PENJING: A MEMORIAL TO THE LOS ANGELES CHINESE MASSACRE OF 1871
2023 | CULTURAL
A memorial centered upon a garden and formed in support of diasporic culture, ritual, and memory, which resists and recasts the use of design in comparison to the era of the Massacre. Eschewing self-caricaturing, exaggerated silhouettes and imagery, Penjing instead develops a concept of Cultural Forms:
geometries, textures, scales, proportions, and relations familiar to and supportive of diasporic memory and practices.
LYNN, MA | 2025 | ADAPTIVE REUSE, UNDER CONSTRUCTION
A headquarters for a condom company with a rich queer, art, and public health history is inserted into a former industrial dairy & creamery. Interiors are filtered and partitioned through a series of soft and perceptually malleable architectural surfaces in place of normative walls. Chain mail curtain, acoustic sheers, dichroic films, and mirrors abound, each operating on sight, sound, publicness, and privacy. The language of domestic space, full of textiles and inviting softness, is borrowed as an adaptive response to the contemporary office environment.
2021 | RESIDENTIAL
Adapting the visual and geometric language of Basquiat’s crown to generate a new inclusive housing typology. Through a reconfigurable cellular plan, overscaled section, and individual access to each bedroom, Crown House is mutably fluid between single family, multi-family, live/work, and non-traditional social structures, variably containing a diversity of domestic and work arrangements within an identical envelope, and updating the ‘missing middle’ of American domestic types.
Currently on long term display at the National Building Museum in Washington, DC
BOSTON, MA | 2022 | RESIDENTIAL
A house looks to the undulations of a hairpin turning mountain road as navigational and spatial device within a nineteenth century domestic interior. A central stair is reimagined as a contingent figure; as it cascades obliquely through the four-story rowhouse, it carves out a connective forty foot atrium within which this misbehaving element continuously reconfigures itself, producing a sculptural figure and vertiginous space within a highly constrained site.
CLOUD PAVILION
NEW YORK, NY | 2022 | LANDSCAPE
A rooftop pavilion in Manhattan which looks to cloud watching as a strategy for both privacy and openness, through choreographed gradients of light, shadow, views, and translucency.
Surrounded by skyscrapers, the translucent roof both shields and intensifies a skyward orientation by treating the roof as a cloud-like volume which produces plays of light and transparency while producing privacy from surrounding taller neighbors.
JAMAICA PLAIN, MA | 2025 | RESIDENTIAL
Situated within a rapidly densifying single-family neighborhood newly characterized by tense exposures and uncomfortable adjacencies between neighbors, Periscope House takes the periscope as its motivating force, choreographing turns and displacements of circulation and views within a tightly packed cubic volume. While most often deployed and seen as a voyeuristic device, the periscope becomes an anti-voyeuristic device at the urban scale within Periscope House. Curved walls and precise apertures gently reorient the body and the gaze to produce both extroverted views and introverted privacies, between exterior neighbors and interior occupants. The contradictory acts of turning within and looking afar, born of contradictory domestic desires, become linked ends of the periscope.
PUBLIC SPACE | UNDER CONSTRUCTION
A trio of public space typologies, centered within a mid-rise residential block, and designed to invert the panopticon’s diagram and relations of power, in service of community.
An amphitheater, an open-air pavilion, and a conditioned hall allow for seasonal year-round occupation, rotating between degrees of enclosure over the months of a year. The trio are framed and sheltered by a gently sloping conic roof that allows all surrounding residents to see entirely through the civic spaces at all times, in service of visible and safe community gathering, and in resistance to level-by-level isolation typical to apartment dwelling.
BOSTON, MA | 2019 | RESIDENTIAL
Oblique Figures inherits an empty cubic space and inserts a stair as fulcrum, pivoting new spatial and perceptual relationships around a central, curving figure. Connecting three scales and orientations of space, the stair differentiates and domesticates its context by transforming in perspective, appearing as a domestically scaled slim column from the kitchen, a publically scaled grand stair from the entrance axis, and a perspectivally exaggerated dramatic figure from the dining. The existing space is fenestrated only on one side, problematizing access to both light and privacy. By reorienting the cube around a central oblique rotation, notions of front and rear are made ambiguous, allowing for a constantly curving gaze to supercede the rectilinearity of its context while bridging between publically scaled double height living spaces, privately scaled single height sleeping quarters, and a roof garden.
BOSTON, MA | 201 5 | CULTURAL
Fly Gallery looks to theatrical fly rigging systems, motivated by an architectural envy for the stage and its ease of transformation. Adapting the fly rig to a gallery space, a grid of translucent partitions descends from above. Spatial proportions and ceiling heights lower for children’s events, backdrops and raked ceilings emerge for projections and performances, light boxes descend for displays, and partitions touch down for new layouts, rapidly switching between accommodations for a range of users and functions.
Functioning as spatial device and light modulator, the fly rigging scrim finely controls qualities of space and light while remaining under a budget of $50,000. Designed for a non-profit dedicated to expanding equitable financial and representational models for emerging artists who are often prey to asymmetric power dynamics, and paired with a community-centered mission to provide educational and civic space for local community members, Fly Gallery’s rapid reconfigurability and low cost are an instrument of social action.
BELMONT, MA | 2025 | RESIDENTIAL, UNDER CONSTRUCTION
A renovation of a 1920s Neo-Georgian home had been successively renovated several times over the course of 100 years, leading to a series of disorganized and cloistered attachments on the rear facade of the house. In response, the rear facades are reconceptualized as a series of veils – pushed, pulled, drawn, or extended to produce calibrated relations to exterior space, light, and privacy.
STOWE, VT | RESIDENTIAL, UNDER CONSTRUCTION
A renovation of a 1980s ranch house looks to surgically extend, rotate, and break apart a roof and its pediments as a carbon-minimizing means of transformation. Inserted chimney flues separating rooves into two planes and allow each to extend shade or tilt towards views. Nestled within sloped ground on one side, and projecting above it on the other, the broken pediment provides a moment of origin for differing responses to the site at each elevation. Beneath the roof, the facades grow glassy or opaque in turn, adapted for extrovertion or introvertion.
STOWE, VT | 2017 | RESIDENTIAL
Trinocular House is built between three distinct landscapes: a flat orchard, a sloped hillside, and body of water, each faced and framed through a gable, and conjoined with a continuous glass-fronted trefoil circulation loop, allowing for an unbroken yet differentiated view of the site, and unfettered wheelchair accessibility to accommodate the client’s elderly parents. As the mountainous horizon undulates, so does the line of the roof, oscillating between the gable and the ribbon window. Faces, fronts, and frames overlap and merge, centering and recentering views to the landscape.
BOSTON, MA | 2017 | LANDSCAPE
Posture and posturing are central to this roof deck in a historic Boston neighborhood. An overloaded brief causes the deck itself to swallow the program, with seated and lounging postures woven in as warp and weft, allowing users to transition between postures with a single turn. To overcome onerous historic approvals, the deck postures as furniture. Modeled after a xylophone, wood elements assemble entirely without screws or fasteners, instead assembling (and disassembling) by hand with sequentially interlocking joints. Furniture masquerades as ground, and ground becomes furniture, sidestepping permitting altogether.
Team: J. Roc Jih (Design), Chuck Choi (Photographs), J. Roc Jih (Carpentry and Install), Polyfab (Milling), Mahoney’s (Plantings)