Project Type: Competition Proposal, YES to ADU Competition (Los Angeles Arts Commission), Winter 2017-2018
Project Team: Tyler Kobick, AIA; Ellise Gallagher; Wesley Bascom; Elizabeth Renner; Lou Wright
Role: Project Leader, Designer
L.A. A.D.U was developed as a proposal for using accessory dwelling units to combat the growing problem of homelessness in Los Angeles, in response to the YES to ADU Competition given by the Los Angeles County Arts Commission. The proposal includes a non-profit cooperative development system created interconnected networks of ADUs in various neighborhoods, and uses an elevated, pre-fabricated construction system inspired by the "dingbat” building type indigenous to Los Angeles. Creating an adaptable, customizable system and offering homeowners a unique financing and project management platform creates the possibility of community-driven development in which homeowners develop value within their existing properties and are able to offer affordable housing options to those transitioning out of homelessness.
Project Type: Competition Proposal, National Gallery of Victoria Architecture Commission 2018
Project Team: Rob Meyerson, Lou Wright, MHN Design Union (Advisory)
All art constitutes a physical terrain. Paint must be dragged across the rough surface of the canvas; the trowel must make its gouges in the clay; and the visitor, too, must travel along the trail the artist has blazed. As the terra incognita of raw material is colonized or conserved, we trek past the the marks left on the path, and this is felt especially in the sculpture garden; where the ground, the terrain, somehow becomes the work.
The most exciting response to the existing ground of the garden might not be more work, but a new ground altogether. A ground that is activated, alive with its own desires, its own scales, its own relentless timing. A landscape across which the visitor can travel, making marks and leaving marks unmade. LANDMARKS represents an attempt to bring the ground to life, to create a place where we can look at a familiar scene rising above a foreign horizon and ask: are we there yet?
The modestly radical proposal of LANDMARKS is to take the ground itself as the site of intervention; a new ground to provoke new experiences. To begin with, this must be achieved with a material departure from the grass and bluestone paving of the Sculpture Garden, and so a vibrant red clay is used - this material contains aspects both genteel and wild, as it evokes the surface of a professional tennis court as well as the red-orange expanses of the country’s interior. This clay not only invites the visitor to explore the unfamiliar - delimited in a neat rectangle, almost like a colonial territory on a hastily drawn map - it engages them in the constant act of making as footprints and traces of movement are highly visible in the multiple layers of graded clay. As rain, sun, and traffic do their work, the project as a whole will change subtly and take on the form of its visitors.
Tectonically, the ground is supported on contoured layers of lightweight geo-foam, which drastically reduce the weight imposed on the roof structure by the project. In addition, the landform is built on a semi-permeable membrane which allows water to percolate through to the existing water-management systems already installed in the roof’s build-up. And punctuating this landscape are a series of “monuments”, large golden structures composed of lightweight , tube-steel frames sheathed in painted metal panel, which will serve as the centers of activity within our new territory.
Of these “monuments”, the two most emphatic are the Stage and The Screen. The Stage, an oblong platform arising from a low hillock of clay, will support public performances throughout the installation and also provide a vantage point from which visitors can survey the terrain. The Screen, a portentious wall cutting across the landscape’s contour, can act as a projection screen for video art or film events as well as reflecting the subtle changes in light created by the vividly coloured ground.
As a whole, the aim of LANDMARKS is to evoke a feeling of unfamiliarity, of trailblazing, and to provide a background against which the public and the museum can engage. Over time, the land will change, will harden in places, will wear away, the ground beneath our feet disappearing with every step.
Project Type: Studio, Spring 2016
Studio Critic: Frank Lupo
A Forest for Some Trees was developed as a proposal for the revitalization of a section of the Queensway, a derelict stretch of rail tracks situated on a raised berm running through central Queens, New York. The program of the new development is composed of three terms: a landscape element that runs the length of the park section, a center for sculpture and artist residency at its north end, and a bridge passing over the active rail line at its south end.
As the Queensway has been derelict for many years, a formidable “urban forest” has developed on the site. However, this forest is, in a certain way, hard for the average visitor to “see” - it is chaotic and impenetrable and offers no immediate points of reference with the commercialized area surrounding it. In response to this condition, the landscape term of the project includes a series of pillars arranged along diagonal meridians throughout the “park”. These stark, vertical elements allow the visitor to “see” the forest through a shifting frame that produces both intimacy and alienation.
As the landscape element is, in reality, more an act of sculpture than of landscape architecture, the purpose of the buildings at the North end should naturally be devoted to the development of sculpture and the promotion of artistic experimentation in the field. The two buildings include residences for artists, exhibition and production space, and can provide a new cultural focal point for an area of Queens currently lacking in artistic institutions.
Finally, the bridge which crosses the active rail line mediates between this “sculptural” section of the Queensway and the more pastoral landscape to the south, composed of baseball fields and a raised greenway. To elongate this moment of transition, the high sides of the bridge taper in a forced perspective, and the hollow frame of the structure amplifies the noise of the train passing underneath. Passing through this gateway in either direction, the visitor is estranged from their location and made ready for the experience of the new and the strange.
Project Type: Competition Proposal, Young Architect’s Competition, Spring 2016
Project Team: Rob Meyerson, Lou Wright
The defining feature of the great Italian university is the enclosed courtyard. From the Ca’ Foscari to the Sapienza, the courtyard calls the student to an introspective existence in which to cultivate the mind. But as Venice and its surroundings move into the 21st century, looking inward will not be enough. A new university campus on the island of Poveglia must give the student a point of vantage as well as a sanctuary.
To this end, The Lagoon proposes a university which dedicates its studies to the problem of climate change, and which materializes this program with a new ‘ground level’ on which to build an urban and educational space. The superstructure encloses the broken quadrangle of the existing ruins - providing the traditional court in which to stroll and contemplate, to gather and celebrate - and raises the majority of the university’s program roughly five metres above the ground. Instead of wasting resources shoring up and restoring an island which will be reclaimed by the lagoon, this school provides a unique perspective from which to study the process of degradation and resilience from all standpoints - scientific, economic, political and artistic.
For centuries, the inhabitation of Poveglia has been a response to crisis - to the political crisis of invasion, the physical crisis of plague, the social crisis of mental illness. The new University of the Lagoon will respond to the crisis of climate change with a new superstructure that holds the bulk of its program above the rising waters, while allowing for habitation of the island’s beautiful ruins as long as their structures allow for it. The first programmatic gesture is at the scale of the landscape: three new canals are dug into the island, providing direct access the central quadrangle via vaporetto from Venice and Lido.
The spoils of the excavation are mounded up to provide support and access to the new superstructure. In this raised volume, a total of 30m in height and expansive in its volume, the main business of the university will take place; classrooms, auditoria, canteen, administration, dormitories and library space are accounted for. Meanwhile, provisional classrooms will be situated in the large existing buildings to the south of the island, and the overgrowth that has overtaken the rest of Poveglia’s land will be allowed to grow unchecked as both an area of study for scholars of resilience and a monument to the inexorable power of nature.
These provisional classrooms will move to the roof of the superstructure as the buildings they inhabit become untenable, and gradually new university spaces will develop on this platform. In this way, the university will become more than a building; it will become the future island that will replace, and remember, the presence of Poveglia.
When Poveglia and its ruins become a new Atlantis, submerged beneath the lapping waves, the University of the Lagoon will remain. Its students will pioneer a new way of living with water, developed at the very heart of the climatic crisis that defines our times.
Project Type: Studio - Live/Work/Play, Fall 2015
Studio Critic: Henry Smith-Miller
This project proposes a school for fabrication in the heart of the redeveloping Brooklyn Navy Yard; a hybrid of manufacturing, institutional, and residential typologies where a new generation of makers will be educated.
The building's siting and massing derive from the intricately folded profile of the industrial coastline; this site condition also inspired the complex, corrugated roof structure that allows for large column-free spans on the interior.
Inside and outside, working and living, opaque and translucent all interweave and overlap to create unique spaces for a new kind of program.
Project Type: Studio - Comprehensive, Spring 2015
Studio Critic: Alexandra Barker
Project Team: Leila Thackara, Rob Meyerson, Lou Wright
The project responds to the call for a supermarket located at the border between El Paso, TX and Juarez, Mexico. Using traditional and contemporary methods, the market hybridizes between the American enclosed 'supermarket' model and the outdoor or semi-enclosed 'fixed market' common to the Mexican urban landscape.
A large canopy unites the site and provides shade and space for goods to be sold outdoors, while three rammed-earth volumes house those goods which need to be mechanically cooled or otherwise conditioned.
Instead of a simple store, the proposal is a landscape, a plaza in which a number of commercial or social experiences can develop; and ideal condition for the complex space of the border.
Project Type: Studio - Residential, Fall 2014
Studio Critic: Erich Schoenenberger
The City of Refuge is a proposal for a 6-story mixed-used residential building in New York’s busy Soho neighborhood, aimed at exploring the urban apartment as an escape, a cloister, a place of calm. While the location on Spring and Broadway is ideal in its proximity to cultural and economic opportunities, it is loud and crowded, and an apartment exposed to this environment would inevitably be a stressful, fish-bowl like space.
To deflect this effect, the facade is deepened to the point that it transforms into an occupiable superstructure and exoskeleton. Taking cues from certain precedents seen in Muslim housing typologies - where the private and public are often separated by zones of semi-privacy, often defined by thickly massed walls - these semi-public open balconies serve to further separate the actual interior spaces from the outside world.
On the interior, apartments are scaled to the monumental dimensions expressed on the exterior. Spidering out like propagating fissures from massive columns housing mechanical chases, interior walls are fractured and tapered to reinforce the impression of a cave-like refuge.
Developed with Dominick Golia for internal competition while at SHoP Architects, Summer 2014. The goal of the competition was to elicit proposals for the then-current RFP from the City of New York seeking to re-design the phone booth for the digital era. WI-FI took the physical nature of the phone booth as its central concern and proposed an object that more clearly communicates the nature of modern communication - wireless, fragmentary, and distribute. To achieve this effect, the typical panels of advertising and clear Plexiglas are replaced with an aggregation of small digital “bricks” which are connected through a ventless thermal transfer system; the recessed screens display constantly updating digital content tailored to the booth’s location.
Project Type: Competition Proposal, Wellfleet (MA) Affordable Accessory Dwelling Unit Competition
Project Team: Angus McCullough, Lou Wright
Date: Spring 2015
Considering and reinterpreting Cape Cod’s mixture of adventurous Modern residential designs and traditional housing forms, this proposal fosters a place to sleep, eat, think, and play. Using the building blocks of heat and water, the house elevates utilities from prosaic infrastructure to poetic formal elements.
At the heart of the plan is a chunky ‘hub’ that serves as the core of the heating system and organizes the spiral flow of the plan. The ‘hub’ punctures the floor plate and extends into the interior, supporting active and passive kitchen uses.
To compliment the centralized mechanical system, the Sled manages rainwater from the large split-pitch roof, redirecting it to a cistern for greywater and gardening use. Thickened walls provide opportunities for integrating amenities and alcoves.
When arranged in a cluster, the Sled leverages negative space to create a living system of four-home units. Mirrored plans work together to create a micro-climate and collect rainwater for a communal garden.
Project Type: Studio - Education, Spring 2014
Studio Critic: Maria Sieira
PHYS / ED is proposal for an elementary school located in Downtown Brooklyn - a school designed with the so-called “problem child” in mind. The student that can’t sit still - the student whose needs are not served by a sedentary classroom and a repetitive lesson.
The school is organized into a pair of volumes stacked and staggered around a central gap, crossed by sculptural bridges. This encourages a learning environment in which the student is constantly moving and exploring.
The hope is that a new kind of schoolday might develop in which the students and their teacher traverse a landscape of subject-defined spaces instead of being confined to a single classroom. In this way, the active student is engaged and invited to learn with all five of their senses.
