The site of Columbia University’s boathouse embodies the potential for a variety of views, ranging from urban to natural. The new boathouse becomes a machine for generating specific moments throughout the site, related to program, scale, and desirability. The design is primarily focused on framed views that establish a relationship between two or more spaces through admiration, observation, or inspiration. The boathouse is a machine for viewing; it generates sights by entrapment, filtration, reflection, and expulsion. By doing so, the boathouse is locked into the city and its internal program, establishing a concrete relationship between boathouse and site.

The apartment block as freestanding mark in an open landscape, the underlying premise for nearly all of NYCHA’s projects including this one, is allowed to grow and ultimately metastasize by extension and continuation of its existing fabric, closing in on itself to create a new organism, a vast honeycomb of what appear to be courtyard oriented spaces. The additions would propose to integrate and distribute middle income and even market rate housing into the overall complex generating an extreme density without resorting to the high rise tower. The potential claustrophobia generated by the excess of enclosed spaces is resolved by stripping out all ground floor and second  floor architecture, allowing for a transparent, piloti supported horizontal realm. New entrances are in glass so as not to disrupt the continuity and semi-private and semi- public use is integrated by breaking up the larger landscape into paths, outdoor seating and bounded passive and active recreation.

Featured in Reinventing Public Housing: Proposal to Recontextualize the NYCHA Housing Estate

Plymouth Church in Brooklyn was considered the Grand Central depot of the Underground Railroad, with its preacher, Henry Beecher, being a key figure in abolishing slavery in America. A museum was proposed to preserve the rich history of the church. But with a lack of artifacts for display, the museum instead embodies an idea of consciousness, where the museum itself and its spatial sequences are the artifacts on exhibition. The path through the museum explains the story of the fugitive slaves by establishing moments of hope and despair through the use of light and darkness, phenomenologically relaying the historical richness of the spatial context to create an impactful experience.

The site is the only portion of Wave Hill, a New York City owned park, that has seen little to no human manipulation. It is the only public grounds that is private and whose feral character contrasts with its domesticated context. The project sought to tame and utilize the feral to form the domestic space of an artist dwelling, which is divided into two functions: the studio and the residence. Hierarchy of public-to- private program and the visual focus of aforementioned program is reinforced by the relationship between site and dwelling. Within the dwelling are moments of visual connections between separated spaces that initiate movement throughout and activates the residence.

The “twist and pinch” is an addition of forces onto a static plane to create a dynamic reading of interconnected force vectors. The application of twist and pinch onto plaster cloth showed two unique characteristics of the action: intensity and layering. These characteristics were translated into the landscape where dowels portrayed the insertions and intensity of forces and created a network of force vectors. The architectural intervention is formed by planes being twisted and pinched at a central point becoming an extension of the landscape.  This allows the architecture to have multi-directionality, intensity, and dynamism, much like the pinch and twist.

The animation museum rested on the boundary between the western and eastern influenced architecture in Chinatown; two characters in one site. This duality became a key factor in the curating of the museum, with the actual qualities and interactions between the two characters would be investigated through animation itself. Paperman, a short love story between a guy and a gal, provided architecture tectonics that varied in scale and intensity to allow for a multitude of dialogues to occur within the museum. From small scale of display cases and artifacts to the large scale of program and form, the two characters of 2D and 3D animation in the museum are in a push and pull with one another, elaborating on the similarities, the differences, and the history the two share.