With data from my period of unemployment, I created a way to look back at what chances really were when I send out an email to a company I am interested in.
This also served as an introduction to the Processing scripting language, and a dose of humor in dark times.
Signaling a new era in design education, the Center for Art, Architecture, and Design Education focuses on purposeful shifts towards a better way of educating. By using the architecture to unite diverse groups meaningfully, the Sam Fox School hopes to better prepare graduates for the future ahead.
Studio spaces and faculty spaces are grouped separately to allow for the development of ideas before they are brought together. Within these groups are a subset of smaller groups. These smaller groups are composed of each students’ or faculties’ work space and one pocket space. The pocket spaces are flexible spaces that promote small scale meetings, relaxation, and discovery. The varying scales of interaction are meant to promote the development of ideas from a thought, to a finished work.
The form of the building has been manipulated to minimize the energy requirements for cooling and heating, while still acknowledging the context of the campus around it.
The Mong Kok Nightclub Hotel is enveloped in a tight fabric and bamboo structure that hugs the form of the program within. It acts as a visual separation between the public and the guest just as clothes hides things from others, adding intrigue to those outside. The bamboo and fabric are also reminiscent of the scaffolding surrounding so many of Hong Kong’s buildings.
The only exposed program within are the all glass boxes that extrude from each hotel room. These boxes can act as storefronts to those offering services, a location to watch others, or a location to be watched. The cantilevered space alludes to the delicate balance between comfort and danger where sexual excitement lies.
Within the fabric envelope, one is within the private space. This is where each hotel room stands alone, looking at other rooms, but not touching. The walls of each room are made of glass, with optional curtains inside. This provides each guest with a unique voyeuristic experience. The sporadic pattern of rooms scatters the view, teasing the viewer by only allowing glimpses of others.
This was an entry in the 2011 Arquitectum.com Hong Kong Nightclub Hotel in Mong Kok.
UDON is an innovative urban parking structure designed to address the safety, health, and sustainability shortcomings of the parking garage typology while placing it in the context of a vertically sprawling Hong Kong in a time of “anything is possible”.
UDON fights the stagnant, patterned monoliths already overburdening the skyline by introducing a form that works with nature rather than against it. The soft form of the strand allows it to work with the context in form and function.
UDON is but one noodle in the soup towards a safer, healthier, and more sustainable Hong Kong.
ONEWAY: a single lane for automobile traffic moving in a single direction with 60 degree parking on one side.
WALKWAY: a running, biking, and walking path that is used as circulation for UDON and as an exercise track.
When ONEWAY and WALKWAY are joined together, they become a single flexible strand that can then be tightly packed in many ways for optimal efficiency. UDON uses simulated particle physics to pack the strand onto the site. This allows required program to be easily nested within the strands. Much like beef cubes in a bowl of noodles.
A one-way parking structure is the easiest to navigate. It requires no map or signage. The parking spots are named according to their distance from the exit and colored according to their height off the ground.
Each rented parking space comes with a bike rental included in the price. One is stored at the front of each parking place, and extras distribute around the structure. The bikes can be used as a sustainable way to bring the customer to the ground level, instead of energy consuming elevators. They can also be used for exercise or as transport into the city, new reasons to visit UDON. This utilizes the potential energy that is normally wasted when one ascends parking structures.
With multiple services offered, UDON has a diversity of visitors. This will not only provide income security for UDON investors, but security for the users. An experienced runner may want to run up then down the entire garage, so they park at the bottom. While a family going for a bike ride may want an easy ride so they start at the top. This dispersal of parking prevents potentially dangerous “dead-zones” of little use.
The general rule of parking safety is “park in highly visible, well lit areas”. With the increased traffic caused by the one-way road, no more “dead-zones”, and the number of people running on the track nearby, each parking spot is frequently viewed.
The walls of UDON are steel cables with varying types of plants climbing up them. The porosity of this skin allows natural lighting to penetrate into the building to illuminate any threats. This, also, allows natural ventilation of the garage while acting as a giant filter that cleans the carbon particulates from the air.
In one corner of the site rises a minimal core with rectilinear volumes cantilevered off from it. These volumes contain the essential functions of UDON. Lobby and reception are at the ground level nearest to the entrance of the parking. Above them are the offices for the administrators. Midway up the structure are the two levels of multi-purpose space, one with a terraced outdoor area. The top floor is the Café, also with indoor and outdoor seating. The outdoor seating has an option where visitors can sit on a stretch of grass and look out over the harbour.
The program volumes are made of concrete with rough recycled aggregate. Shielding this from solar rays, a single layer of back-painted glass is offset from the surface of the concrete. This glass can be backlit with multicolor L.E.D.’s to appear as glowing boxes in the sky during the “Festival of Lights”.
The rectilinear form of the program volumes is meant to appear as frozen in time whereas the curvilinear form of the ONEWAY-WALKWAY conveys the constant motion taking place within it.
Zombies are your friends, families, and loved ones. They have been infected with a disease that has made them behave in ways much more aggressive than usual, driving them to the point of murder and cannibalism. It has been shown that there is a direct link with the Zombie virus and these aggressive tendencies. Though there is no cure at this time, there is hope for those infected. Like all viruses, we can fight it and revert the victims back into healthy humans.
Finding a cure for the zombie virus will take time and resources. Time is infinite, as long as zombies do not overrun your position, and resources are abundant, yet spread across the country. The only choice is to have a mobile lab.
With a mobile lab, survivors return to a hunter-gatherer society, scavenging and searching for their needs. The mobility also protects them from zombie swarms, as their bodies can easily pile-up and eventually overwhelm any position.
Because no ones knows what the horizon may bring, a flexible design must be achievable with the mobile lab. It must constantly change its role, like an aircraft carrier on land. Fortunately, NASA already has something similar, the Crawler-Transporter for the space shuttle.
Properly outfitted, “The Creeper” can slowly navigate the unknown path towards finding a cure for the zombie virus.
A twenty story monolithic office tower rises in Abu Dhabi next to a park. The face is split revealing a fractal and mirrored interior, while offering the park to those inside. The fractured facade appears randomly shattered, but they are scripted through grasshopper to reflect on a single point out in the park.
At the end of the rift is a single glass lift, transporting employees from the double height entrance lobby up to the helicopter landing pad on the roof. The access to the center of each floor plate allows the floors to have multiple occupants with a shared lift lobby.
This was a one month competition done during my time at Atelier Jean Nouvel.
This project with friend Bobby Cheng is an installation to be located at the Capella Resort in Singapore by Norman Foster. Interpreting a series of sketches and discussions, my role on the project was to quickly develop different complex schemes using parametric software. Images were then sent to Singapore for design decisions.
I aided former colleague Bobby Cheng, with the 3D design work for the Fat Cow Restaurant in Singapore. This was a fast paced interiors competition that was eventually won by ourselves against two other high profile interior design firms. Work involved creating schemes and working renderings to help illustrate the potential of this space.
Restaurant is now open.
Approached by fellow architect Mark Smith to aid him in the modeling and rendering of an innovative proposal for a series of housing blocks in the Tai Po area of Hong Kong.
Models were built off of sent elevations and floor plans. More detailed design was done together through sketches and discussion.
