Atelier Mey

Demonstration projects have long stood as a means to expose the potential of novel processes, emergent materials, or inventive ideas aimed at addressing contemporary questions.  MASS Haptic is a call to action for the state of Florida in utilizing the regional timber resources, and manufacturing potentials to construct healthy buildings from grown and renewable materials; a frontal approach to climate change, renewable materials, and energy/carbon flows. Designed as an outdoor learning pavilion, MASS Haptic is an offering to the local students, faculty, and UF Gainesville community as a structure to inhabit and learn about a regional approach to contemporary wood building, processes of design, construction, and the tactility of wood.  Most importantly, having a structure to inhabit as an outdoor learning classroom will allow a tactile experience offering touch, smell, hear, and see a building. 

 MASS Haptic portrays a story from forest to building connecting the act of building to the subsequent territorial implications. The story setting is the Southern Yellow Pine [SYP] forest that blankets the Southeastern U.S.  A group of species that grow fast, in long spindly poles that range from very straight columns great for dimensional lumber to bent, twisted, and thin straws that are used for pulp for paper/cardboard and pellets for combustion.  MASS Haptic pulls from two ends of the wood spectrum: 1. The manufactured Cross Laminated Timber [CLT] panel and 2. the bent, twisted, and undersized logs. SYP-CLT panels made from traditional digital fabrication methods are used for the roof canopy.  As a challenge to high-intensity materials processing and manufacturing, trees destined for pulp, pellet, and chip streams were up-cycled as structural columns.   By up-cycling, these trees’ worth economically, environmentally, energetically, and through carbon contributions were advanced. The adjusted lens of the trees’ contribution to a structural scenario allowed this up-cycling.

The natural resource programs within the University of Florida have established leaders in the ecology, economics, and human-dimensions aspects of our environment. The New Natural Resources Building, led by the University’s School of Forest, Fisheries, & Geomatics Sciences (FFGS) and IFAS Leadership, promotes the opportunity mass timber construction provides to support these three aspects, through the planning of a new campus structure which will support seven different natural resource programs. This project unifies decades of innovation in natural resource and forest management, teaching, and outreach through a collaborative team positioned at the intersection of practice and academics; it will expand natural resource and forestry education realizing a mass timber building rooted in healthy building practices. Augmenting IFAS’s nationally leading practices of putting into action the theories and principles of forestry subjects through the Austin Cary Forest Campus, the New Natural Resources Building proposal catalyzes the mission of the University of Florida’s natural resource programs through the physical implementation of forest management into a southern yellow pine mass timber structure.

The Integrated Natural Resources Building [INRB] would be the first of its kind in the region and will serve as a public platform to promote innovation in the construction sector, environmental initiatives though the use of regional grown and manufactured timber. The proposed INRB would bring under one roof seven different program areas and existing FFGS outreach and program missions. The University of Florida is committed to identifying new opportunities for building construction. The proposed building will showcase the quantifiable environmental and economic benefits of using wood as a sustainable building material and serve as a proof of concept to overcome market barriers.

House In A Garden is a single-family urban infill project nestled into the Historic Coconut Grove neighborhood of Miami, Florida. Conceived of as a single story dwelling the building acknowledges the importance of the existing scale in the urban fabric of historic Bahamian structures. A full-width porch meets the street along the north elevation; addressing the community and establishing an outdoor room while an inner courtyard offers light and garden views to all occupied spaces. With sustainability at its core, the project is the first mass timber building constructed in Miami-Dade County, establishing a new standard for resilient and ecologically focused design with the use of regionally grown, sustainable and renewable construction materials. The use of southern yellow pine [SYP] cross-laminated timber [CLT] panels required working closely with the local building officials, planning and zoning offices to bring this emergent building technology to southern Florida. The project stands as a case study for material testing, product certifications and the acquisition of a Notice of Acceptance for SYP-CLT and SYP-glue laminated products, subsequently instituting new code-compliant approaches for sustainable building materials in Miami and Florida.

The program is arranged throughout the tight urban lot intermixing the interior spaces with an assortment of exterior gardens. Entering the site, visitors move along a linear garden, sliding under the meandering wood roof plane and arriving at the inner garden court. The program of the house wraps the inner court offering access to views into the gardens and the dappled light filtered by the surrounding tree canopy. In addition to daylighting, the court opens to allow passive ventilation from the south pavilion into and through the north living bars.

Rejecting the approach of tearing down and rebuilding demands creativity and careful observation from the designer to uncover hidden potential between the site and the existing structure. The Light House project is focused on utilizing the existing structure’s energy by making architectural changes to specific elements, with a special focus on the roof. By modifying the roof, the project aims to explore the relationship between the ground and the sky, light and shadow, and the connection between interior and exterior spaces. This approach allows most of the existing structure to remain intact.

Embracing the complex conditions of an existing structure requires someone who is not swayed by newness. Light House seeks to champion the ideas of energy, light, space, and time.

The new layout reorganizes the social and public areas through spatial experiences and openings in the roof to provide views of the sky. The private spaces, including four bedrooms and three baths, are designed to have focused views of the exterior. The project also includes a series of gardens of various sizes, serving as oases, visual backdrops, buffers, and secluded spaces.

The residence is positioned along a small lake enveloped by a deciduous forest near the Saint Croix River along the Minnesota Wisconsin border. The northern region of the Midwest is best defined by its extreme weather pushing summer temperatures past the hundred-degree mark while winter months may witness temperatures falling well into the negatives. Early design questions explored how the construction of a dwelling melded with the patterns of life would empower the site characteristics instead of isolating them. Design strategies aim to couple the varied thermal conditions with program allowing the house to breath through the seasons with the embedded characteristics of the site.

 The project takes advantage of the dynamic range of thermal characteristics offered by the site through dispersing the program to address seasonal swings. Interior protective spaces allow a comfortable existence through the harsh winter months and extend the transitional season by allowing a connection between interior and exterior conditions. Exterior garden spaces, platforms along the woodline, nestled into the hill and exposed to the environmental and lakeside gathering areas allow the family to move around the site in search of coolth through spring, summer and early fall. The interior of the residence offers a range of spaces from intimate moments impressing a feeling of warmth to larger exposed space connecting to the surrounding site.

Work completed while at SALA Architects.

Work completed by Christopher Meyer while at SALA Architects.

The use of the urban landscape is critical; the typical percentage of buildable lot area for a single-family lot in Miami is around 60%. This leaves valuable interstitial space in the rear yard, side yard, and front yard needing to be activated–the question posed to the future city is how these unbuildable areas are active contributors to the urban community.  The Fowl Fence is a linear coop, designed as an inhabitable fence that stretches across the rear of a single-family lot, the utilization of the otherwise uninhabitable space.  The Fowl Fence is designed to house fifteen to twenty hens 

 The structure is composed of an interior dry coop and an outdoor chicken run.  The structure of the object depends on the mass of the coop, a waffle grid of nesting boxes that produce lateral stability in the long axis while in the short axis, the chicken run begins as a rectangle at the coop entry and slowly transitions to a triangle at the opposite end of the chicken run.  The last third of the run consists mostly of triangle sections providing lateral stability for the narrow chicken run. The form was generated in response to the constrictions provided by existing banyan trees.

 The coop utilizes off-the-shelf dimensional lumber with all of the members generated from 12’-0” 2 x 6 treated southern yellow pine boards. Each board was cut into four pieces (2 ¾ x 1 ½ x 6’0”). Layered inside the vertical wooden screen is a standard perforated aluminum skin. This perforated panel provides breathability of the structure, airflow, and wind movement while keeping the hen fowls protected from urban predators such as foxes, raccoons, snakes, cats, and dogs.

Abraham Maslow (American Psychologist 1908 – 1970) states, ‘if the only tool you have is a hammer you will treat everything as if it were a nail.’  Embodied in Maslow’s depiction of the singular mindset is the necessity to search for new ways of seeing the familiar  The project,  Liminal Dialogue aims to reposition the body in space to uncover perspectives which challenge the inhabitants’ preconceptions of water and land.  The project explores, and augments, the relationship between solidity of the ground plane [terra firma] and the fluidity of the waterscapes [aqua firma] by physically suspending the body in space above the surface of the water. The suspended inhabitation pushes and pulls the body across these boundary conditions, encouraging the occupation of two distinctly yet irrevocable bound environments. 

 The project, Liminal Dialogue is conceived of as a language to inhabit the normally uninhabitable conditions of the waterscapes in and around the South-West-Flanders territory. The interventions are proposed as both a singular moment or multiple sites that work to link the River Lys with surrounding ecological and urban systems.  Implementing traditional construction safety netting surfaces of inhabitation are stretched, draped, pinned, stilted and formed across/over bodies of water.  These surfaces stand as places of rest, relaxation, movement, playscapes and exploration in order to uncover the dynamic and powerful relationship between terra firma and aqua firma.

The project 1000X embraces a mass-based system leveraging the dense network of members to create a dynamic relationship with light and visual connectivity between the interiority and exteriority.  The heavy, mass-based system stands as a critique on the contemporary use of dimensional wood members to create increasingly thin frames (walls) masked by ubiquitous sheet good materials with high embodied energies. The standard off-the-shelf SPF dimensional lumber stacked assembly is connected with 2 ½” LignoLoc® compressed beech wooden nails.  The project was assembled without the use of metal fasteners, rods or brackets with a footprint of 10’-0” in width, 25’-0” in length and 10’-0” in height.  The introduction of non-traditional building methods implemented under the ospis of embodied energy and material geographies offers the aspiring architecture students’ new methods to address the increasing disparity between built artifacts and environment.

The 2018 SummerFAB program with Wentworth Institute of Technology in Boston, Massachusetts brought together high school aged participants from around the world to engage in the fundamental principles of architecture under the pretext of thinking through making. The program culminated in a built project, 1000X, as a means to introduce the ‘affirmation of the real’ to architecture students through the act of making. The brevity of the design-build pedagogy–working with a four-week curriculum–requires a clarity in learning objectives and a preciseness in teaching design techniques.

Work completed while at Kennedy & Violich Architects in collaboration with Christopher Meyer of Atelier Mey.

In collaboration with Ground Here.

In collaboration with Josh Jow.

In collaboration with Niccolo Dambrosio.

Design and fabrication work completed while at Kennedy & Violich Architects. Installation of custom acoustical plywood wall by Atelier Mey. Photography Credit: KVA