Creating a dialogue between building and site, the nature center complex creates an interdependent relationship between Chicago’s social and natural systems while creating a place to get away and relax from the dense network of the city. The circulation flow weaves a series of disconnected buildings into a singular cohesive campus comprised of four distinct programmatic entities. The connective tissue between these buildings become the circulatory system through the complex, it is also the location of exterior activities and gatherings. Consisting of public plazas, event decks, botanical gardens, boat slips, cafes and public art and performance spaces these areas of public collection turn the nature center into more than simply a place to get away, but rather a place to get to.

The plan of the complex addresses specific site aspects such as maximized views toward the harbor, city and habitat, alignment with the waterfront and boating/beach culture and creating a parallel orientation with initial visitor approach. The sectional qualities of the complex aim to address environmental conditions such as optimal solar gain, predominant wind direction during both summer and winter months, and the penetration of natural light.

Our world was dying, humanity on the brink, until a discovery between the harmonic pairing of precise spectral wavelengths and sound frequencies combined with focused magnetism revealed a strange quantum relationship that unlocked something unexpected on our world. Once fused into a crystalline matrix, a triplen harmonic emerged that revealed a massive helical quantum entity. Seven specific entities were identified over time, each leading to brilliant organic and inorganic advances in energy development, environmental rehabilitation, material durability, physical agility, stealth, defensive technologies, and metaphysical manipulation.

This is the story of the Prism.

Coming Spring 2017.

Work in Progress

I wanted to develop a furniture system that functioned as a didactic assemblage - to illustrate connectivity and analog/digital relationships. Both of these factors influenced the ideas that went into this chair. I wanted to work with wood but I also wanted to develop and manufacture a printable connective system that could snap together (and unsnap) so that as an individual grew they could swap out the wooden panels to adjust to their size - to re-engaging the furniture in order to actively modify its dimensions.

The Division of Architecture at the University of Oklahoma needed a compact and punchy piece of marketing collateral to hand out to prospective students. This piece was designed to fold into a rectangle that was small enough to side into a back pocket.

Work in Progress

Spalted Birch Playwood, Poplar, Enamel, Laquer

Interactive touchscreen-based software developed for the Sam Noble Oklahoma Museum of Natural History’s Galileo's World Exhibit.

Interactive touchscreen-based software developed for the Sam Noble Oklahoma Museum of Natural History’s Galileo's World Exhibit.

Connect Staff is built specifically for staff to communicate with each other and with guests through private networks. Staff can manage tasks and respond directly to guest requests, and management can monitor response times and streamline team assignments. Connect Staff helps to ensure guest satisfaction and an efficient workflow.

Connect Lobby is an all-in-one interactive platform, carefully spec'd for quality performance and the highest caliber user experience. As a centerpiece for lobbies or other high-traffic hotel areas, it has the flexibility to beautifully convey hotel’s offerings and marketing initiatives. With features like hotel info, local recommendations, flights and social postcards, Monscierge Connect Lobby is designed to enhance the guests experience and free up a hotel's front desk.

An intentionally tiny site, CKA uses compression as a mechanism to frame and limit the view. The resulting interaction gives the user an experience of operating a shutter to expose particular layers of information.

A rapid assemblage of metal scaffolding and donated or scavenged construction and traffic mitigation materials were used to carve gallery spaces for a group art show in the endangered Cranston Street Armory.

The challenge of the exhibition was to mediate between the soaring open web trusses and heroics of the 38,000 sf structure and the smaller scale of the art. The scaffolding slices diagonally across the grain of the drill hall, it's vertical elements punching up through the massive volume of space to anchor the exhibit and lock back in to the existing structure. This project was achieved through partnerships with the Vanguard Group of Artists, the Convergence International Art Festival and the Providence Preservation Society.

A collaboration with Hogan + Macaulay Architects, this project was conceived as a cinematic montage and used to explore the use of light as a medium to 'drape' imagery across the Providence Hurricane Barrier.

The imagery selected and the compositional choices made for this exhibition included body parts, such as arms, hands and faces, as well as photographs of dancers juxtaposed with more abstract imagery. The entire exhibit was initially simulated on formZ using the exact lighting specs, distances, surrounding light pollution levels, and physical properties to gain insight on our design choices but also to point out any environmental factors that might challenge our preconceptions.

The goal was to create a visual dialog between projected elements of the human form and the highly engineered structural elements of the Hurricane Barrier. The result exceeded our expectations as the dual 12,000 lumen light canons cast intensely vibrant imagery upon the Hurricane Barrier's three story volumes and lacy structural assemblies, cutting through a lightly foggy fall night over the Narragansett Bay.

I was awarded the opportunity to design the new studio space for the previous firm that I worked for, SA Architects in Cranston, Rhode Island. Housed in a previously vacant furniture warehouse, the design re-uses the existing building shell and incorporates Rheinzinc rain shielding on the north and western facades.

Interiors were designed to pull away from and expose both existing and new structural materials so as to function didactically. Larger interior functions are also expressed as singular massings to create a sense of distribution across a landscape.

Meeting Street School, a 76,000-square-foot building situated on a nine-acre campus specializes in special-needs educational, therapeutic and diagnostic services to over 3,000 children and their families each year.

The main design objectives for the campus include: creating a dialog between an unfolding urban landscape and the natural environment, developing public spaces that engage students through overlapping meeting spaces, indoor gardens and galleries, outward gestures into the landscape to engage its surroundings, an expansion and contraction of spaces in order to create private/intimate corridors that morph into public/social spaces for gatherings, and fragmented/linear circulation that combines notions of “hallway” (mechanical) and “pathway” (organic).

Alley intervention concept.

Transitions experienced from line, to compression, to decompression emerges as a formal expression that expands along a deep alley in Providence.

Lighting is a subtle affliction upon these forms, to expose the raw shaping of refined materials while drawing the occupant inward and through the space - describing the general metamorphosis of shape as they leave the safe confines of the alley.

Drawing series capturing Albuquerque conviviality.

Exploring social user experiences of abstract communication for mobile platforms that use visualization and sound as vehicles to codify environmental and physiological vectors that respond to user intervention through the manipulation of overlapping spatial relationships.

Looking at new uses for existing social networks, Mandorla establishes an augmented experience between you and your local friends by synthesizing sounds and visuals based on each users facebook profile aspects. This synthesis triggers as your friend's virtual auras intersect, giving a user the opportunity to engage through interaction by altering and morphing sounds through the HUD like interface.

Examining streamlined, minimal ways to encapsulate a wide array of socially recommended local places, deals and offers that are sourced through a variety of review sites, facebook and twitter feeds, deal sites and online search tools. I am interested in developing ways to boil down large volumes of local online recommendations, favorites, and 'likes' datasets and develop strategies to present them in legible and highly navigable ways using graphical layering and experimental workflows.

I can envision the next evolution of this research moving into an examination of digital visual overlays and heads up display technologies to extend my research into visual communication strategies to organize complex environmentally overlaid relational visual feedback within augmented reality systems.

Examining infrastructure and encroachment, this project looks at geo-tagging as a way to tag a message onto an area. The GPS points were dropped within and around Petroglyph Estates, a cookie cutter creation of southwest suburban sprawl, abuts Petroglyph National Monument, one of the largest petroglyph sites in North America. This project was designed to raise environmental awareness of extensive development and sprawl by pulling our view back to see the approaching storm.

This piece was constructed as a physical visualization that captures the interactions, glances and gazes between the characters from their respective apartments in Alfred Hitchock's, Rear Window. The development of each nodal zone defines a spatially unique room from which each character is gazed upon by an unknowing subject. I would like to continue exploring this form of storytelling as a larger spatial construct for people to occupy and to incorporate interactive projection elements as a means to overlap additional layers of information upon physical forms.

This shelving system was created to further my working comprehension of a variety of wood types and to explore the cellular alignment found in wood and plants. The shelving and sides are made of yellow pine, black walnut, and compressed wood fiber board. All of these components represent the cellular walls of of wood.

The voids, typically filled with water at a cellular level are replaced at a macro level with man-made refined cellulose, books. The yellow pine shelf ends are oriented to expose the end grain thereby developing a dialogue between it and the highly magnified graphical representation of offsetting and volumetric variability that is present but imperceptible in the yellow pine to the naked eye.

While sidewalks create the potential for local interaction, few use them due to sprawl. As a result, the city’s collective memories are fragmented and discontinuous, or forgotten. This new circuit allows for local exchanges to reside, to leave residual traces for others to observe. If people cannot genuinely pass by each other, the next possible means would be for their presences to interact and remain for others to observe and take part in that experience.

This intervention of reclamation is a hack upon the city grid, burning new circuitry specifically for individuals to circumvent ‘the grid’ and flow over it at a pedestrian time scale instead of the compressed scales of speed and efficiency. This new circuitry provides the captured catalogues of visitors’ experiences, a free zone of both immediate and residual interactions, within an area that previously provided no such means.