More to come as it becomes public.

The community goals for Salem’s streetscapes were to provide continuity in a diverse environment, celebrate the local landscape, brighten downtown, integrate wayfinding and art, and establish and support social spaces. We established these goals in a visioning exercise, came back to them often, and worked to achieve them through a year of intensive, rewarding public engagement and design.

Our team’s solution to provide continuity was to develop scalable streetscape designs that could be applied to diverse sidewalk widths and uses while providing a consistent palette of materials to tie the downtown environment together.

We worked closely with City of Salem forestry and maintenance staff to write planting requirements that could support a healthy tree canopy, adaptive landscape, and meet the public’s goal to celebrate their location in the lush Willamette River Valley.

We integrated thoughtful lighting, historic interpretation, and art opportunities - especially at Salem’s unique alley entrances - and worked through designs to supported important and vulnerable sidewalk users such as children, families, and the elderly.

To establish the critical social spaces Salemites desired while meeting our project constraints to stay within existing sidewalk dimensions, we found underutilized bump-outs and excess asphalt in inefficient parking striping to convert opportunistically into social seating, community information sharing, art, and historic interpretation areas. In some instances we looked at parking utilization and suggested temporary or permanent conversion of spaces into social gathering or green space as a future project.

The Salem Streetscape Plan was unanimously approved by the Urban Renewal Agency and work is underway. The full plan is available here.

Our driving goal in St. Bernard Parish was to alleviate flooding that had hindered public life and transform water infrastructure into positive public space.

St. Bernard Urban Wells
At the south side of the parish, part of our strategy was to increase capacity in several existing canals. Canals cannot be left stagnant for more than a day at a time to keep them safe from mosquito breeding, however, so we had to find an inexpensive way to keep water flowing. Soils analysis suggested that subsurface fresh water is flowing underground from the Mississippi River toward the 40 Arpent Canal and our so strategy was to tap into this hydrologic energy with wells at the river-side of the canals.

We designed injection wells to monitor and aid water flow through the canals at all times and used them as a public amenity and educational device in the plan.

At the core of all our urban design projects was a battle to sway the hearts and minds of New Orleaneans to think of their city as interdependent with water. To "live with water" in their delta city instead of fearing, hiding and controlling it. I used a phenomenological approach to communicate this in my design for the wells, where spending time near one becomes a reminder that we are not separated from, but surrounded by water; a beautiful, life-giving force.

At the northernmost edge of St. Bernard Parish our strategy was to increase capacity in the 40 Arpent Canal by allowing overflow into undeveloped adjacent properties. Our team developed three initial concepts for these properties; one prioritizing recreation, one development, and one clean water. Our team came up with the overarching ideas collectively and I developed and communicated them visually. 

I am a big fan of digital collage for quick, communicative work and an take a sketch book on every vacation.

Design as Protest
From newly freed slaves' encampments along busy train lines to a taco truck wall around Trump Tower, designed protests play an important role in shaping American democracy. Our group of designers and citizens came together to identify worries and hopes for the future; then tackle one through design.
My group's Design as Protest project was to illuminate voting districts that unfairly deprive people of representation; making those invisible lines visible and showing their absurd, provocative shapes. Our next step is to work with Design as Protest artists to turn these concepts into public art.

Team: Julia Sevin, Naomi Doerner, Morgan Maiolie, Sarah Woodward, Bob Snead

Project Pipeline
Project Pipeline connects architect mentors with New Orleans high school students in semester-long classes and summer camps. The National Organization of Minority Architects started Project Pipeline in 2009 to address the issue that few minorities pursue architecture degrees, which leads to an imbalance in representation in a discipline that shapes all of our lives.

I work with a team of four in the spring semester of 2016 to develop strategy, curriculum, plan final critiques, oversee volunteers, and mentor students.

Front Yard Initiative Toolkit
Paving front yards in New Orleans is a widespread practice that aggravates localized street flooding, contributes to the urban heat island effect, pollutes water, and creates an environment that disincentivizes walking. It is also illegal, but many people aren’t aware the practice is problematic.

To encourage homeowners to design new, permeable yards and qualify for public funds to do so, my team donated our time on Martin Luther King Jr. Day to design this toolkit. It starts with considerations like how much sun your yard gets and how much maintenance you're willing to do, continues to different strategies that match those considerations, and concludes with example plans from previous projects. We worked with homeowners who had previously received grants to convert their yards to understand pitfalls and opportunities from their unique experience.

Community Art Critiques
I curated art at a New Orleans coworking space to incite discussion about social issues in our community. Some of our artists studied environmental degradation on the Gulf Coast, food sovereignty across the US, the history of social memory, and the urban spaces of New Orleans. We held art opening discussions to talk about the art and the topic the art addresses. 

Our team's goal was to invite people moving past Arabi into the downtown by offering easy wayfinding and a reason to go there. One part of our team developed strategies for the heavily trafficked vehicular corridors to the north, while I developed strategies for pedestrian activity on the levee to the south.

People often walk dogs, run, and bike the levee on the Mississippi River as its one of the only contiguous dedicated pedestrian pathways in the city and surrounding suburbs. The levee is particularly active south of Arabi, but not many people leave the levee to enter the downtown. One strategy to promote more crossing was a playful wall design that added local artwork (symbolized here with colorful graphic circles), symbols denoting businesses people could visit on the other side, bike locks so bikers wouldn't have to hoist their bike over the wall, and pool ladders that make it easy to hop over while playing off the apt local saying that New Orleans is a city in a bathtub.

On the Arabi side of the wall, our strategy was to serve Arabi denzens by adding a sidewalk that undulates up occasionally to provide a more interesting walk with views of the river, and incorporates rest with shade structures and benches at key locations. We also designed a platform to provide space for locals who cross the levee to sit by the river that rises and lowers with river levels.

I analyzed personas of those people who use the Arabi downtown, riverfront and circulation corridors as part of my design process.

"In the same way that traditional zoning precludes healthy, mixed-use communities, the segregation of natural and built environments has created cities where environmental degradation is the norm and the landscape is bland and homogeneous." - Mike Houck. Humanity is a part of the natural world and the environments we create must be viewed as evolving systems within a planetary whole. Too easily, it seems, we forget our roots. This project aims to help a city remember the connection to nature that gave it its start.

I completed Edge Urbanisms: A Holistic Experience of Wilderness and Culture in my graduate thesis design studio in 2011. The study explores a fundamental tenet of urban planning and building design: that we draw a boundary between the built environment and the natural, the urban and the geographic, and create cities that lack connection to our unique geographic place and time. The Edge Urbanisms project is about engendering a holistic sense of place by folding together urbanity and geography to create a healthier and more complete environment for human beings.

The Site
The site is one of the few areas between Boise's open land and the city that has not been developed with housing. This provides the unique opportunity to create a hard edge between urban density and open land. The entire project area is masterplanned schematically while the main architectural focus is the bar building to the east of the site, on the edge of built environment and landscape.


The FORMAL Fold
Ecotones, the edges between two habitats, can take many shapes and the one chosen for this site is the fold. The fold creates a long edge between both the urban and natural environment, allowing each to retain its identity while being interlocked with the other for an integrated experience. 

The TEMPORAL Fold
The small stream to the north floods this site annually. The phenomena of the flood is welcomed by the project because lends a welcome sense of temporality and change to the environment, something people trek into the foothills year round to experience. 

Temporal folding also happens daily through the sun and seasonally through native plantings. Sanford Kwinter’s The Complex and the Singular and Randall Teal’s The Process of Place inspired this project’s embrace of transitory phenomena. Both hold that places change throughout time and this should be brought to the forefront of their design.

The TECTONIC Fold
Sketch model experiments with folding and with light informed the tectonics of the skin between the urban and geographic parts of the fold. Ramps fold through the interior and exterior, obscuring the line between the two and providing a continuous walkway above the flood. 

A planted screen creates an ever-changing edge to interstitial space between the building envelope and the outdoors. 

This undergraduate schematic urban design project creates linked wildlife corridors through downtown Coeur d'Alene, Idaho. Coeur d'Alene is a small resort town inhabited by outdoor enthusiasts and its economic success has lead to an expansive footprint; pushing away the wildlife many residents enjoy.

I completed this project as a 5th-year graduate student in 2011. The Cultural District Masterplan identifies the elements that make the city of Boise unique, then builds upon those elements to create a cultural district that promotes this lesser-known city as a specific urban place uniquely connected to it's geographic place, time, and conditions.

A strong local focus on agriculture, abundance of solar access, and a unique relationship to the river in Boise's arid climate combine as primary drivers of architectural form. In this schematic design, building massing is dramatically affected by the angle of the sun, the prioritization of urban agriculture, and the meandering of stormwater treatment facilities.

Solar Tilt Diagram highlights south-facing facades of buildings along the 8th Street Cultural District. The downtown street grid does not run directly north south, so to allow buildings to address the street as well as maintain south-facing façades I introduce rotate building floors at the second or third story. This diagonal already exists in a few downtown Boise buildings to some degree and here becomes a defining aesthetic of the cultural district. Reorienting these façades makes the sun more easy to control for daylighting and more easy to adapt for outdoor space.

Green Space Diagram addresses the potential for green roofs to bring the area's dedication to agriculture inside the city, to further outdoor living opportunities and to inject green space into a dense part of the downtown.

Storm Water Diagram shows how water can be collected from impervious roofs and streetscapes, channeled, slowed, and remediated in street-side bioswales. Bioswales serve to beautify the street and guide the way through the district to the Boise River.

The photocollaged images show how these bioswales can appropriate existing voids in the urban fabric, infusing the Cultural District experience with native flora and fauna.

The first set of work was done for the Integrated Design Lab in Boise, the research arm of the University of Idaho for sustainable building design. This project is an example of digital daylight analysis done in Ecotect, then analyzed with Daysim, and Radiance for a classroom in Twin Falls. 

The next set is of was for the Brulatour House in New Orleans, LA. The building will be renovated for use as art museums by the Historic New Orleans Collection and the program requires some bright, open spaces to view models and maps and some spaces with very controlled light (18 fc, 44,000 fc/yr) for centuries old pen and ink works. Our design team took light measurements at several museums, analyzed many daylighting strategies, and settled on a 68% clear sawtooth with 2 ft-oc fins and 20% VLT operable shade cloth. I was responsible for light measurements, daylight modelling, and graphics, and assisted in design development and client presentations.

Following that is a physical daylight model to analyze several ceiling design iterations of the multi-use space in an academic project. Graphs show the difference in daylight factor between two facade options; translucent with a typical screen and clear with a perforated copper screen. I ran this analysis using a heliodon and cloud chamber.

I currently manage planning projects for Walker Macy under the direction of a principal planner or landscape architect. Projects I have lead or am currently leading at Walker Macy include:

- Tacoma Links to Opportunity Streetscape Planning

- Parkrose-Argay Development Concept

- Oregon State University Vision (subconsultant to Perkins + Will)

While I worked at Capital City Development Corporation in Boise, Idaho, I managed public-private development agreements, public art projects, and streetscape improvements. Projects I lead there include:

RFP for 620 S. 9th Street

I worked with a team to write an RFP for the redevelopment of a warehouse in a busy arts and culture district. We developed ten priorities for the site and asked development teams to propose a use that incorporated our goals and their knowledge of the market and the local community. The winning team proposed a mixed-use housing project with innovative live-work units designed by GGLO and developed by RMH. Construction is underway now.

My role was to assist the team in developing goals for the site, writing the RFP, and presenting to the CCDC board of directors for approval. I was one of an 8-person committee that reviewed proposals and selected a winning team. 

CCDC 2012 Annual Report

I produced two annual reports for CCDC to communicate the agency's goals, project progress, and finances to local stakeholders each year. My role was to set the project timeline, coordinate with project managers to develop copy, ensure the report met legal standards, copyedit, design, format for print and develop a distribution strategy. Below is our report from 2012. 

Bicycle Trio

I worked with the artist team MIchael Brown and David Cole and the city public art director to enliven a street corner in the Linen District with interactive musical art. My role was to approve design and material selections, manage funding, and coordinate with public stakeholders. Watch the bikes in action.

EcoArt Series

I worked with three architect-artist teams and the city public art director to develop artwork for a quieter commercial corridor that educates the public about ecological phenomena in their city. My role was to approve design and material selections, manage funding, and coordinate with public stakeholders.
Heliotrope by Dwaine Carver and Trout Architects, Litharacnium by Margo & Dennis Proksa and MODUS Architecture, and Virgo by Amy Westover and McKibben + Cooper Architects