In seeking spatial solutions to these considerations, we created a complex array of possible housing configurations from a relatively simple system of thick inhabitable walls, each with a specific directional frontage. These thick walls were then arranged to accommodate the all of the necessary spaces and privacy needs of an intergenerational household, resulting in a figure/ground relationship that created opportunities for common spaces that emerged as the “negative space” between walls.

These spatial dynamics were then fitted within a standardized bay spacing to allow for the creation of modular units for maximum flexibility, allowing the mass to respond to its location on site. This also allowed for the units to follow similar logics as the interiors, creating shared common areas that resulted from the negative spaces between units, all while dramatically increasing overall site density. The resulting thick exterior walls were then taken as an opportunity to address the cold climate of Detroit and are detailed to Passive House Standards, with walls ranging from R-40 to R-60 and roofs of R-60. Because of the simplicity of the modular approach, massings were able to take advantage of simplified details and leverage economies of scale in construction costs with standardized window types and prefabricated assemblies.

PROJECT DATA:

Site Plan

Townsend Street Elevation