A Dusty Reality
Five sand factories dot the coastal beach town of Laguna Beach, California. After noticing a lack of tourists, the homeowners took it upon themselves to replenish the pristine beaches through a bottom-up sand-making initiative. Their single-family home topology made it conducive to occupying the space between, beside, and adjacent to one another. The thesis looks at this proposal in 50-year increments. What does the beach look like in 2025 versus 2175? Rocks are brought in from local home development projects and pulverized into sand. As the years progress, factory workers occupy the homes they share close contact with. The owners grew weary of the constant sound, dust, and work necessary to preserve beaches and fled to other destinations. A dystopian future is produced, all in the act of preservation.
Four Deceiving Columns
During Emperor Hadrian's reign in Rome, he ordered Apollodorus of Damascus to rebuild the Pantheon. Upon arrival at the Pantheon, you are greeted by a typical Etruscan-style Temple, large overhanging eaves, widely spaced columns, and a deep front porch. It is not until you venture inside the structure that you witness the magic the pantheon reveals. Similarly, the four columns in my proposal for the pier along the entry port of Miami act as an element of deception. They individually highlight a given element: water, wind, rain, and atmosphere. To partake in the magic, you must venture beneath the pier into each individual column.
Blur
BLUR's intent is to question why we travel. Why do we spend money to visit some of the most beautiful places in the world? On any given day, hundreds of visitors line the cobblestones of Washington Street to capture the same scene: the Manhattan Bridge centered in the street, with brick warehouses flanking it. Over and over again. The site has become one of the most documented urban viewpoints in the world. It has also become a place where the photograph has begun to replace the experience that produced it.
BLUR interrupts the ritual. The installation does not remove the view; it replaces it with a version ofitself, slightly out of focus, slightly wrong. A view that visitors cannot photograph their way through.
What remains is the space itself: the cobblestones, the light, the scale of the street. BLUR asks whether a place can be experienced once the photograph it promises is no longer available and treats the uncertainty of the answer as the point.
The 7-day installation would be a blurred photograph of the Manhattan Bridge, mounted on lightweight scaffolding and set in front of the view it depicts.
Riptide
A riptide is not a wave you see; it is a force you experience. This installation treats the street as a coastline: a straight, neutral line subjected to an invisible pressure, producing moments of compression and release, calm and turbulence. Viewers do not encounter the piece from a distance; they enter it, walking within its currents. The work translates an oceanic phenomenon into an architectural condition. The two-hundred foot long installation is comprised of a simple 2 x 4 stick frame construction with waterproof drywall.
Silence
Since 1915, DUMBO has generated 82 decibels of noise from Manhattan Bridge trains, 30 decibels above typical urban daytime levels. That isn't a minor inconvenience.
This acoustic crisis remains persistant to visitors who come for the iconic view on Washington Street. Meanwhile, residents do not have this problem. They have solved it through high-end windows, acoustic insulation, and soundproofing. For everyone else, the bridge offers a photograph at a tax of defining constant noise. The neighborhood’s acoustic crisis reveals a deeper inequality: not everyone can
afford to experience the same environment with equal comfort and agency.
We propose a temporary public installation that offers what the neighborhood cannot provide equally: refuge. A soundproofed glass apartment, ten feet in the air on a steel frame, furnished like a studio. Visitors enter at five-minute intervals and experience the bridge in complete silence. The decibel level drops from 82 to 43.
This installation doesn’t obscure the view. It completes it. By temporarily offering refuge to everyone, we reveal what’s been privatized: the
right to experience one’s environment on one’s own terms. The installation asks a simple question: What if everyone could access refuge in DUMBO?
Reconnecting With Providence
A simple piece of string acts as a rigid form to constrict the space, creating four distinct chambers. The size of the window dictates the red tarp; as the light begins to flood into the red chamber, it slowly begins to disperse into the other three. Due to the double-curved form of the structure, one can only see a section of the final red chamber without even entering the space, leaving viewers curious about what lies beyond the window. Once you enter the last chamber, a single window pane that is framed by the tarp is your only connection to the exterior.
Alternative Pathways For A Sea Voyager
While using repurposed sailing materials, I hoped to depict a journey between two land masses. I embedded a dwelling along the border of Catalina Island and the mainland, one which may succumb to natural elements. The dwelling is a mere blip along a 27-mile journey.
Volume of Inhabitation
Tasked to design a multifamily residence in Washington Park, Providence, on a 3,200 SF lot, I prioritized six actions for human inhabitation: a place to sleep, a place to work, a place to wash, a place to eat, and a place to socialize. The two units interlock with each other and create simultaneous moments of presence and absence through transparent mask facades. The units sit diagonally on the site, following a diagonal grain.
Indiscriminate Arrangement
Tasked to design lightweight furniture for the Walk & Talk Arts Festive in Ponta Delgada, twelve RISD students were crunched for time and material. We completed this task in three days using the local wood called cryptomeria. The Festival coordinators asked for modular pieces with multi-purpose functionality. Apart from that, our chair contains four seats with angled backrests. As one, the chair transforms into a tabletop, making it an ideal gathering space.
A Chair For One Or Two
Lounge chair made for the ideal sleeping position.
Between Two Walls
Between Two Walls is an installation proposal for Madison Square Park Conservancy in New York, NY. The proposal is a mile-long corridor consisting of over 300 8’ x 3’ tall wood & drywall boards that wind their way through the existing park landscape. The installation invites the public, young and old, to leave messages along their journey and allows bystanders to peak between the boards from afar.
Occupying The Third Space
We crave comfort and rational surroundings. In an attempt to design a physical representation of an irrational space, we envisioned a wall. A wall creates comfortable surroundings. But can a wall itself be considered comfortable? By entering a space not designed for human interaction nor the comfort of maintaining prolonged conversation, we uncover a third space. The interior of a wall is a space only thought of in terms of enhancing our pleasure on the exterior. As we enter the in-between, we blur and dissociate the boundary in which the function of a wall is programmed to do.
TEDxRISD Conference
Secured $25,000 from the institution to organize the inaugural TEDxRISD speaker conference at the Rhode Island School of Design. We were yearning to bring back an experience that resembled the diversity of thought from a Foundation-year studio. Seeing, listening, and being inspired by students, faculty, and staff from across departments was the goal of this event. The event has since brought in over 60,000 YouTube views, helping boost donor engagement and interest prospective students & families. Learn more at: www.tedrisd.com
Drowing Debris
Utilizing the virtual reality program Gravity Sketch, allowed us to mold and virtually create objects with our hands that we have seen in various churches across Europe. We questioned the notion of gravity early in the process. While designing our first columns, organizing them from ground to sky felt absurd without both. We spotlighted three elements: the column, the chain, and the debris. As one progresses through the assortment of features, the columns begin to scatter and dissolve. The chain thus links these elements, acting as an opposing force to the thick columns. Under tension, they keep them in a coherent whole, resisting the entropy of a world under expansion.
Surplus
Surplus is a consolidated logistics platform revolutionizing the flow of surplus construction materials and addressing the critical issue of waste influx in the industry. With 600 million tons of construction waste ending up in US landfills annually, Surplus aims to unlock the untapped potential of reusable materials, significantly reducing environmental impact while bolstering contractors' profitability. Surplus streamlines the process by providing a peer-to-peer marketplace connecting buyers and sellers in real time, allowing contractors to offload surplus materials efficiently.
Surplus was recently featured in the Architecture Newspapers September 2024 Sustainability issue titled, 'New Companies Surplus and Surcey Harnessing Green Technology To Adress The Climate Crisis Head On', and was the top ten global finalist in The Terra Carta Design Lab Competition.
Board of Advisors: Jonathan Knowles, Laura Briggs, Kyle Loyd, Angella Boswell, Yahya Jan
Between Mist & Reality
This proposal engages climatic elements as a primary agent of architecture, transforming the Storefront for Art and Architecture into a space to observe and experience the relationships between the city and the elements of a swamp. By building out three hyper-humid rooms of varying sizes, this proposal searches for and aims to encapsulate the transitional nature of the swamplands. By utilizing tinted PVC curtains to cover the primary apertures of the space and allowing artificially induced fog to trickle out, the public is invited to physically encapsulate themselves within the swamplands.
Like the swamplands, which are neither totally land nor totally water, these rooms create soft boundaries between the natural and artificial. Blurring the relationship between inside and outside, these rooms provide a platform in which different social encounters may unfold. An interpretation of the ephemeral, this intervention aims to make sense of the foggy, humid, wet, and biodiverse nature of swamplands often hidden from our human experience.
Swamplands act as buffers between human expansion and untamed wilderness, transitional zones rich with contradictions and mystique. Our proposal for Swamplands ties to these ‘misunderstood landscapes’ of Swamplands - creating three unique spaces that act as points for cultural engagement. We did this by simulating climatic factors such as humidity and fog, as equal agents, to evoke natural phenomena through artificially generated means.
Rich in experiential metaphors to what it is like to travel through the coastal areas of the Eastern seaboard, this proposal turns the building inside out, positioning the swamplands as a sensory experience from which to observe the dualities and ambiguities of New York City’s urban fabric. Like an imperfect translation, the ephemeral is evasive, yet it provides an opportunity to soften boundaries and question our relationship to the natural and built world.
Postmarked Publication
Postmarked is a biannual publication showcasing architecture's interdisciplinary qualities through students’ writing and image-making. Each issue has a different theme that crosses physical borders and disciplinary boundaries. The publication consists of a collection of ‘postcards’ written and selected by students engaging with the built environment locally, nationally, or globally. Postmarked namesake encapsulates our international student body population and positions the architectural discipline in different contexts.
Providence Library
Water has the opportunity to take on a variety of volumetric shapes. As an object moves through the water, it displaces its weight by forcing the surroundings to adjust proportionately. This adjustment, therefore, changes the size and shape used to form this library's design. A narrow library is constructed to convey these volumetric masses as if an individual is standing between two waves. The ripple has been applied to both plan and section to allow the exterior walls to dilate, which encloses the program's spaces.
Newly Available
Nineteen graduates from The Rhode Island School of Design, Yale School of Art, and The Cooper Union converge visions to introduce their diverse creative practices to the City of New York. Determined to inspire discourse, these painters explore boundary-shattering mediums and techniques: Scope and scale are up for debate, while color and pattern are under investigation. United by an unwavering dedication to their craft and a fierce appetite for exploration, their “why not?” philosophy propels the art of painting into the future.
Artists:
Liam John Little, Olivia Springberg, Geist Topping, July Guzman, Owen McCallum-Keeler, Caroline Zhang, Gwynna Dille, Mason Tepper, James Warren, Felix Benton, Ray Steele, Rachel Wolf, Matt Herriot, Stella Egelja, Rosa Chang, Ronan Day-Lewis, Diego Miró-Rivera, Catherine Webb
Horseshoe Addition
A client who owns an 1800s carriage house in Andes, New York, wanted a substantial addition. Our proposal consisted of a significant 25’-0” x 25’-0” wood-framed sunroom, a screened porch, and a mudroom