Black House and Universe
What Can A House Be?
…
an Exploration into a Black Phenomenology
This studio aimed to analyze the relationship between architecture and its representation. By examining the translation of imagery into fragments, the design process of bricolage was employed to test new approaches to creating a new domestic space, making the imagined explicit.
The catalog of digital images was collected through a deeper study of phenomenology that opened the question: What is Black Phenomenology? If the source material is devoid of “Black Space”, can disassociated fragments lead to the self-exploration and preservation of Black Aesthetics?
The following project uses Bell Hooks’ essay “An Aesthetic of Blackness—Strange and Oppositional” as a precedent to begin a journey of Black phenomenology and aesthetic exploration through space. As Hooks believes, aesthetics is not organic but an intentional consideration of the function of beauty in our spaces. “Black House and Universe” enters a site a family has stewarded for generations, specifically to explore self-expression, cultural preservation, and beauty.
These projects originated as homes occupied and lived in by the family, and their collection of personal art and generational objects has now transformed their spaces into a cultural center and museum. What began as a fundamental human need has now evolved into an archive of the family’s past, prompting the question: What can a house be?
The thought experiment was inspired by the stewardship of land owned by my father’s family for generations in a time when black ownership was unrealistic in the South. Elements of these collages were sourced from images of my family on their land.
Center for Listening Ethics
...a Library for Banned Books
“Listening emerges whenever we open ourselves to presence, resonance, and connection.” Bureau of Listening.
The Library for Banned Books and the accompanying Center for Listening Ethics attempt to explore spatial design that evokes and encourages the practice of listening. Inspired by the artistic explorations of the Bureau of Listening based in Denmark, this design aims to create space for "slow-thinking and caring space for listening and ethics." Encouraging the thought, in what ways can we listen?
Adaptive Objects
Designing a New Spatial Order
… a Community Wellness Center
This project aimed to reorganize the original grid of an existing big-box retail store and create a new spatial order within and outside the initial grid. This adaptive “recycle” design was driven by parametric Voronoi diagrams — in two and three dimensions — that resulted in 3 unique objects that were highlighted to create the form of the design. Extensions were made to fill programmatic needs.
Multiplicity and the Heterogeneous
The overt intention here is to develop transformational techniques that challenge the ‘ideal’ spatial order of the grid and to produce differentiated architectural spaces that are both of their own and part of a new, larger order – multiple and heterogeneous. Each generation was a development upon the next, all situated on the study of light and shadow.
Home Away From Home
... a Culinary School and Cinema
Situated on the principle that Place drives Identity, Identity drives Ability, and Ability strengthens Place, this project looked to create a new campus for the Community Culinary School of Charlotte. This project aimed to reflect the rehabilitating and life-giving nature of the culinary school by calling on references from the residential homes that were located in the neighborhood of the site before urban renewal. In doing so, this project sought to answer the question: Can/should a commercial building mimic the aesthetics of the “home.”