Portfolio 2025 by saragonzalezarchitecture

Gonzalez Sara

Arts District, LA

Tented serves as an academic extension of SCI-Arc through studio space and flexibly programmed areas. This project is in part a take on what was affectionately known as “the SCI-Arc tent” - a large tent installed in the parking lot during the school’s transition to the arts district campus. The old tent arose out of a need for quick shelter. Tented arises from a need for quick expansion.

This project starts with exploring cloth’s behavior, taking note of how easily it deflects when filled with a load. As such, Tented explores deflection as accommodation through materiality. The exterior faces of the project are occupied by modules of moving frames on tracks that allow students to create space as they need it. Occupancy then becomes indexed through the materiality of the tent, with the translucent tarp allowing for the reading of bunches and folds, cataloging interior activity. This tarp also sits atop a predictable, adaptable grid that returns agency to the common student.

SCI-Arc tent 2002

Materiality

MERRICKST.

Concrete studios suspend within flexible tent

Kit-of-parts tent allows for maximum adaptability

Tent walls slide on tracks

Tarp diffuses light

Render demonstrates

SAN BENITO-SOM

UCSB SUMMER 2024

San Benito is the first phase of a 2 phase housing development at the University of California Santa Barbara. This summer I had the pleasure of assisting SOM LA’s design team on this project as an intern. 6 buildings housing over 2,000 beds are connected along a central corridor with clear views of the coastal mountains running from one end to the other. Aside from providing much needed student housing, San Benito will also feature a retail dining market and other student amenities. One of the main tasks I was assigned was to produce preliminary renderings, 3 of which are shown here.

ELEVATION PARK

Nashville, TN 2022

With Gabriela Arevalo and James Chidiac

In the 1960’s, the City of Nashville built highway I-40 through a prominent space in the Black community: North Nashville. This community was known as the “Black wall street” of its time, a cul-tural Mecca founded upon a thriving music industry and prominent spaces for Black education. The construction of I-40 fragmented what was once a united community. Access between schools, churches, and local businesses were cut off and the value of the land fell. In recent years, the City of Nashville has been looking to correct the wrongs inflicted upon the community by proposing the construction of a bridge across the highway. Elevation park is a proposal of this.

Elevation Park is not a bridge, but a conjunction: a web of connection that spreads and bends into the local community, healing the cut I-40 inflicted and returning the land it stole. Elevation Park’s unique park-conjunction typology provides public, accessible points of connection for North Nashville, promoting cultural ex-pression, equitable education, and local business. North Nashville doesn’t need a bridge, it needs its land back.

Connect Pull Push Punch

Widen

Thicken Spread

Passive cooling blurs line between indoors and outdoors

CROOK

2023

With Gabriela Arevalo

Humans have been using bricks and stones to form walls for centuries. Oftentimes, stones are custom cut to allow for eacho-ther’s irregular geometries to form a regular wall, without mortar. Historically, the wall’s purpose has been to stand straight, to protect. Crook explores what it means to have bricks custom cut to form leaning walls and different modes of representation. This project navigates the physical, the digital, and the print (digital made physical) as well as the interaction between harvested wood and poured plaster

The brick as a physical object embellished with grain

The brick

the ideal assembly, digital

The brick as the nuanced assembly, physical

PIXEL PERCUSSION

Tartu, Estonia 2024

With Ella Brindle

Pixel Percussion challlenges the assumption that the words “facade” and “skin” are synonymous. Rather than keeping facade at the surface, this project utilizes the facade as both structure and organization. Taking the grid and thicknening it, Pixel Percussion then tilts it to become an extension of the landscape, producing new opportunities. This begins to shape interior spaces that become suspended in this new structure. Rooms then become surrounded by a cloud of pixels of various sizes and density affording various uses depending on program.

and landscape

EMAJOGI RIVER

KUUNI ST.

UUETURU ST.

Building

slide into Emajogi River

facade organizes rooms

Pixel

Hollow pixels make way for MEP routing

Drawing by Elisa Andretta and Gabriela Arevalo

Facade filters light in library

Sparser pixels produce gradient in atrium model

DANCE!

Chinatown, LA 2022

Dance! considers design through human movement. The form itself is an extruded annotation of myself acting out the verb “to fold”. This market and dance studio combination in Chinatown explores how prospective customers move in relation to commodity – by either circulating around it (as in a market) or within it (as in a dance studio). This idea of moving in, around and through is expressed through a central passage core and translucent mesh façade. The specifically angled perforations on the facade draw visitors off of Broadway into the plaza. What emerges is a space that becomes a dance, where program mixes, and circulation becomes the commodity.

Film stills of myself folding my arm

S.BROADWAY

Dance! Sits between S. Broadway and Chinatown Plaza

CHINATOWNPLAZA

S. BROADWAY

Model demonstrates light dispersion

Increasing reveals propel visitors toward entrances

CHINATOWN PLAZA

Facade peels to reveal entrace

THE PORCH Housing,

NOMA Student Competition 2023

With Gabriela Arevalo, Salma Lopez, Ray Vista, Acacia Li, Leonardo Sanchez, Youssef Hachane, India Chand, and James Chidiac

Porches are incubators for those who have been excluded from the public space. Albina has historically served this purpose for hte Black community in Oregon, as a home for the unwel-comed. I-5, Memorial Coliseum, and Legacy Emmanuel Hos-pital took away this space.

“The Porch” re-interprets traditional porch spaces that serve as a transition space between the public and private. Extruding the site and hollowing it, we create public space. This space, however, can only become a porch when connectred to the surrounding urban fabric. This Transitional Space is then classified into 3 teirs: the public, the semi-public, and the private to foster various relationships and connections throuhgout the complex.Affordable units are partitioned from the outside by colorful fog catchers inspired by the vibrant colors of Albina’s neighborhood porches. The water collected from these feed community gardens situated within pockets of the mass of units. These units are wrapped by a series of elongated porches which deviate from the traditional interior hallway to produce an atmosphere where a neighbor gets to know a neighbor.

Traditional Apartment Rotated With Porches

Model details facade

Courtyard kiosks

1 minute film: The Porch

Film still showcasing bank interior

Film still illustrating porch exteiors

URBAN HILL

West Adams, LA 2023

Beverly Hills is synonymous with exclusivity, glamour, and wealth. Nestled in the hills, this city has become a safe haven for LA’s richest as an escape from the city. West Adams is part of the crowded city from which they escape.

Urban Hill brings the qualities of Beverly Hills to the flats of West Adams through an act of weaving. It begins with a single unit that repeats and wraps around an invisible core like weave around weft. This gets repeated further and sheared to form a sloping, porous mass with trails, private entrances, and independent units, similar to Beverly Hills. Unlike the Hills, however, Urban Hill gives a warm welcome through the appearance of the facade. This plush, peach envelope is comprised of waterbladders that store rainwater. These bladders act as insulation and also feed vertical gardens housed in the building’s pores that feed the community.