Work done while completing my Masters in Landscape Architecture, First Professional degree at The University of Texas at Austin School of Architecture.
Fall 2017 - Advanced Landscape Architecture Studio
This studio's proposals were developed in partnership with IMPLAN, the planning advisory entity in Saltillo, Coahuila, Mexico, and Universidad La Salle in Saltillo. We were asked to develop public space design guidelines for this small industrial city in northern Mexico. As a final deliverable, teams implemented our design guidelines in a range of typologies. I and two other students took on green corridors.
The City of Saltillo is superimposed on a network of arroyos that drain a dramatic mountain range southeast of the city. While the city was originally founded around these waterways, some of which were spring-fed, today they are largely ignored. This proposal presents a vision for the city: how the corridors can be imagined as infrastructure for ecology and society. The urban fabric they flow through is not homogeneous; restoration and trail building is imagined as a phased system contingent on availability of resources and variable right-of-ways and urban contexts.
The Green Corridors of Saltillo are a wholly new landscape typology for the city, offering a shared connection to ecology and history as well as a physical connection within the city.
Team members: Rem Kielman, Matt Wagoner
CIty-wide perspective by Matthew Wagoner
2017 ULI Hines Student Competition Winner
Rooted was built upon the inherent power of food culture to bring together people of diverse backgrounds in a comfortable and lively space.
Rooted creates a uniquely gritty, transparent, and adaptable urban community where both residents and visitors alike can make, learn, and grow.
Team members: Luke Kvasnicka, Chris Perkes, Mason Rathe, Kirsten Stray-Gundersen
134,400 lbs of food produced on-site annually
6.1 acres of community, learning, and production gardens
71% decrease in impervious cover
0.76% rainfall infiltrated in rain gardens and green roofs
Rendering by Luke Kvasnicka
Spring 2017 - Comprehensive Landscape Architecture Studio
Intersecting Tracks proposes a framework plan for the McDonald Observatory, a world-renowned observatory in the Davis Mountains of West Texas.
Intersecting Tracks prioritizes expanding programming for visitors and researchers, enhancing ecosystem performance, engaging a sense of place through experience, and building local relationships. Two “tracks” of research, one looking up at the skies, the other down at the soil, plants, and animals, will coexist on this remote, 800-acre satellite campus. And four physical “tracks”, trail loops of differing lengths, allow both researchers, land managers, and visitors to explore the site. These trails link the varying terrain, plant communities, water features, and telescopes, weaving research and experience through the landscape. The 20-30 acre plots shaped by the trail network become research plots for both bison grazing and controlled burns.
Team member: Rem Kielman
Spring 2016 - Landscape Architecture Studio II
The Save the Bay campus, located at the confluence of the Buffalo Bayou and the Trinity River, derives its forms from the surrounding chemical plants. The rational utility of the chemical plant in plan is translated into a terrain of subtle depressions and benchlands. Earthworks prioritize the rapid establishment of estuarine habitat while anticipating future sea level rise and storm surges.
