Washington_Winter15Arrival: Tacoma Presbyterian

Washington_Spring14POPurbanism: Platforms

Washington_Winter14A Georgetown Factory

Washington_Fall13Urban Institutional Campus

England_Spring13Pool Hall & Stadium Seating

England_Spring13Pavilion: Historic Entrance

Maryland_Fall11Studies in New Media

Rome_Fall14Fashion: Metaphysical History

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POP This project, titled quite simply Platforms, presents a studio-based scheme that fuses urban planning, architectural theory, sociology, and contemporary technological systems. As a general hypothesis, Platforms proposes that there is a better way to balance the economic, political, and cultural capital of today’s urban society. This scheme is thus made up of three contingent parts, labeled as platforms, striving for a diversified urban activism, rather than a homogenous strategy to solve the ills of this world as past utopian movements have attempted to do. There is no panacea; there is only diversity.

The three platforms have been labeled as the “institution,” the “experimenter,” and the “squatter.” I stress that these are labels because they generalize the audience for which each platform is geared, though they are in no way restrictive. In other words, the platform is as inclusive as the users who make it up chose to become. The “institutional” platform comes strongly from the precedent set by Rem Koolhaas’s early philosophies, namely Delirious New York. In this retroactive manifesto, Koolhaas celebrates the phenomenon of Manhattanism, promoting the city’s mythical history and its subsequent creation of a “culture of congestion”- a culture born by the clashing of programs in a rational grid with irrational experiences. Consequently, Koolhaas has come to symbolize (in the context of this project) the city-sponsored and formalized projects that try to enhance the experiences of its constituents. Secondly, the “experimenters” are the creative and entrepreneurial types who find precedent in the actions of Theaster Gates, a Chicago based artist. Gates grew up in southern Chicago, and as his artistic fame blossomed he remained communally conscious to the run down and abandoned homes in this part of Chicago. By seeing these eyesores as poetically beautiful opportunities, Gates transformed these buildings into usable spaces, enlisting the help of community members and making connections with other people within the neighborhood that could give back. Adapting to Pioneer Square, the surrounding tech-start ups, museums/galleries, and other members of the creative economy can invigorate and activate spaces around this part of Seattle with artistic optimism and playful investigation. Lastly, the “squatters” represent the sub-culture and too often overlooked members of society that have become resourceful and wildly intelligent out of the need for survival, growth, and development. While taking advantage of unaffiliated locations, these squatters create homes for a wide range of activities without the burden of bureaucratic formal solicitation. Teddy Cruz, an architect based out of San Diego, has dedicated his practice to researching and educating others about the architectural opportunities based on the model of impoverished communities. “[There is] a collective imagination,” Cruz says in one of his TEDTalks, “as these communities re-imagine their own forms of governance, social organization, and infrastructure, [they] create a new democratic politics of the urban.”

By addressing a diverse audience, this project has aspects that are universal and seemingly non-site specific. I counter, however, that the scheme is quite user-specific and in the way in which I have rendered it, become quite culturally and infrastructurally sensitive to Pioneer Square and Seattle. For example, the concept was initially born out of the recognition and presence of vacant spaces in Pioneer Square. With regards to spaces that can be leased or bought, the first quarter of 2014 yielded a vacancy rate of 11.1%, a value about 2% higher than average Seattle. The full impact is marginalized by this statistic, as it does not take into account the amount of historic buildings and upper floors that have been deemed structurally unsafe. The imagery of Pioneer Square as the historic birthplace of downtown Seattle has thus manifested itself as the neighborhood filled with decaying grittiness, seasoned materiality, and repurposed quirkiness. The line between having a pleasant character of patina and the repellent tendencies of decay is a delicate dichotomy. Yet similar to the ideas espoused by William McDonough and Michael Braungart in “Cradle to Cradle,” there is still ample “nutrients” in these vacant spaces. By recycling them – in the cradle to cradle sense of the word – sustainability takes on a broader definition while remaining omnipresent for the urban.

On the other hand, Pioneer Square (in recent years) has become the home for young tech companies that are taking advantage of its relatively low rent prices and proximity to downtown. More importantly though, these companies represent a mode of venture thinking that, like Theaster Gates, sees the character of Pioneer Square as one filled with latent beauty waiting to be unearthed. In their wake, a vast array of dining options often seen in the vibrant and eclectic neighborhood of Capitol Hill have decided to invest in Pioneer Square as a growing community, despite its still low rate of residency. This type of thinking inspires me as a designer; it tells me that people other than architects appreciate the empty spaces and want to reuse old buildings instead of tearing down and starting over. And it taps into the discussion that D.W. Meinig presents about those who see “landscape as ideology.” The cultural rooting of Pioneer Square presents opportunities for mixing a wide range of Seattleites. Its juncture of merging grids at the southern tip of downtown becomes a physical and even metaphorical catalyst for hybridizing and mixing typologies that bring people together in a completely transformed setting. As Meinig points out, changing the ideas of the city is just as significant as changing the visuals of the city, thus changing the paradigm of unusable to activated can start this shift in ideas.

urbanism

Consequently, the platforms are born out of the people and cultural context of Pioneer Square and Seattle: a fusion of optimistic institutions (not to mention that Seattle City Hall and many other municipal buildings are located in Pioneer Square), audacious adventure seekers, and clever artisans. The way in which these platforms will take effect in Pioneer Square is also quite site dependent, as they have been designed – or rather in the Kahnian sense of the word, realized – in the form of intuitive typologies. Using programs of sports, food, technology, and performing arts, the platforms are empowered with various typologies that are vehicles for the goal of a democratic urban activism. And through “multiplatform simultaneity” (a term I have coined for this project, insinuating the simultaneous existence of these platforms) the typologies can collaborate with one another, compete for attention, or stay private and discrete from the public eye. Platforms, in this way, becomes intellectually more poignant and complex than the romantic cliché of transforming the bad to good. Rather, it presents itself as an economic and social gradation of spatial presence and significance in the city.

Lastly, to test the theoretical feasibility of these polemical platforms, I harnessed the ideas of Kevin Lynch in his famous, “Image of a City,” and designed how each of these particular platforms would interface with the city as well as a case study site on an empty infill plot by the piers. “Imageability” can become de-architecturalized and more sculpturalized, just as the Greeks thought of their temples not as a building, but as a massive sculpture expressing a particular retelling of a divine legend. So to, the three platforms take on their own language of sculpting the spaces, forming differences between the platforms or dialogues when necessary, and creating a more readily recognizable network for those moving through the city (just as Lynch hypothesized for American cities).

The institutional platform takes on a language of curvilinear, high-tech design with a sense of physical permanence. On the case study site this became a concrete swimming pool, curving around to provide pockets for sunbathers and flowing underneath a tensile-structure installation with a dynamic form inspired by the work of Anish Kapoor. The site becomes a fluidly changing landscape of water, hard-surfaced relaxation, and a shadowed sand-filled play area. And the networking is then achieved through the spreading of an institutional affiliated website, which maps out Pioneer Square with locations of platform-occupied areas and displays of marketable perspectives of any particular intervention.

The experimenter platform on the other hand, utilizes pre-fabrication techniques of inventing innovative ways to construct, conserve, and finesse. Utilizing mostly wood, these experiments excite the tectonic appreciation of designers as well as the layperson. And at the case study site, the swimming pool is emptied of water, becoming a skateboarding bowl coupled with fabricated ramps and boxes to place underneath the shade of the tensile structure. This re-imagined urban beach appeals now to a culture of biking and skateboarding, all on the same plot of land, just days apart, and advertised with a mobile app. The mobile app speaks to a higher turnaround for the experimenters and engages an exploratory interactivity with the built environment quite different than that of an institutional website.

The third platform, the squatters, will be smaller scale occupations comprising found materials, particularly steel drums, introducing the industrial nature of the Duwamish just to the south of Pioneer Square. Through intelligent creations with these materials, the mundane is elevated and playscapes are erected in the heart of a city. On that same infill site, a simple platform is made out of wooden pallets and steel drums are brought to create a type of bleachers for a concert venue underneath the protection of the tensile structure. The bleachers become quite maneuverable though, as the concert breaks out into more of a dance party and less of a formal occasion. This is then imaged by flyers, printed out and posted around various parts of the city to create awareness.

Ultimately, the three platforms and the venues in which they are spread and actualized, whether purely digital, word-of-mouth, or hard copy information, represent this idea of new democracy and diversity. Through design thinking, an urban theory is created and then tested for the mass public. They are the stewards of the very land they own, populate, and harvest.

Located in an industrial part of Seattle, this factory is adjacent to a vacated19th Century Brewhouse and a wallfragment which is integrated as a streetfacade for the new factory. The proposedfactory gently meets the existing brick with a glass lobby serving as a thresholdto a “world within a world” - a space formaking and exhibiting the significanceof making. A parametric roof structureopens up clerestories for controlled northern light, while creating a tectoniclanguage that speaks once again to the act of fabrication, the act of illuminatedthreshold, and becoming contemporarywith a quickly evolving context.

“...of the beauty of ruins...of things which nothing lives behind....of wrapping ruins around buildings.”- louis i. kahn

tectonic modeling

tectonic modeling

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institutional

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This two phase project is an urban design for an institutional campusof civic educational buildings.Located in the Central District of Seattle, WA, the campus plan spreads the buildings out in order to maximize their integrative ability,while connecting them with a new pedestrian friendly artery through the heart of the campus. This pathway features permeableconcrete paving, a green mediumwith lights, consistent seating, and a promenade of communallycurated art installations. Moreover,the path connects the area to two newly designed parksfor social gathering, a communitygarden, a farmer’s market, an elementary school, and mixed-use residential and retail buildings.The path - as part of the larger urban plan - is meant to catalyzemore commercial development and revitalize the Central Districtwith a diverse mix of residents and users of commerce, artistry,and educational facilities.

node

campus mall

urban campus

campus circulation

new pathway and parks contextual connections

The second phase of this urban project was to design one of the campus buildings, in this case the Center for Civil Rights and Labor History. The Center is a gateway to the heart of the urban campus, marking its commencement as a space for people to gather both indoors and outdoors. The building’s entrysequence is shaped by a glazed axis that cuts diagonally acrossthe site to conform with the directional shift in the main pathway for the campus. This axis leads visitors through a cafe and lobby directly into the primary space of this building: the Experience History Hall, an event space for exhibitions, story-telling, and interactive learning. Facing south this oval is contained within a glass facade that looks onto a shared plaza between it and the adjacent Vocational School. Finally, the terraced exterior form provides a sloping roof that meets the plaza ground for people to walk on - curving up andaround - culminating in a raised plaza above the

Experience History Hall.

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foliage cover

growth mediumseperation layer

drainage layerroof membrane

rigid insulation

rain chain

charred wood column

glass mullions

CLT structural decking

charred wood beamcharred wood girder

corten cladding

air barrierrigid insulationbehind air gapvapor retarder

interior finish

suspended ceiling

wooden bris-soleil

glazed air-lock entry

bioswale filtration system

For the final project as an undergraduate, the studio was held in North Yorkshire, UK thus the site was located in a former Georgian marketown of Richmond, Enland.The site is currently a soccer field seperated physically from the city center by the River Swale, but maintains views to the city’s medieval fortress. The swimming pool is part of a master plan that reconnects the field to the city with a footbridge and creates an athletic complex with a club house, community recreation center, and stadium seating. Inspired by Renzo Piano’s monastery addition at Ronchamp, the pool hall is buried into the site’s topography, creating a cave-like stoa, alluding to the earthly origin of water and creating a sense of natural presence for swimmers. Lastly, the hillside becomes the roof and space for seating as well as public gathering spaces

water

wooddecking

woodscreen

historic/new walls

steel columns/window wall

precastconcrete

The founder of the state of Maryland, George Calvert, lived in a Jacobeanestate in North Yorkshire, UK. This historic house and the surrounding grounds are preserved as a museum, thus this project proposes a much needed entry pavilion with cafe and ticket office. By redesigning the entry promenade, the building creates a series of angles, giving views to the historic house and overlapping planes of materiality alluding to the use and reuse of architectural styles and precedents over time.Respecting the historic adjacent walls, the pavilion exposes this dichotomy of time to lets users interact with the tactile contrast as much as the conceptual difference of form.

new site analysis

existing site analysis

Using Maya and Rhinoceros, I made a 3D model ofSantiago Calatrava’s City of Arts and Sciences in Valencia, Spain. Then I created realistic and diagrammatic renderings to highlight the dynamic and

elastic geometries.

Simplifying the building down to a detailed module, I 3D-printed a digital fabrication as a physical example of the undulating, yet very systematic forms mastered by Calatrava.

This site, right on the Tiber River in Rome, is latent with so many layers of energy vis-a-vis history that I felt it appropriateto approach the studio project with an air of theoretical experimentation. The building- through its geometrical form, structural expression, and circulation patterns- taps into the urban notion of subordinating organicism to desires of linearity, taking precedent from 16th Century Pope Julius’ Via Giulia and Mussolini’s proposed axis through the site towards the Renaissance Florentine Chiesa Nuova. Moreover, the building sponsors a dialogue of relationships between the Medieval and Imperial Roman ruins on the site, creating a metaphysical experience outside of time whereas the building firmly places fashion in the cultural and historical ethos of Italy.

hadrian’s villa,tivoli

woodland chapel,stockholm

corinthian column,rome

peristylium,pompeii