Subverting Suburbia

Next Gen Nota­bles: Sub­vert­ing Suburbia

“We are keep­ing the baby and we are using the bath­wa­ter to water our garden.”

A pub­lished online arti­cle about me and some friends get­ting a notable fin­ish in the 2009 Next Gen­er­a­tion Metrop­o­lis Mag­a­zine Design Com­pe­ti­tion. Mark Tir­pak, who is not men­tioned in the arti­cle, also helped–he is an urban plan­ner.  Sam Schonzeit did most of the archi­tec­ture work that I helped do ren­der­ing, and John Hart Asher did the land­scape design.

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Danish Cohousing

Cohous­ing: com­mu­ni­ties bal­ance the tra­di­tional advan­tages of shared com­mon facil­i­ties and on-going con­nec­tions with your neigh­bors. These coop­er­a­tive neigh­bor­hoods, both inter-generational and for elders, are among the most promis­ing solu­tions to many of today’s most chal­leng­ing social and envi­ron­men­tal concerns.

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Collective Food Market

This a col­lec­tive food mar­ket, a place where local farm­ers can bring pro­duce and goods to sell, local peo­ple can cook and there is more room to social­ize pro­vided than at reg­u­lar super-market. This makes it a more civic place, instead of solely com­mer­cial. Hav­ing more social space allows for higher sales and cre­ates a cul­ture of ‘reg­u­lars’ who hang out at the market.

Solar D Marketable Prototype

Designed in 2007 for the Solar D Mar­ketable pro­to­type, a house designed to the needs of the mar­ket. It is larger [approx 1500 sq. ft.] than it’s coun­ter­part the Solar D entry for the Solar House Competition.

Box Vase

A 4“x14” box vase that is made from Wenge wood, an exotic hand­some dark wood from Africa.  I designed a geo­met­ric pat­tern and cut it out with an ancient CNC router, the “lac­ing” or track­ing of the router blade is par­al­lel with the geo­met­ric design cre­at­ing a step­ping fin­ish on the wood–as seen in the pic­tures.  The dark­ness of the wood and the ‘complicated-ness’ of the design cre­ate a sub­tle effect.  The box slightly bulges in the mid­dle, giv­ing it enta­sis–sim­i­lar to a Greek column–that ‘tricks’ the eye into see­ing a more straight and ver­ti­cal volume.