Archive for September, 2010
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Bucktown House
2003
To the northwest of downtown Chicago, sandwiched between the post-industrial landscape of the Chicago River to the east, and largely Hispanic communities to the west, is a neighborhood called “Bucktown”. Originally settled as early as 1833, the most formative onslaught of settlement in community history was the mass immigration of Polish Catholics beginning in the 1870’s, and continuing through the turn of the century. It was during this era that the community experienced its most significant period of development- …
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Core Club
2004-2005
With SPaN.
The Core Club is an exclusive 30,000 sq. ft. lifestyle club in Midtown Manhattan. The project presented the challenge of weaving a cohesive design methodology into a program including a bar, restaurant, movie theatre, complete health club, and library. Since the envelope of a New York City high-rise constricted most formal and spatial notions of architectural cohesion between floors, the design was unified by thematizing and manipulating materials. A series of trademark material were designed (such …
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Convention Center
Spring, 2001
In most American cities, the paradigm of the urban environment as the material index of social collectives has lost its validity. Today, it has become cliché to note that communities are more convincingly defined around one’s prime-time television habits than any architecturally conceived sense of place or belonging. Even the notion that the city is the center for economic exchange and trade has quickly lost ground to technologically enabled exchanges. Beyond the glaring urban exceptions within the United …