Performative Space

This project explores how a movies works as a perceptual construct and can be used as a conceptual basis for architecture. Blade Runner is set in a futuristic hyper-urban city. The dynamic environment is constructed through an interplay of shifting light conditions and the varied velocities of characters, objects, and the camera. I chose the Washington Avenue Bridge due to the rough physical character of the infrastructure in contrast with the multi-speed, multi-leveled traffic. My intervention intends to heighten awareness of these dynamic relationships through light as a means of tracking motion, revealing the eroding structure, and defining programmatic zones.

Performative Space Exploration

This scene in Atonement uses montage to create an intimate, emotional connection between two characters. Cutting between two places at the same moment in time, the camera makes use of soft daylight, foreground interference (dust, smoke, and reflections), and close ups, inviting the audience into a private moment. The Cowles Center's sidewalk is not exactly analogous to this scene, but rather it subverts the idea of intimacy by looking for it on a city sidewalk. Photographed using devices from the scene, light, reflections/transparencies, and depicting intimacy were explored. The result is a moment between to strangers; uncomfortable, but cinematic.

Performative Space

This project was designed to explore cinema as a conceptual construct and apply our discoveries onto a public space. One Hour Photo is based on an emotionally isolated photo clerk who intervenes in the lives of his customers. The movie uses symmetrical, slow, rhythmic montage and a bright, low-contrast lighting scheme and color palette to dehumanize the central character. I chose the 35W bridge because its palette, lighting, symmetry and calculated nature mirror the movie well. My exploration and intervention revealed that the introduction of active people heightened the awareness of the dehumanizing qualities of the space.

Social Media as Disaster Relief

The earthquake that struck Haiti in January 2010 dealt a catastrophic blow to an already beleaguered nation.  Almost immediately after the devastating quake mobile phone technology became a critical means of registering and routing requests for specific types of relief aid via text messaging.
 
Social media have begun to develop into powerful tools in areas experiencing natural disasters, civic violence, and other emergency situations.  Using Haiti as the site for exploring the use of interactive telecommunications as a component of response efforts, students were asked to speculate on the possible architectural implications of this emerging technology. 
Responses included establishing a network of communication relay structures that would serve to both virtually and visually link key points in the city, an interactive website to aid people in locating friends and families in times of emergency, and a system that would allow community members the opportunity to voice their thoughts on post-disaster community needs.

Second Sky

In an era of active material investigation, light has become an increasingly important ingredient in the pursuit of optimal and unforeseen material effects. One notable trend has been the adoption of fiber optic principles of bending and extending light to a variety of materials--such as light pipes, acrylic tubes, and mirror ducts. These principles have been harnessed to produce responsive material effects at the scale of a detail, as well as smart day lighting and energy optimization strategies at the scale of a building. This four-day intensive design + research catalyst introduced examples of light behavior and material integration, in addition to methods for developing physical structures that utilize light as a primary ingredient. Participants designed and constructed multivalent lenses and surfaces that filter, modify, and channel light emitted by a mirror duct system called the 3M Light Guide that is being installed in the second-floor south studio space in Rapson Hall.

Stereotomic Structures Catalyst

The goal of this Catalyst "Stereotomic Structures" is to analyze, understand and apply practically some principles of stereotomy in architecture. This Catalyst Studio explores stonecutting properties, rules and reactions of self-supporting structures made of stone. The aim of this Catalyst is to create a vehicle to translate drawing into a spatial map of gravity forces depicted by objects on the space gathered by stereotomic rules.

This course emphasizes very particular constructive characteristics of masonry using skew arches as provocateurs. The lens to observe and develop architecturally these type structures takes a specific problem of stereotomy faced by stone masons in the past when arches were supported on oblique walls. The study of the skew arches focuses on how "the constructive" is the creative engine of the architecture. The goal is to understand history through architectural technology exploring different modes of practice in the discipline of architecture.

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Paper Folding

Paper folding allows you to work through a composition/design without thinking about it. You are suppose to read back from each move to see where the progression is headed. Moves are dictated by initial rules set up by the designer. In my paper folding, I was working with the medium and it's natural tendencies- curling and flowing. I am showing the final move for 3 different progressions , as well as the final progression and move.

Exercise IV. Defining structure - Defining architectural design

In this exercise students focus on the structural system of their studio design proposal. During this semester, we have emphasized the intrinsic relationship between architectural design and structure. Through our sessions we have reviewed the most common components that make building structures. We have learned the different components comprising a building structure (spanning and vertical), we have studied how spanning elements can be solved (form, vector, bulk, surface active, etc.) and we have studied how lateral force resisting mechanisms work. We have studied the supporting system of buildings and we have learned about the role of structure in the overall architectural composition. You have brought to class case studies of significance to the contemporary context of architecture. Through these case studies we have learned that meaningful architectural proposals are loaded with the strength of structural logic.

Exercise II. Case Study, Structural System Analysis.

This project aims to identify the structural components of a chosen Case Study and represent them through diagrams. The outcome of this assignment has two components; a scaled model and a set of well proportioned or scaled diagrams and drawings. Structural members were identified following this hierarchy:
a) Primary Structure
b) Secondary Structure
c) Lateral force resisting mechanisms
d) Materials
e) Flow of forces in the structure

MCAD Addition: The Silence and the Roar.

A Common Thread: Revitalization of the Delmar Grain Elevator Site

Over the past decade, this part of the city has been subject to close scrutiny from the planning and design communities in Minneapolis

Arising from this scrutiny have been many proposals intended to improve the area and bring it into the fabric of the city. The University has proposed and begun the construction of a new biomedical research campus. The Metropolitan Council has begun construction on the Central Corridor LRT. The City of Minneapolis has commissioned the SEMI Master Plan, which proposes wetland remediation and a Grand Rounds connection over the railyards that define the northern edge of the site. Numerous studies at the University have grappled with potential reuses of the grain elevators on the site.

What is missing from these proposals is an all-encompassing vision - something that ties together the disparate proposals for this site into a meaningful whole.

Ultimately, the individual proposals are only as good as they relate to one another and build upon mutual strengths. The aim of this project is to leverage the strengths of the existing proposals for this area into a cohesive vision for its future

Minneapolis College of Art and Design: Expansion as a microURBANISM

The relationship between art students and professional artists is a dynamic one, always changing and dependent on the location it exists in. This expansion to the Minneapolis College of Art and Design explores the relationships between this dynamic world of art in the Twin Cities and how a student of MCAD could connect with it. Pods to be used as living units with attached studios connect to create a network of living/working units, as well as interstitial useable spaces in between. Circulation through skyways create an experience similar to an art walk, easing the transition from student to professional.

MCAD Site Model

Design as Progression

Inhabiting the Grid: MCAD in the Digital Age

The program of an art school carries an inherent tension: it must provide both a safe and ordered place to support its students, but it must also expose them to varied environments and push them out of their comfort zones to catalyze creativity.

This proposal for the expansion of MCAD combines the diverse physical order created by the repetition of "L" shaped buildings with a new way of using architecture through existing social media and apps that interface with a flow of building occupancy information.

M.C.A.D. Intervention

Conceived of as a merging of landscape and building in order to retain as much outdoor space as possible while allowing the Minneapolis College of Art and Design to quadruple their functional space. The program is arranged in the manner of streets and plazas with units pushing, pulling and puncturing the "Torn Prairie" above. Rammed earth bearing walls and massive beams carry the prairie, which pulls apart at the seams to allow light to penetrate work spaces. Display and critique functions are enclosed in channel glass "light boxes" that punch up through.