Design stories for the rest of us.
Type: Narrative
Year: 2019
Give up the nine to five for eternal sunshine and a space to thrive. The citizens of Blocksburg are an easy-going people, with each dumpy carving out their own little slice of utopia. With over 12 blocks in it’s jurisdiction, the Township of Blocksburg is a veritable paradise. From premiere transportation and civic plazas, to world class dining and entertainment, to the region’s best high school football team, there is certain to be something for everyone.
Type: Product
Year: 2019
An exercise in parting out complex geometry for in-house fabrication, the world’s largest dumpy measures in at just under three feet in height (and took just under 300 hours to print).
Type: Product
Year: 2017
Since the height of the Renaissance, the “Cabinet of Curiosities” has served as a microcosm for artifacts odd, unseen, or yet to be explained by modern understanding. Aristocrats dressed in fine linen would file away their objects of intrigue as a kind of natural history museum, intended to preserve the jewels of the past. A recreational frivolity, this can be read as mankind’s first example of collecting things. A private reflection of one’s innermost thoughts, the categorization of objects and curatorial efforts deployed within the cabinet gave man agency over the way he wished to view the world, and served as record of his conquests far and wide.
Throughout time, the act of collecting has pivoted between high art and high commercialism. Block Parti paints the building and the toy with the same brush, producing a world in the image of a collection. If we cast the city grid as an upscaling of the “cabinet”, then the act of urban planning is akin to curating a city of collectibles (buildings!). Through the acts of blowing up and miniaturizing, creating formal interchangeability, and manufacturing a false scarcity, Block Parti takes all the cues of our capitalist culture and places it in a tidy box, and that box is in near-mint condition.
Block Parti is a high performance collection of modern architectural delight, miniaturized to a convenient scale for anyone to effortlessly enact their God complexes in a variety of fun urban scenarios. The project equates architecture with child’s play by creating a skyline in the image of four action figure-like toys. Four distinct parti pris narrate a playful account of the function and appearance of each building.
Type: Product
Year: 2019
PlantPants allow you to add personality to your house plants by memorializing them in one of six signature poses. The perfect companion for small ferns, succulents, air, or water plants.
Type: Game Art
Year: 2020
Jim Nally’s Cattle Royale is a family weight area control game for 2-6 players. Players attempt to herd cattle by deploying strategic positioning and executing actions. Arch Hero applied the artistic vision and graphic design work to produce a visual prototype for play-test and pitch purposes
Type: Character Design
Year: 2012 - 2020
The scale figures which inhabit a drawing live entire lives on their own when we aren’t watching them. The sterile silhouetted CAD figures of the 1990’s have long since been out of style and retired. It is high time we develop an entourage with more style and flair. We must be careful to design world’s for them to inhabit in their own image, because after all, it is they who have to live with it.
Type: Narrative, Exhibition
Year: 2019
Queue, an Exhibit about Waiting in Line was a 100’-0” long drawing exhibit showcased at the School of the Art Institute of Chicago Department of Architecture as part of a curated, visting artist installation. It is a sequential story written from two points of view with two end points. One character is the Drifter, a master of navigating the social contracts required to function in everyday queue society. The other is the Tourist, a man with a keen eye for form and the intricate patterns society bends itself to. When architectural space is reduced to its lowest common denominator (visitors navigating social hierarchy though space) things start to look the same.
Type: Game Design
Year: 2019
A game about standing in line, players must navigate the various personalities in the queue to wait their way to the top! Developed in the Dreams PS4 early access software platform, Queue*bert is a prototypical game idea yearning to make fun out of the ordinary.
Type: Narrative
Year: 2015
Beautifully Banal is a story about a fly. It was created as an entry for the second inaugural Architecture Fairy Tales competition in 2015, wherein it received second place among 1000+ entries. Participants were invited to submit 5 spreads that crafted a story with text and images. The submission leveraged the very dry representation of traditional architectural drawings layered with challenging, sometimes ambiguous sequences of cartoon narrative. The project aimed to celebrate the beauty of banality in everyday life while very tactfully telling its story.
Type: Narrative
Year: 2016
An introspective graphic narrative of the journey through architecture graduate school. Post-Humorism, a world divorced of open mindedness and a willingness to have fun, shows the dangers of obsessing over dogmas within the built spectrum. The playful Anti-Design works of designers from the 1970’s including the likes of Archizoom, Archigram, Koolhaas, and Super Studio taken literally as livable proposals for buildings would have made for a terribly dystopian environment by any practical account. However, taking a moment to consider these extremes played out ironically opens a conversation of “what if” in order to question the current status quo.
Type: Narrative
Year: 2015
A provoking look into the debate of theory vs practice. Many great ideas cannot be realized beyond the realm of “paper architecture” when paired with the scrutiny of the real world. This anti-human design proposal created to solve the issue of customer’s loitering too long in a coffee shop is as soundly logical as it is mean spirited.
Type: Narrative
Year: 2017
The practice of selling off air rights is a peculiar reality in the zoning policies of today’s urban environments. An exercise in contextualism, what happens when one structure is enabled to tower over its neighbor? Playing out the extremes, it is not difficult to imagine a world more in the semblance of a rolling playground in the sky than the sterile grids and cityscapes our predecessor’s imagined long ago.
