portfolio

Root: the Gulf Coast DesignLab

spring 2023 • advanced design • Lufkin, Texas

The Gulf Coast DesignLab is The UT School of Architecture’s only design-build studio and practices a hands-on approach to environmental activism through design. We worked with the Temple Foundation to develop an outdoor teaching space on the Boggy Slough Conservation Area, a facility for regenerative agroforesty research and practice. Our student team worked collaboratively to design a new structure which we constructed ourselves over seventeen total workdays on site.  I was tasked with designing landscape details that managed stormwater drainage from the structure's roof, and took on planning and executing a planting plan, including selecting species, sourcing, budgeting, and procuring needed materials.

Furthermore, our student team prepared a master plan which recommended siting for a number of new buildings and an interpretive trail system for future development. 

Blackland Prairie Preserve

fall 2022 • advanced design • Onion Creek Metropolitan Park: Austin, Texas

The potential of soils to sequester carbon is often overlooked in design and planning; this is especially true on brownfield sites which are regarded as contaminated, scraped, replaced, and wasted. What if we took the time to get to know a site’s soils and use them as the driving criteria for ecological planning and management? This project proposes a way to study, treat, and engage the community on caring for soils. 

The redevelopment of Onion Creek Metropolitan Park could meet the synergistic goals of restoring Blackland Prairie habitat, providing a nurturing and enlightening park user experience, and stewarding soils for carbon sequestration. Designing for soils as the primary concern for the site means they must be carefully evaluated, treated, and monitored over time. The site’s unique and checkered histories are reflected by its varied soil conditions. Knowing these soils is crucial to the site’s future as an engaging, community-driven carbon sink. This means that we must both protect soils determined to have high embodied carbon and restore those which are degraded at present but have the potential to hold high levels of embodied carbon.

This project involves an investigation into the unique soil conditions and stories of Onion Creek Metropolitan Park, the Onion Creek Greenbelt, and the Yarabee Bend neighborhood through field surveying and mapping, a set of recommendations for how to preserve, improve, and steward these soils towards the goal of carbon sequestration, and finally the Civic Science Field Guide - a tool for monitoring and adaptive management of the site through civic science and public education. The plan’s Conceptual Framework relates surveyed soil characteristics to a set of treatment approaches. The field guide empowers park users to learn about and participate in the care of the park through identifying these soil qualities on the site, building an archive of knowledge about the site’s ecosystems as it is used.

Soil Origins

fall 2022 • advanced design • Austin, Texas

Our studio began with a conceptual investigation of soil - the science of it, its potential to mitigate climate change through carbon sequestration, and how humans use and abuse soils today. As a class, we developed a 140+ page book of critical investigations into soil and prairie ecosystems, with my contribution being a primer of the basics of soil science. Next, we began a study of soil phenomena across Austin. Over several weeks, the studio cohort fanned out across Austin, taking soil samples as a way of testing low-tech methods for understanding a place’s ecology. These data were collected and compared with the soil units used by the USDA to describe Austin. What we found was that each sample’s story was poorly described by these coarsely-aggregated units, as soils in an urban environment are modified and transformed by human processes. In this project, I designed the methodology for data collection and managed the outputs, taking a leading role in the interpretation of the study's results.

Geologic Botanic Garden

spring 2022 • studio IV • El Paso, Texas

Research into the history and culture of El Paso, Texas set the stage for the design of a botanic garden on the planned deck park capping Interstate 10 through downtown. This conceptual mapping investigates the influence of regional geology on our site’s character. Though geographic principal says that closer things are more related than farther things, I argue that the iconic sillhouette of the Franklin Mountains over El Paso, though distant, is material for inpiration. This mapping combines topography, a viewshed analysis, and surface lithology to draw the geological features, near and far, that shape the site.