Architecture
I collaborate with architect and historian Jesse Honsa on conceptual projects and competition entries. Based on research into real sites and cultural conditions, our projects often push past conventional limits into highly imaginative territory where we explore alternative ways of building and living. Below are some highlights of our collaboration.
De/Motown
What if Detroit, with it’s depopulated suburban neighborhoods and decaying infrastructure, were to contract, intentionally, into a series of nodes, built around existing areas of massive bulk — factories, business districts, mega-malls? We explore how urban living might look if the bulk of the Detroit population were to reoccupy the skyscraper graveyard of the central business district. Stacking industrial, commercial, residential, and agricultural functions into these towers and connecting them at multiple levels with viaducts. The motor city ceases to need cars in this ultra-dense urban center.
This project won first place in the ThinkSpace “Urban Borders” competition sponsored by the Zagreb Society of Architects .
Protest Architecture
Inspired by the Istanbul protest movement to save Gezi Park. One of the few public green spaces in the Beyoğlu district of Istanbul, Gezi Park was slated to become a shopping mall. Encamped occupiers set up a micro-city within the park, even building a small library out of torn-up flagstones. Police attacked nightly with tear gas and rubber bullets. For many residents in the area, participation in the protests became a part of nightlife. In this project, we envision the protestors taking over other construction sites around Taksim Square, using found materials to build informal civic infrastructure for extending and expanding protest culture, centered around a massive public hammam.
The Ark
This project is an experiment in isolated communal living. Originally spurred by a call for proposals for offshore prison designs. We discarded this dystopian concept. Instead, we designed a monastery. A voluntary, self-sufficient, retreat from the world. A stationary ship, like an oil platform for living. Built of timber with a communal workshop, greenhouse, kitchen, and gathering space. We took inspiration from Bentham’s Panopticon prison design, but inverted it. Monks’ cells, rather than being on view for a centralized authority, were themselves placed in the central viewing position, collectively looking out on the communal life of the vessel.