Student Projects

Lived-In Criticism

I stood on the dirt ruins and concrete foundation where Pruitt-Igoe once stood in St. Louis—the massive housing project became the symbolic “death of modernism” after its Minoru Yamasaki design became a death trap for the thousands of people within. Though some critics believe design cannot be blamed for its problems, what are unpatrolled interior hallways, lack [...]

Lived-In: Media Lab

The Fumihiko Maki designed extension to the MIT Media Lab in Boston is a six-floor, heavenly-white transparent machine—while its glass and metal screens on the exterior, (white) painted walls, and colorful stairways leading up into the lab spaces are serene, the building is based on principles of openness and collaboration for the students that occupy [...]

Wood Vibrations

It’s weird. Sometimes I think that the visual appearance of an object or building is the least important thing about it. Charles Eames once said (or quipped), “Thinking of how a chair looks comes pretty far down on the list of things I worry about when designing.“ And his chairs looked good. When I look [...]

Architecture Illuminated in New York

As a college student in St. Louis, I would regularly walk from a collegiate-gothic quadrangle to the St. Louis Art Museum to see Giovanni Paolo Panini’s massive perspective painting, Interior of St. Peter’s. St. Peter’s Basilica is so grand in scale that its image on a museum wall made me feel like I was levitating [...]

THE DISAPPEARANCE OF THE FRIDGE: Camouflage and Obsolescence in the Kitchen

Behold the glorious modern kitchen! Sparkling countertops, high-tech materials, and majestic range hoods: it’s all the industrial appeal you can imagine! The appliances are all energy efficient, the custom cabinets have a space for every gadget, and only the food stands out against all this heavy-duty stainless steel. But wait. Where is the refrigerator? Ah, [...]

The World is Your Can Opener.

“At one time a badge of shame, hallmark of the lazy lady and the careless wife, today the can opener is fast becoming a magic wand, especially in the hand of those brave, young women, nine million of them (give or take a few thousand here and there), who are engaged in frying as well [...]

Definition of Design

As “a plan or scheme conceived in the mind and intended for subsequent execution,” (OED noun, 1a) and also the act “to appoint, devote (a thing or person) to a fate or purpose,” (OED verb, 7) design is a hybrid of rationality and the supernatural. Consider the designs of a pencil or a pair of [...]

Accidental Memorials

Written for Andrea Codrington’s Criticism Lab
We thought it was just a basket of peaches. On vacation one August, my sisters and I took a break from the beach on a day when the waves lapped lukewarm along the sand and the ocean was fully populated with the creepy translucent bodies of jellyfish. Instead of trying [...]

Times Square: Beautiful Catastrophe

Written for Karrie Jacobs’s Urban Curation class
If the architecture of New York City is a perpetually evolving work in progress, Times Square is a key interface where friction creates sparks and heat as the past collides and coexists with the present. The visual contrast of old and new, of century-old masonry facades next to glittering [...]

Reading Room: Renovating the Pierpont Morgan Library

Written for Alexandra Lange’s class Architecture and Urban Design Criticism.
My first glimpse of the main room of McKim, Mead, and White’s Pierpont Morgan Library while on a high school field trip was a life-affirming moment. I’ve loved books and libraries since I was about three, and that initial view of triple-tiered bronze and inlaid Circassian [...]