LUCCA TOWNSEND

Location: Athens, Greece

Status: In Design

See the full description on the Sasaki site:

Work Completed while at Sasaki, my role included design of the pedestrian bridge, guiding all architectural elements, designing pavilions, and coordinating with local architects AREA.

Location: Baton Rouge, Louisiana

Status: Beginning Construction

Three structures provide shade, rain protection, views, and fun along the bayou promenade at Greenwood Park. Each has its own character influenced by its immediate surroundings. The three are tied together through materiality, inspired by the weaving bayou and undulating cypress forms. The structures will be composed of a wood deck, steel structure, and thermally modified ash slats.

Work completed while at Sasaki, my role included conceptual design through construction documentation. For more information on the rest of the park, check out the Sasaki website: https://www.sasaki.com/projects/greenwood-community-park/

Location: Somerville, Massachusetts

Status: Built

A huge copper pizza oven steals the show at T&B Pizza. The team at HBDT (Happy Birthday Design Team) worked with owners Tim and Bronwyn, and design build firm REarchitect, to realize this cozy dinner joint. By knocking down the wall between an office and convenience store in an old union square brick building, the space transformed into a kitchen-centric restaurant.

Location: Boston, Massachusetts

Status: Built

Hovering over the Boston Greenway in airspace previously occupied by the elevated highway, this sculpture spans 600 feet suspended from buildings. It’s form, changing with wind and light, recalls the layered past of the site and its city. Delicate yet monumental, it interrupts the hustle and bustle of downtown with a sense of calm contemplation and intangible transience.

The sculpture’s soft motion of woven fiber netting recalls the ocean that once extended to the site. Three holes reference the voids of Boston’s “trimountain” used to fill in land for the growing industrial city. Colored patterning is a reminder of the lanes of  traffic that severed a city from its waterfront to accommodate the automobile.

Weaving into buildings, the sculpture physically reconnects the city, utilizing the latent lateral capacity of skyscrapers. Mirroring the intent of the Greenway below, it contrasts the hard urban edges and reclaims airspace for the public. It is simultaneously a commentary on the history of cities and a celebration of current transformation. Its interconnected fiber networks are a physical manifestation of how the layers of time and human action are inextricably linked like ripples in water.

Work completed while at Studio Echelman, my role included conceptual design, 3d modelling, and construction documentation. Images and work was a collaboration with Daniel Zeese, Cameron Chateauneuf, Mieke Prins, Melissa Henry and others.

Status: Unbuilt

The Chapel is at the heart of a faith-based residence. It’s angular slate exterior mimics the surrounding context, and provides an outdoor gathering space. The soft, curvilinear wood interior is designed with acoustic parameters to create a quiet, womblike environment. The chapel is oriented so that sunlight hits the altar around 5:30pm, when mass begins.

Work completed while at Sasaki, my role included conceptual design under the direction of Katia Lucic, 3d modeling, renderings were a collaboration with Carlos Torres.

Location: Travelling Sculpture

Status: Built

1.8 was designed for the Smithsonian American Art Museum’s Renwick Gallery. The soft netted sculpture fills the 100’ space with color, motion, and lightness. It’s form is derived from data sets of the wave heights from the 2011 Tokoku earthquake. The title refers to the amount of time, in microseconds, that the day was shortened due to this event. The carpet below mimics the topography of the sculpture above.

Work completed while at Studio Echelman, my role included conceptual design, 3d modelling, and construction documentation. Images and work was a collaboration with Daniel Zeese, Cameron Chateauneuf, Mieke Prins, Melissa Henry and others.

Location: Philippines

Status: Design Development

Project Sugar conceptualizes housing for new university campus in the Philippines from the urban scale to the building scale. The campus plan steps the buildings sizes down from the main campus, with larger residence halls facing the main campus, and smaller row houses for faculty behind. The plan considers wind movement in the hot Philippine climate, outdoor social gathering spaces, and informs the smaller scale building designs. The landscape encourages pedestrian movement in the car-heavy culture. More comprehensive designs of a residence hall, pavilion, and villa typologies bring the design from the planning scale to the detail. The residence hall is focused around a central social hub composed of interlocking double height spaces. A bright steel stair makes vertical movement visible from outside. Bamboo screens change density based on sun exposure. Precast concrete panels of various sizes and textures mimic the bamboo screen and create visual interest. A central courtyard is shaded by trees. Villas alternate between 3 and 4 story houses for graduate students and faculty. The Villas designs are based in Philippine culture, Feng Shui, light, and thermal comfort.

Work completed while at Sasaki, my role included conceptual design under the direction of Romil Sheth and Steve Lacker, 3d modelling, and construction documentation. Images and work was a collaboration with Jay Schwartz, Ruben Sannen, and Jose Compres.

Location: Boston, Massachusetts

Status: Design/Theoretical

Loosely defined as a conceptual urban winter ‘warming hut’ or ‘glowing igloo,’ the installation will serve as an inviting, responsive and dynamic public art piece. The uses of this installation could range from an intimate meeting place, to social gathering space and wintertime venue for public events and performances.

Designed to block winter winds and embrace limited daylight hours, the pavilion increases the perceived temperature within the enclosure. Constructed of hexagonal concrete modules, the porous structure shields from prevailing winds, becoming increasing open as it faces toward the sun. During the day it collects solar energy and casts dynamic shadows. At night, modules coated in a glow-in-the-dark aggregate emit light harvested during the day.

Work completed while at Sasaki, my role included conceptual design under the direction of Christine Dunn, 3d modelling, and material testing. Images and work was a collaboration with Caroline Booth.

Location: Buffalo, New York

Status: Mock up Built

A team of Sasaki designers, engineers, and University of Buffalo students spent a week exploring the structural properties of terra cotta at the Architecture Ceramics Assemblies Workshop (ACAW) in Buffalo, NY.  The annual workshop, which aims to change the way designers and manufacturers collaborate, is sponsored by Boston Valley Terra Cotta in conjunction with the University of Buffalo. This year's workshop was attended by teams from Sasaki, Morphosis, SHoP, and AECOM, among many others.

As a material for sculpture, pottery, and other water-tight vessels, terra cotta dates back nearly 6,000 years. From the original Latin, terra cocta, meaning “baked earth,” it has been one of the easiest and most widely available materials with which civilizations could form and create, requiring only the sun’s heat to dry. By the 1800s, terra cotta was known primarily as a roofing material and architectural ornamentation, fired in modern kilns. The Sasaki team deliberately wanted to expand that definition of the material and experiment with the structural integrity of terra cotta, by designing a free standing shade structure entirely constructed of terra cotta.

Work completed while at Sasaki, my role included conceptual design, 3d modelling, and construction documentation. Images and work was a collaboration with Christine Dunn and Chris O’Hara from Studio NYL, with help from the rest of our ACAW team

Location: Boston, Massachusetts

Status: Design/Theoretical

The cemetery is a memento mori at the city scale: an everyday reminder of life’s transience amidst the usual urban distractions. A new typology, it takes inspiration from a history of burial in Boston, major themes in cultural rituals, and current shifts in the way we live. The cemetery houses the remains of the deceased, but exists for the living. The building addresses the needs of the mourner, mortician, and quotidian passerby. The cemetery is integrated into the urban fabric, acting as a street, park, and public space. It grows with the area around it, and as memories are made and left there.

Location: Boston, Massachusetts

Status: Design/Theoretical

Asked to design a mixed use building to meet the needs of Boston’s Seaport Neighborhood, I analyzed the area via craigslist personal ads (now extinct). The community seemed to be lacking a space for sexworkers to live and work in safety.

Each floor of the building is designed for a specific craigslist client. The building itself connects two street levels, and invites the community to engage in this traditionally taboo program.

A test of the CNC milling process, this swing is able to hold significant weight without fasteners. The pieces slot into each other to create a seamless connection. The entire swing is created from one sheet of plywood.

Location: Cleveland, Ohio

Status: Built

To make this railing for the Nord Family Greenway in Cleveland, I created a script to rotate the posts according to views. This rotation creates visual pleasure as the pedestrian moves by.

Work completed while at Sasaki.