GSAPP - Advanced Studio 5
GSAPP Visualization Award for innovative use of computing media
Featured in City Lab and ABSTRACT
This project is a hyper-rational exercise in the limits of efficiency: how far can the benefits of a single operation be exploited before the cost to adjacent systems becomes prohibitive? What if the resultant conflicts became a source of productive friction?
The double entendre of the title “Turned On” refers to both the electrical/mechanical investigations of the project, as well as a broader interest in the potential of sensuality to overcome received ideas of functionality. While the central efficiency of the project concerns environmental conditioning, the program of office building was selected as a premise to explore Modernism’s troubled relationship between the production of a climate and the production of the subject.
The driving environmental concept of the project is to challenge notions of thermal comfort by allowing the conditions of spaces within the building to fluctuate according to the seasons and the time of day. By radically partitioning program spaces into combinations of a 13’x13’x13’ voxel, exterior spaces function as climatic buffers, and the existing conditions of heat and light (present in any tall building) are captured for efficient use.
In order to best capitalize on these newly variegated conditions, a wide range of programs are placed within the building according to an evolutionary algorithm which scores activities according to climatic desires. This computational intelligence not only ensures the most efficient building, it concretizes a platonic, mathematical logic as the foundation of the design.
As the algorithmic objectivity of the partitioning logic takes control, paradoxes begin to emerge: first, the Tati-esque absurdity of navigating a thermal landscape devoid of traditional circulation routes; second, a deformation of floors and ceilings, as the massive ductwork necessitated by the tangle of walls warps the slabs. The resultant system introduces a seemingly irrational landscape of pleasurable spatiality, as playful and experiential as the algorithm is calculating and inhumane.
Sidewalk Labs, KPF Urban Interface, with Luc Wilson and Meli Harvey
The “smart city” represents an opportunity to consider both the future of cities, and the future of how cities are designed. Large-scale master planning takes days, weeks, or even months to create individual options, struggling to keep pace with the demands of ambitious urban projects. With this bottleneck in mind, KFPui and Sidewalk labs developed a computational methodology capable of producing tens of thousands of designs, applying data science and machine learning workflows to aid in analysis, and developing web apps to engage stakeholders and solicit feedback from a broader audience. This approach allows a cross-disciplinary team to quickly prototype high performing scenarios capable of addressing the complexities of the 21st century city.
Rather than graft new technology onto traditional urban design, the Smart(er) City privileges performance over form, and merges the concerns of human experience (comfort, daylight, visual interest) with functional efficiency (sustainability, building efficiency, access to transit and green spaces). This iterative, simulation-based workflow embeds computational intelligence directly into the built form of the city, creating an urban fabric that is resilient, flexible, functional, and livable.
The methodology integrates numerous parametric models for street grids, programmatic uses, public space, population density, and building typologies. Each iteration is then evaluated according to a wide variety of performance criteria including views, daylight, comfort, sky exposure, solar radiation, wind, energy efficiency, access to parks and transit, mobility, and qualitative aspects such as “visual interest”. Lastly, machine learning models are used to predict the most promising candidates from the large design space of options, and to filter the data sets of complex results.
While each project has unique cultural, climactic, and programmatic needs, the challenge of balancing contradictory constraints is nearly universal: How do we create great views without overshadowing streets and parks? How do we capture the maximum amount of light for PV panels on roofs, while still creating optimal daylighting at building facades? How do we create popular public spaces that are open to the sun but protected from winter winds? Computational design can provide valuable insights to designers interrogating the complex challenges of 21st century urban environments, creating a digital platform to solve problems, engage stakeholders, and collaboratively explore unexpected solutions.
Livelihood, at both individual and city scales, is dependent on the ability to move from place to place with relative ease and sufficient speed: movement from here to there is a requisite for urban prosperity. “10 Minute Trip” is a tool that creates a comprehensive visualization of everyday movement in New York, merging pedestrian and subway transit modes to show that the relationship between time and distance is fluid.
Beginning with a defined starting point, 10 Minute Trip shows every building that is accessible within a 10 minute radius. Color-shading depicts the time required to reach each building, marked in one minute increments. Subway stations, available train lines, average wait times, and additional stops are all considered: walking to a station, waiting for the train, making a transfer, and walking to a final destination may all occur within a 10 minute timeframe and is quantified with the tool.
The 10 Minute Trip tool can be applied across scales, providing a comprehensive view of the varying conditions of connectivity that exist within a single city. The intensity of transit hubs like Grand Central Station and Queensboro plaza become immediately apparent, as does the relative isolation of neighborhoods such as Sunnyside and Redhook. In a video, the tool is applied to the entire length of Broadway, one of New York's most iconic streets. Running from the northern tip of Manhattan at 220th Street all the way south to Battery Park, demonstrating both the remarkable intertwining and uneven distribution of the New York City subway system.
Any sufficiently robust analysis system carries the potential to become a design tool, and 10 Minute Trip provides a new platform for planners, designers, urbanists, and architects to engage with the many conditions that define the world’s metropolitan places. Compelling visualizations will attract both the committed stakeholder and the casual participant, improving the dialogue that surrounds urbanism, architecture and data.
The urban experience is both “here” and “there”. Here: the stationary, what is visible and felt, activity, density and aesthetics. There: connectivity, the inevitability of movement, constant and integral in the city. To be effective, place-based analytics must consider both.
Here and There considers a one-mile diameter of the built environment. Organized into concentric rings of one-minute walk times, building programs are illustrated by color, with thickness depicting density. A neighborhood’s architectural fabric, including sizes and proliferation of structures, use, and density, is brought together to visualize the experience of place.
Comparing visualizations from each of the city’s boroughs highlights the incredible range of density in New York: Midtown’s overall built form lies in sharp contrast to the largely residential and mostly suburban quality of Todt Hill on Staten Island; Downtown Brooklyn’s diverse programming is distributed, reflecting the thriving and lively atmosphere the neighborhood is known for. Larger conditions are composited into animations, contrasting 42nd street’s surging density with 125th street’s mid-island clustering of smaller structures.
A closer look provides more detail, revealing the complexity of Downtown Brooklyn’s built environment. Rings closest to the center display large scale developments, including commercial, retail and residential programs, while outer rings show the mixed-use, smaller scale periphery that is typically associated with the neighborhood.
Through analysis and visualization, Here and There challenges common assumptions regarding neighborhood character, augmenting the design process by introducing layers of information and a deeper understanding of site.
GSAPP - Advanced Studio 6
Featured in ABSTRACT
This project looks at how history is produced and managed in Beirut, Lebanon. Its central historical subject is Lebanon’s 15 year civil war, a litany of brutality, religious factionalism, war crimes, and the deliberate targeting of civilians. The lack of resolution following the conflict, the eventual failure of the State, and the rise of Hezbollah all contribute to the impossibility of Lebanese identity, precluding agency in the process of historical signification.
In the center of the war, in the geographic middle of the city, is the Green Line. An abandoned scar of demarcation, this was the most dangerous, damaged part of the city, lined by snipers and continually battered by routinized violence. And yet, this very fact of abandonment lead to the organic creation of a lush, verdant, uniquely Beiruti, heterotopic space. The plants along the Green Line form a self-signifying system, expressing the raw historical data of the war through a highly specific lexicon of vegetation, a direct link between the factions fighting in the war, the weapons used, the damage created, and the resultant plant life.
The project establishes evidentiary moments in the built fabric of Beirut, fostering the growth of specific plants as an indexical system. The built interventions assert themselves as a brute fact, adhering to a strict set of rules for implementation that allows for as little subjective interpretation as possible. In being placed over, under, or in front of the signifying plant, the intervention performs three actions: 1. it marks the site, creating difference and information; 2. it acts as a recognizable system, creating legibility across disparate conditions; and 3. it protects and encourages the growth of the plant.
Plants are paired with specific articulations of the intervention to form the signifying system: small flowered wall climbers (Clematis Flammula) are closely covered by transparent glass that traps humidity close to the wall, while a taller, sturdier, tinted glass casts shade over building rubble for the larger, bushy groundcover (Ephedra Campylopado). The growing conditions are as varied as Beirut’s building typologies and the weapons used against them, and the future growth of the plants will eventually damage the factual evidence which enacted the process of signification, adding further provocation to the act of historical production.
Amidst all of the challenges faced by the contemporary Beiruti subject, questions of sovereignty, political stability, the failure of the state, religious factionalism, unchecked neo-liberalism, the unresolved history of the war, terrorism and new conflicts, this project attempts to serve as a reminder that history is a process of constructed signification, that the raw data of Beirut’s recent past is still available for reinterpretation, and that the forces of Hezbollah and SOLIDERE are not totalizing. Ultimately, the project is hopeful, but it is more suggestion than solution. The flowers are nice, but they can’t answer the questions for us…
SHoP Architects, with Ayumi Sugiyama, Victoire Saby, Cortez Crosby
In 2015 I interned at SHoP Architects, working primarily on the scripting of a parametric façade for the renovation of Site Santa Fe, in Santa Fe, New Mexico. As the central architectural move in the project, the screen is a curtain of folded aluminum carved away by a negative mass, as if by erosion or geologic forces. The resulting façade is stunning in its geometric complexity and spatial in its overhanging depth and occupiable courtyards.
Conceptualized as a site specific, elevational relationship to Navajo textiles , the pattern of the façade is produced by 2,500 unique panels, forming a rhythmic differentiation between its North, East and South sides. The slope of each “facet” in the carving mass drives the tightness of the weave, elongating or compressing the diamonds, and creating widely variegated polygons at the “creases.” Varying levels of perforation respond to interior programmatic relationships, and allow for the removal of interior layers to optimize material usage.
Completed in August, 2016, Site Santa Fe opened to widespread acclaim. More information about the project can be found on SHoP’s website.
Photos and rendering courtesy of SHoP Architects.
Event Production is pop-up Architecture: working with clients, artists, municipalities, sub-contractors, and collaborators to create a space of shared experience. NE2C Productions was co-founded by Jason Danforth and Pete Ward in 2004, for the purpose of hosting a series of local rock climbing competitions. By 2007 the company was staging ambitious outdoor events in downtown metropolitan areas with professional lighting, online broadcasting, and innovative, portable climbing walls. By 2011 the roster of events included the national championships for rock climbing, the largest brands in the outdoor industry, music festivals, bike races, and marque venues like Central Park in New York City.
$1M events and more than 100 employees present a wide range of challenges, but the design of the climbing walls was uniquely important, in that it provides the geometric foundation for thousands of movements. It is a piece of performative sculpture that is simultaneously the stage and the central visual element of the event. Additionally, the wall is the most complicated piece of equipment involved on site, and each design incorporates strict logistical considerations related to transportation, erection, variability, and manufacturing. Beginning in 2007, NE2C Productions partnered with industry-leading manufacturers to produce innovative new walls each year of a variety of championship-level rock climbing events.
