bee/ bird/ bat/ brick the old notion of “natural� no longer holds true, as we inherently manufacture every landscape we inhabit. with our increasing footprint and impact on the environment, it is up to humans to fabricate habitats for the animals we endanger. the indigenous has become extinct, only the neo-indigenous remains. this is not a drawback, but an opportunity for cohabitation with other species. this collaboration provides trade off of services, such as heat, food, energy, and information- in exchange for shelter.
Integrating bees into urban environments promotes the existence of diverse flora and urban agricultural sustenance.
Perforations in the maintenance lid allow for smoke to pass through and sedate the colony before inspection.
Commonly seen as a pest, swallows attach their mud-nests to buildings. Once the colony is established, building owners pay to have the nests removed. The nest brick avoids this destrution of habitat by intigrating the nest into the architecture.
Bats are synanthropic animals that regularly occupy human structures when migrating. Bat feces, or guano, has the potential to be a fertilizer and energy source..
The brick is filled with interior walls to form the tight nooks and crannies that bats are attracted to.
The interior surface of the roost brick is lined by a bumpy-textured surface for the bats to suspend themselves.
roost brick Imagine a brick that holds life. The Roost Brick is a hollow brick made for zoological inhabitation and structural capacity. Each brick functions individually as a shelter. When aggregated, the wall of Roost Bricks becomes an ecosystem. Existent forces within the site determine the pattern of aggregation, allowing for ecosystemic adaptation. The bricks not only hold life, but are intended to supply energy through animal material (honey, information, and guano). Each brick has openings that allow the unit to connect or segregate itself to the expanded network of aggregates, allowing for the unexpected cohabitation of local fauna– Homo sapiens included.
Above, perspective of the roost wall, as seen by a cliff swallow. Below, slip-casted ceramic prototypes of the bricks.
Void patterns are generated by rotating, flipping, and clustering the each brick. These voids allow for more light to pass through the wall and provide spaces for smaller-scale organisms.
Pattern variation also creates different reflections of light.
Nose to Butt, creating connections between shelters to promote the existence of an ecosystem within a wall.
the dumping grounds For forty years, the Technical Porcelain and China Company (TEPCO) dumped ceramic by-products into San Francisco Bay, producing the cryptogeologic field of industrial debris that currently defines Tepco Beach. Adopting the site’s original filling technique, The Dumping Grounds uses gravity as a primary construction process to create space as archeological fragments fall into place at -9.81 m/s2. Made from the artificial ground, the ceramics center provides a space for the exhibition and evolution of this unnatural ecology. The Dumping Grounds takes one on a journey through the ceramic process from its beginning in the ground, to its end as a new ground.
Above, the site of TEPCO beach, in Richmond, CA. Below, the ceramic ground that makes up the site.
At low tide, the peninsula is exposed to reveal the displaced ground.
Span and column diameter determine the sag of the debris-filled cable nets.
At mid tide, an island is formed by the rising ocean, accessible by an elevated concrete walkway.
At high tide, the ground is concealed, rendering half of the museum inaccessible. Section taken through the sagged debris.
The wider the span, the deeper the sag, creating room for spaces to be buried.
Administrative offices occupy the space between the roof and the ground floor, buried in the sagging nets of ceramic shards.
Exploded diagram exposing the many layers of the dumping grounds ceramic museum.
8’ long model of the dumping grounds, made from melted acrylic, 3d-printed salt, wood dowels, and cat litter.
View from the roof where administrative offices are buried beneath the ground like archaeological artifacts.
The museum’s materiality bears and exposes the weight of our industrial processes and renders a useless byproduct useful.
patterned deconstruction, part I human constructions resist gravitational forces: pre-determined forms for a specific occupation. this digital animation investigates the formless and emergent spaces created by gravity’s deconstruction. entropic and passive, these spaces are an inspiration for new modes of construction and form.
patterned deconstruction, part II A digitally animated film about the relationship between vaulted structures and gravity. Resisting gravity, vaulted space inverts the force of gravitybut what happens when worldly forces disappear?
shattered ground human constructions resist gravitational forces: pre-determined forms for a specific occupation. this digital animation investigates the formless and emergent spaces created by fracture mechanics. entropic and passive, these spaces are an inspiration for new modes of construction and form.
invisible borders a super 8 claymation made about the mexico-america border. a faint line can be seen dividing the screen in half, however, nature continues to deny this manmade separation. to illustrate an architecture of nature, time lapse animation is required to depict the time scale of natural and synthetic systems.
feral city As we are bound and confined by buildings, so are animals in a zoo. These scenarios propose a new kind of ecosystem that coagulates the Homo sapien environment with an that of an animal. Just as the settler builds on the west, the animal builds in the “Feral City”. The “Feral City” is a wild city. The plants, animals and insects proposed are merely meant to be catalysts of an emergent ecosystem of many more systems and organisms. These are theoretical proposals for a symbiotic relationship with organisms other than ourselves, inherently evolving.
debris follies How can we repurpose debris? Can debris become a building material? How can architecture learn from the materiality of the site it stands on? This series of follies explores how the byproducts of culture can architecturally reappropriate themselves into something other than waste.
To exhibit the an artificail ground made of broken chinaware, it is unearthed, geometrically categorized, and dumped into gabion cages to form walls.
The intricate spaces created by the ceramic geometries form habitats for smaller organisms such as insects, crustaceans, etc.
Fracture mechanics (n): the field of mechanics concerned with the study of the propagation of cracks in materials. repose (n): a state of rest, sleep, or tranquility; be lying, situated, or kept in a particular place. dump (v): to deposit or dispose of (garbage, waste, or unwanted material), typically in a careless or hurried way. The Repose Folly is a simple concept: an interior formwork is built to receive dumped concrete debris that comes to rest at its angle of repose.
Below, an interior view of the Repose Folly with a structural gabion interior,
3D-Printed Salt is used as a formwork for creating interior space. The brittle-nature of salt allows it to be removed after the concrete cures.
Other methods for interior space construction use debris as a formwork, which is then removed after the pured material cures.
Vaulted space is filled with ceramic debris, inverting the sagged space from the Dumping Grounds.
A rubber net with a structural hexagonal pattern is draped with weights and solidified by epoxy resin.
manhattan motel Manhattan is city of pedestrian perception. Yet outside the island, outdoor space is largely perceived via automobile. Many of these transients enter the city through the Queens Midtown Tunnel. Before driving through the tunnel, the image of the city as a postcard: billboards are superimposed over a vast skyline of vertical skyscrapers, and the energy of the city is conglomerated into one image. After the tunnel surfaces onto Manhattan the postcard disappears, and a huge billboard presents itself as the initial image of Manhattan. The hotel transforms into a motel (motor hotel) which functions to shelter both human and automobile. There are two sides of the site: one facing the culmination of a highway and the other facing the beginning of a city. Each side has its own scales: time, size, sound, smell, and taste. The Manhattan Motel coalesces pedestrian perception and automobile perception in the “ melting pot� of a pool (Central Park for the city) to bring locals and tourists together. The site becomes an oasis, functioning as a public pool and motel. The motel becomes the sieve through which two different perceptions flow.
cryogenic space The rise of museums throughout the twentieth century indicates cultural excess, with the general need to present cultural artifacts. The museum is a cryogenic freezer, mausoleum, cabinet– a parasite within the city. Located at the intersection of two major avenues, the site converges two worlds: The black market of Broadway and the wealthy consumer world of Fifth. In order to preserve the hybrid site, the museum grows out of the existing building typology, sprouting from a decaying remains. The “museum�, as a typology, continues to attach more programs to itself, until it is no longer a museum, encrusted with bureaucratic activity. The existing commercial zone melts into the back of house, institutional, and consumer programs. The masonry facade of the original buildings becomes a programmatic aperture for the sculptures inside, creating light and dark spaces depending on the art medium. Art, an anomaly in this site, is isolated into a crystallized container that takes art out of the white box and wraps it up with urban fabric.
smart car pavilion A “SmartStation” used for the display and sale of the 2.5 m long “for two” Smart Car, located on an urban site in Manhattan. Two cars are located here, one outside for display, one inside for test-driving. The SmartStation has one employee, exhibition space, and service space. This project brings ideas of shelter, site, technology, and weather into an urban context. The idea of the showroom was translated into a billboard, the marketing typology of the area. Using the fundamentals of pictorial space (foreground, middleground, background), the architectural billboard entered a fourth dimension...
H20 pavilion The H20 initiative serves to promote and educate the public about water conservation. The initiative was manifested on a local scale in the construction of a mobile-modular museum that traveled to multiple events in Southern California, where an unknown water crisis exists. The pavilion provides free water, reusable water bottles and water filtration systems. It hydrated around 500,000 visitors in 2010. To reinforce the pavilion’s program, it was constructed out of reclaimed wood, recycled plastic bottles, and water-based paints.
rae residence Designed and built a Brooklyn loft space with a bed, shower, closet, food prep, and laundry in less than 300 square feet. The client wanted to install another level in his commercial space to create a live/ work space within the confines of a sparse budget. The design reappropriates the existing structural components as elements of circulation and visibility.