Theoretical (Copy)
Alabama Astrobleme Museum
Wetumpka, Alabama | 2011 | WoodComp Studio Prize Winner
Following the discovery of the Wetumpka Crater, one of the world’s best preserved oceanic impact craters, an request for proposals was circulated for the Impact Crater and Science Center. In this submission, the architecture of the museum itself recounts the story of the meteor’s impact. The harsh, angular building seems alien to the heavily wooded landscape. Its travertine façade appears neatly fractured into large rectangular slabs. The path along occupiable roof—one of three distinct programmatic sequences—gives visitors sweeping views of the ancient floodplain before turning abruptly and culminating in a blade-like edge that gestures toward the point of impact.
Boston Children’s Hospital
Boston, Massachussetts | 2012 | Alagasco Studio Prize Winner
A large but compact hospital on a small site adjacent to the Big Dig bolsters the process of healing the gash in the urban landscape by the introduction of the now-buried I-93. The hospital, with its low, corten-steel-wrapped plinth, responds to the scale and texture of the North End, while the patient care towers and their white ceramic sun louvers fade into the sky above. Each tower is oriented to help children and their families regain a sense of context and groundedness within the city as they move through the hospital. At the ends of the east-west corridor, visitors can glimpse the Zakim Bridge and South Boston; in the north-south tower, one sees the Old North Church and the Customs House Tower across the park, visually stitching the the city back together.
Famagusta Fish Market
Famagusta/Gazimağusa, Cyprus | 2012 | Istanbul Technical University
A district of the walled city of Famagusta is rejuvenated through the renovation of one of the many unused storage buildings along the ancient fortifications left by the Lusignans. The project began with a desire to rise to the height of the city walls in order to make visual contact with the nearby sea that locals can normally only hear and smell. The height needed to see the horizon of the sea was achieved by nestling a box-like restaurant in the peaks of the roof. The restaurant is coplanar with the top of the city wall and connected to the historic landmark by a footbridge allowing diners a seaside stroll before or after dinner. The old storage space below functions throughout the morning as a fish market and into the afternoon as a teahouse, bringing round-the-clock activity to the area.
Cooperative Birmingham
Birmingham, Alabama | 2013 | Interior Architecture Core Studio
A Pay-What-You-Can-Café, a social services center, a corner grocery, leasable business and retail spaces, and a wide variety of courtyard-centric condos, complete with affordable micro-units create a dynamic cooperative that leads the way for responsible development in once blighted but now up and coming downtown Birmingham, Alabama. The site of intervention is the old Board of Education building located adjacent to Linn Park, a municipal park known for its transient and homeless populations. Cooperative Birmingham seeks, through all parts of its program and design, to mitigate the historic inequities distilled and spatialized in the nearby park.
Black Belt Treasures Expansion
Camden, Alabama | 2011 | Interior Architecture Core Studio
Black Belt Treasures, a non-profit artist collective in rural Alabama, approached Auburn University seeking a design for an art exhibition space that could double as rentable event space. The result is a highly flexible gallery space that circulates around two translucent pods containing artist demonstration space, community meeting space, and small-scale exhibitions. These pods divide the large warehouse space into two more intimate galleries: an elevated platform for displaying sculptures and a painting gallery with suspended, movable panels that allow the space to be transformed for large meetings, performances, and receptions.
A House for Hoarding
Lake Laceola, Georgia | 2010 | Architecture Core Studio
In response to the client’s enormous collection of antique glass bottles, this small lakeside retreat deploys a field of expanding and contracting boxes woven together as a screen to house the collection. The screen responds to the interior program, creating nodes of privacy when needed and strategically opening up to sweeping waterfront views. The depth of the south-facing screen not only makes it useful as storage for the client’s colorful collection of glass but it also maintains a balanced interior climate by preventing heat gain in the summer and permitting solar heat gain in the winter.