restorying the potomac

collaboration with Roots to Sky Collective Oakland, MD and Potomac River Watershed (2021-ongoing)

Restorying Potomac is a radical land-based research, restorying, and exhibition and ‘remonumenting’ project being undertaken with Roots to Sky Collective. The project seeks to generate a new living archival activism connecting and transecting the source of the Potomac River with the Washington, DC metro area watershed.

The foundational story of our “Re-storying the Potomac” project is the history of the Fairfax Stone. For 250 years this British colonial territorial boundary marker at the source of the Potomac River has presided as the dominant cultural destination in the region— including the site known as the Fairfax Stone. The project brings voice to the cultural paradigm shift and changing relationship with these monuments and convenes a permanent living, breathing exhibit that tells the stories and experiences of Black and Brown people who were living on this land pre-colonization and post-colonization.

In this inaugural project, we plan on deepening the “gallery experience” from passive exhibition to an active interdisciplinary site that is home to curated decolonizing workshops, educational seminars, short documentary vignettes, art installations, and multimedia historical motifs. humanities programming right : colonial territory analysis drawing (Jerome Haferd with research assistant Sidnie Ancion) opposite : archival British colonial map, Potomac watershed showing indigenous territory.

The project activates two new public audiences: first, it engages the existing local rural communities and “mountain experience” visiting public in a new provocative way by providing a living museum-style cultural and civic destination; second, As an educationcentered decolonizing project, “ReStorying the Potomac” engages a wide range of BIPOC audiences who represent many different lineages and experiences which may be interwoven by this exhibit’s common themes of rediscovering the nonwhite traditions that have coexisted along this historic watershed.

P.O.P.S.

New York, NY (2018-19)

research published in MRPJ Journal 2020

These drawings are products of research on the various forms that public space takes in New York City and the permissions, expectations, and “happenings” that occur— and don’t—in these boundaries. The city, itself, performs constantly. The quotidian as well as the spectacular acts are carried out by its infrastructure, its people and the ecosystems it contains. As architects we believe in the public realm and its opportunities to serve as a forum, a place for public discourse, for culture to thrive and to engender place-making and specificity.

Today there are more than 550 POPS lodged deep within Manhattan’s thick, privately owned grid. Yet these spaces provoke a series of questions about inclusivity: Do they work? Who has access and when? How does one know they have access? Besides “access” what makes the space “public?” Since POPS can be ambiguous within the overlapping realm of public and private space, we feel a need to “prop” them up. Through a series of imaginary events, these drawings weave together interstitial, interior and exterior— stitching dead ends into connective tissue and sparking habitation of new and different kinds. By combining underutilized fragments of the urban realm, a more contiguous “forum” is produced and imagined. The stitching is an exercise in arrangement, and how to produce a civic, spatial language out of three-dimensionally “puzzled” territory. While only a fiction, the act of drawing unlocks an urban imaginary to aid us in asking more of our public spaces.

rolled-up city

24x24x24 Storefront for Art & Architecture (2018)

“The seat is a collective act of drawing, movement and meditation. Unpacking our city, we unroll and exchange - folding the Individual into the collective.”

Rolled-Up City is a project consisting of several parts a stool - which doubles as a collective drawing, and a corresponding performance - which doubles as a narrative text which unpacks the experience of an East Harlem region.

The project starts with a seat concept in this case a singular object that is comprised of 24 constituent rolls. These allow the seat itself to become the program, as the yoga mats unroll to allow for the drawing to be displayed, the narrative read, and the meditative practice to take place. The collective drawing, coproduced by many authors, is produced using East Harlem as a point of departure, and then follows a logic of contamination across individual and collective territories. The finished drawing mirrors the physical performance as both are simultaneouisly intensely individual and yet entirely collective spatial exercises.

This ‘happening’ is part of a larger collection of mini-events, each filling one hour of the summer solistice.

Side By Side

Cleveland, Ohio (2019-ongoing) mixed-use accesible housing grand prize, ZeroThreshold design competition

SIDE by SIDE proposes an accessible urban prototype that incorporates communal cooking, gardens, and learning. Designed for intergenerational living, this project utilizes the prototype’s concept to transform an empty double lot and adjacent vacant lot into a mixeduse project designed to combat social isolation and provide an innovative new accesibile living typology.

Substandard housing, lack of access to green space, and lack of social connectedness affects a wide variety of neighborhoods and demographics, including Old Brooklyn. Rather than tackle these issues in isolation, SIDE by SIDE offers a holistic design to address and improve accessibility and community-based issues faced by both the alter-abled and ablebodied alike.

The siting of this prototype - three lots located at the transition between the neighborhood scale and the retail / light industrial scaleoffers an opportunity to bridge the two and bring people together. These urban “edges”, common in many cities, become the point of departure of the project’s two primary components : 1) the community park / semipublic zone, and 2) the mixed-use living building with rear private garden.

Beautiful Browns

St. Louis, MO (2021), multi-unit housing

Jerome Haferd w/ Wayside Studio (Curry Hackett) second prize, OnOlive Emerging Black competition

Beautiful Browns conceives a single family house not only in the landscape, but from outside to in, behaves as a landscape itself. Wrapped on all sides in a second skin to support vegetation, Beautiful Browns draws upon Black and indigenous American references, systems, and parallel histories to imagine a dialogue between domicile and landscape.

Inspired by the post-urban landscapes of St. Louis, the massings of the Cahokian mounds of this territory, and Gee’s Bend quilts, Beautiful Browns echos the form of a ziggurat facing the street and stepping down to the back. Gardens invade the house from the north, progressively stepping up the building to occupy planted roofscapes, trellised rain screens, and idiosyncratic cavities between interior and perimeter.