Architectural Works
2018-2025
The Temporal Affordable
Urban Scale Reconnection
Bridging the Gable
Desirable densification
Growing in the Gradient
Container village concept
Inhabiting the Interlock
Density across scales
Lakeside Community Garden
Design-build rehabilitation
A.I. Furniture Fabrication
Experimental digital workflows
image: author. From
Professor Charles Rudolph + Teammate Nola Timmins
Spring 2024
The history of the Atlanta Constitution building exemplifies the history of infrastructural disinvestment and economic decrepitude that south downtown and Atlanta’s gulch has experienced in the face of de-industrialization.
Our mass timber addition to a revitalized Atlanta Constitution is about urban scale reconnection. Large scale infrastructural correction is required to facilitate the growth of affordable and desirable communities. The new pedestrian bridge recreates the experience of the long demolished Wall Street viaduct extension.
Category winner of 2024 Spring Capstone Expo and $1,000 cash prize
Isometric towards southwest
The adaptive reuse of the Atlanta Constitution fills a gap in the urban fabric of Atlanta. When Union Station was demolished in the 1970s, the Wall Street Viaduct extension was demolished as well, severing the link between Ted Turner Dr and Forsythe St.
The new pedestrian plaza links the two streets across the real ground level that used to be occupied by trains and the raised street level with an accessible outdoor path across three distinct levels.
Easements, property lines, and city and state ownership collide in a confusing legal tumolt
Infrastructural Erasure Over Time
Atlanta South Downtown and Gulch
The mass timber addition to the Atlanta Constitution bridges over the urban reconnection plaza to a long, horizontal bar of commercial space. The ‘bridge’ contains affordable housing designed to meet a mixture of federal rent subsidy programs. The adaptive reuse of the Constitution will similarly mostly compromise affordable housing. The upper tier of the commercial plaza is fronted by a townhome style live-work space for artists with a bundled rent.
Below: Program and Massing
The relation of the residential spaces to the commerical and public spaces was carefully thought out. Nowehre was this more evident than in the design of the artists’ live-work spaces. A studio and plaza-facing gallery space is on the ground floor. Above is an apartment. In turn, this plaza is situated above the larger commercial spaces intended for a grocery store.
Plan of third and fourth floors showing artist townhomes facing plaza.
Below: Section through pedestrian walkway through site
Professor Andrew Bruno
The city of Atlanta, Georgia must coursecorrect away from the damaging dedensification it has experienced. Just a few short steps away from an entire city block cleared of residences through the use of immenent domain, the empty lot at 219 Atlanta Avenue represents typical conditions and dimensions for the city.
Bridging the Gable prototypes a socially vibrant and economically sustainable densification pattern by fitting four family sized residences on a typical lot, with each unit containing an integrated studio space as an economic driver. Each studio space supports artisanal activities centered around physical production.
Facing Atlanta Avenue in the area typically occuped by the front lawn setback, a glass walled combination gallery space and workshop allows the residents to showcase and sell their products. The glass walls rising up to the gabled roof superstructure occupy the traditionally isolating front lawn while respecting the sightlines through the visually public but legally private front lawns.
The cascading roof superstructure organizes the entire site
The primary organizational logic of the site consists of different gradations of private and public access under one shared roof. By extending the gabled roof superstructure to the edges of the site but maintaining hard subdivisions in space to define individual units, a strong gradation of privacy is created oriented to the new pedestrian path through the site.
This new orientation towards the foot path through the block alleviates the tension natural to densifying a lot with a narrow street frontage. No individual unit has privileged street access, an important principle to creating not just four individual residences, but one community. Rather, the collective exhibition and gallery space at the front is the primary interaction with the street. 1
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Front elevation facing Atlanta Avenue
Traditional setback is occupied by glass-walled workshop and gallery
Pass-through courtyard bridges the east-facing private side yards with the west-facing public side yard.
Glass walled rorkshop and gallery space for residents
Ground floor studio space accomodates any number of varied artisinal activities
Three story unit with lofted third bedroom is oriented towards thru pedestrian street
South yard provides open outdoor space below public walkway connecting to the apartments behind
The thru-block pedestrian connection is an essential part of this densification strategy. The significant elevation difference between the parking lot behind the site and Atlanta Avenue is met by introducing a bridge component carrying foot traffic above the rear yard, meeting the ground on the side of the site serving as the new ‘front.’
Relationship between ground condition and roof condition. The ramp connecting the site to the apartments behind it is suspended from the roof
Rear pedestrian entrance creating across-block connections
Right: new block-bridging pedestrian connection shown in purple
Atlanta’s English Avenue neighborhood on the West Side has faced decades of disinvestment, leaving the area riddled with abandoned houses and closed businesses. The roofless masonry walls of St. Mark’s African Methodist church embody the creative way the community has adapted to its challenging conditions.
Local businessman and pastor Winston Taylor operates the ruin as an innovative outdoor concert hall. He partnered with the studio to generate concepts for turning the two vacant lots next door into an outdoor food hall with vendor spaces made from modified shipping containers.
All five food vendors can be viewed from the street
Non perpendicular containers align to a new axis based off of sightlines from the street
The arrangement of food vendors on the 50’ x 100’ site is intimately tied to the towering masonry walls of St Mark’s church. To work as a viable commercial enterprise, all five food vendor containers are positioned so they can be viewed from the street. The narrow street frontage and rigid dimensions of shipping containers encourage the ground floor vendors to be aligned to the side of the site. Less space constrained elements such as the main stairs and the second floor seating area conform to an off-axis alternate grid angled towards the church ruin.
Isometric towards street from northwest
Below: Section through site longitudinally
Special attention was paid to how the site could function both independently and in conjunction with the concert venue in the ruin of St Mark’s. The upper level serves as seating during normal operating days, with an open balcony and an enclosed private room. The stairs strategically form a choke point so that the space can easily be cordoned off for use by performers or for other events.
The restrooms exceed minimum code mandated capacity and are screened by the stair up to the second level. A trellis for climbing plants completes the camouflage to ensure patrons entering and leaving the restroom are distanced from the food vendors and seating.
Restroom-screening stair section with vegetation trellis shown in purple
Exploded isometric of combination vegetation screen and stair
Restroom-screening stair and trellis seen from courtyard
Professor George Johnston
Spring 2023
Atlanta, Georgia’s metro system, MARTA, severely underutilizes the land their stations sit on. Despite being built over a railroad right-of-way that predates the historic neighborhood around it, the city condemned nearly an entire block and fractured the street grid across from Candler Park MARTA station; a sparsely used surface parking lot was then built over old homes.
‘Inhabiting the Interlock’ prototypes a dense housing infill over the parking lot designed to work with both the typical Candler Park block and the irregular MARTA site.
A new pedestrian scale street grid of 15 and 25 foot publically accessible paths is stretched across the site. Iverson Park is redistributed to create a new plaza facing the station, anchoring the site’s ground floor retail component.
Rearrangement of Iverson Park to form station fronting plaza Park space Park space
New pedestrian scale street grid across site with pocket parks terminating viewsheds
The new block system has two primary lot types. The ‘double’ block’s lots have a street frontage on the north and the south side. Both ground floor retailoriented flex spaces face the plaza side and their top floor flats face the smaller residential scaled street behind. The two residence designs interlock around their outdoor courtyards.
In the ‘single’ block lots, the units have a single street frontage. On each lot, two townhomes of two stories face each other across a continuous light well. The divide forms courtyards along each unit.
Each 50’x70’ lot is mirrored to form a 100’x70’ series of four interlocking homes in two pairs. The organization around a continuous light well courtyard divided to belong to either unit along its length addresses the traditional daylighting weakness of town home design.
mirrored repetition
two ‘double’ unit layouts
first floor second floor
‘Double’ lot with two frontages
mirrored repetition
two ‘single’ unit layouts
first floor second floor
‘Double’ lot with two frontages
‘Single’ duplex interlocks as a single repeating unit
‘Double’ duplex interlocks as a single repeating unit
‘Single’ duplex interlocks
‘Double’ duplex interlocks
100 Fold Studio - Summer Studio Program
From June 19th to August 11th, 2021, I worked on a design-build project with 100 Fold Studio in Lakeside, Montana. A team of nineteen students rehabilitated the Lakeside Community Garden by creating a new perimeter enclosure. A series of tiered terraces engage the elevation change on the north side, providing crucial storage and areas for resting.
The team built the garden ourselves over the course of a month. Due to pandemic era price inflation, traditional construction materials had skyrocketed in cost. The entire shade structure was designed to be built with fencing materials instead as their value had risen less severely.
We faced extreme difficulty dealing with the poor tolerances of fencing materials on-site. In particular, small variations in the horizontal slats added up by the end to create noticeable alignment issues. Solving these problems with material variation and difficult connections helped further my understanding of how structures go together.
Beginning to arrange the horizontal slats
Laying out the fence poles that locate the horizontal slats
The garden rehabilitation was designed to, first and foremost, allow the community garden to be a gathering space as well as an agricultural space. The entire perimeter fence was redesigned and rebuilt to be more durable and more effective at keeping animals out. The terraced social space anchors the experience by organizing arrival and providing a place to rest and get out of the sun.
The garden a year after construction begins to ‘grow in’
The new fence has several large gates for moving fertilzer in.
Do A.I. aided design and fabrication workflows doom creativity? This ambitious experiment in digital workflows suggests that the humans wielding the A.I. are still the ultimate authors of the design.
A.I. image generating software Midjourney proposed designs for modern wooden chair designs. The bulk of the design direction was determined by the A.I., but it couldn’t advise how to build the chair or even basic facts like dimensions.
It became a reverse-engineering exercise, only with considerable creative freedom. As part of a desire to experiment with new materials, the legs were cast in concrete and an implied line in the original design became more fully expressed.
Inferring and exploring the limits of the parti sketch the A.I. generated was challenging. However, the fabrication portion tested the limits of our understanding of both materials and production processes.
Waterjet-cut concrete eliminates the need for complex molds
The production method left significant waste material
Interactions between the different materials were difficult due to imprecisions in fabrication
Expressing a line implied in the original reference
All of the materials used had degrees of imprecision and variation that made production difficult. Gluing up lumber to create large boards for the CNC machine to cut out the individual wooden sections was especially difficult and required careful craft.
The two concrete rectangles to receive the concrete pour were given an indented grid pattern. Due to part of the MDF formwork becoming embedded in the concrete, the lines became less subtle than expected. Fabrication errors and unanticipated design problems gave the design an entirely different feel from the A.I. starting point.
The original machine-generated image was a design starting point, but it did not spell the end of design creativity; it was the beginning.
Left: The Midjourney A.I generated image that formed the basis of design
Right: The size and proportions of the design had to be extrapolated from the A.I. basis of design
Below: Material change becomes an important part of the design
