DIFFUSE DENSITY
Detroit Brownfield 2006
The project proposes a sustainable market-based urban forest and wetland development model to restitch three communities south of Detroit separated by an 87 acre industrial brownfield.
"The ecological analyst faces a dilemma: on the one hand... he must first recommend whatever will give the system a positive budget of flexibility; and on the other hand the people and institutions with which he must deal have a natural propensity to eat up all available flexibility. He must create flexibility and prevent the civilization from immediately expanding into it." - Gregory Bateson
 
Published: Michigan's Dimensions20 2007
 
 
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GALLERY DIALECTIC
Primary School Ann Arbor 2005
This early proposal is for a primary school granted land within the parking lot of an existing nature preserve.  The school is anchored at one end by a multipurpose gym and lap pool, wedged within a northern concrete wall, and at the other end the administrative office.  A constant, easily understood and navigable sectional parti organizes the building, with slight angular variations that create difference and programmable residual space for classroom exhibit and storage.  The building runs perpendicular to the slope so that the structure is lowest near the entrance drive, preserving canopy views, while shielding the park from high-traffic areas.  Internally, this grade change raises the classrooms six feet above the forest floor to allow the vertical curtain wall to interact with the field of trees.  The linear arrangement of interconnected classrooms and pseudo-open plan dispels with classroom hierarchies and allows for the reorganization of notably rigid educational systems.
 
 
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GLOBAL EQUATORIAL INDUSTRIES
Latin & Sub-Saharan Flower Trade 2010
With Somatic Collaborative.
This study maps the distribution of greenhouses in four high-altitude regions:  Bogota-Madrid, Quito-Cayambe, Addis Ababa-Oromia, and Nairobi-Naivasha.  Supported by their adjacency to state capital infrastructure, these locations deliver most of the world's flower market while heavily polluting regional water supplies and subjecting worker's health to high levels of pesticides.
 
 

SPECULATION I
Chongqing Museum 2010
Architecture that operates at the urban scale generally attempts to dissolve.  The project seeks to find a particular language for the museum that is able to conform to a nearly infinite range of site dimensions and topographic conditions, linking high and low ground.  The building is parametrically generated in CATIA by a 'best fit' algorithm, placing program throughout the structure based on its proximity to defined program attractors, distributing and re-distributing in the available space.  Alternating voids, projected normal to the ground, are cut through the building to force linear circulation through the galleries.  Two sites were chosen with drastically different site areas and proportions, producing a tower and pseudo-mat typology that are formally geologic in their stratification and registration of Chongqing's highly varied topography.
 
 
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BROOKLYN FOUNDRY
Atlantic-Vanderbilt Yards 2009
The project registers a new visible public infrastructure to foster the distributions, collections and expansion necessary to sustainably re-diversify the City's land uses.  The hyperdense structure creates a highly-differentiated cross-grain, traversed by multiple, focused public grounds that look to reorganize the collision between mega(infra)structural planning and a society of private ownership.
 
 
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ARID GROUND/ SUBFLOW
Arizona Regional Water 2009
Continued over-pumping of groundwater and diversion of the region's surficial flows has caused more than 3000 square miles of Arizona to experience some form of differential land subsidence.  Rapid population growth is increasingly juxtaposing urban densities with tensile earth fissures, pulling at the basins' edge.  Land use in the region will need to adapt radically to new systems of water conveyance, use and storage.  Climate modeling indicates the desert southwest will be particularly hard hit by global warming, with longer droughts and more extremes in rainfall.  A change in the ground's makeup may very well alter the policies and capitalist politics of private property, immanently establishing a new geography for the region.
 
 

TRANSMISSION LANDSCAPES
L.A. Energy Infrastructure 2009
Though the system has strength in its effective distribution of massive amounts of power to the entire Los Angeles metropolitan region, 'weak' energy can be defined in terms of more ad-hoc planning arrangements within and on the city's periphery where natural processes have the ability to interact, damage and possibly benefit the system.  The notorious yearly brush fires in the Los Angeles National Forest and the modified, artificial 'burn-cycle' of this landscape, the 1994 Northridge Earthquake, drought and the disproportionately high hydroelectric capacity of the California Aquaduct's Castaic terminus, underground pumps and artificial natural gas reservoirs are just a few examples of those opportunistic points of operation.  In studying these points, one can begin to approximate the infrastructural 'maxima and minima' of the system under very precise environmental loads.
 
 
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BASIC LINEAR LIMITS
Structural Approximation 2010
Collaboration with M Puig & Y Inamoto.
This work is a look back into scripting from the bottom of the technological pyramid.  It is a similar exploration as with many of my projects in its inquiry of authorship, default, conceptual linearity, approximation and flexibility.
The project works under the following parameters and basic assumptions:
1) Any shape, any solid.  The user inputs any 2D shape touching the four cardinal points, and then defines a bounding solid into which it propagates.
2) Orthogonality.  The project defaults to the orthogonality of the coordinate system.  The shape panels connect at 90 degrees in order to create the simplest friction joint possible.
3) Continuity, linear assembly and density.  The propagation creates a linear, orthogonal path, imprinted on the panels with assembly numbers, until it is either stopped or is unable to continue.  New paths can be started until the desired structural density is achieved.
4) Self-aware and recombinatory.  These paths, if near, will choose to recombine for increased structural rigidity and mark each recombination with an (!) point, allowing the user to judge the form's overall stability.  The program, even if stopped, will remember the achieved configuration and continue to build upon it.
5) Asymptotic approximation.  As the paths meander, the shape panels are scaled asymptotically relative to the bounding solid: The closer they come to the bounding solid, the smaller the panels, and hence the bounding solid's form is approximated with higher resolution.
6) Global deformation.  The project began towards its end also to globally deform, through mathematical equations, the matrix within which the panels propagate, beginning to escape the orthogonal rigidity supposed earlier.
 
 
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AESTHETICS, RISK AND JUSTICE
Housing the Migration Corridor 2011
Considering current places of industrialization, specifically China, there is a new emergent type coming into the profession, thinking of recent commissions for Morphosis and Diller, Scofidio + Renfro to create what are essentially factory-campuses, the 21st century, capitalist equivalent of the Chinese danwei.  Using comparative research on New York and Hong Kong-Shenzhen, this project aims to establish a program for and analyses on the possibility of embedding a new factory-town type into the post-industrial city.  Formally, the work is an exploration of limits and deviation from the necessary economies of both social housing and light industry, and the negotiation of their scalar differences at high densities.  It positions a model that can raise awareness across a very horizontal set of architectural and ethical goals, to reacquaint us with both industry, and the 'other.'
 
 

PROSPECT ON STRUCTURE
Grand Army Plaza 2008
The call to reinvent the face of Prospect Park's 526 acres of forest, water and wetlands is to signal a new public attitude with the extension of the park's ecological systems and interface with the City, creating a multifaceted network of open space, transit and cultural exchange.
 
Awards: Honorable Mention Reinventing Grand Army Plaza Competition
Exhibited: Design Trust for Public Space Exhibition Brooklyn 2008
Published: Reinventing Grand Army Plaza 2009
 
 
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MOBILE PARAISOPOLIS
Brazil Mobile Commodity Market 2010
Collaboration with S Corriel.
Informal interventions typically create new modes of entrepreneurship without understanding the logistics of existing informal capital flows, largely between divergent and imminently juxtaposed income groups.  Are there possible sources of capital for physically retrofitting slums from within these economies, and can there be increased community ownership of physical improvements when funded by these processes?  "[In Planet of Slums,] Davis finds that... employment in the informal sector is not generated primarily through new initiatives but by dividing existing jobs and incomes."
Paraisopolis has been a laboratory for extensive mapping and census efforts by both the Brazilian government and NGOs.  Referencing precedent successes and failures of earlier projects, this work proposes to pilot an icon-based mobile yellow-pages platform linked to a particular industry with wide environmental and social benefit.
The settlement, at any given moment, can be understood to be about 50% under construction and is 90% masonry.  In order to decrease mass construction waste and the high price of materials, and increase local availability, a mobile commodity pricing and yellow-pages platform allows suppliers to market their goods in bulk with a cooperative of Paraisopolis material shop owners.  This location-specific, distributed platform further allows contractors and property owners to source locally from a new dispersed array of material stockpiles, creates new jobs and facilitates a full-circle waste recovery cycle.