Walter Gropius Founded the Bauhaus School in Weimar, Germany in 1919 as a craft and fine art school of building. Following some political and ideological differences, the school was later moved to Dessau in 1925. Few years later the Second World War started and the Bauhaus was closed by the Nazi regime. After the War, East Germany remained occupied by the soviet coalition and was forced into communism. The City of Dessau-Roßlau was unfortunately left on the East side of the Berlin Wall until its demolition in 1989.

Consequently, the city was left partially desolated, losing 75% of its population after the reopening of West Germany, leaving a grim landscape of semi-abandon streets and social housing blocks. In an effort to reactivate the city, the Bauhaus building was restored to its former glory and promoted as a tourist attraction. However. On the other side of the train track, the rest of the city remained partially blighted. The city of Dessau attempt to revive the rest of the city is call “Die Roter Faden” or the Red Thread, a meandering path through the city, connecting remaining historical sites and promoting new architectural ideas to be developed around the newly proposed Bauhaus Museum.

Beyond the Wall is a set of propositions attempting to re-embellish the city through architectural and artistic features. Several interventions are proposed, from small kiosks to craft workshops and galleries displaying Bauhaus art and newly created work from these workshops. The intent of these spaces is to reactivate the city and incite youth to remain and establish a life here, subsequently contributing to the future city infrastructure. This architectural promenade around Dessau is meant to support this cultural clash between the existing subculture and a new high art tourism.

The city of Sunnyvale is globally known as the heart of the Silicon Valley. The Birth place of the semiconductor industry. In the past years, this new tech gold rush intensified exponentially. As a result, the city fabric is now saturated with expensive real estate, from luxury condominium to vast tech company headquarter, occupying almost all the city available urban space. This situation is pushing urbanists to wonder where to expand next and whether it would be a viable option to expand over the bay.

Bird City is a proposition, aiming to settle part of the Sunnyvale headlands and collide 2 different paths of migration: The human migration, to the north towards the Bay and the aviary migration to the south towards South America. Bird City would provide an extension to Sunnyvale real estate and a cohabitation platform between humans and birds.

The city would extend over the Headlands, as curvilinear 3 dimensional streets inspired by bird flight patterns and supported by sets of large pillars imbedded into the rock of the bay. Each of these streets would host a specific use such as work, retail, transportation, living which would then cross to create vertical mix-use conditions hosting the major vertical circulations. The structural pillars would extend towards the sky and carry habitat for the various bird populations of the site.

La Viñera Remmelluri, is one of the oldest in Spain. On this exact same site, preceded by Cistercian Monk dating back to the 11th century they manage to curate the most precious fruit of the earth to produce what they call the “Sangre Divino”. This majestic site rests timelessly on the flank of the first stone buttresses of the Pyrenees, monitored from its top by the ancient abbey’s ruins. Down below, carved in stone, and even older, are the remnants of an old 8th century necropolis.

Today, the old vinery is expanding to cater to international tourists flocking the Rioja region to discover its wonderful viticulture and culinary offerings. It is where the extension takes place, at the crossroad of the site history and the landscape of the Rioja valley where lies ancient medieval fortresses and sentinel towers raising from the earth to meet the sky.

The Resulting design provide a state of the art underground vine production chain and storage vault with additional tasting rooms and terrace. A monumental tower crowns the facility, marking this historic site and providing the best view in all the Rioja valley. The tower is protected by a retaining wall acting as an outdoor gallery connecting it to its ancient past: the necropolis.

On this gently rolling hill located in downtown Lafayette, California; is now resting a purposeless parking lot catering to the overflow of car from the surrounding retail neighborhood. As the result of the rapid development of its downtown area and the rise in its un-affordability, the City of Lafayette has decided to repurpose this beautiful site as a mixed-use project hosting 18 units of affordable housing. The frontage of the site lays on Moraga Rd, a high traffic avenue bridging the freeway access, through downtown Lafayette, to the City of Moraga which is entrenched in the valley below. The frontal retail edge must therefore provide adequate resiliency and protect the individual of this newly founded community.

The proposed design is inspired from sheltered community of monks found in abbey cloisters. Almost all the elements of the cloister typology can be repurposed with great functionality to host and protect a community of different size families. The dwelling units are surrounding a central courtyard open to multi-purpose activity. The court is itself surrounded by circulatory arcades providing shading and a threshold to the privacy of the units beyond. The size of the units varies from studio to 2 bedrooms and are mixed in location to provide cross-cultural and familial interaction. The units are organized on two levels and are flanked by a larger building reminiscing of the church nave from the abbey typology, providing a large communal kitchen and a various array of shareable amenities. Finally, a community edible garden is provided on the same concourse than the central plaza, resting over an underground resident parking lot.

The architectural essence of the Southern shotgun house is characterized by a unidirectional circulation and spatial organization. This archetype assumes a simple monolithic form, extruded from a typical gable roof house profile, hosting a single family. The space is then subdivided more or less equally in 4 spaces to provide privacy as required.

The following study aims to compare opposite aspects between a set of crafted cast objects, the “balloon animals” and the shell-like structure inherent of the shotgun house light wood frame construction. Subsequently, the crossbreeding of the two would result in the creation of a new typology Identifiable by its long monolithic form with cavern like carved-out spaces stacked on 2 levels.

The conglomeration of these new-found house structures would result in a more communal setting for its inhabitants, therefore restoring the concept of the front porch, as an internal meandering courtyard path.

It is 2020; a terrorist group decided to challenge our addiction to technology. Using arrays of EMP devices, they managed
to destroy the integrity of the electrical network in several San Francisco neighborhoods. After the initial shock, people have adapted by adopting a natural way of life paced by the oscillating cycle of day and night. 

UN-LIGHTED is a mixed media collection of artifacts and experiments that explore the premise of life without artificial light. These pieces claim neither interpretation nor a political stance; rather, they attempt a neutral representation of everyday life at various spatial scales. The exhibit allows its audience to re-discover the “inopportune” reality, and shines a new light on our perception of spatial and human interrelations and interactions.

The dark maze is a wooden sensory boardgame. one player is blindfolded and rely on its sense of touch to stay on the right path to the finish. You must make it as quickly as possible trhough the randomly puzzled maze that your adversary created. you receive a time penality and hear a buzzing sound each time you are out-of-bound. The game was develop in collaboration with Hurshel patel and tiffany chan. I realized all the design and fabrication of the  game and contributed to some arduino programing.

The center is a publicly funded think tank that focus on research and policy making for the the East Bay Area. It is also a place for people to learn more about the existing ecological conditions around the Bay. The complexity of the program combined with its location at the crossroad of various transit systems such as BART makes it even more challenging in managing public and private spaces. The center is splited into two collaboratimg think tanks: one that focus on marine policies and one on flora conservation.

The form of the building respond to the busy edge of Adeline Ave by raising into layer that become increasingly private from the underground BART station to the top floor.

This project is based on a critique of environmental design as a disruption in our environment and was created as critical making provocation.

As a society, we are carelessly wreaking havoc upon ourselves by over-consuming our natural resources without any limitations. The creation of the Mossed-up movement is a response aiming to open the world’s eyes to the true problem. We wanted to approach the issue controversially, using both technology and biology as our medium of choice to provoke the users to participate in an involuntary self-critique. We used moss as a bio-medium to create QR codes, read as symbols of technology’s downfalls rather than its typical functional use.

The mossy binary code is left on concrete walls as an ephemeral symbol of technology which is then reclaimed by nature as the moss spreads out of its technological form. This project also resulted in the creation of a manifesto film that you can find below.

The Fibonacci Vortex came from the idea of traveling stars. When still, stars are perceived as points but when they travel, they become lines. As lines meet to form plans they create infinite repeating patterns. This project is an intent to physical represent this condition.

The Hiroshima Memorial was conceived as a sequential set of spaces that interpret the experience of the Hiroshima nuclear bombing. Each successive space is designed to become more oppressing as you follow the path of light casted by the sun at the exact time and date of the fateful event.

This is a space where one can found himself. A bare wooden volume over-viewing the Bay Area where one can reflect on life. During the day, only the mediator can see the outside and his virtually cut-off from the rest of the world by a thin glass sheet.

However, at night, when the central fireplace is lit, the meditation shelter becomes a beacon of light with-in the darkness of the surrounding hills.