As a response to the 2011 Kirjava Satama competition to re-envision Helsinki’s South Harbour, this project explores edge inhabitation potential.  In an effort to engage citizens with the landscape, the major development of the urban intervention is a museum along the western bank, bridging Observatory Park with the city center and market square.  The linear organization of the building activates the edge through stepped roof plazas and ramped circulation that leads pedestrians along the water and through the transition from the natural world to the urban.  

This hybrid science center/museum seeks to highlight the geology and natural history of Finland alongside environmental art in order to emphasize the accessibility and poetics of science. Through coupling education, recreation, and art, the interactive museum fosters an awareness of environmentally based causes and effects.  Environmental art seeks to recombine existing environments and natural materials into installations that symbolize the possibilities for reshaping our world.  The demystification of science, specifically related to the natural world, is essential for a far-reaching reevaluation of modern behavior and approaches to industry, and the museum itself functions as environmental art, embedded into the geology with which it interacts and reveals. 

Sisters, OR, east of the Cascade Mountain Range and Willamette National Forrest is home to a vibrant and active arts community, but as the number of artists grows, the infrastructure to support their endeavors is limited.  This project, initiated by a local arts organization, challenged designers to create mobile artist studios, which would provide self sufficient live and work components ready to deploy and take advantage of unused land in the area.

LIVE :: WORK :: TRANSMIT views the studio as the artists'​ PLATFORM, providing the interface between two extremes: the outer and inner environments.  The patterns and processes at work at either scale manifest best in a minimal immediate setting where SENSITIVITY is heightened. The  live and work units are derived from the same module that can be easily hitched to a vehicle and expanded once sited by means of pop out compartments, allowing an open plan that retains spatial definition.  The detached buildings enable the NECESSITY of functional separation while creating inward CONNECTION through hinged circulation. Outward connection is achieved through selective TRANSPARENCY in all four cardinal directions, regardless of siting.  SIMPLICITY supports solitude, encouraging transmission of a sum greater that its parts... the artist's work.

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“More freedom, rapid change, and reality definition for an emerging nomadic people…”  -Ant Farm, Truck Stop Network, 1971

The Bike Stop Network seeks to proliferate information exchange within an area known for its stunning scenery, but still somewhat unconscious of the freedom and ease that can accompany cycling.  Examining the work of the underground architecture collective Ant Farm, I sought to adapt their ideas of resource re-appropriation and exchange into this project about connecting touring cyclists with each other and the communities they explore.  By inserting a network of rest stops along the Old Scenic Bikeway in Eastern Oregon, cyclists are provided with not only facilities, but with a means to share experiences, maps, and recommendations.  This intervention further attempts to bridge the community with the traveler, contributing to the local economy and culture by encouraging a cross fertilization of ideas. 

Similarly, the contrast between technological infrastructure and ecology seeks an appropriate balance.   Accommodation sites are simple, yet embedded with a low frequency radio transmitter, which allows participants who check out a receiver to easily find the sites, regardless of changing maps, landmarks, and terrain.  The project’s formal development was influenced by this approach to the recording and transfer of data, specifically as it relates to mapping the human experience and the visual connection with radio waves and line graphs. 

Likewise, the scheme of the structure furthers this idea of exchange by joining two facing “lean-to” modules, their entrances overlapping in the interstitial space.  The modules were developed through extensive cut and fold exercises to achieve straightforward yet changeable arrangements.  Easily deployable and adaptive, they respond to both topography and use.  The particular ways in which the modules become an aggregated whole also begin to serve the transmission of information at a larger scale.  They become billboards, projection screens, and outlooks, conscious of a multi-directional course.

Net (work) attempts to weave urban agriculture with foot travel by overlaying a structural web that performs as both remedy and beauty.  This intervention expands the notion of “sustenance” to include the digestion of place as well as food. This modular formation stretches and compresses, dives, and surfaces in order to activate the mind and senses while carrying participants through constructed paths of food production. Collective experience is comprised of many individual moments and by elevating the variety of personal engagement the city thus follows.  Apathy, isolation, and neurosis are replaced with participation, education, and meaning as inhabitants become actively involved in the processes and synapses that make life possible.

This project challenged designers to develop two large city blocks in Guadalajara, Mexico into an orphanage for teenage boys.  The site selected had a significant relationship to the city, being adjacent to the governor's residence.  While orphanages are typically hidden away at the outskirts, this location offered a valuable opportunity to raise awareness and visibility of the pervasive issues of homelessness and street life that the city's youth are facing.  On the other hand, concerns for safety led to one local advisor's adamance that the property be encased by a five meter wall.  This particular design seeks to balance those matters by playing with various levels of permeability and engaging the city streets while remaining protected.

A direct gradient of public to private spaces follows the entry sequence so that the administrative building acts as a sentinel by the gate and the boys' dormitories are situated at the rear.  Moments of visibility are offered ranging from physical exchange to merely outward visibility to complete opacity based on programatic needs.  The opportunities for physical exchange built into the program include a street cafe and studios/workshops that open up to the main street, thereby offering the teens ways to share their talents and build entrepreneurial skills.

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Finally, the design and construction of the compound must prove inexpensive and energy efficient, adapting to the hot climate and future need for expansion or flexibility.  All the buildings on site, therefore, consist of an elevated roof plane offering stack ventilation and easy access for repairs.  This canopy is overtly expressed in the architecture and extends to provide exterior shading and moments of relief as well.  The dormitories in particular are a series of interlocking modules; the interstitial space creates semi-private gathering spaces and the replicable fabrication establishes numerous possibilities for expansion.

An assortment of models from architectural experiments, exercises, and presentations.

I believe physical modeling to be as important to process as to presentation, and I often use sketch models to work through both concept and construction.