Professors Paola Giaconia, Achille Michelizzi, + Marco Brizzi
Winter-Spring 2024 // Portland, OR // Professor Jeff Ponitz
2024 Cal Poly Launchpad Selection // Created in Collaboration with Samhita Vallamreddy
“Connect 4” aims to exaggerate the universally shared experience of food. Growing, cooking, providing, and eating all create connection, and this project ties these processes to the context of downtown Portland. Through multiple levels of connection, including an experiential and narrative path, the project exaggerates the many steps of food from farm to table. The unique spaces allow for users to utilize food processes important to them while encouraging interactions between Portland’s many publics. This ultimately fosters connections and encourages greater understanding among the city’s diverse population, largely through the many experiences with food.
SECOND FLOOR PLAN
ROOF PLAN
IMMERSIVE VIEWS: “TABLE” EXPERIENCES
IMMERSIVE VIEWS: EXPERIENTIAL PATH + MARKET
MODEL PHOTOS
OCCUPYING THE ALLEY
Spring 2023 // Los Angeles, CA // Professor Kelle Brooks
Honorable Mention - 2024 Coalition for Adequate School Housing Student Design Competition
OCCUPYING THE ALLEY
ALEX JENKINS STUDIO BROOKS
“Occupying the Alley” serves two purposes: offering a new elementary school for the neighborhood and addressing the lack of community space currently present in the Arts District of Los Angeles. Situated in an abandoned alley, the ground floor is intentionally occupied by public space, allowing the site to function as a place for not just students, but the entire community. The school is largely raised above the alley, incorporating outdoor learning and interactive learning principles throughout the design. These methodologies can be seen in both the classroom unit and the whole to re-imagine how students can learn more effectively.
MOVING PANELS ALLOW FOR VERSATILITY OF SHADING, PRIVACY, & LEARNING
Fall 2023 // San Diego, CA // Professor Tom Fowler
Located adjacent to Interstate 5, “Within the Walls” is a micro-housing community for artists that seeks to bring connection back to an auto-centric neighborhood. This is largely accomplished through a series of high, narrow spaces, or “inhabitable walls,” that encourage more intimate, human-scale interaction compared to the project’s eightlaned neighbor. A network of studios, open-air galleries, and pedestrian alleys open up to a central plaza, fostering a variety of exchanges between artists and the public. Micro-housing units and upper-floor outdoor spaces continue to implement human-scale connection through intentional glazing and weaving patios.
Within the Walls
LIVE/WORK/SHOW MODULE: STRUCTURE
LIVE/WORK/SHOW MODULE: CLADDING
EXPLODED AXONOMETRIC
MODEL PHOTOS
SLOW! CHILDREN AT PLAY
in Collaboration
Fall 2024 // Florence, Italy // Professors Paola Giaconia, Achille Michelizzi, + Marco Brizzi
Created
with Kaelyn Campbell and Lily Hanna
In a city overrun with tourism and the compulsion to move through every cultural site with haste, Florence has become viewed as a commodity rather than as a living, working community. To counteract this bustling, “Slow! Children at Play” aspires to reshape Piazza dei Ciompi into a slowing down point, orienting the urban fabric towards its inhabitants and enabling representation of the true city. Occupants’ curiosity is invoked as they meander through the transformed ground plane, the newly located medieval loggia, and the library and kindergarten below. This is possible through a rethinking of the relationship between monuments, public programs, and open space.
