This thesis presents an alternative approach to adaptive reuse that operates between historic preservation and complete renovation. Widespread appreciation of both ancient and modern ruins provides the starting point for a proposal to convert what remains of an 80-year-old rice mill in Houston’s Fifth Ward into a hybrid urban farm and community center. Exploiting the as-found conditions shared by most architectural ruins, such as incompleteness, porosity, invasion by nature, ad-hoc human intervention and a blurred interior/exterior relationship, can allow them a continued life while promoting their expansion into a functioning center for urban agriculture. Such qualities arguably give this site, and many others throughout the city where once-typical industrial structures have fallen into disrepair, value as unique community icons that resist the homogenizing forces of private development rapidly taking over inner-city neighborhoods. Neither strictly preserving the remains as a relic nor reconstructing the as-found into a different building, new interventions instead blend harmoniously with the weathered material presence of the extant structure while adding functionality and accessibility.
Much of the ruins are kept intact to accommodate hydroponic farming, with the most drastic interventions providing circulation across the site. A new public promenade connects the neighborhood and provides access to the two buildings. A new bridge traverses the railroad to connect the promenade with parking and a bus stop. A new water tower provides access to vertical farming in the existing silos and helps irrigate the site. The warehouses are also filled with new public programs, offices and housing, while exterior walls provide additional surfaces for vertical farming. Surrounding land accommodates commercial farming, composting, and community gardens. In this way, the ruins persist as evidence of the neighborhood’s agro-industrial past, but also become a generator for new production and social activity that engages the immediate community as well as the city at large.
This proposal for a county court annex and library, to be located near the Museum District of Houston at the corner of Binz and Almeda, offers a new range of experiences to the public through the implementation of an appealing, organic form that differentiates itself from its surroundings while remaining contextual in scale to the adjacent neighborhood. The bulk of the building is elevated to make the grounds available for a public park. Trees grow through light wells that puncture the meandering, interconnected lobby of the building, both modulating space to allow for specific programs and integrating the structure within the tree canopy of Houston.
Individuals are protected by the shade of the building as they filter through a forest of columns to two main entrances. Revolving doors lead to large, spiraling ramps that encircle planted trees growing through light wells on the way to the main floors of the building. The first floor of the interior contains service-oriented areas, with tax offices and clerk counters located in the courthouse wing and the circulation desk anchoring the library wing. Open public areas such as exhibition spaces and a cafe occupy the intermediate space. Finally, the top floor contains spaces for collective, organized activities, which include courtrooms, classrooms and daycare.
The ever-present sinuous edge unifies the multiple functions of the building into a continuous space, fostering interaction across members of the community while establishing a connection to the surrounding city of Houston through uninterrupted views.
Situated at the western end of Rice University’s main pedestrian axis among a sea of parking, the site for the school’s new opera house demands a building that will act as a focal point while integrating with the architectural tradition of the campus. This project addresses the context of the site as a starting point, activating a heavily-trafficked yet under-utilized buffer zone between education buildings and expansive parking lots with new spaces that encourage spectatorship and provide moments to linger, as other successful campus hot-spots provide. The building can be accessed from all sides, with monumental stairs leading up to an elevated lobby that ties the main auditorium to rehearsal and support spaces.
The auditorium utilizes the acoustical properties of bent wood construction to provide a shell that both reflects and diffuses sound where advantageous. Furthermore, the striated patterns of the wood visually unite the orchestra and both mezzanines with the proscenium. An outdoor auditorium provides the opportunity for passersby to observe rehearsals in the practice area, while smaller rehearsal cubicles hover above off the south side of the lobby.
Instead of merely serving a few specific performances throughout the year, the lobby and surrounding grounds become an active social condenser serving the entire student body 24/7.
Building on previous investigations into the acoustic properties of engineered wood and styrofoam structures, this proposal effectively combines the reflective quality of veneer plywood with the absorption of polystyrene foam in a system that minimizes external acoustical bleeding. Milled 1”-thick polystyrene foam panels are sandwiched between 1/4” perforated birch plywood to create triangular units that fit snugly together when assembled on site. Tongue-in-groove joints are glued together following the precise geometry of the milled panels resulting in a continuous faceted screen that mimics the double-curvature of the original formal gesture.
This single screen houses three individual rehearsal spaces that can accommodate one, two or up to four musicians, respectively. The geometry of the screen tapers in the vertical dimension to reflect sound inward and down towards the musician while minimizing acoustical bleeding towards the top of the structure. In plan, the circular shape of each rehearsal space also reflects direct soundwaves inward. The geometry combined with the absorbative quality of the foam, which is enhanced by a pattern of perforations in the wood veneer, effectively traps sound within each acoustical zone. Sound waves that eventually escape become masked (inaudible) before reaching the other two zones. The sinuous shape of the sound screen promotes a fluid movement of spectators around relatively open rehearsal spaces, encouraging interaction between the musicians and an informal audience without audible or visual interference from the other practice areas.
This pavilion proposal for a hypothetical site, which is bounded on either side by existing (undefined) city fabric, provides a new pedestrian thoroughfare while offering shaded park space to the public. The concrete-coated steel plate structure appears folded like origami to create a series of gateways that increase in scale towards a central gathering area while allowing for smaller pockets of rest space to exist around the periphery of the site.
This studio at Rice explored architecture’s relatinonship to urbanism through the proposal of a new educational campus in Istanbul. Following research into the region, the particular site in Istanbul, and analysis of architectural and urban precedents, a “master framework” was produced within which each student designed an individual institution that would share its resources with other universities in the city. Rather than acting as an enclosed or isolated island, the new campus commons explores the possibility of a constellation of open university infrastructures dispersed throughout the city’s urban territory. This new educational typology becomes a new type of collective space with connections to major universities, schools and the general public.
The below map positions the site in relation to other higher education institutions in Istanbul. The master framework for the new campus proposes a gridded reforestation scheme to territorialize the site where the shared educational facilities will be located. This landscaped forest accommodates park grounds and recreational facilities alongside the individual institutions, which are joined by a campus-wide tram line.
The building proposed here is located in the northeastern portion of the master framework and is one of two sites that actually touch the periphery of the campus. The site is framed by an L-shaped clearing on the south and east sides, requiring a set-back from the road and providing access to the proposed campus tram line beyond. The building occupies the entirety of the given plot and maintains a singular legible form derived from the given square of the site footprint.
The design negotiates a position as a segue between the city and the campus by establishing directionality of movement and privileged views that both reinforce the building as an object in the park and maintain a dialogue with the other projects in the master framework. Voids cut through the square block to both frame views of the surrounding landscape and promote views within the building across floors. Organizationally, these voids generate a variety of plan conditions that support the complex program of the institution. The project thus takes on the role of a performing arts institution within the campus, where porosity and transparency support the notion of the spectacle while subjects of the building take on simultaneous roles of performer and audience.
Club Life is a 24-hour wellness center that offers a variety of fitness activities and spa amenities throughout the day. Mornings center around personal appointments, with afternoons devoted to group activities and after-school care. At night, social gatherings and performances take place. Situated between a quiet residential neighborhood and a major commercial thoroughfare, this project investigates the potential of the urban compound as a typology that can accommodate various programmatic shifts and changing user groups over the course of the day.
Close analysis and interpretation of Peter Zumthor’s thermal baths in Vals, Switzerland as a precedent inspired a similar language of massive blocks modulating space to accommodate this program and respond to the new context of Houston, TX. Here the blocks form clusters on the west side facing Kirby where users are directed to group-oriented spaces for dining and entertainment, while blocks remain individual volumes on the quieter east side near Kelvin where circulation meanders through individuated spaces devoted to health and well-being. The systems established by the placement of blocks on the "gather" and "meander" sides of the site bleed into the central segue zone, which serves as the main entrance and borders the olympic-sized pool in the middle of compound. A grid of columns continues the aesthetic effect of massive support members and breaks down to allow gathering spaces to emerge and intersect with meandering circulation paths, which can be seen in the above detail.
This acrylic model and accompanying exploded axonometric diagram were produced as an analysis of Herzog & de Meuron's design for a library in Cottbus, Germany. Blue acrylic denotes "hard public" spaces, in this case the regimented book stacks, while pink acrylic signifies "soft public" areas, in this case study rooms. Private/service areas are hatched and structural members are basswood dowels.
Over Your Head Umbrella Shop brings the weather indoors to create an immersive shopping experience within a mall setting. Customers are surrounded by falling water as they meander through the boutique, protected by the very products they have come to purchase: umbrellas, which form a canopy installed overhead. Umbrellas and other rain accessories are displayed by mannequins that stand in the rain, which falls from carefully placed sprinklers and through a ceiling grille to the drainage system below the floor grille. While creating an intriguing atmosphere within a typical mall setting, the rain room also instills a sense of urgency in the customer seeking fashionable rain gear. All drawings and the base rendering were produced using Revit software.
The constraints of this hypothetical site for a METRORail station require an entrance between two existing office towers and a concourse spanning three railway platforms beyond. The lobby, concourse, and platforms are sheltered from sun and rain by a proposed canopy supported by a monocoque structural system of aluminum panels, which provide shade, while glass clerestory windows allow sunlight to filter down between vaulted bays. Glass enclosed elevators and concrete slab stairs provide access between the platforms and the concourse, which is supported by a post-tensioned concrete system.
The design of the canopy was inspired by gothic vault systems and has ribbed support columns placed in the center of each platform. A module composed of intersecting arches has been stretched to span the width of the concourse and then repeated toward the outer edge of the site, decreasing in length and height to produce a cascading effect.
This proposal for a 5.3 million square foot multi-use development in La Défense, the main business district of Paris, attempts to bring back certain qualities that have been lost from the 1950s master plan, which adhered to a perpendicular arrangement of modernist elements intended to bring legibility and order to the CBD within the urban fabric while tying the site to the city of Paris through its position on the grand axis. This new intervention would revive the orthogonal logic of the original plan, which has been lost in subsequent building generations, and produce a dynamic relationship of new forms that offer more varied spatial experiences while maintaining a cohesion that has been sorely lacking in this district.
In the original master plan of La Défense, mostly orthogonal building volumes maintain certain relationships in their arrangement around courtyards, and the insertion of voids at multiple levels was intended to bring light to the pedestrian deck and produce new interiorities that divide the vast expanse of the esplanade into habitable zones more sensitive to the human scale, as can be seen in the precedent images below. Since the 1950s, new construction challenged these intentions for their generic towers, and deviated from the plan in an attempt to produce icons marketing individual corporate identities. The result is a chaotic mess of poorly organized plazas and confusing circulation that has lost the cohesion of the original plan.
The line diagrams (below left) map out the traces of orthogonal elements that are present in the current plan of La Défense. The proposed scheme takes its formal and organizational cues from the history of the site, seen in these traces of perpendicular building footprints. New vertical circulation cores emerge from these traces, maintaining a formal legibility in their solidity which is distinct from the volumes of new program being injected into the site, which are clad in a rational glazing system. Thus the project presents and archaeology of sorts, offering an entirely new environment that grows out of the layered traces of the site’s history.
This schematic proposal for the core camp facilities at the new Boy Scouts of America camp, located some 60 miles north of Houston, TX, was developed in collaboration with fellow interns Jose Martinez-Giron, Brandon Berry, Katerina Paletykina, Tracy Manuel and Rachael Laughter at Gensler in 2012. Our design takes cues from East Texas vernacular architecture, such as the dog-trot housing typology, to produce a collection of meeting spaces where campers can share ideas and enjoy activities surrounded by the piney woods.
Facilities in this part of the camp include a lodge with a general store, admin office, and infirmary; a STEM center and classroom pavilions; a meeting hall and swimming pool.