The Ohlone Greenway Extension is a speculative project that looks to increase housing density in Berkeley. Adjacent to a residential neighborhood, an abandoned Santa Fe rail line cuts at a diagonal through the city. We propose to reclaim this land to create multi-family housing and a new greenway for all. We are proposing to reclaim the land to create multi-family housing and a new greenway for pedestrians and bicycles. The Ohlone Greenway is an existing 5-mile pedestrian and bicycle path in Berkeley that ends before the Santa Fe rail tracks begin. The Santa Fe tracks once carried train service in West Berkeley until the tracks became dormant in the 1970s. Over the years, voters in the city have passed a…

In response to the ever-growing need for additional Easy Bay housing, the Monterey Multi-Family housing project offers an opportunity for a case study at a carefully selected site. The proposal sits between a beloved small-neighborhood commercial area and a traditional single family residential zone. This interface is a common seam throughout Berkeley and Oakland, snaking through the flats and hills, offering gathering places and access to walkable restaurants, markets and small businesses. The corner of Hopkins and Monterey is a large lot with a small freestanding cafe in the center, the popular cafe provides an anchor for the site. The project proposes maintaining the cafe, upgrading and combining it with a public courtyard at the ground level. Also at the…

An oversized Middle allows a radical new response to the FAR on small odd lots – a Micro Tower. The Micro Tower leverages central voids in infill sites to maximize living spaces for middle income populations squeezed out of urban living, it packs 6 floors of living, with 12 units, in a narrow lot. Each floor is a gradient of enclosure levels clustered around a Climate Core. At the oversized Middle, space opens to the sky. A loose Fabric building envelope allows residents to informally capture more space as needed yet be spared the constant cost associated with larger living space. Towards the lot ends, a tighter Glass and Steel building envelope protects primary living space. The Climate Core runs…

“As porous as this stone is the architecture. Building and action interpenetrate in the courtyards, alleys, and stairways. In everything, they preserve the scope to become a theater of new, unforeseen constellations. This is how architecture, the most binding part of the communal rhythm, comes into being here. And only in these streets is the house the cell of the city’s architecture. Porosity results from the passion for improvisations…Buildings are used as a popular stage. They are all divided into innumerable, simultaneously animated theaters. Balcony, courtyard, window, gateway, staircase, roof are at the same time stage and boxes.” –Walter Benjamin, One Way Street The goal of making a more permeable, walkable, and equitable city is a twofold one. The first…