Following the hurricanes of 2022 and 2024, Sanibel and Captiva became acute sites for reconsidering the future of coastal construction. Storm surge and extreme winds exposed the fragility of conventional island building practices, while also making visible the ecological labor required to sustain vulnerable coastal landscapes. Commissioned by the Sanibel-Captiva Conservation Foundation, the La Gorce Family Intern Village provides housing for researchers and conservationists whose work follows the seasonal rhythms of the island: sea turtle nesting, migratory birds, marine habitats, coastal vegetation, and the long-term monitoring of a changing barrier-island ecosystem.

The project treats intern housing as a small civic and ecological campus. Thirty residents are accommodated across three self-similar buildings positioned between marshland and roadway. Their loose arrangement resists the singular object-building, producing a porous field in which native vegetation, circulation, and shared outdoor rooms structure daily life. The space between buildings becomes as important as the buildings themselves: a circular clearing operates as an informal living room and outdoor classroom, while an amphitheater, deck, and pavilion support collective meals, workshops, field classes, and public programming.

The project reworks familiar elements of coastal Florida architecture: elevated volumes, deep roofs, screened porches, shaded interiors, and simple carpentry. Each building is organized around a triangular recessed porch that shades the interior, produces a communal threshold, and reduces wind pressure on the envelope. The porch becomes both a climatic and social device, extending the shared kitchen, dining, and living spaces toward the landscape.

The architectural and structural systems are shaped by the demands of rebuilding in a changing coastal environment. Hip roofs reduce uplift, compact, nearly square plans limit wind exposure, ventilation focused windows dot the facade, and the buildings are elevated above FEMA base flood elevation on concrete directional piers, allowing stormwater to pass beneath.

Plum Island House is a coastal residence on a New England barrier island north of Boston. Elevated above the sand dunes to accommodate storm surge and shifting coastal conditions, the house celebrates the vernacular, the voluptuous, and the volumetric. Cedar shingles generate new form while responding to existing conditions: patterning a gradient over the façade that both invites and receives weathering; mediating seamlessly as three curvilinear volumes peel back from their orthogonal base.

Drawing on Vincent Scully’s reading of the Shingle Style as volumetric rather than planar, the project exploits the shingle’s capacity to bend, wrap, and render complex geometries continuous. A simple square volume anchors the first level. Above, planar surfaces transition into arcs that slip outside Cartesian space, defining sleeping suites and extending into an open roof deck. The curved volumes read as objects within a free-floating plan, suspended between rectilinear enclosure and sculptural figure.

The three figures orient toward the Atlantic Ocean, surrounding marshes, and coastal dunes, recalling the widow’s watch traditions of New England’s seafaring communities. Lightly elevated above the landscape, the house is designed to weather alongside its environment. As the cedar shingles age and darken unevenly, edge and curvature intensify, allowing climate, salt air, and time to become visible parts of the architecture.

Project featured on DesignBoom

Carr House gathers the geology of Johnstown, Ohio, into an above-ground shelter. Rubble discarded from local limestone quarries is collaged into liquid concrete; when cured, the composite assembly is tilted vertically. Exterior corners slip past right angles, exposing volumes that are both rugged and smooth. Carr House reappraises the value of debris, utilizing riprap as a finish material.

Serriframe keeps a low profile as it tiptoes through Boston’s neighborhoods. The system borrows brick to knowingly subvert it, rendering a reverse bond pattern in weathered steel. Serriframe is conspicuous camouflage: rigidly versatile, materially transparent. Experienced in motion, Serriframe becomes a flicker in the urban scene.

Tesuque Studio is a concrete tilt-up structure that hovers between earthbound and ethereal. Five walls are poured directly on the ground, taking its texture with them into the vertical plane. Flat formwork translates to a five-sided volume as curved edges collude in three cylindrical roof slopes. The resulting building, a ceramic workshop and gallery in Tesuque, New Mexico, all but dissolves into its desert site.

Halo is part-salon,  part-school, and part-clinic, designed for women and girls coping with cancer. Multiple compounding textures present the idea of “cosmetic” as generating both ornament and figure. Perimeter walls emulate the sensibilities of their surface material: playful, dreamy, and cloud-like.

Somewhere between puffy shingles (a New England staple), an heirloom quilt, and the loose fit of a favorite pair of jeans, the pavilion speaks to the familiarity and nostalgia of our collective favorite things. 56 quilted panels are stuffed with recycled denim turned into building insulation and supplemented with fabric waste from the garment industry. The result is a chromatic speckling and indigo hue. Casually draped over the frame, each puffy panel invites us to walk, bump, hug, and lounge freely between the pillow-like walls.

HillGarten punctuates a sense of meander. Nestled within a leisurely landscape, a pointed gabled roof provides a communal respite, propped up by belly columns in the round.

Botanical Court inverts an outer perimeter inward. Housing McMaster University’s Palm collection, the greenhouse becomes vertically attenuated in section and dimensionally thin in plan, wrapping around a central public courtyard that enjoys 360 degree views of the palms, without compromising the integrity of the greenhouse ecosystem.

Library offers a continuous experience – a labyrinthian loop of bookshelves, crenelated to produce individualized spaces. The sinuous organizational form is revealed surrounding a central garden.

Dimple Chair combines traditional handcraft with digital fabrication. Timeless woodworking techniques shape the chair’s figure, while the pre-programmed CNC machine carves sundry impressions into the grain of the seat.

Tilt-Up Pavilion brings a playful approach to generic construction techniques. Five concrete walls are poured on-site and hoisted into place, their exposed edges revealing – layer after layer – the time it took to make them. Cold joints, pick points, and structural embeds become central actors, as the construction process reveals its theatrical leanings.

Phantom Fictions asks if mirage can be material. Situated in the Straits of Messina, this proto-architecture measures atmospheric gradations while visually indexing them, perpetuating the fiction of Fata Morgana with air as both material and performer.

Kaffeology is a cafe composed of curves surfaced in plaster.