CENTRO DE ARTES NADIR AFONSO
PUBLIC PARTICIPATION WITH ART
Centro de Artes Nadir Afonso Museum
BOTICAS, PORTUGAL
Centro de Artes Nadir Afonso literally and figuratively breaks new ground in Portugal. Divided into two distinct but connected parts, the new sustainable museum merges landscape and architecture into a bifurcated sustainable building consisting of an urbane cultural structure facing the newly built municipal building and a green-roof park covered below-grade exhibition hall facing the rolling hills adjacent to Boticas. The urban face of the building includes a double-height entry hall and a one-hundred-seat auditorium that contribute to the civic stature of this growing Portuguese town. The exhibition space, embedded in the hillside and covered with a sustainable planted green roof park, functions as a connection to the more pastoral section of the town. The below-grade exhibit hall and surrounding outdoor court are carved out of the natural hillside.
Strategically located at the intersection of a newly built national highway, the new 20,000-square-foot sustainable museum can also serve as an anchor for additional development within the adjacent region. The museum is poised to become a global destination that will expose the art of Nadir Afonso to a much larger audience for it has the potential to serve as a cultural and economic engine to drive the growth of both the local and regional economy.
PRE-FAB LEARNING LANDSCAPE
A FLEXIBLE LEARNING SOLUTION
Pre-Fab Learning Landscape
STATEN ISLAND, NEW YORK
Lacking space for required additional classrooms, the challenge for this New York City Community charter school was to create a hybrid design that would provide quality spaces for learning that were flexible, removable, cost-effective acoustically quiet and aesthetically delightful. The final resolution entailed relocating athletics to the school exterior and re-purposing the school gymnasium into a Pre-Fab Learning Landscape. The Pre-Fab Learning Landscape is a sustainable, flexible and easily constructable.
2018 VENICE ARCHITECTURE BIENNALE
PLACES WHERE CONVERSATION CREATES SOCIAL FABRIC
Hyperloop Suburb
2018 BIENNALE TIME SPACE EXISTENCE EXHIBIT IN VENICE
Suburbs are sometimes thought of as dystopian, insulated places. The Hyperloop Suburb, a speculative, experiential installation at the 2018 Time Space Existence biennial exhibition on display during the 2018 Venice Architectural Biennale, explores whether innovations in transportation can breathe new life into these liminal spaces. Bringing airplane speed to ground level travel, a hyperloop is a high-speed system capable of closing the distance between the city and its rural periphery. Situated between the urban and pastoral, suburbs can potentially be at the center of an impending regional re-think, raising the critical question “How do we want to live”.
The exhibit rejects the binary view of the polarity between city and suburb. It speaks to a 21st century re-look at the regional environmental continuum, the productive penetrable neighborhood and the permeable ecological cluster. Toward that end we offer the Hyperloop Suburb as a wake-up call to all involved in the transportation arena to simultaneously consider the broader civic implications of current technological exploration.