Research Studio – University of Illinois at Chicago – Spring 2015

The public plaza is undergoing an unprecedented transformation. Historically plazas and public squares have been defined by the building that surround them, and often design in tandem. The Mayan square and temple dace each other, as do the Italian piazza and the church. The French place is surrounded by uniform housing blocks. The corporate plaza is an extension of the lobby. The plaza currently has no firm relationship to buildings.

The project rewires the fundamentals of plaza design to combine flat and three dimensional platonic forms in multiple orientations simultaneously and integrally. The project takes The Alcoa Building in San Francisco by SOM as a case study to rethink the building plaza relationship. The stark difference between the levels of the street, plaza, and building are challenged by the creation of “pocket plazas” that carve spaces in the existing plinth , creating hybrid space between public and private.

competition entry 2020-collaboration Arch. Kevin Aragón

The Norwegian landscape is characterized by long stretches of fjords, lakes and rocky mountains covered by extensive forests. This Nordic country, once inhabited by the Vikings, has traditionally built and used log constructions for shelter and refuge. The traditional stabbur is an iconic symbol of the landscape and culture of the Norwegian countryside. Originally built for food storage, today the various stabburs found in Norwegian homes serve a variety of purposes. The stabbur is characterized by 3 main elements, its elevated base supported by pilotees, the first level that was meant for storage , and the top one that was inhabited.  Inspired by this charming staple of the norwegian scenery, the idea of the ultimate stabbur emerged.

autumn 2014- University of Illinois at Chicago

The project explores historic disciplinary material to extract operative diagrams of the creation of voids; then design the protocols for the assemblage of second-order systems, and then the experiment of carving the existing Merchandise Mart in order to introduce new notions of urban interiority. The notion of urban interior will be approached as an alternative to collage cities and the accumulation of programs by designing voids that exhaust the differentiation of specific categories laid out by the proposed diagrams.

The Victorian Animal is taken as the diagram to combine two different systems. The operations of dome proliferation developed parametrically, but implemented manually, are combined with one another to stablish a strategy for the growth of the dome field applied to the existing structure of the Merchandise Mart.

The 18th Century library is studied as the program to drive the system. The Merchandise Mart is taken as a shell. The Dome proliferation produces nested interior urban spaces than then produce floor plates from their intersections The main domes are generated from the existing corridors and entrances of the Merchandise Mart. The proliferation of these geometries study the interior nesting conditions generated by the system.

autumn 2020 – The Oslo School of Architecture and Design

The neighborhoods of Haugerud and Trosterud are at the edge of the urban fabric of the city of Oslo. They are demarcated by dominant edges, the Alna river, the Oslo rift and the forest Øst Marka. This old farm land now houses a generic and functionalist suburb with extensive asphalt surfaces and green deserts. Nonetheless the edge layers found in the area possess great potential which is absent from the current landscape found on the site.

The design proposal aims at canalizing the potentials found in the site to construct a landscape that fosters connectivity and identity. The site of Trosterud is chosen as the main focus of intervention given it’s layers of challenges that are utilized as potentials in the design strategy. The site has large extensions of underutilized parking spaces and service underpasses that cause severe flooding at the T-bane station with high rain. These underused spaces hence have insecurity problems. Nonetheless the site has a privileged elevation which frames views of the hills and markas surrounding the city.

The proposal focuses on 3 main edges, the belvedere rock, the rain garden and the production history edge. The belvedere rock edge opens up the asphalt to shine a light on the unique geology of the site and open up the views to the city. The rain garden aims at storm water retention and the creation of a wetland ecosystem to improve the now green dessert found in between the two rows of buildings. Finally, the last edge focuses on the farming history of the site and the demand for allotment gardens. The proposal uses landscape as a tool for identity and connection but also as a response to storm water flooring and soil suffocation.