2021 COTE Competition

The Fairmount School of Art and Ecology provides a holistic and immersive educational experience for each student through artfully scientific design. The architecture communicates basic concepts of elementary education through integrated, explorative, and enjoyable learning environments to personally and academically benefit each student. The design embraces the idea of the learning environment as the “third teacher” in which the architecture contributes to the student-teacher relationship and plays a role in the learning process. The school has many design features to enhance the quality of both indoor and outdoor spaces while minimizing its negative impact on the natural environment. All these features provide learning opportunities for the students to learn and discover.

The Collaboration Center for Innovation, “Undefined Boundaries,” seeks to encourage hope and power among future citizens, without distinction or inequality. The project focuses on every positive aspect the site possesses in an effort to promote growth for the future of Tucson. The essence of the city resides in its people, culture, and natural landscape; therefore, the project aims to emphasize the beauty of each component.

The concept of Undefined Boundaries reflects the border between Mexico and the United States, by implying how the placement of dynamic spaces can diminish a “defined” boundary. The building pursues the goal of diminishing borders, where different aspects like inside/out, near/far, private/public, and built/ natural blend together to become one. The project celebrates diversity, uncertainty, and sustainability, by expressing a sense of openness and arousing the user’s curiosity. The soul of the building emerges from the essence of the culture and history of the city of Tucson. With a gross square footage of 30, 900 sf, the CCI embraces Tucson’s hot/arid climate and applies environmental strategies with the purpose of revealing integration of architectural, technical, and natural systems. For high emissions, Tucson’s climate in 2080 will feel most like today’s climate near Hermosillo, Mex. The typical winter in Hermosillo, Mexico is 10.7°F (5.9°C) warmer and 38.5% drier than winter in Tucson. From personal experience, Tucson’s climate feels incredibly comfortable compared to Hermosillo. Architecture articulates the inhabitation of the Earth, therefore rethinking the future of sustainable design has become a necessity.

The CCI applies various passive strategies to achieve an efficient performance. The first level aims to ventilate throughout cross ventilation. Lower openings in the south façade and higher openings in the north façade promote air velocity and benefit the spaces from pressure differentials. Furthermore, dynamic facades in the east serve as inlets (high pressure) along with a solar chimney, located in the west façade, being the outlet (low pressure).

The building serves as the hub of an investment in Campbell Avenue and Rillito River campus. Thus, the CCI provides an outside area with market stands, as well as a public resource library, with the purpose of celebrating diversity, blurring boundaries, and acknowledging information. The center promotes wellness by embracing the desert environment. A main design strategy is to implement nature throughout the architecture, blending the built and natural. The program is also distributed into mutli-use areas such as the collaborative living room immediately connected to the shared work area.

A photovoltaic panel system is located on the roof to supply solar power. The exhausted air from air handler cools down PV panels. The absence of water is a notorious characteristic of the desert, therefore, the presence of water throughout the site is used as an evaporative cooling strategy. A long pond located in the south facade of the building promotes air flow in order to ventilate the ground floor passively. Dynamic facades facing east and west adapt to climate throughout different seasons to reduce solar gain while thermal mass provides adaptive climate benefits.

In addition, native landscaping reduces irrigation needs, since desert vegetation is sparse and includes mainly low-water-use plants. The building’s materiality embraces its surrounding and, at the same time, shows conscious socially focused design. Timber is one of the few natural, renewable, and durable building materials. The process of regeneration of forests is cyclical, which ensures timber’s availability.

The integration of parking throughout the site is crucial in the design. The proposal provides different types of transportation as possible solutions like charging stations for electric vehicles, along with public seating platforms as community spaces, with bike parking and scooters. With 104 parking spaces, 10 being ADA handicapped, the parking resembles a natural environment. Composite granite and permeable parking are the proposed materials which benefit the aquifer by allowing rainwater to recharge it.

To conclude, the schematic design process of this project was based on a strong concept that would give meaning to every single decision made. Rethinking the future of sustainable design is one of the main driving forces of the CCI “Undefined Boundaries”. Environmentally conscious decisions must start since the schematic design stage. The building’s orientation and placement define the overall integration of systems in both inside and outside spaces. For instance, the project’s location, closer to Campbell Avenue (a busier street) serves as a buffer to protect the Innovation Garden’s wildlife from urban movement. Since the project “seeks to encourage power among future citizens”, the CCI prioritizes well-being. The use of natural building materials like wood promotes health benefits. The design is defined by a series of elongated walls, which create narrow spaces, this promotes circulation throughout the building. Finally, the project reflects biophilia design by inviting people to interact with and within the natural landscape of the Sonoran Desert. Over the past years, the world has been acknowledging controversial problems, which cannot be ignored. The Collaboration Center for Innovation, Undefined Boundaries, addresses social, political, and environmental matters with the intention of recognizing humanity’s susceptibility to change.

The Nags Head Coastal Discovery Museum located adjacent to the heart of Nags Head, Whalebone Junction, serves the entire community by providing a myriad of activities for visitors and residents alike. New pedestrian pathways, sidewalks, bike paths, stoplights, and miles of scenic trails create a healthier and more active lifestyle on Nags Head. The roughly 26,000 SF museum sits on 6 acres of natural vegetation and marsh overlooking the Roanoke Sound. By reclaiming this area of Nags Head, the complex encourages understanding and protection of coastal wetlands while increasing community interaction and spurring sustainable development.

Located on the north end of the North Carolina Outer Banks within climate zone 3, Nags Head has served as a popular tourist destination for hundreds of years. Its location as a barrier island means that it is often the first line of defense for hurricanes and nor’easters that continuously batter the NC coastline, drastically reshaping the land. Residents and visitors have grown accustomed to this way of life; however, if climate change continues to worsen these storms and cause unprecedented sea level rise, the future of Nags Head may be in trouble. Therefore, it is important to tackle these issues now before things get out of control.

The one-mile master planned area along the sound serves to revitalize the sound front, with miles of multi-use trails and numerous activities for all people of Nags Head. Scattered with affordable housing, tourist attractions, shopping, restaurants and my design for a new coastal museum. The sprawling network of multi-use trails provides a more efficient and carbon-neutral way to experience Nags Head, whether on foot, boat, or bike. There are numerous overlooks along the trail that offer splendid views of the sound as well as places to fish, crab and bird watch.

Inspired by the geometry and natural efficiencies of many local marine species, I was drawn to that of the sea star, with deck “appendages” of the museum reaching out into the marshscape. The building is organized by fish or whalebone-inspired masses that contain and frame space and views. From the parking area, visitors approach the building using a ramped boardwalk, leading into the central open-air breezeway. To the left, one can enter the volume containing the coastal recreation store, the public restrooms and an outdoor sitting porch overlooking the inlet. Opposite the breezeway, one enters the main museum and research area. Large fin-shaped light monitors bring bounced natural light deep into the building. Staff research offices line the north edge of the galleries and encourage visitor-staff interaction through the glassy walls. Solar panels and weather-monitoring instruments are located throughout the site as well to provide live information on tides, ecology, and atmospheric conditions while allowing the public the chance to interact with staff and researchers to learn more about the coastal environment. The best views, however, are certainly offered from the cafe + lounge area, where fresh local food is served to visitors as they enjoy the cool summer breezes and activities along the sound.

Nuuttuq is a proposal for a cultural and sports center in Ikaluktutiak (Nunavut), made for the 1700 Inuit inhabitants living above the Arctic Circle, at 69 degrees latitude, in Nunavut. The project land on a 275 000 sq² site, having a footprint of about 120 000 sq² from which 95 000 sq² are interior spaces and 25 000 sq² are exterior spaces. Nuuttuq expresses the migration, the movement between two places. As the natural movement of the once more nomadic population, the building pulses over the seasons, proposing a program improving health and well-being of the Inuit community. These spaces, either interior or exterior, expand according to seasons and uses of the buildings before retracting into the combination of shared use spaces during winter constitute the notion of pulsation. Elements of the program are forged by the wind flows of northern light on the site, in a layout adapted to human and climatic fluxes as a reflection of the existing urban fabric. The inhabitability of outdoor spaces protected from the wind and exposed to the sun thus becomes a key element in the viability of the program’s pulsation.

The mix of functions integrated into the project and complementing the ones of the community, also promises a temporal sustainability of the frequentation of the place, on a daily scale as for the years to follow.

Our current model of consumption is one of “take, make, waste”. It is a process which describes the linear flow of material that ultimately sees waste as its end. While its importance is understood, architecturally the effects of waste are hardly seen or felt. Once an object passes through the hole of a recycling point or into a bin, it is essentially lost from the social consciousness of its users. Out of sight and out of mind.

In the design of a new urban factory in Zurich, we propose the introduction of a bioremediation facility where mushrooms are used to decompose plastic waste. Via this process, plastic decomposition happens over months rather than years, thereby proposing an alternative means of managing waste. Furthermore, mushrooms are a new raw material. The emerging technology of mycelium, which extends from the typical mushroom process, offers a biodegradable raw material, all grown directly in the city.

We ask ourselves two key questions. How can our new factory tap on the emerging social consciousness about production and extend it to consider an object’s end of life, bringing awareness to this pressing issue of waste? Can the reintroduction of local manufacturing in the city together with locally produced raw materials, promote a more sustainable way of production and consumption?

Our factory addresses these questions by manifesting itself as two diametric opposites, a solid dark heavy concrete core with a light flexible 3-dimensional grid wrapped around. Each part corresponds to its two key inhabitants; the mushroom farm and urban factory.

The factory engages the public on the ground floor, where the mushroom farm and the plastic recycling overlap. The public moves through the ground floor, from plastic dropoff to viewing gallery to factory shop selling locally produced mycelium and plastic products. This curated journey exposes the typically hidden operations of waste processing while offering the public an intimate encounter to understand the aftermath of their waste and its possible afterlives.

In the factory above, lightweight steel construction contrasts with its heavy primary concrete structure. The factory is designed as a flexible framework where its walls, floors and partitions can be disassembled, reassembled and adapted to the ever-changing needs of industry. Within the thick core walls, embedded machinery rechannel waste heat from its machines to heat the mushroom plant below. Its core’s thermal mass forms a climatic buffer to Zurich’s temperate climate, reducing the overall energy load of the building. Together the mushroom farm and the factory form a closed ecological loop within.

Ultimately, beyond just reintroducing production into the city, we see our factory and mushroom farm as an opportunity to close the existing gap between production, its users and waste. It proposes a new paradigm of production, one that doesn’t just perpetuate existing modes of practice but takes into consideration pressing concerns of life cycle, ecology and material use.