Hedgehog House

Spring 2009

Hedgehog House is a summer cottage to be built on sloping farm land in south-western Pennsylvania. The region is spotted with aging timber barns that are remnants of dozens of deserted farms. In lieu of their intended function, the barns have become picturesque follies hidden amidst the winding country roads and mountainous terrain of the area. This project exploits the picturesque nature of the region’s barn structures by borrowing the typical building type and distorting it through a …

Seaport

Fall, 2008

With Thom Moran.

This project was an entry to the 2008 ENYA Competition: South Street Seaport Re-Envisioning the Urban Edge. The competition brief called for the design of a new pier on the East River containing a mixture of community facilities. The authors of the competition hoped that such a structure would help to reconnect the community to their waterfront.

This entry contends that the best way to reconnect the South Street Seaport neighborhood to its waterfront …

Imaginary Apparatus: New York 1966-1973

Spring, 2009

In 1966, under threat of bankruptcy and crumbling urban infrastructure, New York City mayor John Lindsay signed Executive Order 10 – a measure intended to attract the film industry to New York. Major productions such as The Night They Raided Minsky’s and Midnight Cowboy were soon drawn to the city. Simultaneously, the city was drafting a significant amount of innovative urban planning policy. One remarkable aspect common to many of these policies is a tendency to understand the …

The Desire for the Real in Urban Real Estate

Winter, 2010

New York’s High Line, the highly anticipated park built on an abandoned elevated train line on Manhattan’s West Side, opened to the public on June 9, 2010. The date culminated an eleven-year process of gaining city and public support initiated by a citizen advocacy group, Friends of the High Line. The story of the group’s efforts have been often told: they saved the decaying piece of infrastructure from imminent demolition under the Giuliani Administration, successfully lobbied for …

SimCity ShapeScape

2008

This speculative project locates a new high-speed railroad station on the current site of Chicago’s Union Station. The goal of the project is to make the use of high-speed rail a casual part of urban culture. Union Station was precisely the wrong type of building for these goals: it is out of scale to the street-level development in its context, its elevations are blank at the pedestrian level, and its beaux-arts monumentality is prohibitive instead of casual and inviting. …

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- …

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 …

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 …

Dayton Street Residence

2002-2004

With G. Goldberg + Associates.

The Dayton Street Residence is a renovation of a typical Chicago six-flat apartment building, located in Lincoln Park.  The entire interior and the back wall of the structure was initially demolished in order to convert the apartment building into a single, 9,000 square foot, residence. The back wall of the stucture was rebuilt to include a series of double-height steel windows that flood the entire residence with natural light throughout the day.
The design …