The Pavilion offers three distinct levels of experience, each tailored to particular forms of use, access, and immersion. At the ground level, four separate volumes, each with an iconic profile, house spaces crafted for specific uses: LABORATORY, INCUBATOR, VAULT, and EVENTS AREA. Together, these form a shared courtyard and a GATEWAY, framing the factory and redefining its relationship to the countryside. The lower level of the Events Area acts as an Entrance Hall for the public, providing direct access to the Lattice and Roof Levels, while each of the other volumes may be accessed independently, allowing all four volumes to operate separately or in collaboration. The Laboratory houses the Barilla Center for Food & Nutrition; the Incubator is a host to start-up initiatives; the Vault is a world-class gallery space to present the Barilla Collection and curated exhibitions; the Events Area includes flexible auditorium and conference spaces.

Hovering above the ground, supported by the four major volumes, the Lattice level contains the central space of the Pavilion: a single large room onto which each of the four major volumes can open. With the capacity to host major events and a footprint that may be compartmentalized into smaller zones for different activities, this structural Armature houses the Experience Area: an immersive mixing chamber, like a kitchen at the heart of the home. Publicly accessible, this space for experimentation provides open interfaces between the users of the Laboratory, Vault, Incubator, Event Area, the Barilla Community, the Local Community, and the Broader Public. The Lattice is clad with a programmable glass curtain wall, providing both enhanced interior functionality (e.g. augmented reality panoramic tours of the Pedrignano Plant) and a customizable skin from the exterior. It is at once a space with its own, distinct identity, and a creation of the overlaps between the activities of the Pavilion.

Like a well-set table, the roof provides a rich gastronomic and panoramic experience. Visitors arrive at the southwest edge of the roof, ascending either the Grand Staircase or Elevators from the Entrance Hall, where they are greeted by a view overlooking the factory and orienting the pavilion towards Barilla’s historic Parma birthplace in the distance. The Barilla Store and the Sapori Barilla are hosted in a collection of small, domestically scaled structures on the roof, creating an intimate, personal atmosphere in these spaces. The Sapori Barilla are imagined as a series of small, informal spaces that may be programmed independently for events, as spaces of experimentation for new brands and new products grown in the Incubator, for cooking classes and demonstrations, or for gatherings of friends and family. The small structures are interconnected by a perimeter promenade, open onto a shared green space at the center of the roof, and share sustainability initiatives for solar harvesting and rainwater retention.

The Digital Design Studio (DDS) is a retrofit of an existing 19th century carriage house, adjacent Wesleyan University’s Alsop House, a listed National Landmark. The existing interior masonry shell and hot water heating system were exposed and refinished. All building systems (piping, conduit, air handling equipment) were painted black (with the exception of items required by code to be red). New wall finishes including wood, presentation boards, and plaster work were finished in white. All millwork and built-in horizontal surfaces were finished in reflective black materials.

The first studio facility on Wesleyan’s campus to offer students an environment for the synthesis of digital fabrication tools, advanced imaging and modeling software, and project presentation space, the DDS has become a gathering space for faculty and students working in photography, architecture, graphic design, design for theatre, and various other media. Classes rotate between three spaces in the facility: a critique and presentation room, a fabrication space (with 3d printers, laser cutters, and other equipment), and a computer classroom. The center also supports departmental curricula in a variety of ways, hosting approximately five design and art classes each semester, as well as workshops open to the wider university community.

SOFTFOCUS is a functional folly, designed to operate in 3 configurations: as a closed information monolith, an open, sheltered kiosk, or a staffed space with counter, awning, and storage for events. Exterior clad in custom-printed wrap with a soft-focus monochromatic landscape pattern. Interior finished in orange. Prefabricated as 11 components and assembled on-site. Juxtaposes rigid, simple geometry with visual and material ambiguity. Forklift and ADA compatible.

The geometry of the project draws on elementary architectural components (vault, pediment, entablature, shed, ramp), recombining these in unexpected ways, in the tradition of romantic landscape folly architecture. The clarity of the kiosk's geometry is complemented by the ambiguity of its visual form. The exterior skin is a blurred landscape pattern rendered in a monochromatic, sedimentary stone color palate.

Row House The project involved an interior gut renovation of a historic district brick row house whose exterior could not be altered. Traditionally, program within a row house is divided floor-to-floor. Each floor plate operates as a unified, visually connected set of spaces, while layers of use and privacy are separated sectionally. The project inverts this pattern, using the section to connect the programs of the house visually, while separating them from one another in plan. The formerly continuous, stacked floors are opened with a series of cuts parallel to the existing structural members (clerestories, floor sections, light channels, storage). The resulting experience of physically moving through the house is made both more episodic and sequential, while the corresponding experience of looking through the house is elongated and extended diagonally.

On the primary floor, an entry vestibule is separated from the dining room by a dense "box" housing the kitchen, pantry, 1/2 bath, and storage. The living room sits atop the box, beneath a bespoke hanging steel stair whose treads were made from the salvaged original beams of the house removed to form the project's "cuts." Sectionally, spaces bleed visually into each other (it is possible to see from the front door out through the windows on the second floor at the back of the house), while the plan accentuates tactile and spatial differentiation, demarcated by material changes across a series of lateral cut lines passing between the existing party walls.

Shingle House is an alteration and addition to a generously-dimensioned city lot with a single, 65' tall, 4' diameter oak tree standing near its north edge and a shingle-style, pattern-book, late 19th century wood-frame house defining its southern edge, parallel to the street. The spaces within the existing house were, without exception, oriented towards the interior, with small apertures located independently of local conditions. The project redefines the interiority of the house on the one hand, by including the north yard as a room with clearly defined edges, while also re-orienting the northern edge of the house to the oak tree. In doing so, the spaces of the project are at once clearly delineated and incomplete.

The large glass wall on the first level is fully operable, allowing the project to operate both as a room within the house and a sheltered extension of the yard, which is used primarily as a plot for growing vegetables and grapes. The new interior spaces defined within and adjacent to the house are surrounded by thickened walls which house storage, appliances, insulation, wiring, plumbing, and lighting - all the trappings of domestic life - and also interlock with the larger interior of the yard. In this way, the new apertures operate not as picturesque framed views, but as visual and physical connections between two alternative forms of interiority. The surfaces of the project exposed to rain are clad in recycled, corrugated aluminum shakes, while the surfaces protected from moisture are clad in white-washed pine plywood. In contrast to these monolithic surface treatments, the floor surfaces and depth of the wall are treated with a collection of textures ranging from black concrete to grass, organized to create subtle spatial differentiations within the larger spaces of the project.

In 1752, the year Benjamin Franklin invented the lightning rod, he also established the first American fire insurance company. That these innovations share a common source is notable not only for the fact that FranklinÕs impact on American architecture may be greater than is customarily assumed, but also because this parallel development prefigures the interwoven relationships between invention, building insurance, and legislation that underlie the production of architecture today. Industrialization brought new threats to the city (electricity, speed, explosives) while also dramatically increasing the scale of historical perils (flood, fire, theft). In turn, these threats gave rise to a field of new products, accessory to conventional building. Negotiating the thresholds between the developing infrastructures of the city and its private spaces (as insured and legally defined), these emergency devices can be understood collectively as a crumple zone intended not to prevent urban disaster but to absorb, limit, and contain its effects. In their early forms, the automatic sprinkler, exterior fire escape, panic bar, emergency light, and theft alarm were, like FranklinÕs original lightning rod, ready for production and deployment on a large scale, without definitive spatial identity, and suitable for use in new or existing construction. Culminating in their current ubiquity, the integration of these devices into the spatial and psychological landscape of the city is the story of the Encyclopedia.

Anchoring Dispersion provides a spatial and physical framework for the questions of the competition program, and for an ongoing dialogue about catastrophe, and memory. The pedestrian fabric of the boardwalk itself is dispersed upwards, to the sea, and anchored by structural masts and a curated exhibit pathway. Each dispersed fragment of boardwalk is identified by a place name, from the Holocaust, distinguished from, but interspersed within, sites of genocide worldwide. As these place names are revealed by the lifting boards, we are given to believe that the entire boardwalk hides an ocean of names and dispersals yet to be anchored.

HydroCity Busan is an ecological, recreational and urban development master planning proposal for Gadeokdo Island. Boasting the largest port in Korea and a continually expanding, reclaimed coastline, Busan is literally a city built on water. By using the islandÕs topography to full advantage, HydroCity creates a new ecological urban model for Gadeokdo that includes both urban density and natural habitat continuity. This allows both the scenic and environmentally valuable coastline and mountain peaks to remain undeveloped and used for the future as a natural and recreational resource. The water resources of the island are actively managed, drawing on both ancient Korean hillside farming techniques and contemporary resources in water management technology. HydroCity gives water a central role as an ecological, recreational, and development resource. Just as the use of water is planned from coast to mountaintop, the terraces provide landscape links between the peak zones and the coastal zones, allowing for a natural continuity between this range of habitats and making both readily accessible.

The Planetarium in the 21st Century: Unlike the artifacts of a typical museum, where the subject is constantly present, the planetarium is an ultra-mediatized environment. in which the subject of astronomy is translated and interpreted for the benefit of the observer. There are few objects to show, but a plethora of concepts and principles to explain. The planetarium is, in short, a museum without artifacts. A museum of concepts. As computer access becomes ubiquitous - search engines like Google Sky provide easy access, interactive and personalized to a vast amount of data, home theaters are becoming more and more sophisticated - the role of one Public planetarium in the new media age should be surveyed. What is the role of the Planetarium in the new millennium?

The 20th century planetarium should serve as an interface for discovery and education, an immersive experience that engages the visitor spatially and actively in the singular spectacle of space. The building cannot just serve only as a passive receptacle of a virtual journey, but must play a central role in the immersive experience, inviting the visitor To navigate through its programs, like a metaphor for space itself.

The Tangshan Earthquake Memorial Park is an accumulation of landscape components - from a modulated collection of ten - which are brought together to form both the Park and Memorial. Each modulated component represents a specific ground condition, with the monument ground as the most important within the set. The Earthquake Memorial is made of three of these landscape components: the monument ground, the memorial pools, and the living groves. It is a place of reflection and remembrance where loved ones can gather, drawing water from the memorial pools to write the names of loved ones upon the monument ground. The ground of the Earthquake Memorial extends to the East and to the West as a series of interconnected pathways, built of the same staggered components as the memorial ground. To the west, the ground extends over the ruins, via a series of elevated pathways, offering visitors an opportunity to move through and look over the ruins and providing the possibility for connecting the memorial to the planned Square of the New Era (Master Plan 2005-2010). To the East, the staggered memorial ground extends through the park, connecting the memorial to the local infrastructure. While the memorial pools separate the monument ground from the ruins to the West, the living groves extend through the park to the east, connecting the landscape of the Earthquake Memorial with that of the large park surrounding it. It is also proposed that the future museum be built on the Northeast corner of the Earthquake Memorial, in the center of the Park on the primary North-South pathway. Throughout the park, the ground is the area of focus for which the variation and repetition of staggered landscape modules provides a strategy for creating a unifying and moving experience.

INTERTIDAL is a park in perpetual flux. Its topography carefully calibrated to the amplitude of the tide, it is a park free of objects where use is tied not to space but to relative tide and topography, their interrelationships rendered as patterns in an endless, fluctuating loop. Responding to the sea's ebb and flow, the intervening wetscapes and landscapes reveal the cyclical and recurrent processes of a nature that is more effectual than picturesque.

The park oscillates between three distinct states during any given tidal cycle: pools, stripes, and islands. At low tide, the park consists of a series of linear pools that act as circuited reservoirs for marine life. The pools spread across the designed topography as the tide rises, leaving a series of stripes that form north-south connections between Main Street and the canal path. At high tide, a collection of islands emerge, which contain intertidal's programmatic elements, including a celebratory green space, a bandshell, a visitor center and arboretum.

Situated between the Cape Cod Canal and Main Street, the site holds the possibility to connect two of the town's most important resources and attractions. In making the connection, intertidal also responds to two distinct scales - acting as a gateway to the system of linear parks along the canal and as a catalyst for main street retail activity. Connecting Main Street and the canal, INTERTIDAL is an accessible and didactic wetland, and also a fully accessorized park. In addition to a crafted range of wildlife habitats, the park is marked by a series of open green spaces and augmented by specialized attractions.

Stationed Overseas is a research project focusing on the architectural, planning, and development initiatives for the reuse and conversion of decommissioned United States Military Bases and other land holdings in the Republic of Panama and the Commonwealth of Puerto Rico. These sites, while typically outside the purview of architectural study, are part of a long tradition of military camps, outposts, and fortifications built and strategically planned on a grand scale. With over 135,000 acres of former U.S. Military positions between them, a combined area that is nearly ten times the size of Manhattan, Panama and Puerto Rico offer a rich collection of case studies in large-capacity planning, land use and programmatic conversions, and environmental rehabilitation, all of which are critical issues not only for developing countries and communities, but also for the architectural profession at large.

As systematic structures of organization and regulation, codes set the terms for architectureÕs amenability to an ever-widening web of internal and external forces. Nevertheless, codes generally Ñand building codes specifically Ñare frequently dismissed as onerous requirements to be met and inhibitions to the free undertaking of design. This myopia overlooks the reality that codes are neither neutral nor objective documents. Physically ambiguous, yet charged with political, social, and formal intent, codes operate as the architecture of architecture, creating its preconditions and shaping its production. As they continue to exert such power, architecture cannot remain uninterested in the production of codes, nor disengaged from their directives.

Traditionally, in architecture as in other fields , codes have been treated as a tool of choice for the imposition or explication of order. How does architecture codify its boundaries, and how should those boundaries be mediated? Is there room for social, political, or economic agency in architecture, and how might their terms be negotiated? What role could architectural production play in shaping Ñthrough tactful engagement with the codes that intersect it Ñthe systems behind these codes? Such questions are as expansive, and as unavoidable, as the possibilities of codes themselves.

Built to circumvent the interruptions and encumbrances of the Manhattan street grid, it is of the utmost importance that any strategy for reengaging the highline within the broader cityscape of Manhattan must go beyond the linear condition into which the high line was designed - as an extension that could easily be severed. It is therefore proposed that the Highline must be grafted onto other urban structures and programs for which it is particularly well suited - parks, the waterfront, athletics - as an integral component within a system of continuous loops. The highline and its adjacencies are particularly suited to a range of activities and programs that the general grid condition cannot accommodate or encompass. In presenting a supplementary form of organization, the loops join these eccentricities of New York - the Park, Broadway, the shoreline - which coexist with the grid, but are never subsumed by it.

The looping strategy operates at all possible scales, ranging from the standard block (an island within streets) to the entire island of Manhattan itself (an island within an archipelago). Central to the proliferation of this looped system are programmatic events that punctuate the loop and three dimensionally activate the specific blocks they occupy. The multiplicity of nested loops within these blocks provides for the simultaneity and layering of infrastructure, circulation and program that transcends the limitations of the single-datum and vector-based Cartesian grid, and allows for the reintegration into the streetscape of a new topography.

These variations within the platted pattern are but moments - the strategy of loops seeks to effectively establish another pattern altogether, woven through and within the flat, rectilinear framework of streets and avenues through out the city. It is a pattern which does not respect the singular division between the street infrastructure and the blocks of stacked interior, nor does it encourage the base condition of object-oriented, plot-line development. Instead, the gradual blurring of the grid and the multi-level looped systems allow for the possibility of another Manhattan.

A temporary installation, Confessional was designed as a materialization of the online Anonymous Confession Board. Sited on a large lawn in front of Wesleyan University’s neoclassical Olin Library, the project was imagined as a thickened screen – a screen so thick it became a space one could inhabit. Inside Confessional, visitors are shrouded and their secrets masked. A trapezoidal field, the project could grow or contract to accommodate more or fewer users.

Built on a seasonal flood plain, under the canopy of a large sycamore grove, BentBlind is designed as a multi-generational bird blind and resting station along an accessible, compressed-earth trail overlooking the Pomperaug River and protected wildlife preserve. Acting as both a marker and a gateway at a point where the trail turns away from the river, the project provides both sheltered seating and framed views across the river. A collection of 8” x 8” cruciform columns made of American cypress are carefully placed and modulated to form seating, frame views, define the pathway, and mark the trail.
An accumulation of columnar landscape components partially protected by a space-frame canopy clad in engineered sailcloth, BentBlind is an intentional "ruination" of a series of modernist architectural tropes (rusticated Miesian columns rendered in rough-cut cypress, discontinuous and fragmentary space frames, and indeterminate interiority). Collectively, these components act as a built analog, in miniature, for the large sycamore grove in which they are arranged, while their layered vertical striation creates a moiré interference pattern as visual camouflage for bird watching.

In the spring of 2009, North Studio worked with Wesleyan’s Center for Jewish Life to create a new university sukkah. A temporary structure erected every fall for Sukkot – the annual feast of tabernacles – the sukkah offers students a place to pray, study, eat, sleep, dwell, and socialize. The client needed the structure to accommodate these activities, also emphasizing that the sukkah be welcoming to all and, finally, that it be halachic - built to the specifications of the rabbinic code. In response, North Studio designed and built a structure to harmonize with the surrounding landscape - to be inviting, approachable, and intriguing to anyone walking by - while simultaneously maintaining the “intentional sacred space” and privacy expected for the sukkah’s religious users. Beyond the requirements for its religious use, the university Sukkah also needed to accommodate 50 people, withstand outdoor exposure, repeated assembly and disassembly, and store easily. The final design is sited at the top of a hill at the center of campus that is both serene and social. The Wesleyan Sukkah’s simplicity of construction and ephemeral tectonics reinforce its historical ties to nomadic huts, while its explicit impermanence encourages both introspection on the fragility of human life and an awareness of the vastness of the built and natural world of which it is a part.

SplitFrame consists of two integral pieces - a floating Observation Deck and an elevated Viewing Station - connected via a hinged staircase. It is situated at the end of a long weir, a vestige of the wildlife sanctuaryÕs former use as a commercial cranberry bog. Working with only hand-held power-tools, all on-site construction was completed without the use of heavy equipment. Informed by student research on sustainable construction technologies and building materials, design precedents, and the projectÕs 19-acre site, the studio worked collaboratively to develop and implement the project following the final client review. Using an innovative pre-cast concrete pin-foundation system for the elevated Viewing Station and a floating aluminum frame assembly for the Observation Deck on the water, the project was designed to minimize its impact on the site, both in construction and over the projected life of the structure. Together, the two platform components provide an immersive site experience, bringing visitors out onto the water, and offering an overview of the sanctuary from the maple tree canopy above.