Galleries

Air Rights Architecture investigates two formerly forgotten aspects of architecture, the roof and the sky, to reconfigure historical notions that: architecture must primarily touch the ground and large buildings traditionally have flat roofs. The project is situated in a prototypical Midwest urban site with endless opportunities to accommodate changing density patterns.

The boutique hotel project was a built structure along the PCH highway along the California coast. The concept was to be taken from a chosen city and its culture and history. Roca Hotel is found in Morro Bay California. The town influence came from adventure, the love of the outdoors, and the rock that brought settlers to the town originally. The hotels design influence is bringing the interior and the exterior together, fragmentation of the rock, and natural materials. 

Not only are disciplinary intersections needed to address the widening separation between civil engineering, landscape architecture, and architecture within the contemporary urban sprawl but a serious engagement into the architecture of the undesirable is needed. Gas stations, large-scale box stores, fast food, strip malls, and poorly design apartments, continue to liter the horizontal urban landscape, yet few of these types of buildings have had serious, if any, design-research engagement.

The studio allows students to specialize in the comprehensive exploration and conjectural thesis of a specific building type for the duration of a semester. Though multiple programs are addressed, the pursuit of genotypic ëprototypesí (as opposed to specific phenotypes) binds the collective aim of the studio. The first half of the studio focused on the production of a book which documented the normative variables and ëparametricí range of different building types.

Box-store urbanism implies the re-location and re-conception of the large scale retail typically found in suburban box stores. The large retail volumes are immediately challenged by the urban fabricís need for reduced lot sizes, mixed use programs, and active street edges. Through intense urban negotiations and parametric modelling the project explores alternative configurations and various types of organizational strategies.

Air Rights Architecture investigates two formerly forgotten aspects of architecture, the roof and the sky, to reconfigure historical notions that: architecture must primarily touch the ground and large buildings traditionally have flat roofs. The project is situated in a prototypical Midwest urban site with endless opportunities to accommodate changing density patterns.