About
My name is John and I am an architect. I manage a research team at Autodesk, where we're building the future technology to enable a carbon-negative, more equitable built environment.
My work has been recognized by The New York Times, New York Magazine, The Atlantic, Wired, and many others.
I was born in Los Angeles, grew up in El Paso, and now live and work in New York City.
Education
Work Experience
I lead a cross-disciplinary team to manifest cutting-edge research into the real-world. This involves directly engaging with messy project realities, high-level goals, compromises, and ultimately opportunities inherent in prototype demonstrations.
I've initiated and delivered on a number of projects. My goal is always to strive for clarity, synthesizing complex topics into actional steps of the "what" and the "how."
I developed and taught a course instigating and investigating unsolicited urban interventions in New York City. Students are taught to self-initiate and identify a problem statement relating to the urban environment, and then manifest a possible solution through a public, physical object, while confronting the myriad issues associated with that decision.
I was part of a start-up team working at the intersection of technology, biology, and design. The Living was acquired by Autodesk in 2014.
I led a 40-million dollar adaptive re-use project from concept design through final construction. I learned how a building comes together—including assemblages of materials, processes, and relationships—while managing the design to construction phases and ensuring an on-time project delivery.
I was a designer within SOM's acclaimed Education Design Lab. My main focus was delivering concept design through construction documents of The New School University Center, completed near Union Square in New York.
I learned firsthand how to navigate the complex relationships between a project's stakeholders, users, site conditions, and the messy realities of building a large, impactful campus building in the heart of Manhattan.
I was the lead computation designer on three built museum projects and multiple high-profile design competitions. I led the engineering coordination and developed a direct link between software and building fabrication.
I also fell in love with the power of advanced software and construction technology to facilitate and democratize a new form of architecture.
Side Projects
Completed in conjunction with Columbia University, Uptown Grand Central, and a very talented young musician, this installation converted the area under the Metro-North tracks at 125th & Park as a site of a musical intervention. For a very low cost, sound activated lights and "speaker pods" created a unique performance experience.
This is an inflatable classroom and performance space installed inside of a dumpster. This allowed us to legally take over street space that is typically reserved for vehicle parking. The project was installed and activated multiple times across New York City between 2014-2016.
The Inflato includes 165 square feet of enclosed space with maximum dimensions at 17’ height by 12’-6” wide and 24’ long. Working closely with the local community for programming, over 2500 people interacted with the installations through a number of musical performances, film screenings, events and workshops including. The total project budget was a crowd sourced $4,200. The Inflato continued to periodically activate to explore how it could fit within its neighborhood.
Re-using obsolete phone booths to share information with your neighbors. Succeeded in capturing people’s imaginations and showed that there are other pathways forward in human-scale, urban design that are not centered on transactional or market-based approaches. Things, ideas, installations can exist in public space only for delight.
Writing
After grad school, I set out on a 6-week, 6,000 mile journey across the American southwest and northern Mexico. These observations were captured under the powerful thrall of the Western landscape—a strange entity mixed in with notions of nation and empire, bravery and myth, history and fiction.
Speaking
The highest Honor Award given by Columbia University GSAPP for design work
Awarded to the top representative graduate project
Awarded for the best final semester design problem in each studio section
Features
Project, practice and thoughts used as research in Hungarian PhD student's doctoral dissertation.
Certifications
Manhattan Chapter