1. Embodied Waste
Master of Architecture Thesis Project (UC Berkeley, 2024)
Advisors: Maria Alvarez -Garcia + Yasmin Vobis
* Awarded Chester Miller Fellowship
Embodied Waste explores the intricate relationship between discarded material and unstable terrain and confronts the idea of disposing something as an act of forgetting. The proposed protective structure located on Tepco Beach, in Richmond, CA serves as an experiment, a provocation, and a theorization of how to treat a discard pile. Founded on solidity’s inevitable disintegration, this project draws from elevated archaeological structures that preserve valued ruins and suggests that these constructions be used to reevaluate and reimagine sites where discarded materials might otherwise remain useless. Embodied Waste is produced from on-site re-crushed semi-toxic scrap material, an attempt at contamination neutrality instead of fixating on embodied carbon measures. Can adopting a conservationist approach to sites of decay (no matter their supposed cultural value) offer a model for reframing and questioning our increasingly developed and deteriorating built environment?
Full Text Description Sheltering cultural heritage sites has been a concern since the first law of preservation was defined in 1790, just a few years after the French Revolution. Protecting historical remains generally entails rigorous preservation procedures. Shielding content from natural environmental factors is a primary concern, which in turn necessitates surrounding material with a roof above. Apart from this reality these enclosures signal that whatever is being framed is worthy of attention and consideration.
Taking this line of reasoning, this project asks what is possible if a less conventionally sacred substance is preserved and put on display, if we used framing as a device and framed something else, would this enable us to see legacies differently? What we've inherited from times past is not always idealistic, it is also the gross, the boring, the toxic, the ugly. When reconsidering what surrounding landscape to "protect '' for the sake of this thesis project, land designated as landfill popped up as an oppositional thought...
These designated waste sites are often in marginal areas adjacent to politically and economically dispossessed communities... Richmond, California (about a 20 minute drive north of Berkeley) is home to more than a hundred hazardous waste sites, including two highly contaminated federally designated Superfund locations, meaning that they require a long-term response to clean up material contaminations. A sprawling network of shuttered chemical plants and oil refineries in the area have left harmful pollutants in Richmond's air, water, and soil.
Tepco Beach is on the Richmond coastline at the southwestern edge of Point Isabel. This uncanny beach served as the dumping ground for the Tepco pottery factory which was in operation in El Cerrito between 1930 and 1968. The beach is strewn with hundreds of thousands of broken pieces of pottery, and more wash up onto the shore from the bay every day. The shoreline is also littered with roadway asphalt that was dumped on the site over time, serving as an impromptu landfill.
The beach is the definition of obsolesence. It's located off the beaten path and since it's relatively hidden and close to an industrial park with a Costco and Post Office, it is not often visited. The provisional protective structure proposed for this project sits on Tepco Beach, framing the unstable ground with a light footprint, thinking that that which already exists might just look like what one proposes. Unlike traditional archeological sites mentioned earlier, enclosure and the interior are not certainties but remain loose and in flux.
The structure participates in the reuse of waste in an attempt at contamination neutrality as an alternative to carbon footprint measures. The surrounding asphalt waste is crushed and serves as the structural material used as filler for recycled plastic bags. These bags, much like sandbags used to create military protective barriers or those stacked in flood zones, are aggregated on site and stack to form 12 foot columns with barbed wire between the bags as done in sandbag building techniques. Building with bags has been proven useful and fitting for these defensive applications and serve much of those same needs in this case.
The structure (much like a pier) is suspended above the water, the waste bags serve as both walls and columns holding a scaffold-like footbridge 30 inches above the beach floor. Moving away from the picturesque and towards a matter of fact approach to the land best defines the organizational structure which obscures views out to the bay in favor of looking down. The bridge and its adjoining platforms sample the landscape, providing compact views to the ceramic beach ground throughout.
Different from traditional archeological sites mentioned earlier, water is at play here and instead of protecting the site from the elements and forming a watertight assembly the building aims to integrate the conditions that have shaped the environment into what it is today. The roof provides coverage over the footbridge, but is cut away along the perimeter to reveal the sky above. At times, during high-tide the footbridge is submerged, naturally closing the structure off from human occupation. The tide works as program, centering new material fragments for view in these dedicated observation areas and washing others away just the same.
Offering less culturally valuable sites a roof and a platform is a way to architect, and perhaps can provide a new practice of commoning that turns our awareness to the temporal-material medium of the earth. Hopefully this project serves as an ad hoc model for remediating sites of discard with a type of adaptable structure that can be erected quite simply with readily available scrap components. The staging of wastelands in this manner inevitably entails loosening material tolerances in favor of reconnecting us to the land or accumulations of unnamable things. But perhaps expanding the definition of resources to include waste provides an abundance mindset as an alternative way to operate within the topics of resource depletion or insufficiency.
2. Becomes This
Integrated Studio collab. with Andreas Manos (UC Berkeley, 2023)
Instructor: David Jaehning
The production of mass timber products involves transforming a tree into a component that is ultimately a more robust composite of its original self. These transformations can include a number of operations from cutting, grinding, peeling, slicing to pressing, heating, molding, gluing, nailing, etc… the outcome being turning something cylindrical (a tree) into something flat (dimensioned lumber). Becomes This reckons with the treatment and processing that underpins mass timber products and plays with turning flat cornered surfaces into something cylindrical again. In order to better understand wood as a structural unit and learn about its possible limits, the project examined a tree’s cellular structure. Trees rely on their cells as a basic structural unit, the cell formations informed much of the design decisions, specifically the cells’ round form and bundled strength. This studio focused on expressing “structure as concept” and this project responds to this prompt quite plainly with nothing more than floor plates and 25-bundled glulam structural tubes which result in a series of interstitial spaces used for programming needs and the the building’s internal MEP systems.
3. EXP: 0/0/0
Ruinophilia & The Off-Modern Ruin: Chinatown Portsmouth Square Studio collab. with Hue Bui (UC Berkeley, 2023)
Instructors: Lyndon Neri + Rossana Hu, Christina Cho Yoo
* Awarded Design Process Award
Top: CNC poplar site model.
Left: Sketch of elevations for Portsmouth Square. Right: 3D printed final square design.
Studio Brief:
The studio referred to Svetlana Boym who suggests “off-modern” relationships between preservation and development, advocating for designers to engage with traces of the past - past authors, builders, failed projects, and revealing the traces of non-realized compositions. The studio took on Boym’s ruinophilia and pentimenti in the context of the historical legacy of Chinatown San Francisco. In addressing the off-modern, it also borrowed from the notion of the monument put forth by Aldo Rossi, who conceived the city as a living entity, constantly transforming and accumulating its own consciousness and memory. Rossi argued that architecture’s value resides within the forms of urban artifacts, which continue to structure the city even after they have shed their functions. To expand upon Rossi’s theoretical framework, students were encouraged to investigate how notions of ruinophilia in eastern thinking can provide new design strategies for adaptive reuse. The design intervention entailed redesigning Portsmouth Square along with the adjacent brutalist Hilton Hotel tower to accomodate multi-generational users, locals, and tourists.
Response: San Francisco’s Chinatown enclave serves a largely senior population with many congregating in Portsmouth Square during the day. Through research, we found that senior Chinatown residents prefer not to move out of Chinatown to more suburban areas to be taken care of when they grow old, mainly due to language barriers and access to social, emotional and cultural exchanges they so readily experience in the city. Since our site is a Naturally Occurring Retirement Community (NORC), we find it relevant to focus on aging in place. In order to privilege, the elderly our design decisions mediate accessibility, autonomy, and social interaction. With an underlying understanding that “aging” does not equal “expiring”, we aim to answer: how can this given site’s infrastructure better host its aging in place community?
4. Red, White, and Blue and Brown
Project collab. with Taylor Mulitz for Proto-Domestics, AAVS SF (Architectural Association, 2022)
Facilitated by: Lingxiu Chong
* Awarded full-scholarship for attendance
500 Capp Street Foundation Exhibition - PROTO-DOMESTICS: Experimenting with the Everyday
Stool
Sitting can happen on this stool, as well as other things. It was made in under an hour without a predetermined plan for its aesthetic quality or funcitonal purpose. It is a response to the question: what happens when you just make.
Handles 1
This whittled set of handles are modeled after the handles in River Cabin at Salmon Creek Farm in Albion, CA. The cabin handles meet you just where you expect them to when climbing from the first floor up to the sleeping loft. Their uncomplicated design and calculated placement typifies the design decisions that result from taking things slow and being resourceful with material.
