This project reconceptualizes mobile living to offer an alternative way of housing in San Francisco where the freedom of mobility and a vehicle’s envelop, is treated within the framework of care and maintenance.

Situated near Balboa Park Bart Station, this safe parking site is transformed into a transitional space to support vehicular and mobile living for residents.

Where the ground level allows for vehicle maintenance, the expanded workshop on the first level gives room for another means of construction to take place. As transient users occupy the structure for six month increments, the workshop offers a makers space equipped with car lofts and mechanical lifts to allow for fabrication of materials and homes prior to departure.

Through a catalog of parts, wall systems and structural components are prefabricated and shipped to create the basic framework of the building. The mechanics of care, such as construction tools, auto repair lifts, and materials, are then infilled to suggest a symbiotic relationship between the two. The boundaries vehicle and the home become negotiable, and the building acts as a conduit, where the act of maintenace and care extend beyond the boundaries of a set of walls and its wheels.

In response to the housing crisis in the Bay Area, this project unpacks the potential of modular housing as an alternative to current building practices.

The proposal hybridizes lofted units with apartment complex typologies to provide a variation of density that can exist in historically low density zones. With a configuration of five units that come together to complete a module, the design facilitates mini-communities that can provide double height living spaces and open-air circulation in each of its living quarters. Ancillary program, circulation, and site improvements are then infilled based on site specific needs.

In collaboration with Douglas Lee, Julia McElhinney, & Max Heninger

Situated along the water’s edge, Pier 70 in San Francisco straddles a boundary that demarcates the separation between land and water. A spatial threshold undergoing constant re-development, Protrero Hill is currently being re-contextualized from an abandoned industrialized zone into a new urban center.

While the revitalization is needed, commercially driven urban development often negates historical context for expedited construction and prime real estates. This proposal seeks to examine urbanization in the context of urban zoning. Historically tied to racial and class segregation, San Francisco’s redlining in the 1930s has prompted planning discussions of gentrification, climate change, and homelessness today. Where the process of urban zoning has segregated the landscape through an index of typologies, this project asks, what happens when urban planning question the boundaries of zoning previously created?

Beginning as an infill to the existing residential block, a series of overlapping program engender negotiations between commercial, residential, and public space as program grows individually and together simultaneously.