40,000rsf, completed at Venture Architecture
The future of a Denver-based oil & gas company is represented through the design of their new office space. Warm, rich wood and accentuates the inherited raw, gritty, and cold exposed concrete, while touches of greenery allude to the company's commitment to environmental care. Occupying three consecutive floors of a downtown high-rise, the office offers superb views of the surrounding city and the Rocky Mountains.
Sift Studio's 2014 entry for the Architectural League of New York's League Prize, previously on exhibition at Parson's The New School of Design in New York, NY
For the League Prize's 2014 theme of "Overlay", rocks were designed and developed through a series of digital and physical processes, then represented through models, drawings, and photographs. These representations, developed in conjunction with a lecture, spark discourse on material engagement and the definition of objects.
This quick project (developed with the University of Michigan's Creative Coding for Designers Certificate) uses Python inside the Processing IDE to individually scale a grid of circles based on mouse location.
Completed at Venture Architecture
Spec Office B's prime location in Denver's rapidly developing South Broadway neighborhood was instrumental in its development. The cherished plot of land demanded that the building's footprint be carefully considered and designed in coordination with occupants of neighboring buildings.
The building's facade provides a respectful nod toward its neighbors while still claiming its independence on the street. Floor plates remain simple and functional for their future tenants.
Revelation is a speculative manufacturer of prefabricated disaster shelter pods. They prefer to be known as an otherworldly entity that provides "everything you need to survive the coming disaster," capitalizing on the ever-increasing paranoia of modern-day consumers.
Three products were designed and developed for this project: the shelter pods, the vehicles that deliver the pods, and the building that fabricates the pods.
The design and aesthetic of the building were driven by the highly-specialized manufacturing processes that are needed to manufacture the shelter pods. Gritty structure, fans, vents, and ducts typically regarded as unsightly were deliberately left exposed to further communicate Revelation's brand identity.
Completed at Abel Design Group
Emerging generative design platforms allow designers to produce a large quantity of work in a short amount of time. “Starting from scratch” on an architectural project is a thing of the past. Why the spend the time drawing site setbacks, parking garage layouts, or even unit mixes along double-loaded corridors when all of that data has been digitized and is at our disposal. By embracing the fact that the computer is better than humans at quantitative, complex, and repetitive tasks, architects can produce double the work in half the time.
This schematic design package for a multifamily project in an up-and-coming area of Houston, Texas was created in a very short amount of time by utilizing generative test fit software. Four options for building layouts, including a variety of unit mixes, parking garage designs, and even pro forma’s, were generated in a few hours and passed along to the project’s developer. One chosen design was developed further. With very little monetary investment in the project, the developer received real quantifiable data and feasible schematic design.
2014 Taubman College of Architecture Thesis Submission
In “Formless: A User’s Guide”, Yve-Alain Bois and Rosalind Krauss state that the dream of architecture is actually to escape entropy, and thus its products are designed to do so. The most prevalent of said products is arguably styrofoam. "Waste Land" is an investigation into architectural possibilities of styrofoam as a construction material.
Styrofoam resists decomposition for thousands of years. Its permanence is hugely unacceptable, especialy for a product that is typically used just once before it is disposed of. It is undeniably an object that must be dealt with, and the discipline of architecture has the potential to “deal with it.” In the project "Waste Land", styrofoam was returned to its ‘base’ qualities, or what one might imagine it would be before the blob of material was extruded into a cup or flattened into a plate. This is done through the solution of styrofoam with acetone. In this densified, globby state, the material hardens to become stronger than its idyllic counterpart. It knows no particular form, but exhibits qualities of cohesion and viscosity. It shows no trace of what it once was. It has become what it once repressed, and has come to terms with its ultimate destiny of waste.
The country of Tanzania is urbanizing at an alarming rate. Tanzanian young adults are understandably leaving their villages for the big city in search of high-quality schooling, improved sanitation, and other amenities, leaving mom and dad to tend to the family farm. The work is difficult, but many depend on the yield.
Tanzania is not the only country where this is happening. How can we support the youth of developing nations to take part in rapid urbanization while encouraging family-farm ownership? Widespread commercialization of family farms would be catastrophic to local economies.
"Remote Agrarians" seeks to solve these issues through remote farming. The speculative company provides an enclosure that can be built in a day around a modest-sized family farm by two people. The enclosure eliminates the need for human-upkeep of the farmland for the majority of the season and allows the farmer to live remotely.
The fully-functioning scale model of the farm enclosure runs on a $30 micro-controller. Water is stored in a nearby rain barrel and is distributed when a sensor detects low moisture content in the soil. An overhead awning expands and contracts based on outside temperature, and an irrigation-system sprays pesticides and fertilizers at a certain time throughout the day. Smartphone-accessible cameras are even mounted inside the structure for 24/7 surveillance.
Programming has become so advanced that our machines can now learn from their mistakes, adapt to ever-changing parameters, and take on a mind of their own. "Billy" is an attempt at asking a simple mesh object to do just that. Utilizing the interface of Processing, a Java-based coding platform for designers, a mesh 'blob' given the name "Billy" was asked to create extrusions on top of extrusions on top of extrusions.
Billy's father never could have known what he would become. He was given some instructions and sent off on his own, growing into whatever sort of blob he wanted to be. Now he is looking more handsome than ever and his father couldn't be more proud of him.
Awarded "Best in Show" at the 2014 Artlink Corrugated Cardboard Exhibition in Fort Wayne, Indiana
This entry in a cardboard-themed exhibition considers new uses for an old material in the digital age. Sophisticated software packages and computer-controlled machining allow for the conception and construction of complicated three-dimensional geometry. This coffee table exploits the potential of using a “high-tech” approach on “low-tech” cardboard. The cardboard could have taken many different forms under the acrylic surface to support it, but the gestural, ‘amoebic’ form suggests a new life for the material.
Completed at Abel Design Group
The high elevation and climate of Fraser, Colorado limits the construction season for ground-up projects to just a few months out of the year. In order to expedite the construction process, the design team opted to have the home built in modules off-site in a factory. The Fraser Residence will be assembled on-site in Fraser after its modules are driven on trailers through Colorado’s Rocky Mountains.
Completed at Abel Design Group
A technology company requested creative uses of their logo (a cloud) throughout their new office space. This custom wall & window graphic was created using Dynamo, a visual programming language. A stock photo of a cloudy sky gets transformed into opaque vector-based dots, then further modified with attractor-point-based nodes that can be manually moved to areas on the floor where occupants require visual privacy. This override increases the scale of dots near areas of the floor requiring visual privacy, thus increasing the opacity of the window film.
A new subculture is emerging out of Silicon Valley retirees. Instead of settling into a quiet suburban home, thousands are choosing to live life on the road in high-end RV's that are interconnected through satellite technology. The tight-knit communities travel in packs and move like dust particles, settling in clusters for months and then dissipating at their own discretion. Many migrate according to the weather, moving south in the winter and north in the summer. Travel is, of course, restricted to the road. "RoamHome" aims to create fully-autonomous roving robotic homes that require no infrastructure.
A microcontroller-driven robotic quadruped provided a basic assembly of servo motors programmed to collectively walk like a spider. Moving by foot (as opposed to wheel) allows quadrupeds to navigate off road. Situated in a location like Palm Springs, California, quadruped settlements can settle at the base of the nearby mountains in the winter where temperatures are warm. As winter turns to summer, they climb slowly to the mountaintops where temperatures are much cooler.
"Flat" is a high-rise concept developed for a specific site in Hong Kong, China. In the densest city in the world, a small footprint and adaptable building shell is a possible solution to low housing inventory.
This quick image manipulation project was a test in image re-sampling with Python. The simple re-sampling code was then taken a few steps further by creating 25% overlap between filled rectangles and a looping randomized alteration to each filled rectangle's alpha channel.
The warm-climate marine environment has already proven itself welcoming to the net-zero building. From fluctuating tides to swift, consistent winds, there are countless possibilities for energy generation. St. Croix's Center for Marine Research and Education dedicates an entire 4,500 square feet lab to the exploration and research of marine-based and warm-climate sustainability. The building and its researchers have focused on one form of biofuel creation in particular: algae harvesting.
The growth and harvesting of algae has recently emerged as one of the most exciting advancements in biological sustainability. It grows 300% faster than any other crop, it absorbs CO2, it is biodegradable, and it can be produced with ocean or wastewater. When properly harvested and processed, it produces biodiesel, bioethanol, and biogasoline.
The Center for Marine Research and Education puts its algae tubes on display along its south facade where ample sunshine can promote its growth. Five identical labs engineered for extreme adaptability promote other research.
