restructuring an identity
East Asia Study Abroad Shibati District Chongqing University Joint Studio
During our 3 week joint studio with Chongqing University, four students from UF were asked to join a team of four students from CQU in an urban planning project to redevelop the historic Shibati [18 Steps] District. This 62 acre site presented us with an over-developed, highly dense area that was not only experiencing problems within itself but was also becoming a hazard to the community. Due to this negative cloud looming over the community, the government intervened, literally tagged about 80% of the buildings (ranging from middle schools to homes that housed three generations) with red spray paint. This indicated a later confiscation, leaving countless families without a place to call home. Witnessing this, our main goal was to analyze these problems and come up with an alternative design for a community that would not only create proper housing, commercial, and civic facilities for the locals but also introduce a new way of living through the usage of architecture that would attract outsiders to invest time and money into this community with a newly structured identity.
urban reticulation
Upper West Side / New York City 2 person group
This project takes place in the Upper West Side of Manhattan, New York amongst a mix of residential and office typologies. The goal of this urban infill project was to develop a mixed use housing community that also brought much needed daily amenities to the neighbouring buildings. Simply put the three vertical private housing structures are complimented by the two horizontal public volumes that bring a sense of communal activity. These networked spaces act and work together to bridge into the community to create a fluid intervention into the existing urban fabric..
West Chelsea District 2 person group Duties: Design and Visualization
This project takes place in the West Chelsea District of Manhattan, New York. The main driver behind this project was the immediate interest we had in the density of the city and how spaces were impacted by the amount of people and the pace of people that occupy it over a period of time. One of our intentions was to present the community with a complex that allowed them to have their own individual journeys. We created numerous amounts of paths that take people on journeys through expanding and contracting spaces, transforming from intimate to completely open at an instant. These spaces were then complimented with public nodal spaces that helped direct the flow of pedestrian traffic. This system of alternating networks and nodal gathering spaces helped establish a sense of balance in the complex..
NOMAS National Design Competition 2nd Place Entry _10 person team Duties: Visualization Team
The 2012 NOM A national student design competition prompt asked teams to come up with a two part design scheme that not only dealt with the built architecture on our specific site in the neighbourhood of Corktown but also the replanning of the district at an urban scale. Our goal was to come up with a design that held a conversation between the public spaces of the community and the new educational/sustainable construction we were introducing on site. The overall theme was to create a place to help revitalize the historic neighbourhood of Corktown and to impact the community at a larger scale with some of the new programs and systems we introduce.
During my initial exploration of our site located on the coast line of Santa Monica, there were many factors that drew my immediate attention. Many of my primary observations dealt with the sheer chaos between informal and formal activities taking place within close proximities, the lack of organization and limited paths of circulation and most importantly the lack of visual and experiential connections between the City, Pier, and Ocean. When I first approached the idea of a Pier and what it represented to me, the immediate thought was that a Pier acts as the link between City and Ocean creating unique and diverse experiences for the various types of users. However a large problem that I encountered, were the lack of this connections presented to the users creating very limited experiences of the pier/city. My proposal of this pier was an attempt to address these initial issues as well as alleviate any obstructions that were initially experienced.
Grad. Year 2 Visual Representation Seminar
Grad. Year 2 Visual Representation Seminar