The objective of my thesis is to study climate-responsive elements for housing. The word elements refers to the components of the building envelope. The term climate-responsive describes any building that reacts to local climate and also respects the physical environment. The hope is to arrive and establish a new set of elements that can transcend future housing developments, specifically in the Miami Beach area. / Master of Architecture

In order to make a more attractive and efficient built environment, residential architecture must be incorporated into the fabric of the city. The most successful cities have a mixture of business and residential activities. In most cities, business flourishes in the center, while housing is pushed out to the edges. This causes the city centers to be occupied by day, but abandoned at night. A city with integrated housing becomes a community, a place where people call home. When the city becomes a backyard, it is thought of more carefully and considered to be more important. For this to take place, good urban housing must exist to accommodate the people who will make the city come to life. This urban housing must be attractive enough to make people want to stay for long periods of time and invest in their own improvements. Personalization and pride in a city allow its residents to feel safe and comfortable. When someone respects the place they live in, they respect the environment around it. In other words, good housing is the foundation for a successful community. The objective of this project was to architecturally manifest an urban residential complex that could foster pride and personal identity for the city dweller. The Cameron Street Housing site provided the perfect arena for this objective in Old Town Alexandria, Virginia. The existing surroundings called for a medium density complex that respected the historical styles and showed innovation to accommodate contemporary living. The concept of the project centered around the separation and identity of one's home, the creation of a community within a community, and the use of thresholds to provide layers of space between the public and the private. The forms and materials reflect the surrounding typology without imitating it; the living units conform to modern living without limiting the types of family structures that can inhabit them, and the site provides a sanctuary for its residents while it gives something back to the community. The Cameron Street Housing design stands as an example of what urban housing can do to improve the city around it. / Master of Architecture

This thesis presents a design process. It takes a look at the issue of whether architecture is what one brings to the design or what one discovers in the process. It explores the complexity that comes from an involvement with architecture without having to do complicated things. It is a study to understand what wall is and how it may accommodate performance. This thesis design commits to an architecture of walls to discover. / Master of Architecture

Master of Architecture

It is impossible to say when man’s mind first conceived the urge to fly, The dream of moving through the air like birds. From Archytas of Taranto’s flying machine to Armstrong’s first step on the moon, flying has progressed from imaginary to an everyday part of life. This thesis is an attempt to establish a new housing type. It is a dialogue between ever changing technology and the timeless ideas of architectural composition. The house is an intersection of timelessness and temporality. Le Corbusier stated “The house of a man, irrespective of differences in time or climate, is a pure, organic organization, and the purer it is, the more it is a type. From hut to palace, this type based on a deeply rational and sensitive foundation and become distinctive in flow of time.” The housing complex, located at an airport near the Appalachian Mountains, consists of six dwellings- each of which accommodate an airplane. Steven Holl stated “The site of a building is more than a mere ingredient in its conception. It is its physical and metaphysical foundation. The resolution of the vistas, sun angles, circulation and access, are the ‘physics’ that demand the ‘metaphysics’ of the architecture. Through a link, an extended motive, a building is more than something merely fashioned for the site.” Architecture is a spatial art; unlike painting or sculpture, it cannot be understood at once. Like music, it is a temporal art that comes into being through movement. Architectural composition should be based on the awareness that architecture is a phenomenon that can only be appreciated with the movement of the observer. Le Corbusier stated “Architecture is judged by the eyes that see, by the head that turns and the legs that walk. Architecture is not a synchronic phenomenon but a successive one, made up of pictures adding themselves one to the other, following each other in time and space, like music.” In a building, the 3-dimensional volume is governed by the interaction of the horizontal (floors) and vertical (walls) planes. Through the articulation of these planes, a rhythmic movement can be achieved. As Gideon suggested in Space, Time and Architecture, time is not just a 4th dimension experienced in concert with action, there is a 5th dimension that has to do with the movement of psychological phenomenon. Time is not strictly sequential, it possesses depth, that is historical in character. It transcends simple sequences, generating connections and triggering psychological phenomena. Architecture is an assemblage of feelings and perceptions in which these five dimensions interact. / Master of Architecture

Theatre would be radical, arousing, inspiring, challenging popular emotion, presenting native problems. Human strength and aspiration would go there for inspiration..." - Frank Lloyd Wright- Bruce Brooks Pfeiffer, Gerald Nordland: Frank Lloyd Wright in the realm of ideas, Bynum, NC: Southern Illinois University Press, 1988, page 100 / Master of Architecture

Connection and variety are the quintessential characteristics of successful urban neighborhoods – variety in places to shop, products to buy, income level of residents, and in the interests and activities of the people who populate the sidewalks. Urban variety is not the consequence of population density alone: people must be in contact with one another, if only visually, for the place to succeed. The inside must communicate with the outside. For a city to work, its people must only follow the simple epigrammatic advice of E.M. Forster – Only connect. A place which facilitates connections must propose a physical variegation: different sizes of places, polyvalent places, places diverse in age and in cost. At the scale of the dwelling, diversity necessitates an economy of material and action, through which even a relatively modest apartment can become an excellent home. Recognizing, then, these fundamentals, is it possible to apply them in such a way that a single project may provide the seed for urban growth in a misused part of a city district? And what constitutes such a seed – what components are indispensable for it to grow? How does the articulation of degrees of privacy energize the city? The question requires that the city, both general and particular, is understood. / Master of Architecture

Master of Architecture

The architect gathers his knowledge along the wandering path of life. He approaches a threshold and a new journey begins, a process of design into which he is gathered to embark on the task of touching peoples lives in hope that they may gather together. "One cannot be together with others in a space if one cannot be alone there in the midst of others." ALDO VAN EYCK / Master of Architecture

A small multi-functional gallery was designed for the town of Blacksburg, Virginia to accommodate the needs of students, university organizations, and towns’ people. The gallery would serve as the location for exhibitions of art, lectures, films, and performance art. / Master of Architecture