Sugar Onwards repurposes Marcie and Gary’s existing sugar house into an accessible, one-bedroom accessory dwelling unit (ADU) for elderly parents. The proposal preserves the sugar house’s iconic hipped roofline and leaves its front elevation entirely unchanged, adding a modest 515 sqft addition (830 sqft total). It continues the building’s passive-ventilation logic: a raised hipped roof and 16-ft clerestory windows draw cool air in low and release warm air high, and centralizes plumbing and mechanical services within a single continuous wall to isolate infrastructure costs. The existing woodshed and a client-specified tree are retained, and a semi-translucent, aerogel-insulated south curtain wall floods the interior with light. The design balances heritage, accessibility, energy efficiency, and cost-conscious, standardized construction.

From Honky-Tonk to Western Swing, country music’s rise to the American forefront speaks only to the simultaneity of the capitalist highlife and its rural blue-collar roots. Many songs narrate the rise from [insert town, state here] and the many pitfalls of domestic life: drinking, infidelity, heartbreak, and religion. The roping cowboy to the fallen gunfighter illustrates the falseness of country music: the songwriter and the artist over perform an imagined and fantastical truth of the otherwise impoverished and destitute South. By introducing country music into a post-GDR landscape in the sister city of Yuma, Arizona, Frankfurt an der Oder, the genre can be revealed for its simultaneous Americana and melancholia. Willkommen and howdy to the country music motel.

On May 29th, 1993, four Neo-Nazi skinheads set ablaze the freestanding home of the Genç family in Solingen, Germany killing five and maiming fourteen of its residents. With buildings set ablaze, the thesis reevaluates the architectural conception of the signifier over the signified, building as body’s corporeal obliteration, Postmodernism’s assertions of form as meaning, and site’s simultaneous temporal disassociation and contextual-specificity. The thesis uses arson as a method of destruction to formulate a reconstructed architecture, an architecture that will confront the possibilities of meaning without monumentalizing, deconstruction without absolute abstraction, and memory without recapitulation. The historical case study of the Genç home initiates a way of looking at an incident backwards, taking a still frame from the available media documentation and resolving its Zwischenzeit, “between-time”, states. Both as a representational tool and an argument for pragmatic deconstruction in the final interventions, the redrawing of the house serves to suspend time, space, object, and phenomenology of the arson.

On May 29th, 1993, four Neo-Nazi skinheads set ablaze the freestanding home of the Genç family in Solingen, Germany killing five and maiming fourteen of its residents. With buildings set ablaze, the thesis reevaluates the architectural conception of the signifier over the signified, building as body’s corporeal obliteration, Postmodernism’s assertions of form as meaning, and site’s simultaneous temporal disassociation and contextual-specificity. The thesis uses arson as a method of destruction to formulate a reconstructed architecture, an architecture that will confront the possibilities of meaning without monumentalizing, deconstruction without absolute abstraction, and memory without recapitulation. Using the major sites as an instigator to the arson’s remembrance, the interventions produce a tangential index of the attack’s attributes (gasoline catalysts; automotive travel; bystanders, perpetrators, and victims) all within violence’s production of the standstill or Zwischenzeit. A gas station juxtaposed with a child care center, a firehouse combined with a hostel, and community amphitheater facing a ghost platform produce antithetical actions that realize the incident without recapitulating exactly. By reenacting the event of violence tangentially in the everyday, can the memory of the arson be, if not subconsciously, provoked and replayed through dogmatic, seemingly innocuous, and introspective states.

A critical journal of architecture and urbanism produced by editors in the Department of Architecture at the College of Architecture, Art, and Planning (AAP), Cornell University. Website: https://cornelljournalofarchitecture.cornell.edu

A monograph documenting fifty years of Morphosis modelmaking (1972-2022): hundreds of physical models unstacked, uncrated, refurbished, and exhaustively re-photographed to reveal the conceptual core of the practice’s model-driven design. Hallie Black wrote the book’s foreword and worked as an editor on the publication. Thom Mayne (author); Foreword by Hallie Black. Rizzoli, December 2022. 1,024 pp.

A Morphosis Architects competition entry for the regional planning and design of the Cangzhou West High-Speed Rail station area in China. The proposal engages the heritage of the Beijing-Hangzhou Grand Canal alongside China's 14th Five-Year Plan priorities and a commitment to sustainability and carbon neutrality by 2060. Hallie Black contributed the project's renderings and views.

Featured in a83, "Projections of a Dogma," 2020. Featured at A+D Museum, "Projections of a Dogma," 2024.

The concern study of deportation policy traces those entering and detained within United States territory. Policy is realized as a bloated, ambiguous, and changing system - deciding the future of everyone that is pushed through. The border's inefficiency is marred by unproductive and dangerous rhetoric. Billions of dollars flow into border protection agencies and surveillance systems to control human flow. The Visions argue that those billions can be used more pragmatically and productively to control exchanges and trade surplus. The border is the final frontier - the Wild Wild West of policy prose. A new network is erected; a neighborhood of grid cities rises.

Drawings are from the first year studios that include precedents such as the Villa Shodhan, a historic American tannery, and a North American beaver. The largest drawing of the beaver's rotational movements is completed with partner Linqi Dong.

An intervention on an existing, everyday table that deconstructs its form into an organizer for drafting tools. The metal slotted armature holds a candle, slowly melting to measure the passage of a drafting session in wax collected at the foot of the table's old worn legs. This is a project that takes a found object into a small instrument for the ritual and time of drawing construction.

“The Eternal Return is the declaration for human migration. Never ending, always repeating, Germany has renewed its role as an Arrival Country upon decades of global division and fission, union and reunion. Its capital has argued just that. Berlin is a city of self-completion and self destruction. The famed perimeter block circles itself time and time again by repairing its holes of bombed remnants or blighted shells. Sisyphus in desire, Berlin is in a battle of refortifying these urban citadels. The city has undergone historic public housing initiatives throughout the decades. At each turn, Neubau and Altbau, the design was simple: to feed the Ouroboros’ longing and complete the ring.” The Monograph illustrates the work of Migration and Gentrification studio in collaboration with the Mellon Collaborative Seminar: Migration and Discrimination.

A travel-fellowship project investigating American nostalgia and its isolating effect on the built environment in small towns across the Rust Belt, Great Plains, and the Southwestern and Southern United States. Drawing on Svetlana Boym's The Future of Nostalgia and Frederick Jackson Turner's frontier thesis, it examines how nostalgic 'frontierism' and memorialization shape rural post-industrial towns, and how architecture might construct alternative narratives of memory and place. Robert James Eidlitz Travel Fellowship (Awarded), Cornell AAP. Team: Hallie Black and Ihwa Choi. 2021 (trip 2023).

Published in Panel (zine, ed. Duncan Steele), 2022.

The capstone work of the first year of the B.Arch program focused on the analytic translation of industrial and historical precedents. The research of 19th century American tannery facilities provides insight on rational horizontally and vertically motivated circulation processes. In juxtaposition to the manufacturing of cow hides, the study of the Villa Shodhan by Corbusier in Ahmedabad, India illustrates a compacted series of vertical and horizontal contradictions. Using the studies of both precedents, the Sheared Passage Cemetery provides spaces for burial, contemplation, and celebration of the family’s deceased. Circulation tells a narrative through loss and healing in congress with views of the surrounding Ithacan waterscape and orchards.

Through iterative processes of design, the studio focused on the translation of material to program. Using concrete and wax, the material research discovers the intricacies of solid and void. These design traits were carried to the Petrified Hollow Shelter, winning first for Cornell’s Baird Prize, and into the Museum for Madrid, focusing on wall as program and void as circulation to create a unified experience through a series of vertical light wells and dark subterranean plains. Urban carpets capitalized on the nuances of material study to connect the urban fabric of this old city’s neighborhoods as well as previous design research and processes.

Located in Detroit, Michigan, the Rosa Parks Transit Center acts as both sculpture and infrastructure. To create such a detailed model of this complex structural system, many months of planning, construction jigs, and trial models were necessary. The final 1/8” scale model demonstrates the keen interests and knowledge of construction elements in the built landscape. Another critical component is the analysis of cost and sufficient material strength for this smaller scale. With my partner Ainslie Cullen, we chose to model this structure due to its complexity and unity of elements. The model of Rosa Parks Transit Center appears in Professor Mark Cruvellier’s book Model Perspectives: Structure, Architecture and Culture (with Bjørn N. Sandaker and Luben Dimcheff, Routledge, 2017), and it has been exhibited for the NAAB accreditation board. All concrete elements were recreated with specific, refined concrete molds. Real materials such as asphalt were also used.

Created with a series of ribs, programmatic spaces float throughout the boathouse to facilitate the three key users of the space: the Visitor, the Spectator and the Rower. Following the boat-shell transportation rail, Buoyancy, Tred, and Cage builds a logic of circulation and program perforated by transparencies and opacities. Unraveling tred stairs divert the three users to their respective program while uniting them in an airy light filled semi-enclosed, caged interior. Visitors, Spectators, and Rowers alike are hugged and enclosed by light boxes, buoyant as the rowing shells transported along the horizontal rail system.

Situated by Tiburtina Station in Rome, Italy, the City of One’s Refuge combats the stigma around the refugee crisis through Italy’s Mediterranean route in conjunction with the need for revitalization of public transit infrastructure. The project uses a series of individual, strategic structures to cluster and create garden terraces along the renovated highway. Using a circulation track through the ground level, refugees and neighbors alike filter upwards to enjoy distinct programming and views outwards from the garden cities. The structural units can be additive or subtractive to incorporate a variety of programming necessities as the site gentrifies or shrinks, peoples inhabit or flee. This unit system in detail explores the user as an individual and the entire site planning as a neighborhood whole. The City of One’s Refuge battles stigma and social thought towards the outsider.