Charlotte North Carolina | 2022 | House
Steel Louise is a single-family urban infill house located in Charlotte, North Carolina. Situated in Belmont, a historic neighborhood undergoing rapid transformation near the urban core of Charlotte’s Uptown, the architecture reckons with dramatic contradictions between the neighborhood’s past and present, offering an alternative architectural vision for infill development.
The monolithic steel-clad form morphs to address multiple scales at once -- gesturing equally to existing single-story historic mill houses as well as more recent, two-story development. Coffered recesses on both the front and rear facades define a series of porches with differing proportions, views, and orientations, drawing natural light deep into the interior. These voids, clad in black painted wood slats and panels, are inhabitable poché, providing a moody dark transition to the otherwise bright interior spaces.
As opposed to more recent development that mimics suburban types, Steel Louise’s ambition was to contribute to the civic life of its context. Large glazed openings offer views from the street through the main living space to the rear yard, expanding the space of the house to the street, giving the private house a unique and generous public appearance.
Photography by Keith Isaacs
Charlotte NC | 2022 | Community Space
The People’s Porch is a platform for community activism in Charlotte’s Enderly Park Neighborhood.
In this space, West Side residents and neighborhood leaders can gather to organize around matters of concern. This flexible community architecture can host events such as neighborhood pop up markets, picnics for family and friends, meetings, skills classes and training workshops, or stage performances. On a more permanent basis, there is dedicated space for bike repair services and training, a key local transportation need.
The design build project emerged in response to resident feedback from the September 2018 Neighborhood Design: Housing Workshop (supported by funding from multiple AIA NC Activate Grants, and AIA National Blueprint for Better). The workshop, held September 22, 2018, brought together AIA design professionals, academics, WSCLT members, stakeholders and residents, to share thoughts on community needs within Enderly Park. The need for an accessible and open public community gathering place emerged from the charette and subsequent discussions.
SILO was asked to lead the design/build effort and serve as the architect of record. The architecture explores how a single inexpensive material (dimensional lumber), coupled with an unconventional yet “easy” construction logic (lap joints), can create a dynamic, flexible, and layered space. Using lap joints minimized cuts, allowing each layer to serve as form-work and scaffold for the next part of the sequence. The design-build effort engaged volunteers and students, delivering a built framework to the community to be given identity through color and imagery.
People’s Porch is a collaborative partnership between the West Side Community Land Trust (WSCLT), AIA Charlotte (AIA), UNC Charlotte School of Architecture, and Community Stakeholders to launch concrete actions that promote affordable housing and reduce displacement from neighborhoods on the West Side of Charlotte.
Photography by Keith Isaacs
Fayetteville Arkansas | 2018 | House
Like a mineral, the architecture of Hillside Rock emerges from interactions with its environment; an abstract outcropping situated within a lush forest.
Located on a dramatically sloping site in the Ozark Mountains of Fayetteville Arkansas, the clients desired a home that would take advantage of the unique qualities of wooded enclosure and mountainous expanse the location offered. The crystalline form is shaped in response to the desire to provide distinct views and experiences from each main living space. Three separate terraces are carved from an otherwise solid volume, each with a different perspective of the environment. The textured white envelope becomes a canvas that catches shadows from the surrounding landscape, revealing in its surface the complexity of forms that abound on the site while registering the changing character of light throughout the day. Instead of scattering small windows indifferently on all sides, the façade’s openings are choreographed to create singular connections to the land at different scales.
The interior’s split-level organization is tuned to the hillside slope, animating an ever changing section of cascading and nested spaces. A central wooden stair stitches together an intricate spatial section that transitions from a concrete base into sculpted white volumes whose scale mimics the immediate exterior environment, capturing the alternating exposure and enclosure found on the original untouched site. Finishes enhance the volumetric quality of the interior space to create a demure backdrop to the vivid colors in natural vistas that transform throughout the seasons.
Photography by Timothy Hursley
Goshen Arkansas | 2018 | House
The Heads House derives its name from a series of sculptural heads created by the client’s father, Richard Staples Dodge, who was a painter and sculptor. Many of these cardboard heads, with their playful often triangulated shapes, have adorned the client’s houses over the past 50 years.
Compelled by the client’s story, the architecture acts as a memory device. The facades reference Dodge’s sculptural forms, which are stitched together by the house’s massive roof.
Designed for the clients’ to age-in-place, the house is organized as two volumes—one long and low that contains the main living spaces and master suite, and a two story volume containing the garage and guest rooms. The gap between is the main entry. Once inside each space is defined by a unique ceiling vault to create implied “rooms” in an otherwise open plan with expansive views to the landscape. The material palette (metal, shake) and red color are borrowed from the utilitarian buildings that surround site, grounding the abstract form in its local context.
Photography by Aaron Kimberlin
Fayetteville Arkansas | 2015 | House
Mood Ring House is an exploration of how architecture can have different day and night presences with distinct experiential and spatial qualities. This unique house is located in an eclectic neighborhood near the town center of Fayetteville, Arkansas.
The “T” shaped volume is born out of a mix of site limitations and opportunities, economic constraints, and programmatic requirements. With a skewed alignment to the lot lines, the siting preserves two established monumental trees, orienting the house to take advantage of north light from a clerestory, and south and west facing views of the immediate forest and distant mountains, all while fronting the main intersection near the property.
A live-work space, work functions are consolidated on the ground, with a majority of living spaces above. The small base aids in reducing the footprint, preserving existing trees, and reducing foundation costs, which are a premium in the unstable Arkansas soil. The cantilevering upper level, in concert with the dramatically sloping site, affords views to the living spaces, creating a private enclave amidst the tree canopy. Beneath overhangs is a carport on the west facing front and an outdoor room on the east facing rear. The shed roof, open to the north, when coupled with an inverted truss profile, flood the interior volume with natural light. At night, illuminated soffits construct volumes out of projecting colored light from concealed LED fixtures. Colors are derived either automatically from the temperament of the house or directly by owners’ desire.
Photography by Timothy Hursley
Cleveland Ohio | 2013 | Religious Institution
North Presbyterian Church transforms an industrial warehouse into a multi-purpose worship space for an urban congregation that serves the under-served in Cleveland, Ohio.
The site for the new church is a formerly decommissioned building where the congregation is strategically collocated with a series of affiliated nonprofit social organizations that share services and infrastructure. Existing size limitations meant the sanctuary was required to be shared meeting space with all tenants divisible by movable partitions.
The architecture capitalizes on the multi-purpose function of the sanctuary to enhance the spatial qualities that characterize sacred worship space (symmetry, volume, indirect/ambient natural light). Conceived as a hybrid canopy/cathedral, a ceiling surface undulates to create a series of vaults that maximize the spatial volume available and conceal the appearance of hardware and headers required for the movable partitions. The faceted ceiling panels are subdivided into an animated triangular pattern developed to simultaneously maximize material economy, ease of construction, and visual complexity.
Photography by Scott Pease
Cleveland Ohio | 2015 | Exhibition Installation
Reflects is a treehouse without trees located in the Cleveland Botanical Garden's "Secret Garden" courtyard. We saw this limitation as an opportunity to transform the treehouse it into a unique sculptural object.
As a point of departure, the gabled house profile creates an iconic and memorable image. The house archetype floats above the surrounding walls. To create the “trees” that the house rests on and within, reflective surfaces are introduced, and the house profile is symmetrically mirrored down, creating a series periscopes that capture surrounding views, transforming them into a “Secret Forest” within the Secret Garden. The abstract, planar, and porous architecture, in combination with the surface reflection, produces a variety of dynamic effects whether on the ground or above, outside or within, engaging everyone in the treehouse experience.
Constructed of a light steel frame and infill panels of laminated plywood, the composite system provides a minimal and low impact assembly. On site construction was minimized by prefabrication off-site, limiting disturbance to the Cleveland Botanical Garden grounds.
Photography by Scott Pease
Charlotte North Carolina | 2017 | Concept Proposal
Belmont Agora is a community-driven mixed use development concept for Charlotte’s Belmont neighborhood. The project was developed in response to an RFP asking for teams of developers and architects to create innovative mixed-use approaches to rapidly activate two adjacent under-utilized city-owned properties.
The architectural and development strategy was to create a gentrification-resistant project. This phased-proposal includes the adaptive reuse of two existing commercial buildings, new ground-floor commercial spaces, and below-market rate housing aimed at local families.
Programmatically, leasable “incubator” units offer low cost and flexible term leasing for start-up local businesses, and community organizations, among others. Traditional brick and mortar commercial space will also be available to attract established local business owners looking to relocate or expand to Belmont. The density and size of residential units allow for below market rate rent offerings to prospective tenants.
From community rooms, services, pedestrian thoroughfares, to the “Agoras”, spaces throughout the project are shared. The Agora spaces will remain open to the public, available for markets and festivals, community gatherings and events, open and accessible to all residents of the Belmont neighborhood.
These interstitial spaces take on a vibrant character, illuminated during the evening with dynamic lighting, attracting residents and visitors to this new community hub. These interior facades undulate to spatially integrate, public, semi-public, and private zones. The ground floor plinth is a flexible open structural lattice to accommodate a mix of temporary, seasonal, and permanent commercial types.
Fayetteville Arkansas | 2018 | House
Boxy Bridge is a two-story house built on a small urban lot in downtown Fayetteville. Adjacent to a 1950’s era fire station, the house is situated in a tightly woven eclectic mix of residential and commercial buildings each with their own unique design language. The project was designed for a newly retired couple, who desired a house where they could age-in-place.
The architecture is conceived as an ensemble of carved volumes derived from the nested character of the site’s diverse urban context. In plan the house closes its envelope entirely to the adjacent fire station on its northern and western edges but opens in an exaggerated way to the street and the courtyard garden space on the south and east. In section, the house’s garden wall provides private living space at the first level where the surrounding context is most chaotic, while the second level and roof garden provide serene and expansive views of the Boston Mountains to the South. The effect is an architecture that at once offers a private refuge with both intimate and expansive connections to its site.
Photography by Aaron Kimberlin
Johnson Arkansas | 2013 - 2014 | House (Unbuilt)
Split Personality is located on a 20 acre site, the majority of which is in a floodplain, forcing its siting to be precariously close to an existing road and generic suburban subdivision. Despite the limitations of the site, the existing natural landscape is a mysterious and beautiful enclave of four diverse landscape types. In turn, the architecture was conceived as four main rooms, each with a distinct character and view of the four environments. Between rooms, spaces are split apart to create interstitial spaces that reveal unique connections between landscapes.
Landscape Architecture by Forge
Fayetteville Arkansas | 2014 - Present
The Hedge is a proposed Baptist Mission Center serving University of Arkansas students, and is located across the street from Bill and Hillary Clinton’s historic house in Fayetteville, Arkansas. The ABS Mission Center (known as The Hedge) originally brought the project to us with questions as to whether they should re-brand their organization and abandon from the religious symbolism the hedge, which refers to a protective envelope that God places around his followers. Rather than abandon this symbolism we embraced its architectural potential as both a diagram and material identity. In doing so, the project took hedge beyond symbol to become an architectural organization that instigates a vibrant inner social life that grows from inside out to create a singular and unifying exterior volume.
The vegetation that makes up the majority of the exterior envelope has varying presences depending upon the level of care that the ABS Mission chooses to give it. The building therefore is placed in a continually oscillating cycle between unkempt hairiness and well-manicured topiary; unbound to a single way of being.
The site sits at the southern edge of the University of Arkansas campus in an area that is currently undergoing a radical change in scale due to the university’s housing expansion program. The architecture anticipates the changing nature of the street to a more public realm. The Hedge is "pruned" to create public space along the street while revealing interior spaces. The distinct presence of the interior is marked by a mass painted with warm colors that change as one progresses vertically through the building and site. Ultimately, this creates an public connection to the varying events within the building with the hopes of expanding the Hedge's mission.
Charlotte NC | Renovation
Draper is the transformation of a historic bungalow into a contemporary house in Charlotte’s Merry Oaks neighborhood. The architectural approach adds volumes for new entry and rear porches connected by a continuous light shaft that also serves as the main corridor through the house. The existing roof geometry absorbs the additions, morphing into a cohesive new shape. Spaces transition between vertical to horizontal as one moves from front to back.
2021 | Salisbury North Carolina | Sculptural Object
Inspired by Frank Jacobus’ drawing Relax You Square, COLLECTS is a totem--a volumetric container for a diverse community of forms, symbols and shapes. Abstract elements interact and engage one another creating figures that resemble characters in a unique language. The 18”x 18”x 72” sculpture is fabricated from reclaimed local hardwood that is CNC carved to created a subtle bas relief. The wood is painted white at the outer-most profiles to make the two dimensional graphic quality of a drawing legible against a sculptural monolith.
Orlando Florida | 2017
Charlotte North Carolina | 2018
Using interactive and participatory design strategies, EFFERVESCE considers how design can reflect on the tragic events such as the 2016 Orlando nightclub shooting to at once celebrate the memory of the lives lost and create new connections between those who engage this pop-up architecture.
Rather than a monument, this memorial is an encounter and an event -- a place of interaction and contemplation amid the commotion of the convention environment. Appearing as a filigreed and dematerializing wall, it inhabits middle of site allowing viewers to circumnavigate the structure. The convex shape of each wall surface subtly captures space without occupying it, while the curvature establishes a focal zone within the field. Within this zone are 49 vessels suspended in the porous structure, 1 for each life lost during the shooting. Upon closer inspection, one discovers that these objects are in fact mechanisms: a siphon and operable iris, modeled on a simple toy bubble gun. The design encourages one to squeeze the nozzle, drawing liquid in to the iris, and on release, opening to reveal a soap bubble surface. Each bubble blown is a fleeting yet vivid reminder of a life lost, and perhaps, a moment of joy. Bubbles periodically floating above the convention floor quickly identify EFFERVESCE, and more importantly, its cause.
With a budget of less than $1,500 and six weeks to install from award, the construction method developed is modular and prefabricated, capable of rapid assembly and disassembly. Built predominantly from interconnected layers of laser cut clear acrylic and aluminum, all components are made of either recyclable, recycled, or compostable materials. Each of the infill elements are unique, integrating the elevation gradient and volumetric curvature, nested on sheets to minimize waste.
Effervesce is a collaboration with colleagues and students from the UNC Charlotte School of Architecture.
Photography by McKenzie Canaday
Fayetteville, Arkansas | 2013
Baltimore, Maryland | 2014
Inspired by Phoebe Lickwar’s photography of Falling Barns from the Ozark region, this installation synthesized two oppositional conditions whose qualities were consistently revealed in the images: the persistent iconic figure of the flat gambrel façade and the dynamic filigreed space of collapsing wood members suspended in animation. As such we combined techniques from the recent history of the architectural folly beginning with profile to create the memorable image of vernacular or iconic form that transforms into an animated volume of flocking lines made possible by parametric procedures.
Photography by Thomas Geeslin
Fayetteville Arkansas | 2015 | Exhibition
Semiautomatic Cenotaphs are memorials for victims of mass gun violence in the United States; the projection of an architectural antidote to the increased frequency of shootings and the disturbingly short cycle of shock, grief, loss, and forgetfulness that accompanies the spectacle of the tragedy.
The project transforms the passivity of automated design and construction into an active critical practice with a social agenda. The work was focused by questioning if the coded language of computational scripting can be asserted with the same ideological force of prose in the modern manifesto.
The rhetoric and capacities of mass customization are germane to recording the effects of gun violence in architectural form. Every mass shooting affects culture at two scales: holistically when considering the tragedy of mass shootings as a national (or global) phenomenon, and locally in the nuanced experiences of communities, families, and individuals. The design approach for the Cenotaphs commences from this observation in the development of a system to account for both the common resemblance and personal specificity of each event of gun violence. Similarity is achieved by constraining the proportion and shape to a sphere modeled after Boullee’s Cenotaph for Isaac Newton, scaled down to reflect the intimate context and for ease of implementation. The distinct aspects of each shooting are captured in the architecture through an algorithm that articulates material differences between structure, thickness, and opacity from data unique to each event.
Ultimately, projects like Semiautomatic Cenotaphs are formats for architecture to assert a sociopolitical imperative through the new means of working available to contemporary practice. And in order to have the broadest influence on the field, architects should continually search to enter into arguments for technology that are critical and affirmational rather than merely optimal or instrumental.
Photography by Ethan Werkmeister
Fayetteville Arkansas | 2015 | Temporary Installation
Fayz Box is a testimonial recording booth for the Fay Jones School of Architecture + Design. The Dean required the Fayz Box be deconstructed, stored easily, and reconstructed quickly throughout the academic year. To accomplish this, the project is a knock-down kit of components that can be assembled by a layman with limited knowledge of the project. When disassembled and flat-packed for storage, the 4’x8’x8’ installation fits into a 4’x8’x8” volume. The logistical constraints meant that the construct is a light frame and a thin envelope. The design superimposes competing patterns of formal and material content that create depth in the flat; an attempt to project substantial volume within a skin. Each “layer” has its own logic of fabrication, organization, and articulation.
St.Louis | 2014 | Temporary Installation
Awarded by an open national design-build competition, Super Sukkah is a temporary pavilion that reconsiders the traditional Jewish Sukkah as a 21st century phenomenon. The brief called for a space that exists between absence and presence, thus this design imagined the Sukkah as a three-dimensional shelter with a distinct day and night presence. During the day, the Sukkah subtly merges with its surroundings while at night, interior illumination gives it an emphatic figural character. The geometry is developed to generate a form that uses a minimal amount of material to create a maximal amount of space--a structurally interconnected volume whose surfaces continuously change in scale and orientation to enhance the effects of reflection and illumination.
Photography by Seth Spradlin
NEOCON Chicago | 2016 | Temporary Installation
A responsive installation to Archeworks’ Wasted Market research, SOFTCORE is hard on the outside, soft on the inside. It’s architecture is conceived using the analogy of a landfill, where a mass of waste is covered by a crust of turf.
Built from materials harvested from completed construction projects and manufacturers’ surpluses, the distinct exterior character and interior environment of SOFTCORE reveals the robust qualities of wasted or hidden resources. Clad with OSB sheathing, the white monolithic receptacle is an 11’ wide x 11’ high x 7’ deep volume, equal to the amount of construction and demolition waste generated every minute in the United States. This solid mass is “cored” to create a place to retreat and recharge within the energetic NeoCon convention floor. Like a geological excavation, the interior space is lined with strata of carpet tile and carpet padding, materials that abate the sound while providing a vibrant and supple surface treatment.
SOFTCORE points toward ways that materials originally planned for obsolescence can be retroactively imbued with new value through acts of design.
Softcore is a collaboration with Archeworks, Land, and the Fay Jones School of Architecture
Photography by Dominic Gallegos
Deer Isle Main | 2017
This project was completed as part of a two week residency was an opportunity to explore a single work of architecture in situ: Edward Larrabee Barnes’ iconic Haystack Mountain School of Arts and Crafts.
During the residency, SILO developed a series of interpretive objects, meant to speculate with the “primitive” architectural vocabulary Barnes developed at Haystack. The research began by documenting as-built conditions in comparison to the original construction documents. This work revealed that despite Barnes’ overt nods to vernacular form and tectonics, he privileged an ideal geometry remaining fairly indifferent to the local environment and climate.
After gaining an understanding the building dimensions and site relationships, new combinations of building forms were explored. These architectural alternatives sought to imagine the campus if it were adapted more specifically to its site, or in scenarios that create new local alignments, adjacencies, and programmatic scenarios. To explore the forms and spaces created, objects were fabricated using the tools on site at the School, with the rough tooling meant to echo the tectonic textures of the existing architecture.
2018 | Furniture
The Type Chair, designed by SILO in collaboration with Scope Architecture, is a full-scale 3d printed chair using PLA plastic. To produce the chair, a cost and print optimization algorithm were created to reduce printing expense and allow a lay audience to effect the formal outcome of the chair.
Published by Laurence King | 2015
Archi-Graphic: A Visual Operation places architecture on the operating table, using infographics to cut a visual cross-section that investigates the field. The intention behind Archi-Graphic is that knowledge of the richness and complexity inherent in the discipline and profession of architecture can become an accessible and even desirable pursuit for architects and non-architects alike. This book aims to be informative without being especially didactic, engaging both serious and humorous themes. Archi-Graphic peers into issues within architecture that are rarely tackled: personality, color, gender, ethnicity, construction expense, and life span are visually revealed through vibrant infographic diagrams. Ultimately, information is an abundant resource that lacks quality and this book challenges that condition, situating itself as a cross-disciplinary project between architecture, graphic design, art, information graphics--an exploration of the architecture of information.
The Visual Biography of Color considers color as a vital, communicating, cultural mechanism. Instead of an dense aesthetic treatise or narrative conceit; the book utilizes data visualization techniques to animate the substance color in both high and low-brow culture to reveal how deeply embedded the value of color is in our color-full environment.
The Visual Biography takes readers on a journey through the visible spectrum. For instance, RED encounters the evolution of red states in the U.S., the compilation of every red subway line in every major world city collapsed onto a single page, and a radiant wheel that displays every major song that has red in its title. The Visual Biography ultimately brings into appearance a glimpse of the complex hidden architecture of color's meaning to the world.
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