The best performances happen in transit: subway platforms, plazas and street corners–dancers, musicians, contortionists. Open to all, these performances are not dampened, but enriched by the noise, grit, and chaos of New York. In the breakwater of Redhook Brooklyn, the terminal concourse floats to remain level with the tide. Working as both terminal and performing arts center, we find a panoramic ribbon framing the horizon, a skyward-facing tent, and a mezzanine opening to the sea.
02 SUKKAH
The Sukkah is a single-room enclosure with a roof of branches built by communities to celebrate the Jewish harvest festival of Sukkot. While honoring the basic and tactile space of the traditional Sukkah, the project explores ambiguous zones of interiority to.
03 ART SCHOOL
How simply can we build an art school? We need: a string of dormitories and studios along the canal, an exhibition hall with rooms of varying height, length, and light. Between them, a walled garden lined with a deep, shaded awning.
06 FARMWORKER HOUSING
Rather than registering as a static point in the landscape, the groundscraper exists as a line across various site conditions and must mediate a multiplicity of geographic, programmatic, and social pressures. In Llanogrande Colombia, the project combines the hydroponic greenhouse, livestock barn, open-air market, and high-density housing. The project follows the gentle curve of the highway, which defines a threshold between the agricultural industry and sparse weekend homes.
04 MULTI-GENERATIONAL HOUSING
How can we design high density housing that both preserves and reimagines the material, cultural, and social identity of Boston’s Chinatown? Made for the life and structure of multi-generational families, four urban “cabinets” turn inward to form an urban courtyard between.
05 HAY RACK
Even in industrialized areas, farmers still rely on the sun and wind to dry hay. In the San Joaquin Valley, California, limitations imposed by urban communities and anticipated buyouts cause farmers to leave their fields fallow, turning the edge of the cities into a ring of bare earth. At the city’s edge, where urban planning and the rural vernacular lose their coherence, the project utilizes the tectonics of the hay rack to establish a new territory with a strong acoustic, tactile, and aromatic regional identity.
07 HAMMOCK PARK
The site already had a strong sense of enclosure, tucked between brick arcades on Rice’s campus, with gentle rustling and cool shade from two oak trees. This is a project that simply allows people to notice and enjoy what has always been present. A system of lantern poles and hammocks give students, visitors and faculty a place to rest, recline, sit and swing, even bunk on two levels. The plan changes based on the social dynamics of the group, able to form large clusters, pairs, or personal space for a nap.
06 LIGHTNESS
What can we learn from the material of foam in our contemporary culture of construction? Since modernism, a largely rhetorical vocabulary of exceedingly thin lines and planes emerged to define architectural lightness: steel columns, glass, membranes. In contrast, heaviness traditionally belonged to a language of volume and mass: solidity, poche, carving. Foam, however, presents a curious contradiction: massive lightness. It is hulking in volume, perfectly solid, yet nearly weightless on the scale. More for less: the stuccoed-styrofoam rock of Disneyland appropriates the appearance of heaviness and solidity in order to disguise its ultra-lightweight, value-engineered tectonic reality.