Current Featured Student Work

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An Intergenerational Live/Learn Center, Atlanta, GA

The built environment increasingly segregates different age groups from one another. Are there ways to critically rethink and reconstruct evolutionary types of environment to counter this trend by facilitating more mutually-informed, -receptive, and -productive relations and developmental processes between the old and the young? This can and should happen through co-situating urban/building types at multiple scales within their given material-spatial-temporal-programmatic context(s) to stimulate better mind-body interaction and development between these different subjects and domains as they perform everyday and exceptional “rites of passage” along their parallel and intersecting “paths.”

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Mobility spaces—transit stations, parking lots and streets—are the most used public spaces in the city, yet they are primarily designed only for efficiency.  As urban theorist Manuel Castells has described, the contemporary city exists as networks of information exchange and physical and virtual movement and flow.  This suggests that the mobility spaces of a city are the most vital elements of the contemporary public realm.  Based on this research, this project explores four strategies that facilitate public (mobility) space: (a) weaving movement with infrastructure; (b) juxtaposing movement with programs; (c) circuiting movement and space; and (d) connecting internal and external movements to site conditions.  The progam is a multi-modal station on Atlanta’s Beltline.

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The ubiquitous existence of an over-indulgent media has projected our nomadic culture into an exorbitant state of pleasure-seeking consumption. The response to this condition demands a project orchestrating a mediated hybrid of hospitality and hospital reconciling the need for both intoxication and detoxification within our society. The project engages the program of the hotel which saturates the tourist and the alcohol rehabilitation center which de-saturates the addict. The architecture achieves resolution between the two programs through the virtual eye of the media and the physical frame of the assemblage.

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At a time when self-perpetuating information attempts to remove all unknown variables with known constants, my thesis engages the variable nature of water as material. Looking to the minimal and earth artists of the 1960’s, this project attempts to remove all of the unknowns from the evident object to emphasize that one variables’ contingency on its’ external environment. Understanding the role of water in Piedmont Park, this design project proposes a new swimming complex in the North Woods Expansion of the Park.

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A Public Space at the Nexus of Transportation Systems, Atlanta, GA

This investigation asks if an evolutionary public space can be imagined and constructed that could “graft” itself sensitively onto available spaces of mobility to regenerate a more democratically-inclusive, -vibrant, and -productive public life than the forms currently available. It proposes that this can happen through carefully grafting certain mesh-like, space-making surfaces of diverse interwoven “strands” onto such sites and their diverse human and natural systems in ways that join and eventually synthesize with them at diverse scales to produce a new system that thrives on its free and active appropriation and change of use and meaning by all through time.

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Donna Harraway wrote in the Cyborg Manifesto, “Our machines are disturbingly lively, and we ourselves frighteningly inert.”  This project proposes the design and construction of an environment in which the underlying forces and anxieties of modern living are revealed: a medical airport.  This program allows for a critical investigation into psychoanalytic fears and architectural program, the human body and our machines, skin and structure, and life and death.