Mary-Margaret Stokes
architecture portfolio
Sculpt
The University of Texas at Austin | Fall 2023
Professor: Matt Fajkus
Partner: Keely Morgan
In the heart of downtown Austin, this project aims to sculpt the urban landscape to interweave equitable public space into a developed city block. Austin’s downtown has a lack of programmed public space within the city grid and open space is even more threatened by the rapid growth and development of the city. The site’s adjacency to Republic Square Park provides a unique opportunity to extend and enhance the public space offered by the park. The design merges the public program of a sculpture park with the private program of a performing arts center to create a vibrant arts destination for downtown Austin and an amenity to passers-by. The fly tower of the large performing arts theater emerges out of the sculpture park as a sculptural element itself that connects to the public realm of the sculpture park through a community black box theater.
sculpture garden gallery theater black box
Balcony Level Floor Plan
theater | full stage
theater | orchestra shell
black box | exterior
black box | interior
Guadalupe Street
Lobby / Gallery
House Orchestra
House Balcony
Black Box
Sculpture Garden
Lobby / Gallery
Lobby / Gallery
Three Rivers Engagement Center
Clemson University | Spring 2020
Professor: Julie Wilkerson
Team: April Simms, Lauren Davis, Hannah Smith
The Three Rivers Engagement Center creates a blend between the ecosystem of the Congaree River and the urban context of West Columbia and Columbia, South Carolina. The project leverages design strategies that preserve the natural elements on the site and encourages the public to appreciate existing water and land conditions. West Columbia emerges from the sloped landscape and locates public space relative to the urban context. Columbia merges with the undeveloped forest to preserve its beauty and locates public space relative to the natural context.
TREC brings the two cities together by offering spaces to engage in education based programs centered around culture and recreation, which were chosen by community surveys. Materials sourced in the building further connect TREC to the site and provide an educational aspect. A complex wall assembly is created layering reclaimed wood, recycled aluminum, polycarbonate panels, and fly ash concrete. TREC creates moments to be part of the urban context and the natural ecosystem simultaneously.
Menlo Park: A City for People
The University of Texas at Austin | Spring 2023
Professor: Dean Almy, Ghel - Ghigo DiTommaso & Laura Johnson
Partner: Nate Albers
Menlo Park, along with other cities in Silicon Valley, face a serious housing crisis and a need for affordable housing. This project identifies the downtown area of Menlo Park as a high-resource area with the potential to provide this necessary housing due to its location to public transit and morphological pattern of surface parking lots. The project transforms the city’s single-use downtown into a thriving mixed-use community that is not just a destination, but a place to live.
The project focuses on the human experience in the built environment by prioritizing each resident’s access to varying privacies of outdoor space. The lots are infilled with single loaded housing blocks that allow each unit to have both a public and a private face. The new neighborhood is made walkable by prioritizing pedestrian and micro-mobility circulation. Main street limits vehicular access while some alleyways completely restrict it. Community amenities are scattered throughout the new blocks to activate the area during different times of the day.
Phase I
existing surface parking lots
enhance main street for pedestrian use
activate new public plazas
Phase II
create vibrant mixed-use district
infill urban housing
Phase III
encourage densification and mix of uses on main street
Front Alley
Back Alley
UnEarthed
Clemson University | Fall 2018
Professor: Julie Wilkerson
Partner: Lauren Davis
Unearthed is a mixed-use, coworking building adjacent to the High Line in New York City. The concept behind the project evolved from a theory that as the bedrock of New York gets closer to the surface the buildings can be built taller, making Manhattan a diagram of its geological condition. The building represents this idea through the horizontal grain of the “plinth” that pushes up the vertical grain of the “monolith.” The plinth builds up to the monolith with terraces that open and connect the building directly to the High Line and form a dialog between the public spaces.
The plinth and monolith respond to the programmatic needs of the building by defining the separation of public and private spaces. The plinth contains more public programs which have direct connections to the ground floor and the High Line. At the level of the High Line, the project gives a lot of space back to the public with park-like terraces. The more private office spaces are located in the monolith where the floors follow a more typical tower organization.
Mary-Margaret
Octopus Pants
Clemson University | Fall 2019
Professor: Joseph Choma
Partner: April Simms
The studio focused on researching fabric formworks for concrete by applying tailoring techniques used in fashion. First, as a team of eight our studio experimented with different variations of sewing and manipulating fabric to produce concrete tiles and columns. Then, we split into pairs and applied some of the techniques developed to a scaled model of a building for SCAD’s fashion school.
Fabric formwork minimizes cost and waste associated with typical formwork methods and allows for unique opportunities in construction. We pushed this by casting both the roof and columns in one piece. This resulted in a fabric formwork consisting of 40 columns sewed together resembling “octopus pants.” By creating slender, twisting columns we also pushed the contradiction of the soft texture created by the fabric with the hard concrete itself.
Bats and Boats
The University of Texas at Austin| Fall 2022
Professor: Francisco Gomes
This project focused on a site adjacent to the Tom Miller Dam below Lake Austin. The natural linear grain of the dam was emphasized and used to organize a linear adjacency of user groups. The bats, boats, and people each inhabit various linear volumes. The existing edge of the lower lake is cut back and the upper lake is channeled onto the site to create access to both water levels. The bat roosts, which sit in the water, are monumental in scale to match the character of the dam. However, from the riverwalk the volumes match the human-scale. The site is accessed via the riverwalk which connects to the city on an urban scale.
Amenity Interiors
ODA | 2024
Team: Katherine Mendez, Julia Fidelis
This was an interior design project for the residential amenity spaces of a high-rise building in London. The challenge was to redesign the lobbies and amenties after construction had already started on the building. I joined the project after mood boards had been defined and began developing formal schematic design concepts for the main lobby arches and entry canopy. I assisted with the creation of in-house renderings and then created the Revit model and drawing set for the design development deadline. The set documented floor plans, reflected ceiling plans, wall finish plans, and floor finish plans along with interior elevations and axonometric details of the three amenity floors as well as detailing elevators, entry canopies, and restrooms.
