Process

Process is where I do my thinking, and it is where I would most like to be read. Every project in this portfolio began as a question I could draw — which drawing tested the sequence, which model found the section, which material changed the plan. These case studies keep the questions visible, along with what the process revealed that the finished drawings alone would hide. Each one leads to the resolved work.

Refuge for Portland

How does a plan welcome someone the city has failed?

I did not trust the inverted plan until I could paint it. The bubble study put the apartments at the edges and the services at the core; the watercolor tested whether the public-to-private gradient actually read as a gradient — the middle of the spectrum the most public, the ends the most private. Both drawings survived into the final building almost unchanged, which is how I knew the idea was structural and not rhetorical.

The resolved work — Refuge for Portland

Hand-drawn program bubble diagram — The program study, drawn by hand before any wall existed.

Watercolor public-to-private gradient study — The watercolor gradient the plan had to keep its promise to.

Timber Way

Diagram of The Tube threshold cutting through the block — We drew The Tube dozens of times; this state is the one where the panels started doing the work of a doorman.

How does a threshold announce a change of scale?

The question we kept testing was whether a resident could feel the city let go of them as they climbed. We lined the route with panels that shrink as you rise, so the walls open progressively and the daylight increases — compression at the bottom is the city, expansion at the top is the apartment. The massing sequence ran in parallel: six states of the same block, each one giving a little more ground back to the street.

The resolved work — Timber Way

Lithos

How does a massing learn what to give away?

We started from the full envelope the pro forma wanted and carved the public rooms out of it — testing each void against cost, sequence, and the Petal requirements in the same conversation. The form-generation pair became the team's referee: if a cut couldn't be drawn, costed, and defended to the developer in one sitting, it came back out. The voids that survived are the ones the finished building is organized around.

The resolved work — Lithos

Form generation — envelope above, carved voids below — The envelope and what we carved from it — the strongest graphic in the capstone and the drawing the jury kept returning to.

Virginia House

The dimensioned plan that came out of the fourth iteration — The plan that left the fourth meeting — every dimension on it is a sentence someone in the family said.

How many meetings does it take for a plan to become a family's?

Four, in this case. The first iteration was drawn loosely on purpose, so the clients had something to correct rather than something to admire. The second was the corrections; the third was the first time the plan felt like a place; the fourth was a window moved nine inches for a tree and a counter extended so two people could cook without crossing. What the process revealed is that residential design is listening with a pencil.

The resolved work — Virginia House

Carport

What does the field correct in a drawing?

Everything the page thought it had settled. On site, a clear dimension met a ground condition the page had not anticipated; a clean detail met the carpenter's sequencing and had to be talked through. I revised drawings standing on the slab, and after construction I rebuilt the set to test every detail against what was actually built. The rebuilt set is the honest one — it is the process artifact this portfolio trusts most.

The resolved work — Carport

Sheet A104 — the roof plan rebuilt after construction — A104 after the rebuild — the ledger detail is drawn the way the framer built it, not the way I first imagined it.