ARCHITECTURE: Academic and professional design work

Mayan Archaeology Museum: Copan, Honduras. Jorge Silvetti Studio GSD Spring 2006

An archaeological museum must tell a story through a collection of objects. Rather than seeing the museum as a neutral.box that is customized by an exhibit designer, in this project I sought to create a more synthetic relationship between the museum's spatial organization and its collection of artifacts. The Mayan rulers built their pyramidal tombs on top of the tombs of their ancestors, creating an artificial geology of time--the deeper archaeologists tunnel, the older the artifacts they find. This principle of nested rings became the underlying layout of my museum proposal: a series of thick (4ft) walls containing artifacts from the seven major periods of Mayan history. Erasure and deletion of modules from these rings creates voids for flexible, interpretive exhibition. The thickened walls of the museum are covered by a low-tech ribbed polycarbonate roof with structural gutters reminscent of the informal roofing used to protect ruins from weather damage on archaeological sites.

 

Innovation Through Mastery--Paffard Keating-Clay. Wes Jones Studio GSD Fall 2006

This studio began with an rigorous analysis of the California-based work of Le Corbusier's little-known disciple Paffard Keating-Clay. Drawing upon this analysis, we were then asked to design as Keating-Clay, demonstrating a mastery of his design language. Finally, we were challenged to orchestrate a controlled evolution from Paffard's language to our own in a design of a new music hall for the SUNY Fredonia campus designed by Harry Cobb in the early 1960's. (All work with Bryan Boyer and Adriel Mesznik)

 

Our final project was a test to see if it's possible to develop a mutated modernism that can sustain a direct connection to older buildings. Denying the modernist urge for tabula rasa became the starting point for the project. Accepting the pitched roof of the colonial building and integrating it into our building produced an array of unexpected results

Mobile Information Unit. CAD/CAM Workshop. GSD Fall 2006

As the consortium of Harvard University art museums begins construction of a series of a new musuem facilites, they approached the GSD with hopes of building a mobile kiosk that could desseminate information about exhibit locations and public events. With Saverio Panata and John Rule, I designed a trailer-based kiosk employing an SMS text-message interface that projects images of art from the collection at an urban scale..

Multi-family Housing, Boston, MA

Given a proposal for developing a section of highway infill in the heart of downtown Boston, this project deployed a mixed-use strategy balancing commercial high-rise and high-density, low-rise. The focus of the project became an exploration of variable living configurations possible within the module of a narrow (15 ft wide) row house footprint. Desire to maximize available light while controlling views within a compact linear block initiated a series of studies of translucenct facades.

Concert Hall, Core GSD Studio, 2005:

Complex curvatures of this acoustical space were created with offset brick coursing and a custom waffle-vault roof system. 3D modeling

 

Steel and Glass Footbridge, Nansha, China:

Schematic design and construction drawings for 30m bridge spanning between Nansha Grand Hotel and new Health Center by NODE. Summer 2005.

 

Print Gallery, Wood Detailing Studio:

The stratification of a custom shelving module is expressed throughout the interior, and revealed in the wood banding of the gallery's facade. GSD first-year core assignment, 2004.

Sports Arena Entrance, Core Studio 2005 :

Boston's Fleet Center is a sports and entertainment arena located at major urban threshold-- the point at which vehicles emerge from the newly developed tunnels of the "Big Dig," and cross the iconic Zakim suspension bridge. Our mission was to design a civic-scale entrance to the monolithic and unexpressive concrete mass of the existing Fleet center that would speak to this significant urban context, and which could handle the daily passage of over 10,000 people. My solution involved embedding a transparent figure into the solid mass of the Fleet and cantelievering it over the emerging highway, creating a series of panoramic views of the city and bridge.

Tripod Building:

Three buildings of an advanced studies institute are to be bridged by a rooftop addition containing studios and offices for visiting fellows, and an auditorium, cafe and a sculpture garden where scholars and artists can mix with the public and display their work. This design envisioned the connection between the three existing rooftops as a single surface, cut and compressed to define various zones of public space.. Holding the private zone of studios and offices aloft above this lower surface are three monolithic walls that dominate ones experience of the louvered upper floors, acting as screens for media display or canvases for the play of filtered light. Emerging from this cloistered space on the top floor is a curved, sloping roof garden for private use.