date | 2018
description | private project for coolship.io
notes | with Will Langevin
FAB Arlington is a visioning project for the revitalization of an auto body shop along the Mystic River in Arlington, MA into commercial and public space designed to feel like a garden and urban gateway.
date | 2018
description | A translation of Fall River’s foundational industrial product into a territory reclaiming urban intervention housing a museum, transit center, library, and cultural space.
The Granite Museum tells the story of the post-industrial city of Fall River on the South Coast of Massachusetts by tracking the diaspora - and translating the stories - of its foundational material and product: the uniquely durable and particularly pink Fall River granite. Constructed from this signature material re-quarried from abandoned and burnt out mill buildings, the long, narrow, ramping structure parasitically straddles the massive Braga Bridge, an urban renewal-era mega-structure that decimated downtown, dwarfed the city, and de-localized space by obfuscating and burying the great slope and rapidly falling river that gave the site its first name: quequechan in Wampanoag, “falling river” in English. As the building mediates the bluff from the hill of downtown to the water’s edge, it houses - and is - a museum of the city’s history as told through granite, and accommodates a library, retail and office space, and transit center ready to receive the long-promised restoration of regional rail service. Three large arches, representing Fall River granite’s use in monumental and landmark structures, make space for the three fluid landmarks of the city’s dynamic history in the form of the daylit river, the highway, and the railway, and interrupt the massive wall, which signifies the stone’s more quotidian and industrial uses. By burying the base of the bridge, and translating the site’s history into an architectural object, The Granite Museum renews Fall River’s control of its stories.
date | 2017
description | landscape integrated comprehensive design and integrated building systems studio
recognition | RISE Graduate Research Award in Arts and Humanities
notes | with Will Langevin + Florencia Lima Gomez
Within a century, Boston will experience sea level rise and storm surges ten feet above current high tides resulting in catastrophic urban inundation, the need for coastal retreat, and billions of dollars of economic losses. At particular risk is a vast swath of the city historically known as South Bay, stretching from Carson Beach to Northeastern University, and from Fort Point Channel to Upham’s Corner. This zone has been filled over the last four centuries creating a floodplain home to dense neighborhoods, commercial corridors, and an infrastructural/industrial district that is, in many ways, the lifeblood of the region and is at high risk of decimation from coastal flooding. Against this threat, a simple grass may hold the key to survival. Cordgrass (spartina sp.) is the keystone species of the salt marshes that once lined the preurbanized Atlantic coast. Its unique ability to thrive in polluted salt water and serve as the foothold for productive and protective ecosystems can be capitalized on to recreate Boston’s at-risk infrastructural zone into a resilient eco-district. Architectural interventions designed to foster rapid sediment accrual and idealize growth conditions will permit the plant to build its own land in prescribed corridors that will effectively function as a system of self-growing sea walls whose heights will always preempt those of the rising seas. Within one hundred years this system of ecological infrastructure will have grown to defend Boston’s most vulnerable areas from rising tides while creating an expansive civic amenity and a responsible, resilient way of life.
date | 2016
description | san jose de chamanga, ecuador housing + urban design studio
notes | masterplan with wei chen + shefali desai
year | 2016
description | urban institutions - south end school, northeastern school of architecture
Adjacent to Blackstone Square in Boston's historic South End, this project imagined a new future for the site of an existing elementary school by refining and restoring the historic street grid, and introducing two new pocket parks ringed by a mixed development of residential, retail, and office uses.
The centerpiece of the project is a new performing arts school that houses a number of specialized performance spaces, an outdoor theater, an indoor-outdoor public space, and a small community library. The school is conceived of as a series of wrapped layers, with the performance spaces collected as a core within an expressive skin of wooden brise soleil. The undulating form of tis skin expresses the shifting of an internal circuit of ramps that rise through the building and lead to the various performance and classroom spaces.
date | 2016
description | NoImPediments Entry Pavilion Competition
recognition | Honorable Mention
notes | with Will Langevin + Trey Buretz
The new entry structure for the home of CAMD, Ryder Hall, will bring the building and all that it houses renewed presence within the University and on Centennial Common, not only through an engaging, embracive, and welcoming form, but also by creating new spaces among its arms to encourage the activities of CAMD to spill out into the public realm. Ryder Hall’s new frontispiece incorporates a proud history of architecture and design that references the grandeur of baroque stairways (including ones close to home rendered in concrete), the elegantly transportive Art Nouveau of Parisian Metro entrances, the ineffably lofty splendor of the TWA terminal, and the spectacular weightlessness of Félix Candela, all expressed through modern construction methods and sustainable, contextual techniques and material. The design creates five new circulatory paths to the building, incorporates an integrated seating design and bike parking for forty bikes, and a new bike and intermodal path connecting the front door directly to Leon Street. The pavilion is built from 100 slices of 6-inch Glued Laminated Timber (Glulam) and perforated with a gradient of pixelated openings reminiscent of CAMD’s new graphic patterns to soften the threshold, allow in natural light, and create opportunities for easily integrating plantings directly into the pavilion’s canopy.
date | 2015
description | Structural Systems Design Proposal
notes | with Will Langevin + Sulafa Hariri
date | 2014
description | onelab oneprize competition, nyc 2014
notes | with bryan yang
Brooklyn Navy Yards boasts a rich naval history with a wealth of drydocks, the source of inspiration for DIYdock, an interdisciplinary studio space centered on the use of cloud networking and digital projections. Using the drydock as both a historical and metaphorical foundation, our proposal seeks to foster interdisciplinary work through the immediate projection of the work produced by those within the studio onto the floating Vessel overhead, thereby creating a cloud of creativity that will inspire the cross-fertilization of ideas. As students and faculty download and save their files, their work is automatically projected onto the underbelly of the overhead Vessel, which houses the lecture hall and exhibition space. The Vessel will therefore be a dynamic representation of a diversity of creative ideas constantly in flux.
The studio spaces themselves also encourage interdisciplinary work as their ramps and tiers constantly cause students and faculty to brush up against each others’ work, while the centrally-located, highly-visbile lounge, the Slip, functions as a gathering and co-working space. Perturbed by the way in which bookshelves too often become dividers in even the most well intentioned attempts at fostering cooperation between design disciplines, DIYdock eschews standard forms of space and thinking to create a space for a future of design without walls.
