HARVARD GSD
ADVISOR: GEORGE LIAROPOLOUS-LEGENDRE
This project utilizes off site manufacturing to meet the challenges of a complex site in Edinburgh, a sloped, enclosed courtyard along the Royal Mile which is surrounded by historic buildings. The only way to access the site or bring in construction materials is through an archway, which dictates the constraints for bringing in volumetric modules. The volumes are constructed of cross laminated timber, and are systematized so that each tube module can be broken down into smaller cubes.
The project’s site strategy draws an “X” through the courtyard; one diagonal is a 7-story bar building of apartments, and the other diagonal axis has a 3-story row of townhouses. The main diagonal bar of the building hovers over the public pathway through the site. The massing of the building utilizes volumetric modules arranged like bricks in a herringbone pattern, which scatters the orientation of the building surface and allows each inhabitant a sense of privacy. The bar building uses the herringbone in plan to create apartment units, while the townhouses herringbone sectionally so that one floor is rotated 90 degrees from the other.
HARVARD GSD
ADVISOR: BELINDA TATO
This performing arts center is sited on an air rights parcel above the I-90 highway in Boston, creating a new vertical campus and theater for the Berklee College of Music and Boston Lyric Opera. The building’s program organization and structural strategy divides the building into four quadrants, with each quadrant possessing its own logic for how people interact with each other and navigate the space. Structurally, these four quadrants are supported by two cores on either end which contain vertical circulation and mechanicals. There is a large truss bridging between the two, and cantilevered trusses enclosing the two auditorium quadrants.
Two quadrants are enclosed trapezoidal volumes, one for the large auditorium and one for the smaller performance spaces. Facing Mass Ave and nearest to the entrance, there is a quadrant for public/private interactions, where a continuous ramping system weaves between spaces for public gathering and rehearsal/performer’s spaces. The fourth quadrant contains user/user interactions, with an interior street connecting three blocks for administration, classrooms, and residences. These two quadrants are woven together by a continuous circulation route which modulates its vocabulary after coming up over the ridge which separates the quadrants. This continuous route allows people in the building to experience different choreographies of their interactions with each other as they move through the different quadrants, creating a microcosm of diverse affects.
HARVARD GSD
ADVISOR: ROBIN WINOGROND
This project reimagines the summit of Hoher Kasten to highlight the tension in the interface between built and natural forms. Hoher Kasten is currently accessible by cable car, and the summit is occupied by various structures and platforms. My project builds on the enchantment of the cable car entry sequence; visitors float through the air in the cable car, burrow through a dark tunnel, and emerge out of the earth in a glass box of sky. The pavilion’s spiral stair is light and floating in contrast to the dark mass of the bedrock, and echoes the tectonics of anchoring and suspension which are found elsewhere on the site. Visitors walk upwards along this curve towards three exits at different levels that connect to the irregular topography of the summit. The building includes a buried wing with a cafeteria and restrooms, and the roof serves as a viewing platform for the Rhine. The construction and materiality of this pavilion dramatize the acts of excavation, levelling, anchoring, infill, and other scars of construction which mold the summit.
HARVARD GSD
ADVISOR: ANDREW HOLDER
This building is a cricket club designed utilizing a fragment extracted from a Baroque church and placed within a nine square grid. The cornice figure in the church Sant’ Andrea della Valle was selected for the interesting way that it negotiates the transition between nave and transept as well as its reparsing of the Latin inscription on the cornice line of the church. This figure was abstracted as a foam model, then used to generate the structure by scaling the figure to building height and placing it in the four corners of a nine square grid. This creates productive spaces of interstitial overlap between figures, as well numerous symmetries in both plan and section, which were adjusted to accommodate the cricket club program. Just as the cornice figure reparses the Latin phrase, the figure in my project analogously reparses and is reparsed by program.
This axonometric diagram demonstrates how spaces were created from the interstitial space between colliding figures. The building’s many symmetries in plan and section provided opportunities for creating different adjustments, or reparsings, of geometric motifs. The first floor of the building includes public spaces, such as an amphitheater, a snack bar, and two team meeting rooms. The second floor includes athletes’ spaces such as the locker rooms, gear storage, and training rooms, and the third floor has practice courts and coaches’ rooms.
HARVARD GSD THESIS
ADVISOR: LISA ANNE HABER-THOMSON
Nature and environment have played prominent roles throughout the history of medicine and the architecture of hospitals. Historically, hospitals in the 19th century were often located in rural retreats to isolate contagion and to heal through clean air and environmental therapies. In contrast, today’s hospitals are closed systems designed for efficiency, homogeneous environments detached from the outdoors.
This project proposes re-entangling nature and health through the design of a hospital clinic, where waste heat generated by life-sustaining equipment can be harnessed to grow new life in greenhouses. Healing programs draw on the historic type of the pavilion hospital, interwoven with cultivation spaces to create a heterotopia of environments. Neither an open or closed system, the clinic becomes a site of metabolic exchange between humans and plants, between buildings and environment, between us and the larger world.
HARVARD GSD
ADVISOR: ZEINA KOREITEM
Located by Boston Harbor in the Seaport District, this film studio campus creates a linearly connected series of sheds containing studio space, actors’ areas, production offices, common recreational space, and workshops. Trucks and parking circulate on the outer side of the campus, while the buildings surround an interior courtyard for gatherings and community. The film studio utilizes the figure of an early Christian basilica’s masonry wall, and snakes this wall around the building to reparse the sheds into different relationships with the building’s sidedness and program. The wall at times thickens to accommodate interior tunnels and stairways, which allows for circulation between two sheds that is separate from both.
Support spaces are located above the studios, or in cantilevered sheds between two studios. This anticipates the need for resilience due to sea level rise, placing the more finished, permanent spaces are above flood level, while the ground floor contains unfinished spaces like the studios and storage. While the studios have no apertures in order to remain dark, the cantilevered spaces are have a glass curtain wall and exposed truss structures.
YALE BA THESIS
ADVISORS: STEVEN HARRIS, MARTA CALDIERA
Through the contrast created between an organic tidepool ecosystem and hermetic concrete buildings, the cemetery evokes a scene of the eternal set among cycles of decay and regeneration. These columbaria rest as closed and pure objects in the field, as if the concrete cubes rose up from the island. However, when one enters one of these buildings, the scale shifts to that of a private room. The buildings face each other in pairs to conceal the entrance from the outside viewer, who approaches along axis to the central chapel and then branches off to the side.
There are three types of columbarium structures, which are generated from the differing heights of the island topography. The columbaria nearest to the water’s edge have stairs ascending up, while those nearest the island center have stairs descending down. This distance of this stair allows for these structures to accommodate the burial of a body, while the structures with no stair and thin walls accommodate funerary urns.
HARVARD GSD
ADVISOR: ANDREW HOLDER
Through the use of a series of crown molding profiles, a hidden room is disguised among four other rooms. The crown molding is treated as a surface condition, as opposed to a localized application of ornament, and is manipulated through a series of revolutions and extrusions. As one circulates through the first four rooms, it is ambiguous whether the crown molding exists as a two-sided, thin wrapper, or the surface of a thick mass. The hidden room is the interstitial space between the two crown molding profiles, which one can assume is poche until confronted with the possibility of occupying the space between the two wrappers. In the sequence of the four rooms, a looping circulation is made possible by ignoring the entrance to the hidden room, and returning through a staircase which leads back to the first room. This stair runs parallel to another stair, which tunnels through the poche of the building and leads from the hidden room to an exterior exit.
The model is constructed to reveal a sectional cut through the stair leading from the hidden room to the exit. The sections are taken perpendicular to this cut, revealing interesting symmetries and asymmetries created by the revolutions of the crown molding.
HARVARD GSD
ADVISOR: ANDREW HOLDER
The jump-cut in film is an abrupt transition where an object jumps from one part of the frame to another. In this project, the building “jump cuts” through two incompatible sections which are bridged as part of the design exercise. Through the interpretation of section cuts as walls at a 60 degree angle from the cut, a system of geometrical rules govern the creation of rooms around a central triangular atrium. The atrium opens onto one side of the building on the lower floor, then rotates, is truncated, and emerges on the opposite side of the building. The urban condition generated by and for this building involves a series of these brick-like buildings arranged on 60 degree axes so that circulation can occur in hexagonal courtyards.
The building envelope utilizes the 60 degree motif to create differing facade patterns on the long and short ends of the structure. Two of the exterior walls have long, narrow slits angled at 60 degrees for light, while the short ends are glazed with a more porous facade pattern cut at 30 degrees. Doors on every level open onto from the short ends of the building, so that the long sides of the building create a triangular courtyard of private space.
YALE SPRING 2014
ADVISORS: SUNIL BALD, JOYCE HSIANG
Near the terminus of the Farmington Canal Trail, the trail runs underneath Hillhouse Avenue on Yale’s campus. My design connects Hillhouse Ave and the trail by creating geometries from the intersection of their two grids, and planting these structures into the landscape. These forms are in dialogue with topography; land is squeezed between prisms, prisms press into land, and land flows into prisms. The model utilizes the language of plywood and the connotations of grain; landscape is signified by the topographical texture, while structural interventions are represented by the flat edge of the wood. Programmatically, the rotated square contains a dining hall and serves as the main structure in the compound, and it is surrounded by a below-grade kitchen and a small learning space.
YALE FALL 2014
ADVISORS: BIMAL MENDIS, KATHERINE DAVIES
This house uses a kit of 9’ x 9’ parts to create a tightly connected series of hexagons resembling a molecule of bonded geometrical units. The large and smaller hexagons are intertwined together based on a modular unit which allows for complex spatial arrangements. On one side of the central hexagonal courtyard, the private wing culminates in the dead end of a bedroom, while on the other side, the more public wing delineates a progression of gathering spaces. The house is situated in a landscape which continues the hexagonal motif as it negotiates both organic and paved areas.
YALE SPRING 2013
ADVISOR: EMMANUAL PETIT
In the first of the architecture program's design studios, an existing building is modelled to investigate the massing, tectonics, contours, and programmatic design of the assigned project. I analyzed the formal geometries and architectural devices used Paul Rudolph's Tuskegee Chapel, a religious structure on a college campus built in 1969.
YALE FALL 2014
ADVISORS: TURNER BROOKS, ADAM HOPFNER
Music Haven is an after-school program that teaches music to New Haven students, and is in need of a new headquarters which include both performance and pedagogical spaces. My design organizes this program into two L-shaped wings, one for performance and one for classrooms. These wrap around a hill which provides elevated seating to extend the performance hall, as well as sound insulation for the practice rooms which are buried in it. From the street, the performance hall is made highly visible to the public.
YALE SPRING 2014
ADVISORS: JOYCE HSIANG, SUNIL BALD
The zongzi is a traditional Chinese dish created by molding sticky rice and meat inside bamboo leaves, which are wrapped in a tetrahedral shape. Inspired by the food’s tetrahedral geometry and the recipe’s focus on repeated folding and unfolding, my bento box transforms from a closed prism into a landscape defining a meal for two. The bento box contains pockets for zongzi, as well as four dishes which unfold like two leaves. Crafted from plywood with canvas joints, the bento box holds itself together through its weight and the nesting of its geometries.
