The enhancement of our well-being can often be attributed to reconnecting with our primal origins, while its decline can be linked to neglecting these fundamental instincts. This proposal seizes the opportunity presented by these flexible boundaries to delve into the concepts of ‘primal architecture’ and how they can be integrated into the modern urban landscape.
The epigenetics of our primal origins continue to follow us throughout our life. And therefore, a primal need, a root, wishes to be fed. Multigeneration housing offers a way of communal therapy as two generations work through shared problems together, both benefiting one another. As a study of what this could mean on a larger scale, a system of agricultural exchange acts as a platform for a diversity of crop that would be shared through balconies and further redistributed with neighbors.A multi family unit on each floor allows not only an opportunity of shared wisdom through generations but an aopportunity to undergoe situational therapy through working through each others trauma together.
Manured Soil
After a 90 recovery period, the pasture is ready to feed the cattle again
Chickens
Chickens populate the pasture, mixing the dung into the loam as they look for maggots that have hatched.
A 90 day cycle of grazing and a subsequent recovery period catalyzes pasturehealth and diverse nutrition for cattle.
Grazing Cattle
Grazing in a herd incentivizes the individual cows to be more competitive, mazimizing growth and consumption while they are being raised
remains after cattle move to the next pasture
Pasture
Cow Dung
Typical Floor Plan
Monolithic sink that joins the kitchen and bathroom
Indoor Hearth doubling as cooktop and fireplace
Retentive Sentiments
Hart Island, New York
For over 150 years, Hart Island has been a burial ground for the marginalized, where over a million unclaimed bodies have been interred in mass graves, reinforcing a legacy of erasure. Once a prisoner-of-war camp, a psychiatric institution, and a burial site for victims of epidemics, the island has been historically intertwined with systems of incarceration and neglect. Managed by the Department of Corrections until 2020, its burial practices remained hidden until drone footage exposed prisoners burying COVID-19 victims for $6 an hour. Mismanagement and shoreline erosion culminated in 2012 when Hurricane Sandy unearthed remains, revealing the precariousness of a site where even in death, space is a privilege. Families seeking to mourn have faced systemic barriers, restricted to limited, prison-like visitation policies. While the island’s transfer to the NYC Parks Department offers hope, it does not undo its history of exclusion.
Retentive Sentiments proposes an ossuary that reclaims space for remembrance. Constructed in mass timber with castle-joint connections—a nod to the island’s lost structures—the intervention provides individualized memory nodes within the rigid burial grid. Each unit, measured to the 9 cubic inches allocated per body, offers a space for families to leave objects, fostering personal memorials within the collective burial ground. In doing so, the project reimagines Hart Island as a site of care and agency, shifting from a landscape of exclusion to one of acknowledgment and presence.
Tuburculosis
COVID-19
Those buried on the island and their families were subject to the treatment of the incarcerated. Visitors are made to apply for visitation, prove their relationship, and give up their phone while being guided by a corrections officer and driven in a retrofitted corrections bus while on the island.
Administration
The Fog embodies not only the laborious beaurecratic journey to Hart Island and emphasized through a threshold that is experienced at the welcome center which also act as the satellite archive department of Records and Registry of New York.
Archive
Isolation
Framing the lives of those subjected to marginalization through an ossuary of objects placed by visiting kin. The Ossuary acts as a meeting point where nodes of memory become supplements to the density of what lies beneath.
Immersion
An earthen threshhold invites visitors to root themselves within a non-denominational spiritual environment by taking off their shoes and feeling the dirt beneath them
Stabilization
A subterranean meditation space serves as a threshold between the living and the dead.
Death Infrastructure, 2023
Agar, Cellulite, Brass Tubing, Acrylic, and Wood
Images of monumental structures of the past cannot live again with the same intensity and meaning if destroyed. Louis Kahn stated that “Their faithful duplication is irreconcilable”.In duplication, contemporary spirituality can be fed with religion, ruins, and monumentality. It’s neighbors become The Dome of the Rock and Christian Church of the Holy Sepulchre.The notion of creating a “spiritual campus”, a table. These monumental buildings in proximity become characters of dialogue in a broader vision of unity among different faiths, perhaps offering a peaceful coexistence that transcends historical conflicts. The architectural design thus becomes a medium for a deeper intercultural conversation, rooted in respect for the past and hope for the future.
Synagogue
Hurva Unbuilt,
Unbuilt, Louis Kahn, Section
Intrascalar relationships begin to transform objects into ideas
Lowered seats break any sense of heiarchy when sitting for a meal.
Witness Marks
Ashokan, New York
The Commons can be described as a spatial infrastructure that harnesses symbiotic relationships consisting of a trans-species population, similar to that of a microbiome, where its inhabitants exist in space and benefit from one another. The commons can be shared space. The commons can be a multiscalar, mutually-adopted ethic towards sharing of resources, space, and territory that transcends property enclosure and works across society, culture, economy, and ecology. Sited on the dividing weir that stagnates the resevoir’s turbidity, the structure becomes a site of local extraction, turning New York City’s Resevoir into a site of multi-scalar utility and transforming the practice of extraction into a shared action, reintroducing the Ashokan community to the resevoir not as a place of polarity but as a symbiotic production of land stewardship with New York City.
Sited over the overflow gate of Olive Bridge Damn, the structure extracts turbid water. Through a process of seiving, drying, and silt seperation, the turbid water can be filtered into natural clay for pottery.
The meditative practice of ceramics becomes a therapeutic experience. Locals are given the ability to work with the land that was once taken from them.
Scale: 1/8” = 1’0”
An elevated ramp terminates tangentially to the structure, inviting those walking the bridge to stop by for the sweeping views of the resevoir and later the encounter of natural clay production.
Kiln Exhaust Parallel To Roof Structure
Standing Seam Roof
Embedded Pressure Treated Lumber Into Existing Weir Wall
Steel Tie Rods
Pressure -Treated Lumber
Joist Bracing Construction
Operable Windows
Exterior Ceramics Kiln For Ventilation And Heat Control
The Living Epithet
A Response to John Hejduk’s Lancaster Masque
Un-sited
Much like shrines or relics, the assemblage of familiar objects fosters a sense of belonging within transient conditions. Living in the Epithet becomes an architecture of congregation—where memory, mobility, and adaptability converge to redefine what home can be. The Living Epithet embraces flexibility, using known objects to construct temporary communities where inhabitants can shape their environment based on evolving needs. The home is distilled into its most essential element—a place to rest—materialized as a singular bed. By merging a Murphy bed with vertical roller blinds, the design creates an enclosure that can expand or contract, shifting between private retreat and communal space. This lightweight, collapsible dwelling is both personal and collective, offering agency to those who occupy it.
Vertical Roller Shade as Envelope
Murphy Bed as Program
Single Family
Water Closet
Single Room
Community Kitchen
The Hole Gallery - Universes 5
Curated by SaŠa Bogojev
A line up of characters and performers, the Curator’s vision of the artist’s work was that of a circus. The Pedastals were designed as traditional stages to perform. The curtain accents became intrinsic to the exhibition, siting the gallery in the dreamscape of a travelling show, where visitors would enter the tent, which framed the gallery’s threshold and interior ceiling.
Corcoran Marketing Visuals
In collaboration with Corcoran Real Esatate and White Hudson John Marketing, a 23 unit Multi-Family apartment building was reimagines into a single family luxury walkup. In the reimagination of 354 Central park West, luxury ammenities of a health spa and mezzanine were prioritized in an effort to create excitement around the possibilities of the $10 Million property.
