Located on Los Angeles’ First Street Bridge, the Center for Architecture in Los Angeles proposes a connection between two very dissimilar communities. Both Boyle Heights and the Arts District are characterized by concentrated nodes, or pockets of industry, recreation, and cultural expression. CALA proposes to physically and programatically bridge the two neighborhoods with opportunities for collaboration and engagement. The design uses one repeated and reoriented volume to provide structural support, house new programs, and present a new way of engaging and experiencing the existing bridge.

Elevate provides an opportunity for affordable housing to populate otherwise ignored sites in Los Angeles. The proposal fills the maximum allowable square footage and raises a building well above the ground. This gesture provides 80 units offered in four arrangements to accommodate families of different sizes. The ground floor includes a community room and a basketball court, as a means of encouraging use by after-school programs, recreational activities and local events.

Layered Living is a housing proposal focused on the ubiquitous infill sites in Downtown Los Angeles. The project explores the ways in which co-living provides myriad levels of privacy, amenities, and resources. Adjacent to Pershing Square, Grand Central Market, and the Bradbury Building, the site pays homage to historic downtown while also addressing a growing concern for urban housing. Layered Living is inspired by the anatomy of a heart, providing tiers of sunlight access as a means of increasing available units.

Chuckwalla Stop proposes a new entrance to Joshua Tree National Park intended to orient visitors to the unique experience of the park while directly addressing the needs of the Park Rangers. The design combines extraordinary moments with an ease of construction and maintenance accommodated by passive cooling and precast concrete assembly. This proposal challenges precast concrete to balance regularization with design complexity as well as thermal mass with a desired flexibility.

Located in the Arts District, this project studies the evolution of office buildings in Los Angeles, looking specifically at their plans and the role of each in addressing changing trends. As users ascend through the building they are offered different options of rentable spaces. The building begins to fill the site, expanding on a ten foot grid. This project is an exploration of CLT and Heavy Timber as an emerging construction technique for mid-rise buildings. Wood presents new challenges to current building standards, while also providing opportunities for prefabrication, on-site assembly, and material expression.

This competition submittal presented a remodel of an office building in Santa Monica which prioritizes the union between creative office space and access to nature. The design employs several techniques which could be readily employed by traditional office buildings looking to transition toward contemporary trends. Vertical landscaping is incorporated as well as an embellishment of current planting around the site. A major digital display feature becomes an opportunity to communicate directly with surroundings. The traditional lobby shrinks to accommodate a larger entrance that blurs interior and exterior.

Worked on this competition submittal as Intern Designer at Struere, Los Angeles

This remodel proposes one specific repositioning of a house within Gregory Ain’s 1940’s Mar Vista Housing Tract for an employee of one of the several nearby industrial companies.  The home seeks to rationalize the existing Modernist house with the desires of a contemporary homeowner. By imposing a new roof structure the design partially encloses private backyard as well as an iconic street-facing differentiation from its neighbors.  This added form is derived from an analysis of an industrial carbon storage tank which uses a system of rotations about an axis to organize its contents.

Silverlake Library draws on its proximity to Richard Neutra’s VDL House as an exploration of the maximum potential for relief within a dense urban context.  Whereas its precedent is confined to a rather small, bounded site, the Library sits alone amidst a public park. The design employs a single continuous space as a means of programmatic organization and circulation.  Rising from the ground the Library iconically overlooks the adjacent reservoir and out to Elysian and Griffith Parks. With the decreasing popularity of libraries Silverlake hopes to engage the community directly with its public infrastructure.

The second millennium was characterized by several waves of industrialization - bringing new attention and activity to areas based upon their strategic location and access to resources both natural and man-made.  However, each of these ‘revolutions’ favored new industries over the old, leaving behind unprecedented vacancy and neglected manufacturing sites while displacing major populations. Contemporary trends look for opportunities to capitalize on these circumstances in cities, bringing foreign and incompatible commercial activity to these abandoned industrial sites.  Instead, Rustopia proposes how these former industrial hot-spots should return to their valuable resources and infrastructure as the basis of adaptive reuse.