SENSORY SPACES, MEMORY TRACES
THESIS STUDIO - 2021
(Vantage Points)
Space is constructed from our personal experiences of the world, from the information that we gather through our senses. The ways in which we interact with and also develop the built environment are complex, subjective, and varied because our sense of space is learned. This thesis explores space through sensory experiences and memory to challenge traditionally static conceptions of architecture and discover potentials within a multi-sensory design approach.
Space is constructed with accumulated memories, but it blurs and erases as those memories fade. This thesis uses the lens of those with Alzheimer’s disease and dementia symptoms to consider how spaces can facilitate safety, dignity, and quality of life. Through this perspective, sensory engagement becomes critical for accessing and navigating space. The ephemeral presence of space creates opportunities for health and beauty within the built environment that may benefit society overall.
This speculative garden at the open-air Partridge Creek Mall is a public gathering venue that enhances the sensory experiences of those who occupy it. It exhibits creative modes of sensory saturation in the built environment, beyond the home or care facility, to draw others into its spaces. While there is multi-sensory engagement in all of the corridors, each one highlights the experience of a particular sense. These spaces celebrate life in the present, encouraging postures for activity and serenity. The flexibility of these spaces ally interior and exterior components to provide moments of comfort and connection. The variety in these spaces accommodates the limitations and the delights that may follow disease progression, promoting empathy throughout. Narrative brings these multiple experiences together in a single frame of space to transform it and those who embrace it.
CO-CO
SYSTEMS STUDIO - 2020
(Constructing New Collectivities)
TEAM: Waylon Richmond & Jamie Lee
CO-CO is a mixed-used and mixed-income housing proposal focusing on the integration of social, economic, environmental and cultural endeavors. The site for the project is located at the intersection of Grand River Ave and Oakman Blvd, Detroit, MI. The project features 216 units, spread across the site in 7 buildings, the project mixes community courtyards with vibrant street corridors filled with a range of public amenities. With a focus on passive design in tandem with prefabricated construction methods, this project promotes diverse communities that are also environmentally conscious. This project seeks to promote diversity through hyperlocal density and appropriate-able infrastructure to build a strong sense of community for the future residents, neighbors and citizens of Detroit.
The CO-CO philosophy embodies the idea of a living city, through the integration of four pillars to achieve long-term sustainability: social, economic, environmental and cultural integration. The goal of CO-CO is to use architecture as a vessel in synergizing these pillars in unison. Our site and architectural strategies seeks to integrate the sustainability endeavors through diversity, density, proximity, open and flexible spaces, and a community land trust model.
In addition to the development of affordable housing, CO-CO’s site plan involves a range of public amenities and programming, from large to smaller scales, with a range of community-focused initiatives. The site assigns each building for different purposes. Interfacing the front of Grand River Ave, the public hub acts as a public interface for the site, inhabiting larger programs such as food courts and markets. The 2 C-shaped buildings function as community hubs, with a focus on programming such as health care, child care, cafes, grocery stores. Tapping into the site's adjacency to the Joe Louis Greenway, the strip typology buildings as creative production hubs, co-working spaces for local entrepreneurs, art and cultural spaces, theatres, recording studios, creative spaces, kitchen incubators, food hubs, food banks, and etc.
NOWHERE
PROPOSITIONS STUDIO - 2020
(Imagined Future Citizenships: Other Futures for the Great Lakes Border Region)
TEAM: Nicole Urban
NOWHERE speculates a world in which Amazon has grown in size and control to become a corporate governing body. This project illustrates our research on the Amazon empire, as a model of a rapidly advancing company, and how we have utilized that model to imagine the company’s transformation into the NOWHERE of 2120.
We chose to title the project and company NOWHERE, pronounced ‘now here,’ because Amazon is hyper focused on customer service and customer demands for immediacy. However, we also appreciate the play on words in pronouncing it as ‘no where.’ Similarly, in 1516 Sir Thomas More wrote the first 'Utopia'. He coined the word 'utopia' from the Greek ou-topos meaning 'no place' or 'nowhere'. This is also a pun on the almost identical Greek word eu-topos means a good place. A major aspect of our project grapples with the idea that NOWHERE is attempting to provide a utopia, a good place, through its services, but such a perfect world could never be fully realized for everyone.
DEUS EX MECHANE THEATER
INSTITUTIONS STUDIO - 2019
(Theater ex Machina: Systems & Stagecraft)
For this studio, the theater speculates a replacement for the Power Center in Ann Arbor and it utilizes the same site and program. This project is based on studies of both classical and contemporary theaters and their machine parts. For the precedents, I was assigned the Deus Ex Mechane, Theater at Taormina, the Sound and Light Lock, and Tadao Ando’s Polygrand Theater. My own theater considers and combines aspects of all the assigned precedents. Diagrammatic exercises helped reconcile them and develop the theater concept.
The form of this theater was made through a boolean operation of subtracting halves of a truncated cone and an elliptic cylinder from a box. This concept derives from the Polygrand Theater precedent, but includes only one curved shape to encompass multiple spaces. The cone emphasizes a linear flow of the public from the outside, through the lobby, and to the auditorium, culminating towards the stage and fly tower. Within this movement, the sound and light lock becomes crucial to separate the spaces and their programs. The smaller front of house and back of house spaces fill the poche of the box.
Similar to the Theater at Taormina, there is a dramatic quality to entering the structure. This theater emphasizes the performative program through its grand entrance and staircases. The exterior and main “horn” gesture presents a symmetrical appearance, while the surrounding spaces provide some variation. The third level includes another large public space: an outdoor courtyard. Within this courtyard is a stepped seating area produced by the cone intersecting with the third level floor. The crane appears as a beacon-like statue, but also functions as a machine that can lower actors above the stage, like in ancient Greek and Roman drama.
ROCK BLOCKS
SITUATIONS STUDIO - 2019
TEAM: Nicole Urban
Through material studies we developed the concept for a product, aestheticized gabion bricks, and the flagship store that produces and models them for purchase. While we intended the bricks and walls to be functional through the application of mortar, we focused on the concepts and details of the product as decorative structures. This is achieved through the multiple options and combinations of colored rocks, mesh, and mortar.
The pavilion is supported by a column and undulating beam system, that allows for the walls to be built and organized with flexibility. The walls exhibit the product and create an environment reminiscent of a park, so customers can enjoy and explore the space freely. The five, glass boxes are for storage and manufacturing spaces and customers can see this process. The box that rises above the roof of the pavilion serves as a lookout post over the entire operation. For this project, we modeled the product and building both digitally and physically, in order to develop the concept and ways to advertise it.
GRADUATE HOUSING
FORM STUDIO - 2018
This project analyzes the opportunities of boolean operations and texture mapping, and connections that can be made between them. It explores the ways in which texture mapping influences spatial experiences within boolean forms. The program for this project was graduate housing for four students, including both common spaces and individual rooms.
The principles behind the building’s massing were the spatial opportunities for circulation, habitation, and apertures that were produced through intersecting prisms and cylinders. All of these moves were based on the rules of a grid system and adjustments were made in consideration of the following texture mapping strategy.
Texture mapping produced another level of tight alignment through the use of an angle gradient. This image allowed for interesting edge and corner conditions and it was closely calibrated according to the predetermined massing. The texture mapping strategy aligns with the massing to confuse those intersections, by either producing false edges or erasing real edges. Both the façade of the buildings and the interior spaces reveal these actions.
GALLERY/MUSEUM
FOUNDATION STUDIO - 2018
This project explores the concept of the grid and the consequences of breaking such a rigid structure. As illustrated in the form generation diagram, I transformed a 3x3x3 cube through various directional rotations and shifts. I then placed a box over that form and used the protruding cubes to create apertures on the surface.
Originally, this formal process was meant to produce a pavilion that utilized only the envelope as a legacy of the interior formal moves. I continued to use this form for the final course project: a gallery. In order to accommodate the assigned program, I inserted the grid and some of the rotated cubes back into the envelope. The grid was offset to be slightly smaller than the original and it brought multiple levels into the structure, while allowing for peripheral circulation. The rotated cubes create gallery spaces, bathrooms, and offices.
The section model shows the interaction between the rotated cubes and the grid structure, thus revealing the complexities and complications of such moves in regards to building program.
TURBO CHARGE 3000
HAZMAT COMPETITION - 2020
TEAM: Hallee Thompson & Nicole Urban
The TC 3000 is a bilayered garment consisting of a protective interior layer and functional exterior layer to provide the best protection around. The Protective Under Layer has a mask feature which uses ear loops to fasten the mask above your nose. It also includes built-in gloves with Frog Fingers for using touch screens on phones.
The Exterior Layer has many pockets for the storage of many different features.
Some features include:
Mask Tubes which allows you to consume your beverages without taking off your mask. Sewn into the seams of the outer jacket, the tubes are hidden beneath the garment. The mask also includes LED lights to help with emoting. This LED piece is hooked up to your phone with built in faces that can change with the press of a button.
Shields Up is a collapsible neck gear, fashioned as a handbag, providing a physical barrier between you and your peers. It easily folds up and fits into a super stylish bag for ease of mobility. Anti-Mask Repellant is a specially formulated mixture using ancient technology, inspired by the effectiveness of bad breath to keep people without a mask away. Using Skunk Tech it sprays away from you so that you do not suffer from the pungent smell.
We chose classic materials that are flexible enough to fold and light weight and on budget! Simple design masks the hidden features in a fashionable way. This ready to wear activated suit prepares you for whatever you may come across in your new normal activities.
HABITAT FOR HUMANITY HOUSE
UNDERGRADUATE STUDIO - 2017
This project was the individual portion of a group assignment for an architecture studio course. Habitat for Humanity owns property on Olympia St. in Grand Rapids, MI that may be developed within the next few years. The property contains steep gradation and is connected to an existing street. Each group of four students was instructed to develop a site solution for these conditions.
The individual assignment was to design a house located on a specific lot of the property that fit Habitat for Humanity’s objectives for accessibility and blending in with the fabric of the established neighborhood. Media for the drawings are graphite, ink, and colored pencil.
PRECEDENT PARTI COLLAGES
UNDERGRADUATE STUDIO - 2017
