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IMAGINING POSIBILITIES FOR A RIVER LOGIC


Hackensack River, New Jersey
Academic
Spring 2025In an alternate reality, where the Hackensack River is integrated into daily consciousness, human systems align with the river’s dynamic patterns rather than dominating or disregarding them. Infrastructure, commerce, and culture are reoriented around principles of regeneration and reciprocity, and grounded in the lessons of specific environmental cycles. To aid in imagining this world, we created artifacts that would exist in this river logic society. Three of which are presented here. 

To play up the playfulness that comes with daydreaming, we used different modes of representation for each artifact. For example, the Watering Hole drawing is set up as a wimmelbild – a hidden object illustration where the drinking water fountain stands at the center of a diverse set of activities that water facilitates.

with Clarasophia Gust & Maria Fairchild







TIDAL CLOCK


Academic

Spring 2025

Methods for telling time are constructed to serve specific purposes. The common 12-hour clock was implemented to standardize time, maximizing efficiency and profit in the transportation and manufacturing sectors. 

The Tidal Clock proposes structuring our days around the asynchronous ebb and flow of the tides to step outside the optimization mindset and begin building a closer awareness of the environmental systems that we live within.

Artifact from the Imagining Posibilities for a River Logic studio project.

For my Arduino code click here.
For the virtual simulation click here.




CHINATOWN STITCH PILOT PARK


Chinatown, Philadelphia
YH Lab
04.23.2025

Furniture prototypes to go in a pilot park in Philadelphia’s Chinatown. The pilot park is intended to provide much need community open space, ahead of the completion of the Chinatown Stitch, a highway cap park. 


with Yadan Luo  & Joe Bondi

LANDSCAPE MONITORING

EMLAB, The McHarg Center - University of Pennsylvania
2023 - present
Coastlines are retreating upland faster than at any time in recorded history. As dunes erode and coastal marshes vanish, the urgency for adaptive strategies along the littoral edge grows. In response, the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers (USACE) has placed increasing emphasis on experimental sediment placement techniques to restore and stabilize these vulnerable wetlands. The success of these interventions depends on careful monitoring and analysis.

To support this effort, the EMLab is partnering with The Wetlands Institute and USACE to monitor an active sediment placement site on Sturgeon Island, located in New Jersey’s Great Sound Bay. As an experimental marsh nourishment project, Sturgeon Island serves as a testing ground for understanding the long-term impacts of sediment addition. Our team is using a fleet of unmanned aerial vehicles (UAVs) to collect high-resolution multispectral imagery and LiDAR data. We process this data using a custom land cover classification system, developed in collaboration with The Wetlands Institute, and analyze it to calculate landscape metrics that reveal how the island’s ecology and form are shifting over time and in response to the sediment placement.

with Keith VanderSys & Sean Burkholder

REINTEGRATING HUMAN & NATURAL SYSTEMS AT LAC MBEUBEUSS 


Dakar Region, Senegal
Academic
Fall 2024At a height of 20-22 m and covering 150 hectares, the Mbeubeuss landfill serves the entire Dakar region and is the largest dumpsite in West Africa. The community in and around Mbeubeuss is simultaneously exposed to harmful conditions and derives essential economic benefit from the landfill. To improve living and environmental conditions while sustaining livelihoods, it is necessary to reintegrate human and natural systems. The region is also experiencing rapid, unplanned urban development, pluvial flooding and an unreliable clean water supply.

To that end, this project porposed a strategy to (1) support a just transition for the regional waste management system, (2) addressing flooding and surface water and groundwater contamination by creating space to hold and filter water and (3) stitching community together through housing, workforce, and public space interventions.

with Briana Belo & Claudia Schreier









INTERROGATING THE SECTION


Academic
Fall 2024




From gravity-oriented to suspension-oriented thinking in the Great Plains.

When we represent geology as a striated section we oversimplify the relationship between land and water. This representation drives our understanding of how surface and groundwater exist and this understanding informs how we use the land.
THE EMERALD NECKLACE’S 
MISSING LINK


Charlesgate - Boston, MA, USA
Landing Studio
Summer  2023
The Charlesgate project aims to restore the broken link in the Emerald Necklace Park System -- connecting this park to the Charles River Esplanade and restoring the Muddy River’s ecological infrastrucutre performance. In the 60s, the Bowker roadway overpass severed Charlesgate’s function as a public park and created additional stormwater discharge. This project aims to provide new public programming under the underpass, improve runoff management, water quality and provide habitat opportunities. The project is in collaboration with The Emerald Necklace Conservancy, Charlesgate Alliance, Massachusett’s Department of Conservation and Recreation & MassDOT.


BOXES & THE PARK: WAREHOUSES AS THE NEW PASTORAL

Logistics Warehouse Campus in the Lehigh Valley, Pennsylvania
Academic
Fall 2023 Assuming current trends persist—continued population growth in the Northeast, reliance on the Lehigh Valley for distribution, and rising e-commerce demands—Pennsylvania’s existing land use practices will lead to increased truck traffic and the steady conversion of agricultural land into residential and warehousing developments. This proposal responds by concentrating future growth along Route 22, a major freight corridor already acting as a development vector, in order to relieve pressure on surrounding landscapes. While it accepts the likely redevelopment of land along Route 22 for warehousing, it challenges the conventional notion that these facilities are incompatible with other land uses. Instead, the project reimagines warehouses as part of a new pastoral vernacular—one where infrastructure, industry, and technology are integrated into the agrarian landscape rather than imposed upon it.

Recognizing the burdens warehouses place on local communities—from pollution to infrastructure strain—the proposal calls for developers to provide greater public benefit. By treating the entire site as a park, and embedding warehouse boxes and supporting programs within a layered, multifunctional landscape, the design creates shared value for both the surrounding community and the nomadic trucking population. 

LEARNING LANDSCAPE


Philadelphia, PA
Academic
Spring 2023
Since European settlement, the Fishtown section of the Delaware River served a mainly industrial function. This project proposes to redevelop the site into a city park – reconnecting adjacent neighborhoods with the waterfront. The site’s long-standing industries – represented in the project through four characteristic materials  –  inform the type, location and form of the park’s programming.  The four industries are metal casting, shipbuilding, construction material distribution, and glassworks. The four representative materials are iron, trees, concrete, and sand. In turn, these materials manifest on the site as an urban square, pine-oak forest, pocket scapes, and dunes.



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