Blue Bridge

Grand Rapids has an affinity for public art, and its craft brewery scene is one of the best in the nation. A scenic spot perched on the Grand River –Michigan’s longest waterway –Grand Rapids has evolved from its 19th-century roots as a hub of furniture production to the modern-day metro area that is attracting college students and young families with its healthy job market, affordable housing and outdoor recreational activities. This picture to the right is the model and would essentially replace the Blue Bridge already in GrandRapids right now with a more Inhabitable bridge where people can live and walk straight through with shops and everything they could need. From the doctors and nurses working in the region’s booming health care industry, to the strong LGBTQ community that hosts the muchfeted annual Grand Rapids Pride event, to the numerous artists and musicians, the region is home to people from all walks of life.

Grand Rapids’ neighborhood associations are incredibly active, bringing the metro area’s population together for community events such as the Eastown Street Fair, which draws people to the artsy neighborhood for food, music and more. The design of my inhabited bridge included apartment on the top floors while keeping retail down at the bottom. My overall design is meant to resemble a heart beat and to fit with the art scene that Grand Rapids has set in place already. The project also had us keep the middle 15 feet or so open for emergency vehicles that would need to get accross if needed, but not used as an actual road. This is specifically a pedestrian bridge that allows for retail and living spaces.

The San Antonio STEAM school is a new rendition of the traditional STEM school, with the “A” standing for Arts. This project takes a different approach to schooling as the students here are held to higher educational standard. The school itself is located on the riverwalk and because of the location there are several limitations for what you can do to the site. The most important being, you cannot disrupt the site views. This simply means that there cannot be a building here that takes away or draws attention from the riverwalk. Working around this can be challenging because it limits creativity with what you can do. Since the site is filled with Spanish influence, I took a more modern spanish approach to the site. There are a few buildings in the vicinity that are starting to go in the same direction. I wanted to do this because a STEAM school should be technological and next level with respects to how things were done in the past. Since our design options were somewhat limited as far as how the school may look, because of how the laws are along the riverwalk. I went with a simple exterior look that had many free spaces for students.

We also had to include a public cafe on the site. The program to this project and how the rooms were arranged was a big part of the project because of how technical the school is, as well as the limited amount of space there was to work with. With the size of the auditorium and how the site is set up it was kind of difficult to figure out an efficient way to arrange everything. Some parts of the program included an auditorium, computer labs, collaboration labs, teacher offices, studys locations, and a public cafe that students have access to.

Fire Stair Section

This is a fire stairwell detail for a construction document project. This project was done in one of our technical classes junior year

Double Tee Detail

This double tee detail was apart of the same project junior year, where we detailed three to four different concrete ceilings that semester.

Bathroom Plan

This page has details from the steel construction drawing class junior year, where I designed an office building and detailed it.

Foundation Detail

This would be a basic foundation detail within the same project.

Roof Section

There were three large spaces within the building that all required a differetn ceiling type, here is the roofing detail for the project.

Parapet Detail

This was a basic parapet detail for the office building

Elevator Detail

This elevator detail was one of the two different elevator's that I deatiled for the class.

Fibonacci Cube

The fibonacci sequence was presented to us and we had to come up with a shape or design of some sort and make a cube out of it in some way. I chose to do a three-dimensional cross and use peices of one to make the cube.

Chapel Design

Here is the model for a Chapel that we designed sophmore year. It was a smaller project and actually the first model I have ever built. It was the first full design that I did as well.

Album Cover Firehouse Design

City Museum Addition

We took an album cover of an artist and we turned it into a threedimensional project. The picture above is where light comes in at on my album cover, which was something we had to integrate in our design.

The City Museum in St. Louis has a site in front of the building that is not appealing or inviting. Our proposal was to design a site that would attract people from various points of the site

This project and the Cliff house below were designed in the same semester

Sophmore year we had the opportunity to design a small fire station for a small town near SIUC. This was the first design where we had professional architects as jurors as well as actual retired fire fighters.

This project was done junior year, as we were given the opportunity to design a house for a famous person with a catch. It is on the side of a cliff.

I was given Rob Dyrdek to design for.

From this view the house is supposed to resemble a skateboard as the truss system in the back serves as the trucks on a skatebaord. Rob is also into to spanish architecture and the cantilevers are one of his logos.