Elderly/Young Cluster

from 2023 Portfolio of 2 Works

Shall We Sit Together?

The two floor plans show the relationship between the long-term, and shortterm and mid-term residents. Mid-term students stay at the second-home owner’s place during the school year; the elderly are given an extra room that can be used to host short-term workers or tourists. The guest room has its own access to the exterior for convenience.

The central atrium space hosts natural landscape and artificial landscape–which are the tables. The space is filled with vegetation so that residents can easily take a stroll around nature even all-year long. The more socially oriented programs are toward the center of the section, giving the residents an opportunity to indirectly socialize while they are cooking or studying. The most private spaces are adjacent to the exterior. The gradient from privacy to communal living offers a variety of lifestyle in a high-density housing complex.

Elderly/Young Cluster

Hotel/Singles Cluster

This cluster mixes the long-term single residents and the short-term tourists and workers in hopes of helping residents build connections with people that they wouldn’t otherwise. On the top in plan (left), the studio apartments for single long-term residents share a double height living room, which looks onto and extends into the central space.

Below, the desk of the hotel room connects to the landscape study table outside. The hotel rooms have the potential to connect with each other for larger visiting groups. The long-term residents and hotel residents have a chance to sit at the same desk and exchange ideas if they so wish.

Family Cluster

This cluster attempts to help young families by providing an extra master bedroom to rent to midterm workers or to be used as a family room for extended family members to stay for a season. Intended for four families, the cluster type prioritizes children by giving every children’s rooms a long desk that extends to become a large playspace in the communal area to facilitate a healthy social relationship among the families.

Family Cluster

The project turns the focus inward toward the landscape. In the evening, when one takes a walk around the lawn, the warm light glowing from the atrium spaces and the activities at the tables light up the perimeter and demarcate a safe boundary. The tables at the end of each cluster are in dialogue with each other, and hence the life around tables to relate to each other. The lawn is a place to appreciate this landscape of tables, from the cluster scale to the community scale.

In Anticipation of Winter

Studio Group Project Spring, 2022

with Dafne Saint-Hilaire & Juman Barazi

Nominated Work

GSD CORE IV

Program: Adaptive Reuse Housing Instructor: Phu Hoang

Contributions: research, design, orthographic drawings, detail,

Inspired by the history and scale of Fresh Pond near the site, materially we were interested in manipulating snow and ice, and socially we were interested in addressing the Cambridge housing issues in relation to the biotech industry. This project celebrates the cruel Boston winter by proposing a new infrastructural system of pipes and year-round snow collection within the site boundary to create new social and thermal relationships for housing. With a double-layer netting design, the pipes host native vines from spring through fall and allow ice sheets to form along a hyperbolic paraboloid surface in the winter. The project adapts the original office building at 1 Alewife Center into a research staff housing and lab proposal that inserts itself into an ongoing research campus development master plan taking place around the site.

The project sits in the vicinity of Fresh Pond, once famous and exploited for its clean ice supply. The proposal inherits the story of the landscape and introduces a modern ice storage scheme which divides the original building, improves the qualities of light and air for housing, and reduces operational carbon.

Top: Ground Floor Plan

Bottom: Site Model

Since the involvement of snow requires the scope of the project to expand beyond the building footprint, we further designed the landscape and roads around the residential buildings in anticipation of future architectures to take place. The volume of snow collection is excessive for servicing the current housing and lab facilities, as well as in preparation for future buildings to utilize the same cooling system.

Spring:

Summer:

Autumn:

From the pipe detail to the site landscape, this project anticipates and celebrates the Boston winter. Cooling water pipes collect coolness from the snow storage and interface with the interior--in the winter as extra cooling storage, and in the summer as an operable cooling double skin facade.

Overall Section

Low Embodied Carbon Construction Workshop

Course: Embodied Carbon Seminar with engineer Hanif Kara

Location: Arles, France

Date: Fall, 2022

Our team constructed a CobBauge prototype wall with an aperture, from formwork to finish. Employing local subsoil and sunflower pulp, the prototype demonstrates a new option for low-embodied carbon construction.