Portfolio

A new ground station for earth observation, designed with the Swiss Space Center. We tilted the tower and used the cliff to turn the building into a viewing platform.

The studio asked for a tower for satellite communication, a data centre, a research hub and facilities for visitors. Leuk in Valais was chosen as the site because it gets around 3,500 hours of sunshine a year. The programme called for an elevated viewpoint, which suggested a tower. After studying how other buildings respond to the landscape, we decided on a radical, pure volume in the mountains.

The programme runs in a line. The research centre and auditorium sit at the start of the building, the visitor programme at the tip, and the technical rooms in the supporting column, so public and private uses stay apart. The laser receptors sit on the roof as part of the promenade, where anyone can watch them. The outer walls therefore carry only structure, which keeps the building monolithic. The rooms are separate volumes, set around a sequence of courtyards and joined only by the roof.

The structure is two concrete walls, tied together at key points into a U-profile that holds the rooms. The beams are built with bridge-construction methods. A light metal substructure then forms the roofs of the boxes, so the rooms seem to float between the two walls.

A new school for arts and crafts in Kanazawa, offering affordable places to live and work, and courses for young craftsmen.

The building would be a satellite of the Utatsuyama Arts & Crafts Atelier and the Kanazawa Craftsman School. I wanted to bring back the merchant and craftsman character that Tatemachi Street once had and give it new life. The idea came from the nearby Daiku Machi, a traditional carpenters' neighbourhood. The project reconnects the two neighbourhoods through the character and traditions they have lost, and shows crafts to the young people walking along Tatemachi Street.

The structure is a concrete frame with a rigid core, echoing the timber construction of the traditional machiya. This robust frame holds light timber partitions and room layouts that can change over time. The mise, or workshops, are left empty so each craftsman can build their own. Services run down the “window sky core”, which makes changes and connections easy. The side walls are vertical timber logs stacked side by side. They insulate well, are easy to adapt and take light fixings, and they are quick and dry to build.

Two houses, each translating a written definition of space into a spatial medium through models and photography.

Each student drew definitions of space by lottery and proposed a house for each. Every proposal had to take on its definition and show its essential qualities in two interior model photographs, each a different reading of the space.

The first house was based on the definition of Ornamental Space. The second was my own interpretation of the Great Hall.

A cultural centre, shops, co-working spaces and a transport hub above the bus and tram station at Bucheggplatz: a landmark at one of Zürich's busiest junctions.

The project began with a fragment of a photograph of Oskar and Zofia Hansen's extension to the Zachęta Art Gallery (1958). From it, the students drew a narrative in the form of themes to develop over the semester. At the same time, a conceptual model brought these themes together as an object and a new fragment.

The second phase dealt with site and programme. After a close analysis of the area between Käferberg and Hönggerberg, we chose the Bucheggplatz bus and tram station. Its infrastructure fascinated us, and the area lacked cultural, leisure and creative uses. The site could become a centre for the city. The building had to be a radical landmark that draws on the energy and flow of people moving through the station.

A pavilion built from a reciprocal frame and joined only with timber-to-timber connections, to be assembled in a three-day workshop using simple hand tools.

The pavilion is part of research on timber joints and structural behaviour at the Chair of Structural Design, ETH Zürich, and part of a wider study of timber-to-timber connections with the Chair of Architecture and Digital Fabrication (Gramazio Kohler). It is designed to be built by participants with different backgrounds and levels of experience.

The work began as a student assistant job, became a focus work and then continued as a free master thesis. I was responsible for the architectural design, the geometric rules, the construction system and the assembly sequence. The pieces were too complex to model by hand, so a parametric Grasshopper model generated the variants and 3D prints tested them physically. The same model made it easy to share data with Dario Quaglia, a structural engineering master's student who studied the global and local behaviour of the structure. We carried out the structural optimisation and planning together.

The result is a structural system based on reciprocal, interlocking members. It is topologically stable and tolerates large deviations in the timber-to-timber joints.

A mixed-use farm that combines slow tourism with two ways of producing food, as a way to help restart the island's economy after Hurricane Iota.

The project is the result of a year of work on rebuilding an area after a natural disaster, and on developing a reciprocal timber system. It focuses on the island of Old Providence in Colombia. In November 2020, Hurricane Iota left almost 98% of the island's infrastructure destroyed or severely damaged. Two lines of work shaped the project: research into the site before and after the hurricane, and testing the timber structure developed at the Chair of Structural Design on a real site with a real programme.

The first method of food production is agroforestry, in which timber and fruit trees share the same land with crops and farm animals. The parts support one another ecologically, producing food while helping the island's forests and biomass recover. The second is aquaponics, a land- and water-efficient system that produces fruit, vegetables and fish with as little as 10% of the water that soil-based farming needs.

The public programme, a farm stay, links tourism with the local community. Guests can trade goods and produce, or work in exchange for their stay. The aim is a slower kind of tourism that engages with the community, as an alternative to the all-inclusive resorts that are spreading across the region.

Global warming may be the greatest challenge our societies face. Rising temperatures and sea levels are expected to bring more extreme weather, and with it heavy damage to the built environment. Construction contributes significantly to carbon emissions, so architects have to work towards a more sustainable future. They also have to learn to respond as natural disasters become more frequent and more severe, with strategies for recovery that address the social and economic fabric of a place as well as its physical infrastructure.

Crises tend to speed up the adoption of new strategies, yet there is rarely time to develop anything from scratch. In Providencia, the urgency to rebuild left architects on the sidelines. The Colombian government's fast-track plan rightly put more than 1,000 new houses first. What was missing was any thought about what happens after reconstruction, or about the problems the island had before the hurricane, food production among them.