Nothing is New, a master's thesis completed within the Possible Futures studio, explores a world where a new industry of building re-use has developed to both provide new building material for new construction and to make use of the numerous old skyscrapers that are now nearly two hundred years old and need to be demolished.

The “Whole City Recycling Center” is one of a number of buildings which operate within this altered context. This facility is designed to access the skyscraper, break it into parts, “dry fit” those parts into new skyscrapers and then deploy the parts into a new city. The proposed building utilizes planers, workers, and the public to re-organize the objects of the city. The building is sited on what is currently the site of the Jacob Javits Center, as well as, the Hudson Yards Development in New York, New York.

Existing as both building and process, the Whole City Recycling Center, enables urban architectural form to become fluid. This fluidity is not unguided. The structure privileges mass and facade over height and plazas. Nothing is New returns New York to a city of churn, leveraging process, re-use, historicity, and the building.

Prescriptive Patina is an attempt to document the multiple scales of time as experienced through a multi-family residential building sited in the city of Detroit. The project engages the topic of time and its passage through material, layout and sun exposure. The project combines what is considered an antiquated structural system (two-way flat plate with concrete columns) and materials (handmade, recycled and recovered bricks) with a digitally driven facade design. The facade of the building is composed of brick embedded concrete panels.

At the programmatic level, the project operates through a clear and highly demarcated dichotomy. Each apartment is composed of a “pillow zone” and a “closet zone” the pillow zone is an unstructured area that simply contains numerous pillows on which to sleep, relax, and socialize. The closet zone is a highly regulated and dimensioned space in which all of the residents belongs are stored and ordered.

Common in the United Kingdom and New England, dry stone walls offer an example of irregular stacking that utilizes advanced spatial reasoning. These walls, often build from “field stones”, served many functions such as fencing for livestock as well as property line markings. The construction techniques are similar to other masonry construction techniques like brick laying.  

The play begins by looking a basic plans projected onto an impressionistic landscape. The child not only receives direction from these plans but is also encouraged to imagine the worlds in which their play will take place.

Having begun the play, the children are forced to develop the structures from the plans without further direct assistance. The colored surfaces and generally consistent slopes allow the child to realize patterns of connection that generally produce stable structures. 

Since the child has been working with limited information and direction, they have been producing compositions through self direction. with a sense of creative self accomplishment, the child can begin to draw on the stones the stories and environments that have been developing internally throughout the play session.

People Pusher is an urban intervention designed to provide a performance/hotel space that through scale and topography (strange mounds) “pushes” people into one another. This push is an attempt to instigate high density interpersonal interaction in a medium density environment.   

The given program stipulated a small structure with a mixed use program, containing a hotel and cultural space in Toronto, Canada. The intervention was intended to address the site, which at this time, was undergoing a process of gentrification. The resulting design created and fostered the ubiquitous urban experience that occurs when people are placed in semi-close proximity to one another. Thus,creating an overlap in space, as well as moments of ‘meeting’, interaction, affect and temporary attachment. The building can be deconstructed into three programmatic components; cultural, hotel and food. Each of these components is scheduled such that there is a constant exchange of people interacting and overlapping.

The library of the Presidency is designed to embody and communicate the ‘oddity’  that is the Presidency of the United States. That is not the commemoration of the person of the president but rather that of the office of the President

Sited on the National Mall between the Smithsonian Art Gallery, the Smithsonian Natural History Museum and the National Archives, the project presents an understanding of  the presidency through a non-sequential timeline. In the initially developed non-sequential timeline, nodes representing each President (beginning with the Hoover presidency) are connected according to the totality of their public careers. For example,  President Johnson’s public service career began during Roosevelt’s Presidency; President Kennedy’s public service career began during Truman’s Presidency. The non-sequential timeline sets up a structure for the placement and design of a  field of pavilions and a creation of the topography. The topography, working in tandem with the pavilions, house exhibition space. In addition to exhibition space, the project includes an archival space. The design privileges non-sequential connections, challenging the visitors understanding of the “Presidency” from a more static understanding to a more encompassing fluid understanding.

The KTV Airport was a one week project designed to explore the possibilities of overlapping and combined programs. Produced using a variety of drawing techniques, the KTV Airport combines karaoke, an airport, and a parking garage. The drawing depicts the placement of mobile karaoke booths within an airport parking garage. These booth are situated amongst the parked cars of travelers who can be seen returning to their cars.

The drawing styles utilized are intended to emphasizes the effects inherent to each. The center of the drawing is drawn in a 90 - 90 projection which is sandwiched between two areas drawn in perspective. The effect of this is to create “hinges” within the drawing, warping the image around the viewer.