PORTFOLIO 2016

Symbolic of the space of infinite potential, the all black, empty, gloss cover is also reflective of my own deep exploration of architecture. It is a black hole of everything I've absorbed and conceptualized from my design education and training since fall 2014, and one of my favorite publications.

 30x30 SKETCHES

 POST UP!

Post Up! was an internal poster design competition open to students at the UIC School of Architecture in November 2016. The aim was to propose a projective lineup for the 2026 Lecture Series hosted by the school. The design should express a pedagogical trajectory and/or hypothetical cultural attitude in relation to architecture. This poster won Third Prize.

The cast of speakers generally reflects the sentiment of increasingly exaggerated and stylistic polemics that abandon the rampant asceticism of the prior two decades.

Frank Gehry: Nearing 100, the old guard Deconstructivist offers reflections and a retrospective on another decade of shit architecture.

Peter Marino: Invited because of his ties to the world of fashion, a world that reinvents itself constantly, and because of his acute awareness of what is and can be "in" and "cool".

Odile Decq: Offers insight on the worldwide success of the Confluence Institute for Innovation and creative strategies in architecture, and what that success means for the future of architectural education.

Leonard Koren: Serves as an enduring figure of the wabi-sabi aesthetic of impermanence, a counterpoint to the resurgent hysteria surrounding ornament and ostentation.

Ricky Jay: A magician near the end of his career offers insights on the world of image, illusion, fantasy, and authenticity - important links bridging magic and architecture. He is the first in a long-term plan for a lineup of non-architects.

 THE LOGISTICAL INTERFACE: A HYPER-MEDIATED CITY

As early as 1964, Marshall McLuhan described the global village as a place not so much altered by the content of a medium, but rather, a space transformed by the very nature of medias themselves. For some, this is little more than the inevitable evolution of urban space in the digital age. For others, it represents the city's liberation from the condition of stasis... While McLuhan was referring to the spatial impact of emerging media, the television in particular, this could conceptually include a literal understanding of media intervention in architectural and urban spaces. If the logistical city is a mediated environment, architecture and urban space must be re-conceived as hyper-mediated spaces or interfaces. Architecture itself has always been a phenomenological and perceptual medium in which materiality and formal composition allow us enter a dialogue with the built environment. Before ever the introduction of digital technology, we understand that the wall divides space, program and experience and can even be thought of as an interstitial medium in and of itself. The advent of the share economy and its digital technologies has produced a further layer of engagement through which we relate to the environment around us.

For example, media interfaces or screens of digital information expedite communication and consumption independent of our location. Peapod, an online grocery delivery service, once enabled passersby to shop for groceries by pointing smartphone cameras at a "virtual grocery store" which is a billboard of product images and corresponding QR codes. The strategy is an example of how online order fulfillment undermines the brick and mortar grocery by closing the gap between a shopper and the products through a smartphone interface - grocery shopping can happen anywhere. There are, in addition, common yet overlooked forms of media that more directly alter architecture and experience. Fast-food drive-thru's or loading docks, for instance, are architectural apertures which are designed to accommodate vehicles interfacing with the spaces of back-of-house operations. These hyper-mediated spaces are an alteration of existing architectural or urban space through a logistical interface, embedding elements of logistical systems to extend architectural faculties to modes of delivery.

The idea of hyper-mediated space is not new. There are common forms of interface that have served to smooth the frictions between architecture, people, and product flows. Dispensary machines, such as ATM's and vending machines (from food kiosks to product kiosk's) have been extant for decades. These interfaces that depend on virtual networks collapse the time and distance that separate consumers from cash or products via information and automation. Teller windows at Currency Exchange stores safely facilitate monetary transactions that could otherwise become hostile. Dumbwaiters or elevators are other spatial interfaces that link vertical spaces and serve as logistical corridors for the movement of products and people. Further, the elevator is one historical example of how mechanical media has informed the architecture that houses it, being partly responsible for the emergence of skyscrapers in the 19th century. The drive-thru window in its various forms is one example of an invasive architectural interface that lessens the time and distance between a consumer on-the-go and fast food. So too is the weather-sealed gasket of the warehouse which Deborah Richmond describes in Consumers Gone Wild as an architectural back - the final threshold between the delivery fulfillment chain and the retail environment. The necessity for this back-stage interface is responsible for the "mullet" effect of big box retail stores such as Wal-Mart and also suburban shopping malls and strip malls which emphasize an eye-catching front while conducting business on the back. One could arguably trace the docking bays of fulfillment and distribution centers themselves to the shipping port. The port is the cultural and economic interface bridging ocean and continent, and has been critical in the development of human civilization.

It's evident these forms and scales of interface have served the fluidity of markets by optimizing processes of commercial exchange, but they are often overlooked as architectural informers. They are typically interpreted as consequences of the need for commercial efficiency and functionality. As Branden Hookway identifies in Pandemonium, they are abstractions that are actually the boundary between idea and matter, spatial and temporal relationships. An interface can be conventionally understood as an aperture or screen, but like Hookway, if instead we think about interface itself as the symbolic and functional relationship between at least two parties pending an interaction or exchange then this can open up more formal possibilities. Also, while we may not think of these intermediary devices as media per se, they are nonetheless means to specific ends in the consumer-producer relationship that have a significant stake in the logistics of product movement. The hyper-mediated spaces of the logistical city would take this understanding to an extreme, for example, in the realm of delivery fulfillment.

Unlike the proliferation of massive distribution centers away from urban density, hyper-mediated space would concentrate in denser areas close to the consumer. Concentration in a neighborhood or at a residence, for example, would close the gap between warehouse logistics and the private domain.

The street itself is a type of urban conduit that already mediates between the home and the neighborhood. In Chicago, the alley is an existing logistical conveyor for garbage handling, telecom and power line maintenance, and an outlet for backyard garages - a public corridor for the delivery of privately utilized services. The alley can be re-imagined as a possible interface to become a further localized segment of the delivery fulfillment chain - accommodating an additional logistical layer for package distribution. In this model, the home directly interfaces with the fulfillment chain by deploying the conveyor belt in the alley as a fulfillment conduit on which packages are picked up and delivered at the alley ends. Given the demand by the consumer for expedient delivery and the ease of online ordering, the conveyor becomes critical in both receiving and shipping. The frictions between ordering and delivering are further smoothed, adding to the comforts of home life in a similar way that the conveyor has added to the convenience of sorting processes in distribution centers.

Porting the docking bay to the home allows the influence of market transaction directly into the domestic realm which, as history has shown with the fulfillment center and shipping port, can lead to the dramatic development of those mediated environments. Conveyor invasion could similarly alter existing domestic types beginning with the transformation of the domestic interior, which is already a revolving door of commodities. Taken to a logical though quite dystopian extreme, the home would no longer be a static commodity container but rather a dynamic, hyper-mediated, space for the consumption of things as they are needed.

A hyper-mediated city involves logistical developments at neighborhood and domestic scales that reflect the current paradigm of rapid and optimal product delivery and service. The result is an expansion of operation of the fulfillment center to that of the neighborhood block and its constituent houses - the final and elusive frontier of big box operation. In a sense, neighborhood blocks themselves become distribution satellites for the final leg of delivery. Meanwhile, the house, as Deborah Richmond suggests in Consumers Gone Wild, has itself become a speculative capital flow, a literal commodity inside the flows of commodities in the neighborhood of the hyper-mediated city. The residential domain is finally "consumed" by the fulfillment chain itself taking its place as a "small box" or just another node in a vast logistical network.

 DISEGNO / POST-1871

Architecture Through the Looking Glass: Perception and Meaning In Architectural Representation
1871 (Merchandise Mart, Chicago, present) and the North American Phalanx (Colts Neck, NJ, 1843): Two communities, two collaborative agendas, divergent ideas about labor and leisure. What if 1871 were re-envisioned as a dispersed campus that, architecturally, is as much for work as it is for education and recreation?

Worktopia: How did the organization of the historical utopian community impact the behavior of its populace and how has it carried on to notions about contemporary work and the workplace? Post-1871 is a new co-working hub and collaborative for work-play - the inevitable merger of labor and leisure through digital technology and architecture. Members can enjoy the benefits of working remotely on a spacious rural campus - symbolically located at the former site of the North American Phalanx which burned down in 1972, 101 years since the Great Chicago Fire. The old informs the new. Alienation in advanced capitalist society is mitigated at Post-1871 where members can channel their alienation into personal productivity for the benefit of the community.

The Drawing Is the Project
Post-1871's early design saw the drawing itself become the project - extracting unique qualities of lines and grids (grid/scapes) to compose, organize and inform the community's planning. These qualities include pixelation, fidelity, resolution, homogeneity, density, and dispersion.

It's This Nor That

A model of The Thing is as good as the thing itself.

The Thing is both complementary and projective on its own in an attempt to give form to a field of hatches by "extracting" the linework that governed the drawing; i.e. The Thing is the physical manifestation of the drawing's linework. Unlike the soft density and ambiguity of the drawing the thing is tangible - legible, hard and certain. Although, just like the drawing, it maintains an exterior homogeneity, generality, anonymity or lack of identity while containing an inner richness only apparent by engaging with it.

Here's The Thing.

That's Here Nor There.

Drawing Conclusions
Vignettes celebrate the qualities of drawing elicited, derived or identified from the initial grid/scape drawings while explicitly calling out the contrasting ideas of labor in the 19th century and contemporary society. The particular use of white space in the drawings frame the subjects in their isolation, even while in the company of others.

 MAYANS

Deviant, glitchy, peculiar, simulated physics, tacky materialities, and strange characters.

 HYPERSHORE: ARCHITECTURE AS INTERFACE

Premise: Virtual communities and digital services inform a new speed of living, becoming the new placeless venues of communication, interaction and exchange. Therefore:

1. Work and play happen any time.
2. Community is everywhere - both location-specific and ubiquitous.

In the new digitally-expedient paradigm, architecture remains too slow to act and must therefore be equally as spontaneous to accommodate spontaneity.

The design for an urban community center on the south side of Chicago addresses the influence of digital media, services and devices on existing notions of wellness, leisure and community. Hypershore is an architectural response - an interface - appropriately conceived as a type of logical questionnaire related to each specific visitor's wellness. What does wellness mean? What are some possible solutions? How does wellness relate to the technological paradigm? How do these answers become architecture? How does this architecture become urban? How does the Hypershore respond?

The Hypershore is a strategy for architecturally clashing social dynamics and a platform for socially-oriented wellness. This is accomplished through multi-functional spaces and programmatic mash-ups or adjacencies. Its mission is to productively leverage the frenetic pace and time-sucking, attention-grabbing pull of digital media through programmatic collisions.

The Hypershore mitigates the built-in contradiction of internet socializing; i.e. greater communicative potential within physical dislocation or the tendency to become more transparent (open) behind a screen due in part to the elimination of physical presence. The Interface subversively alleviates physical tension by easing its subjects into an urban environment that collides disparate social groups under the guise of wellness and leisure. Architecture becomes an interface to the city, activity, people, and wellness.

Mat-building can be said to epitomise the anonymous collective, where the functions come to enrich the fabric, and the individual gains new freedoms of action through a new and shuffled order, based on interconnection, close-knit patterns of association, and possibilities for growth, diminution and change. Smithson

Architecture was seen as the combination of spaces, events, and movements without any hierarchy or precedence among these concepts… [a way of generating] non-hierarchical relationships, program, and an unlikely combination of events. Tschumi

The Hypershore fosters wellness as a social activity by aggregating social condensers - programmatically categorized into modes of access: shared, semi-public, direct, and indirect. These social condensers both delineate and blur lines between spaces and programs, privacy and publicity. The result is a lengthy parkscape - collapsing space and program via a multi-functional urban carpet. Truncated pyramids, reminscent of Mayan temples and how they shaped urban interiors, organize built area, earth-shelters and small hills. Program is a non-hierarchically distributed across the scape - creating a merging gradient of interrelated form, program. Heterogeneity via homogeneous mass.

...Programmatic layering upon vacant terrain to encourage dynamic coexistence of activities and to generate through their interference, unprecedented events. Koolhaas