The city grows and we crowd into it, growing ever closer together. We look for a home, but find little deserving of that name. We pay our deposit and an architect retreats to the studio, designing an average apartment building for the average consumer.  We feel little connection to this place, so our roots are shallow. Our urban life becomes a study in involuntary compromise – we reshape our lives to fit the box we live in. 

This is not the only way.

Instead, we can imagine a system of dynamic feedback: we tell the architect about our lives, and we see our home grow in response. We engage with cutting edge technologies – parametric design, large-scale data collection, immersive 3D representation – not for their own sake, but in our service. We engage in productive dialogue – with the architect, with our new neighbours, and with ourselves – about our housing needs and desires. We make compromises, but voluntary, informed compromises.  We grow a community, and plant our roots deeply. 

Your High-rise Home is a prototype of this system – a schematic design process incorporating direct, individual feedback from residents at all stages, to increase choice and communal identity in high density housing.

Download Your Highrise Home Interactive Preview

Download Your Highrise Home Booklet

During the 2012 European Architecture Student Assembly, I joined a group of 12 to create a small pavilion investigating the control and manipulation of light. Designed and built collaboratively over 2 weeks in Helsinki, the project centred on this Northern city’s long summer days - where residents experience near-constant sunlight. The visitor peels open a 7 metre long pivoting wall and steps inside the narrow space, the door closing behind to create a near-total darkness. At the far end, a counter-weighted tilting wall gives the user direct, bodily control over the amount of light entering the structure.

What scale is your city?
Tokyo’s futures are a matter of constant contention. The rich low-city tradition of dense, socially functional and internally complex communities is today endangered by the ascendant mode - towers in the park which have atomised existing neighbourhoods across the city. By proposing an interstitial development shot through with pathways and mixed uses, Homescale would restate the value of fine-grained urbanism in contemporary Tokyo, in turn strengthening the traditional city’s claim to existence.

Every city is a complex place, but the expression of that complexity is never a foregone conclusion. If we value an expressive city, we must find ways to manifest complexity in our urban environments - and to push back against the forces which would wipe it away.
 

Set on a small central-city site, the intensity of both program and context was the catalyst for this design. Here, I considered the question of how a building might take advantage of high-density urban form while ameliorating density’s disadvantages. The stepped, multi-terraced form of the street-facing bar addresses the public, and is read from the exterior as a richly activated vertical landscape of human activity - the formal expression of the space reflects the richness of its use.

This project, completed in a group of five, was submitted as part of the weeklong Robin Boyd Studio in February 2014. Designed for a site in Melbourne’s Docklands, this high density urban primary school envisions a kind of urbanity in miniature, an environment in which children can acquire the particular skills required of a citydweller. In line with contemporary pedagogical theory, the Learning Village eschews the traditional classroom in favour of a ‘neighbourhood’ model, with a variety
of spaces tailored to accomodate the needs of a diverse student population.

A studio project sited in Footscray, this proposal for an urban infill site aimed to push back against the sensory flattening and alienation which often accompanies urban renewal. Through a long program of on-site observation, I identified a characteristic street sociality in central Footscray which will likely be endangered as the area is redeveloped. To resist this erasure, the project proposes a through-way between two important public spaces, dotted with open sitting-out space which can accomodate the area’s existing patterns of use. These public spaces are accompanied by two social housing units which serve the dual purpose of providing convenient, affordable accomodation and extending habitation of the spaces beyond daylight hours.

A concept design for a new underground train station at a university campus, Revealing Place focused on the idea of  ‘revealing’ as lying at the intersection of vision and knowledge. While the train station is the immediate catalyst, the underlying question is somewhat broader:  what are the opportunities that can be activated through the act of revealing?

Three different kinds of revealing figure in the final design: First, revealing urban structure - using the spiral pathway which winds through the building to improve the navigability of the campus as a whole. Second, revealing urban function by digging out the metro station, and placing the activities of the university on display. Third, revealing urban inhabitation - the building is deliberately complex and multi-faceted, design to show the rich and complex relationships which occur in and around any building, but are too often hidden from view.

In these ways, this design aims to foster stronger and more honest connections between the university and the city around it - an act which promises benefits for both.