This research project foregrounds the valiant efforts by tenant activists to preserve Pruitt-Igoe, the 57-acre housing project built just north of St. Louis's downtown in the early 1950s, then torn down two decades later. The project researches the efforts of the Pruitt-Igoe Tenants Union, the Tandy Area Council and Teamsters Local 688 to protect and expand social housing. With its infamous demolition, the tenant organizing and trade unionists that fought for the right to maintain the complex have gone untold outside of labor history. The project brings St. Louis into conversation with projects in Colombia, Thailand and Italy, engaging a wider view of the profound effect housing has on community and health.

A reversal of the traditional mother-in-law suite, this 400 square foot addition provides space for Catherine's caregivers as she ages in place.

Competition entry for UCLA's Small Lots, Big Impact.

Small house for a musician in the wild-urban interface of Boulder Creek.The site is defined by ancient redwoods, history of fire, and steep topography with a risk of landslide. The project is a community-built, peer-financed fire re-build home.

The program needed to fit domestic, work, and community space in 700 SF on a difficult site and tiny budget.

The proposal is a series of stepped platforms under a large roof. The rooms, foundation, and roof follow the topography, sliding along the hill. This is necessary to avoid removing existing trees and to keep excavation to a minimum. A large earthwork performance space outside will be built in the near future.

The house has 5 rooms—a music therapy studio, a minimal bedroom, a bathroom, and a kitchen that overlooks the bedroom. The music studio and attic are convertible into bedrooms. The exterior earthwork is meant for sharing with the local community members who will build the project, an unconventionally public space in a rural residential setting.

The local building department does not require an architect, but the client wanted one. We took a fixed 5% fee for the project management and a drawing set. The contractor is offering labor at a fixed cost of 40k, the rest of the labor is volunteer. These cost constraints make architecture possible on a 200,000 budget.

In 2008, NYC DCP identified decking over rail yards and corridors as among the few remaining opportunities for urban development at a large scale. Forty-eight acres of new ground above the defunct Bay Ridge Rail corridor in South Brooklyn provide a site to refigure the relationship between New York City, third sector develpers, and tenants. To develop this corridor, the city will maintain ownership of the deck but leases its air rights. Rather than losing long-term revenue by giving tax relief through 421a, the city provides short-term construction subsidies to third sector development organizations.

Built at the scale of large public housing projects but at the coverage of a garden apartment, the plan includes 12,000 bedrooms across over 4,000 units at a land coverage of 32%. Development of urban villas along the corridor allow for housing to be built at a large scale while maintaining access to green space and without creating a segregated housing estate. Undecked areas and their regular maintenance allow the rail corridor's sunken landscape to thrive, putting "ground floor" apartments and the pedestrian boulevard in the canopy of the urban forest growing below.

This is a proposal for a series of soft sites along a 100-foot-wide rail corridor that runs inland from Upper New York Bay along 39th Street in Brooklyn, NY. The eleven half-block parcels comprising the corridor are owned by the City of New York.

This corridor is below-grade, a shallow depression through which runs the MTA D and the decommisioned South Brooklyn Rail. These parcels are empty but are zoned to accommodate 2.5 million buildable square feet. Using this potential intersection of commercial and residential strips, the project facilitates safe transit for pedestrians and cyclists heading to the shore for work and play, as well as providing space for the various noncommercial and social activities of existing communities.

Phragmites (Phragmites australis) dominates the Quinnipiac Tidal Marsh. Considered an invasive monoculture, Phragmites is an effective mediator of the heavy metals that plague the formerly industrial Quinnipiac River. Despite providing this function, the tidal wetland remains alienated and isolated from the surrounding city. The sole point of public access to the wetlands is an overlook trail accessible from the parking lot behind Target and Buffalo Wild Wings in the North Haven Pavilion Shopping Center. The land is owned by the state of Connecticut andódespite advocacy efforts spearheaded by the Quinnipiac River Partnership and The New Haven Bird Club. There have been no substantive restoration plans since 2004.

Given the stalemate at the state level, this project engages directly with marsh to imagine opportunities for public engagement with the tidal marsh beyond just recreation and observation. Rather than accept phragmites as invaders, I considered it a material source from which to cast paper.

At the site I cut and harvested Phragmites. Also on the tidal marsh is a Goodwill outlet where I sourced used rice cookers, deep fryers, bread makers, and blenders which I used to render Phragmites into a viable paper pulp. Cued into the culture of hand papermaking by Lillian Bellís landmark Plant Fibers for Papermaking, I made a Phragmites recipe bookóthe recipe book being a common form of knowledge sharing in the papermaking community. The result of the project is a matrix of sheets indexed to that recipe book. The 80 varieties I developed demonstrate the material capacity of this reed source to yield divergent forms and images.

This proposal for the Gowanus Canal finds potential in integrating multi-family housing and infrastructure development to advance climate mitigation on city-owned land. Where many proposals for preventing flooding along canals contract and 'armor' the waterway, this proposal expands and connects the canal into adjacent streets, regaining the absorptive and filtering capacities of the historic marsh on the site. The figure of the original canal is inscribed by durable live-work apartments above.

Here, the residents and the wetland are reciprocal stewards of one other. Contemporary residential development along the Gowanus presents the canal as a picturesque amenity, even though the canal is Superfund site plagued by chronic combined sewage outflow. This proposal allows the canal to testify to the city's historical and ongoing metabolic processes. Contrasting the dominant mode of development, this housing project foregrounds the inextricable link between urban dwellers and urbanized land to foreground their mutual dependency.

In response to a call for a high school art center on an oft-flooded site in Fair Haven, CT, this proposal offers a cohesive wooden frame to host an auditorium, private studios, classrooms, fabrication spaces and archival storage for student work.

The studios are calibrated to the needs of young artists, each of whom is offered a room of their own and granted day-and-night access. The studio is a social and expressive space as much as a personal and creative space. The auditorium and circulation areas are semi-public spaces where parents and friends are invited to share and collaborate on works-in-progress.

The Studios are built on a brownfield site. As the site is prone to flooding, the project sits away from the water and landscaping is focused to the site's edge: young trees emerging from the ruderal grassland are replanted to fortify River Street. The remaining field is maintained with a light touch and provides ground for seasonal programming—artistic and environmental.

A speculative project for a monastery of nuns, whose inhabitation permits corporeal readings of a former wetland. Sited in California's San Joaquin Valley—a historical river basin that is now one of the most agriculturally productive landscape on earth—the nuns stage hysteric displays of metabolic self sabotage.

They tower over the I-5, at a junction where the Amazon fulfillment center approaches the San Luis Reservoir, bordering large-scale agriculture, quartered-off ducks clubs, and pristine wildlife refuges. Emulating Lina Bo Bardi's Teatro Oficina, the convent's architecture circumscribes the limits of human habitation. Circulation is cut, restricting movement to a spiral piling the nuns upward. The space accommodates the waste their life mandates—until their passing—as they attempt to demonstrate the metabolic distress of their locale. Their monastery hyperbolizes self-sufficiency and its limits in a commodity culture. Their only respite is to eat and keep what comes with that.

A delirious entry for NOVA designs' 2018 "Future Living" competition, receiving an honorable mention. The project adopts Zygmunt Bauman's premise of "liquid modernity," wherein self-perpetuating ambiguity transfigure power structures, cultural systems, and interpersonal relationships, this project imagines liquid life in an infinite-expanse mat ho using. The project is more pragmatic than dystopia: it illustrates an inevitable conclusion of neoliberal housing logics.

A hallucinatory character study from Alice Notley's "The Descent of Alette."

"Then I saw" "what I thought at first" "was a dead end—" "a wall" "As I neared the
wall," "an opening" "in the ground in" "front of it" "became apparent—" "which turned out to be" "finally" "a staircase" "descending deeply" "below the level" "of caves" "I hesitated briefly—" "the corridor, the staircase" "were
so plain & empty" "Then I began to "descend the staircase" "I couldn't see" "to the bottom" "of it" "at all" Somehow the staircase was lit" "so that only" "those steps were visible" "that fell directly" "in front of me" "I descended" "& descended,"

The Descent of Alette, 1996

Asked to reconsider minimums in dwelling, I ordered a house in a gradient of thermal and wet utilities. The anti-poche house redistributes the wet wall into occupiable space. Five rooms are arranged enfilade under a water collecting roof. At the porch, collection tanks double as thermal storage. Dining, a free space, is serviced to either side. Sleeping is condensed into insulated bed-boxes that vent to the exterior capturing fresh air. The water heater takes center in the bathroom—a hearth of sorts—while circulation bends around to the kitchen and then exits again.

Another hallucinatory character study from Alice Notley's "The Descent of Alette."

"'I'm killing no one" "You are not real" "You said so "yourself,' I said" "'Forms in dreams . . . " "forms in dreams . . .'" "I searched within" "for right words" "'I will change the" "forms in dreams'" "I lifted" "the dead plant" & flung it" across the grotto" "'Starting"
"from dreams," "from dreams we" "can change," "will change" "In dreams," "in dreams, now," "you will die'" "He turned" away from me" "Lay looking upward," "wide-eyed, panting" "His body seemed" "to become" "more & more" "transparent," "lose
Substance" "From within it," "within him," "a ghostly tableau emerged," "hovered," "above his body," "was performed in" "air above him:" "There was a thicket" "in which a knight" "lay dying" "on the ground" "A woman tended him," "bent over him" "in ancient" "Greek costume"
"But she" "was a skeleton" "with long hair" "she spoke & told him:" "'What you have made me—" "what you now see—" "is your consort" "in eternity . . .'" "The knight took" "her bone hand" "They clasped hands," "the scene dissolving"

The Descent of Alette, 1996

Pacific Mews is designed to provide for healthy and low-carbon urban living, even in the suburbs. Built to the Passive House standard, the Mews prioritize decarbonized energy sources and low-carbon materials. By combining urban infill with climate-responsive building techniques, the Mews are a vision of the cities we need to build in the global north if we are to avert the worst of the climate crisis.

The Mews take an "efficiency-first" approach to decarbonization through an airtight and highly-insulated envelope. The structure is stick-built timber, an affordable and low-carbon structural system. The walls are balloon-framed to prevent thermal bridging at the floors, and the building is wrapped in a continuous layer of wood fiberboard insulation. The exterior of the building is finished in a natural lime plaster, and the interior with low-VOC finishes. Windows are typically double-glazed, as triple-glazing does not provide a realistic payback on its embodied carbon through operational carbon savings in all but the most extreme of California's climate zones.

Across California, climate change is leading to new weather patterns and extreme events. The Mews are heated and cool with air-source heat pumps that provide cooling in the summer and heating in the winter. Heat pumps at the Mews use low-GWP non-HFC refrigerants. Ventilation in the kitchen and bathroom is sufficient to provide the necessary number of air changes, and exhaust air is processed through an energy recovery systems. Essential systems can remain available during extreme events with the provision of the onsite energy storage required in the prescriptive approach to meeting the latest T24 energy code. The most important heating and cooling systems, though, are the living ones—native deciduous trees planted in each yard (Quercus lobata or similar) provide privacy, solar shading, cooling through evapotranspiration, and a connection to nature for the residents of Pacific Mews.

The Pacific Mews takes inspiration from the Warren Mews in Brooklyn, NY—dense affordable dwellings on a relatively small lot built in the 1870s as workman's cottages, and now some of the area's most desirable apartments. The Pacific Mews celebrates the provision of abundant and affordable housing by building the maximum number of units (6) possible in an urban area and providing a higher percentage ( minimum 33%) of low-income units than 5-unit plans (providing a minimum of 20%).