Neva Siers

Peter Zumthor cast the Bruder Klaus Field Chapel around 112 tree trunks, then burned them out — construction by fire, smooth outside, charred within.

The method rebuilt at mockup scale: drawn first, then poured — concrete around cardboard tubes standing in for Zumthor's timber wigwam.

The formwork isn't stripped — it's set alight. Fire hollows the flutes and leaves a charred surface no tool could carve.

Water finishes what fire began. Sprayed and rained on, the char washes back and the surface turns bright and reflective — weathering not as decay, but as design.

Vastness, heat, and light are the brief. The campus begins with the territory — and lets the landscape set the rules.

Not one building but many — an archipelago of rooms and courtyards balancing solitude and community, focused work and collective life.

Each island is its own room — resolved in plan and section as a distinct unit within the shared desert field.

A hierarchy of elevated roof planes does the climatic work: shade below, ventilation between, framed desert views beyond.

Courtyards become classrooms and classrooms open to the horizon — the boundary between architecture and desert dissolves into daily life.

The design tool is a void: sculpted cones that pull daylight down through the building, each well claiming a room from the open interior.

The plan gathers around the vertical voids — rooms with distinct atmospheres held in one continuous field, open to each other but never the same.

In section the building comes alive: floor topography rises and dips, ceilings funnel, and daylight is guided deep into the interior.

Each well makes a place: gradients of light mark where to gather, where to pass through, where to pause.

The beach as found: a historic destination drifted into neglect, on a shoreline where the lake keeps moving the rules.

Before the design — the 63rd Street Beach read as location, as layered systems, and through the ghosts of its original Beach Pavilion and Pier.

A public swimming facility as the civic heart — the building that gives the beach a reason in every season.

Expansion and compression organize the section: interconnected indoor and outdoor rooms that adapt to weather, season, and the lake's shifting edge.

From intimate corners to communal rooms overlooking the lake — the shoreline returned to everyday life.

The contemporary city keeps living, working, and recreation apart. This block folds them back together.

A public market at the core — commerce, recreation, and everyday encounter holding the block open to its neighborhood.

Housing as a hierarchy of sharing: short-term communal rooms, live-work units, long-term homes — public flowing gradually into private.

The block inhabited — exchange, adaptation, and the ordinary days that make a neighborhood.

An ordinary corner in Ann Arbor — parking lots, crosswalks, and a low commercial block — waiting for a reason to gather.

Sweeping curved walls choreograph circulation — compressing, expanding, and slowly turning the visitor toward darkness. The form emerges by operation: site, offset, blend, rotate, align.

Natural daylight is filtered through each layer of the building — a continuous transition from bright, open space to intimate darkness, heightening anticipation before the film begins.

Where the curved forms intersect, a two-story theater is carved out — emerging from the geometry rather than existing as an isolated room. The journey begins long before the screen comes to life.

Detroit's industrial heritage meets contemporary sustainable design: a hybrid CLT and concrete structure on glulam columns, wrapped in angled precast panels that shade the sun and give Harper Avenue a sculptural face.

A layered spatial hierarchy — live-work studios, then collaborative workspaces, then the public courtyard — encourages both focused creative practice and spontaneous interaction, fostering a community rooted in artistic exchange.

A glass-enclosed courtyard filled with light and vegetation forms the social heart of the project — proof that adaptive urban development can turn underutilized sites into resilient cultural destinations.

This project began as field research into the living root bridges of Meghalaya. For generations, the Khasi and Jaintia peoples have trained the aerial roots of the rubber fig across rivers and ravines — bridges that take decades to grow and only strengthen with age. Beautiful not for precision or polish but for intention and patience, they teach a way of making that is slow, relational, and in harmony with the land.

In Vedic philosophy everything begins with sound — Om, the original vibration. Mantra is sound; Yantra is form; Tantra is the technique that binds them. This became the design framework: the environment's sound is the Mantra, the textile's form is the Yantra, and the body — resting, moving, breathing — completes the system.

Woven from natural and conductive fibers, the textile senses ambient vibration and transforms it into subtle physical feedback, allowing the body to perceive changing environmental conditions — architecture as an active system of resonance rather than enclosure. Rest becomes an act of sensing; the space becomes one of reflection, connection, and ecological awareness.

Watching craftspeople work — knowledge living in their fingers, their breath, their timing — I saw makers in conversation with material, not in control of it. I have always learned through making; as someone with dyslexia, my hands knew fabrication before theory. This project reminded me that craft is not a style but a way of being. Some of the most powerful structures are not visible: a vibration, a thread, a rhythm — a tree growing across a river, slowly, until it can carry someone else across.

Material study drove the project: early PETG experiments gave way to folded steel, trading soft glow and diffusion for shards, shadows, and sharp directional beams. The switch reshaped fabrication, opacity, and assembly tolerances alike — while spiral geometries and cut perforations keep material and light in conversation.

Waterjet cutting, precision bending, and hand assembly transform rigid metal into a dynamic surface — patterned perforations and folded apertures filtering light into an atmosphere of shifting illumination.

A folded-steel helix wraps a programmable core that answers touch: one tap crossfades to the next color, a double tap pauses the wave, and tapping again resumes it — a dialogue between material, structure, and light.

Repeating cellular units build a porous surface — openings and recessed cavities filter illumination through the screen, producing shifting patterns of brightness, shadow, and spatial perception that change throughout the day.

Embedded sensors and programmable lighting respond to human movement, activating pulses of light that travel across the installation — the screen registering presence and answering it.

3D-printed clay planters support living vegetation within the modular framework. As the plants mature, they introduce an evolving biological layer that reshapes the visual and spatial character of the screen over time — an architecture that grows.

Built through parallel digital and hands-on processes. The base panel was CNC-routed from curly cherry hardwood into a continuous cellular field of varying depths and openings, so light passes through and diffuses across the surface. The cell inserts were clay-printed on a KUKA robotic arm — each a distinct geometry that doubles as a planter for soil and vegetation — set over a waterjet-cut metal backing, with PRUSA-printed modules and Adafruit light, moisture, and distance sensors driving a movement-responsive lighting system. Digital control sets the system; material, planting, and light keep it changing.

The module begins as a star-shaped polygon and folds into a cell. The folded geometry increases rigidity while minimizing material use — a lightweight system balancing environmental performance against fabrication efficiency, developed through parametric modeling for scalable assembly across varied façade conditions.

Each module is fabricated by robotic pellet extrusion, and the layered extrusion toolpaths remain visible across the surface — celebrating the robotic process as an integral part of the architectural expression rather than a trace to be sanded away.

Openings within the system promote natural airflow, while recessed cavities provide sheltered habitats protected from wind and rain — a façade that strengthens the relationship between architecture, fabrication, and urban biodiversity.

Against the instinct to build seawalls, the project treats flooding, surge, and sea level rise as conditions to move with — transforming the ground itself into a responsive architectural surface.

Lightweight hollow PETG modules joined by flexible connections let the system behave like a textile — individual elements tilting, flexing, and moving independently in response to the water around them.

Variations in module depth and submersion generate changing spatial conditions that make the movement of water perceptible through the body — inhabitable landscapes that evolve alongside their surroundings rather than standing against them.