大象视频

On hillsides across Portland, enormous concrete water tanks stand empty and silent, weathered, forgotten, and marked for demolition. For more than a century, the city held itself together with water: fifty-four metal tanks and concrete reservoirs set across its slopes to guard against floods, earthquakes, and the chronic failures of an aging sewer system. These tanks are not broken. The city has simply outgrown them, replacing them with seismically engineered underground reservoirs, and now pays to demolish sound concrete even as a 2025 city audit reports an infrastructure backlog growing by more than a billion dollars a year.

RE.SERV.OIR proposes a different reckoning. Rather than demolishing another decommissioned tank on the West Hill, where highway, light rail, bus, and bicycle routes converge near the intersection of four neighborhoods, the project preserves and repositions its walls as the foundation of a building dedicated to public life. Their mass becomes enclosure, their depth becomes thermal stability, and the carbon already locked within them stays there, avoiding new structural concrete entirely.听

Above this anchored base, a mass timber frame rises light and open, its broad roof harvesting rainwater that is filtered and stored on site for building use and community emergency supply, closing the very hydrological cycle the original tank was built to compensate for. Around a glass-roofed courtyard open to the sky, the building gathers civic halls, classrooms, cafeterias, exhibition rooms, a library, an amphitheater, and a pool into a single public heart.听

The concrete that once held water for a city bracing against disaster now holds space for the community that lives above it, proof that the structures a city outgrows are not waste to be cleared, but materials to be reimagined.

Civic Fabrics of Ecology transforms an existing warehouse in Bankhead, Atlanta, into a mixed-use civic, educational, and nature center connecting the community, local economies, and the ecology of Proctor Creek. The project responds to displacement, industrial pollution, flooding, environmental degradation, and limited access to community resources by treating architecture, landscape, water, education, and economic development as one interconnected system.

Learning The Living Ground – Bear Creek Ecology Center

鈥淒esigning architecture that teaches people how to care for fragile landscapes by structuring how they engage with them.鈥�

Located in Northern Michigan, the living learning center reconnects people to fragile ecosystems through environmental education, ecological stewardship, and community engagement. Situated within an important migration corridor for pollinators and inspired by the declining monarch butterfly population, the project explores architecture as a tool for creating meaningful relationships between people and vulnerable landscapes.

Native vegetation and seasonal adaptation shape how visitors experience the site. Integrated indoor and outdoor spaces create opportunities for learning through participation while minimizing ecological disruption. The approximately 30,000 square foot education center includes classrooms, exhibition spaces, indoor growing environments, community gathering areas, and outdoor educational landscapes that support environmental engagement throughout the seasonal year.

The project responds to seasonal conditions through adaptable spaces and native landscapes, while stormwater management strategies contribute to long term ecological resilience. Water becomes both infrastructure and an educational tool. Stormwater collection, storage, and reuse are made visible, allowing environmental processes that often remain hidden to become part of the learning experience.

Discovery unfolds over time. Changing seasons, evolving vegetation, and measurable ecological growth become part of a living system rather than a static landscape. Environmental performance is connected directly to human interaction, transforming environmental education from something observed into something experienced. Through continued participation, the project encourages long-term stewardship among current and future community members.

Medicine of Place is a holistic medicinal retreat and community healing center located on the Keystone Refuse Compound, a former coal processing site situated in McDowell County, southeastern West Virginia between the communities of Keystone and Northfork along Route 52. The site occupies climate zone 4A with its cold winters, warm summers, and significant seasonal precipitation. The buildings occupy a gross estimate of 12,000 square feet of interior space.听

The project is campus-scale, comprising multiple buildings distributed across the terraced hillside. The campus features a laboratory with an exhibit and workspace for educational purposes, a greenhouse restaurant, a fitness center with a pharmacy and yoga studios, and a residential building with shared dormitories, singular residences, communal kitchen, communal garden, traditional therapy rooms, and private gym.听 All of these programmatic features work together to produce herbal medicine for exporting products along Route 52 and providing education and jobs to the area. Supporting landscape infrastructure includes community herb gardens, medicinal crop fields, a reflection pond, bioswales, cisterns, and forested walking paths with integrated seating.听

The project serves multiple user populations simultaneously: individuals recovering from addiction, survivors of trauma and abuse seeking refuge in cultivation and communal care, regional tourists drawn to living Appalachian folk medicine traditions, and researchers and students documenting indigenous healing knowledge. The laboratory anchors the campus as a working production and educational facility.

The building program emerged from the remediation of a brownfield site, contaminated coal refuse excavated, capped, and prepared to receive architecture for the first time in decades. Rammed earth walls are constructed from soil excavated on site. Fly ash concrete foundations reuse coal combustion byproduct. What was once a landscape of extraction has become one of restoration harmonizing architecture, agriculture, and community in the work of healing.

At Eagle Pass, riverfront and public spaces have been closed, fenced off, and folded into the militarized border apparatus; turning the one to three day stay into an architecture of waiting, sorting, and hold. Right to Stay relocates that stay into dignified shared housing on a Main Street infill site, where arrival is reorganized through care, climate, and contribution rather than containment.

The project is organized by thick, inhabitable living walls that turn the border鈥檚 most punitive figure into shelter, storage, services, and threshold. These walls establish a gradient of agency from private retreat to family space to communal kitchens, laundries, workshops, childcare, gardens, and shaded courtyards. Legal status no longer dictates spatial status: migrants and colonia residents live within the same framework and build ownership through stewardship, cooking, cleaning, repairing, learning, and growing food. Operable partitions let residents decide when space is private, shared, open, or closed as household needs shift, tying agency to daily life.

Environmental systems are embedded in section, circulation, and enclosure. Solar chimneys, operable facades, and cross-ventilation draw air through units and shared corridors; courtyards, planted edges, and roof gardens create shaded microclimates for South Texas heat; sloped roofs capture rainwater for gardens and washrooms; photovoltaic canopies generate on-site power while extending communal shade. Durable shared structures support planting and outdoor rooms, and visible environmental systems make climate legible in daily life and support passive survivability during heat and outages. A border housing in which resilience is inseparable from dignity and systems of control are turned into systems of care.

As climate change intensifies water scarcity and environmental pressures across the Sonoran Desert, architecture must move beyond minimizing harm and instead actively contribute to the health of its ecosystem. The Arid Futures Pavilion explores how contemporary design can work in partnership with the desert landscape through integrated water conservation, habitat restoration, and climate-responsive building strategies. By treating water as a valuable resource, preserving ecological systems, and blurring the boundary between the built and natural environment, the project demonstrates how modern architecture can become both a steward of place and a catalyst for resilient futures in arid regions. Water conservation serves as the project’s organizing principle. Roof forms harvest seasonal rainfall and direct it into on-site cisterns, while bioswales slow, filter, and retain monsoon runoff. Captured water supports rooftop gardens, native landscapes, and educational agricultural programming, transforming precipitation from a scarce resource into a catalyst for ecological and community resilience. Green roofs extend the site’s vegetative capacity while visually connecting the building to the adjacent wash and surrounding desert landscape. The building occupies a minimal footprint, preserving habitat corridors and allowing native trees, cacti, and desert-adapted vegetation to weave through and around the architecture, embedding it within its ecological context rather than separating it from the land. The pavilion combines passive cooling strategies, including deep overhangs, north-south glazing, natural ventilation, and rain screens, with renewable energy generation through rooftop photovoltaic arrays. Mass timber construction reduces embodied carbon while durable regional materials, including limestone, weathering steel, and insulated masonry walls, provide long-term resilience within the harsh desert climate. Ultimately, the Arid Futures Pavilion demonstrates how contemporary architecture can coexist with the natural environment, blending modern design with ecological responsibility to create a place that conserves resources, supports community, and celebrates the unique character of the Sonoran Desert. Through its integration of landscape, water, and architecture, the project proposes a future in which buildings are not objects placed upon the earth, but extensions of the ecological systems that sustain them.

Junction 52

Collect. Repair. Return.

Junction 52 proposes a new civic typology for landscapes where isolation is not only social, but spatial. Along the Route 52 corridor between Maitland and Kimball, West Virginia, steep terrain, dispersed towns, long travel distances, aging infrastructure, and limited shared services make everyday life difficult to sustain. Rather than treating these hardships as obstacles, the project uses them as design material. The slope collects water. The roof collects sunlight. The road collects movement. The building collects people, skills, stories, and sound.听

The project transforms a pass-through gap into a place of pause, repair, and return. Centered on bluegrass practice, instrument making, informal exchange, and advocacy, Junction 52 treats music as both cultural infrastructure and emotional repair. Bluegrass carries memory through rhythm, repetition, storytelling, and shared listening. It gives people a reason to gather without needing to name loneliness directly. The program is built around this psychology of music: the way sound lowers distance between people, creates belonging through call-and-response, and allows grief, pride, humor, and history to be held collectively. The programs hosted in different levels of the building are not separate activities, but different scales of the same healing process: making sound, sharing it, and returning to it together.听

Environmental strategies are inseparable from this social purpose. Planted terraces slow runoff and stabilize the mountain edge. Rainwater harvesting, greywater reuse, and living machine treatment reduce dependence on unreliable water systems. Narrow floor plates, operable openings, daylight, thermal mass, and mixed-mode ventilation reduce energy demand while keeping comfort tied to the landscape. Locally responsive materials, paired timber columns, ashcrete, recycled polycarbonate, and separable connections support repair, adaptation, and reuse over time.

CULTIVATING CYCLES

When one thinks of grocery stores, rows of produce come to mind as if the produce just exists and has the same permanence as the shelves it鈥檚 displayed on. One forgets what comes before that 鈥� the intricate cycle behind its growth. Cultivating Cycles aims to bridge the gap between consumers and farming processes. It focuses on the expansion of the existing Farmer鈥檚 Market in Cambridge, Canada. Preserving the original structure was integral in celebrating its character and historical significance.

The expansion allows users to learn about and engage in simplified cycles of farming through a re-imagined programmatic layout and spatial narrative, where visitors move through interactive spaces tailored to each farming process: garden classroom and community garden for cultivating, market for harvesting, community kitchen for cooking, shared dining area for consuming, and greenhouse for composting. All of the proposed spaces revolve around the heart of the site, the community garden, a physical and symbolic anchor connecting interior and exterior spaces.

The Rillito was once a river that flowed year-round, supporting large cottonwoods and a vibrant riparian ecosystem. It was part of a large network of water systems that carried snowmelt from the Catalinas into the land below. Its gift was used by hundreds of communities, the first among them the people of the Hohokam tradition. The path of the Rillito River that exists today follows the riverbed that once fed the complex canals and reservoirs the Hohokam used to cultivate a large number of crops and native desert flora. They were deeply in tune with the seasons, the patterns of the sun, and the intricate movements of the stars. The Hohokam existed symbiotically with the land, and knew it as a part of their everyday lives.

This is the river carried into the project. The Rillito is a seasonal corridor that has sustained movement, cultivation, and habitat in the Sonoran Desert for generations. Along this bend, the Loop passes through land shaped by Hohokam canals and fields.

础驳耻谩苍 is grounded in this environmental reality of the Sonoran Desert. It supports research, education, and public gathering while making the forces that sustain life here present to those who move through it. Rather than treating heat and aridity as conditions to be sealed out, 础驳耻谩苍 creates an experience organized by shade, moving air, collected water, and seasonal light. Comfort is not hidden behind machinery. It is felt through the architecture as an active relationship with climate.

This relationship is rooted in the traditions of desert building. The zagu谩n becomes more than a passage. It is a threshold from the Loop into a cooler, slower interior world, where wind and shade create refuge and gather community. The building’s orientation toward prevailing breezes and toward river, farm, and mountain views allows the landscape to remain constantly present, shaping how the project is understood and occupied.

Time is made visible through a pair of solstice trackers. Light captured at the sunrise of each solstice connects the building to the farming cycles and environmental knowledge that preceded it, while also marking a future grounded in attention to place. In this way, 础驳耻谩苍 does not simply reference history. It carries its lessons forward.

Through earth, shade, water, and habitat, the project positions architecture as a participant in the desert rather than a barrier against it. In the end, 础驳耻谩苍 stands as a working proposition that here, architecture is not a refuge from the desert, but a careful arrangement of life within it.

Duluth sits on the听southwest听edge of Lake Superior, shaped by harsh winters and extreme seasonal change. Living Nexus is a direct response to these conditions 鈥� a building that does not fight its climate, but works with it. It brings together housing, community spaces, retail, and nature into one connected system that serves the entire city throughout the year.

The center of the Nexus is the courtyard. This space changes with every season. In summer, it becomes an outdoor market and dining area. In autumn, it hosts cultural events and harvest festivals. In winter, it provides a warm and sheltered space for the community. In spring, it is open for makers, artists, and local entrepreneurs.听The courtyard is the heart of the building.听This is what makes Living Nexus different from a typical mixed-use development.

The project also performs. By using听Cross-Laminated Timber (CLT) and mass timber听construction听instead of concrete, the building听replaces听over 820k kg of CO鈧� 鈥� making it fully carbon-negative. Rooftop solar panels produce 106% of total electricity needs. Rainwater is fully collected and reused on site. 90% of all materials come from within 300 miles, supporting the local economy by cutting transport emissions.

Water, energy, ecology, and economy systems are all connected, they do not work alone. Each one is supporting the others, creating one efficient and regenerative cycle. This integrated approach ensures resilience and performance under Duluth鈥檚 extreme climate conditions.

鈥楲iving Nexus鈥� proves that a building can do more than provide shelter. It can strengthen a community, support a local economy, and听respond to a harsh climate at the same time.听This project is a clear model that other cold-climate cities can follow 鈥� showing that responsible, people-centered architecture is both achievable and necessary.