Issuu

Nathan [ B.Arch ]

SELECTED WORKS 2023 - 2026

Diya

THE ARCADE

Mixed Use Residential Building in DC

Duration : 16 weeks

This project is a mixed-use residential building designed to serve both the public and senators, integrating living spaces with functional government areas. The arcade, provides a sheltered, pedestrian pathway along the ground level, linking the building’s public spaces with the surrounding area. This arcade enhances accessibility, guiding the public through the building while maintaining separation from the more secure spaces occupied by senators. The design fosters interaction between the community and the political process, ensuring transparency and openness. The upper floors house residential apartments within the building. The combination of mixed-use functions with a strong public connection ensures that the building serves as both a home and a civic hub

Ground level floorplan that facilates pedestrian movement towards Union station

Mapping of the capitol complex

Level 2 floorplan

Parapet at metal wall panel

Exterior sheathing

Exterior

Firestopping Insulation

Herbaceous Perrenial ground cover

Herbaceous perrenial ground cover

Soil with high water retention capacity

Galvanized steel for water drainage

Dual shell breathable high density polyethylene waterproofing

Dual shell breathable high density polyethylene waterprooﬁng

Foam Insulation

Foam insulation

Vapor barrier

Vapor Barrier

Mullion

Curtain wall at termination

Sealed Glazing Unit

Sealed Galzing Unit

Snap Cap

Pressure Plate

Drainage Path

Formed Metal Base

Rigid Insulation

Membrane Tie - In

Membrane Tie-In

Waterproof Membrane

Exterior Grade

Perimeter Heating Enclosure

Curb

Concrete

Mullion

THE OPEN MIDDLE

Teaching kitchen & Community center in Riva san Vitale

Duration : 12 weeks

This project supports students studying abroad by providing a shared space for refuge, social interaction, and cultural exchange. Located on the villa property, this project replaces an old shed with a teaching kitchen, dining, and gathering space. The design propsal is based on prospect and refuge theory. Drawing from local cultural precedents, the courtyard functions as the primary connective element between the villa and the open middle, structuring movement while providing a shared outdoor refuge for students studying abroad. The center supports informal gathering and reinforces the project’s emphasis on community, ritual, and everyday use.

The Cube 04

Art mueseum in Downtown Blacksburg

Duration : 8 weeks

The CUBE aims to reimagine and revitalize an underutilized parking lot in the heart of Blacksburg. The surrounding area will be transformed into inviting greenspaces, offering a vibrant public gathering place for residents and visitors alike. By leveraging the landscape as an extension of the public realm, improving pedestrian flow and creating opportunities for informal gathering. A recessed ground level increases transparency and permeability at the street, while the copper-clad upper volume provides a durable material expression that establishes a clear institutional identity within the existing urban context.

The

Week I built something in switzerland

Duration : 1 week

A temporary community pavilion in Riva San Vitale, designed and built in just one week by my 3 friends and I to give back to the community that had welcomed us into the town for a semester. Made from simple wood dowels found at the local hardware store into modular structures, the pavilion and two benches create an open, playful space for gathering, interaction, and pause. It’s modularity encourages people to change how they would like to make it a different experience for each person, and integrated plants were for the community to take home and remember us by!

Thesis Beginnings

My thesis explores the threshold between movement on land and movement through air and how this moment of transition is shaped not by mechanical efficiency but by the spatial qualities of abstract sculpture.

Rather than treating the airport as a machine optimized only for efficiency, this project asks how architecture can express the experience of flight. By treating architecture itself as a sculptural medium— capable of expressing movement, continuity, and transformation through abstraction

The design process began with paint. By using it as a way to intuitively explore motion—how flight feels rather than how it works. These paintings mapped rhythm, acceleration, compression, and release through abstract gestures.

By translating these 2D studies into 3D by scanning and layering them into stacked acrylic model, it allowed these fluid marks to accumulate into volume, revealing how curvature and tension could generate space. The wire mesh studies explored elasticity, contouring and tension, helping me understand how surfaces could stretch, fold, compress and relaese.

From these experiments, I developed a design method I call Tensional Folding.

Airports are some of the most emotionally charged spaces we occupy. They are places of anticipation, departure, waiting, and separation—yet their architecture is often reduced to neutral infrastructure. I believe the threshold between land and air deserves spatial intensity

This thesis challenges the idea that infrastructure must be rigid or only purely functional, it proposes these necessary constraints—movement, structure, security, light, can become generative forces for architectural expression

Hollywood Burbank Airport (BUR) became the ideal site for this thesis. Unlike major hub airports defined by overwhelming scale, BUR operates at a smaller scale.The constant growth in size and advancement of planes places all airports in this state of constant evolution

Located within the creative fabric of Los Angeles, BUR serves industries built on motion, storytelling, and abstraction, making this propsal a contextual response rather than an anomaly.

My goal is to design this gateway generated through tensional folding. A continuous, sculptural terminal that embodies fluidity, movement, and upward transition.

Tensional folding describes an architectural process in which surfaces deform under tensile forces, producing continuous folds that integrate structure, circulation, and enclosure. The fold is not a formal gesture—it is the spatial expression of internal and external forces acting on a surface. Rather than fragmenting architecture into floors, walls, and roofs, tensional folding produces a continuous field where surfaces gradually change state—from horizontal to vertical, from solid to void, from compression to release.

At Burbank Airport, the threshold between land and air is no longer just a moment of transit—it becomes a spatial experience that feels like taking flight.