Black House and Universe:
An Exploration into a Black Phenomenology
… What Can A House Be?

Type:    Architecture Core Studio
Site:     Charlotte, North Carolina, USA
Date:    2024
School:    University of North Carolina at Charlotte
Instructor:    Alexandra Waller

This studio aimed to analyze architecture’s relationship to its representation. By examining the translation of imagery into a matter of fragments, the design process of bricolage was used to test new approaches to the creation of 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 original 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, their collection of personal art and generational objects has now transformed their spaces into a cultural center and museum. What began as an important human need has now expanded to become an archive of the family’s past, begging 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 where sourced from images of my family on their land.




Adaptive Objects:Designing a New Spatial Order
… a Community Wellness Center

Type:    Architecture Core Studio
Site:     Charlotte, North Carolina, USA
Date:    2024
School:    University of North Carolina at Charlotte
Instructor:    Jefferson Ellinger

This project set forth 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 Type:    Architecture Core Studio
Date:    2024
School:    University of North Carolina at Charlotte
Instructor:    Jefferson Ellinger
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

Type:     Architecture Core Studio
Site:      Uptown Charlotte, North Carolina, USA
Date:     2023
School:    University of North Carolina at Charlotte
Instructor:    Betsy West
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.”