Yes, and… The Improvising Landscape of the Displaced

My award-winning master’s thesis examines the notion of sense of belonging for displaced communities within urban and public space settings, asking how the art of improvisation can be used as a design tool to enhance sense of belonging in our shared spaces.

Transitional Landscapes

As an ASLA Emerging Professionals Spotlight, I examined the benefits and possibilities that landscape architecture and its design elements have in helping grieving children, through working with a children’s bereavement camp in Richmond, Virginia.

Hull Hill

A collaboration project, Hull Hill is a competition entry for a Hull public library’s unused space in Richmond, Virginia, where we imagined the seasonal changes, and creating floral curtains that not only becomes a refuge from the busy neighboring streets, but also a unique space to host the library’s children’s programs.

Seneca Village and Central Park: The Forgotten Land of the Free

The Black Lives Matter movement taught us quickly that we must continue to learn and unlearn in order to make progress and create a better and more just future. I believe the same can and should be applied to our design thinking and approach to understand and designing sites. To be an active participant in that process within our field, the Ideas Pinup: Seneca Village invited everyone to come up with design solutions to what is a design problem. Seneca Village could have been saved, African Americans who owned land in the Village could have been thriving in their lands for the decades to come. Even now, only a few years ago when areas within original Seneca Village boundary went through a redesign, it should have begun to at least take active storytelling into consideration, but unfortunately it didn’t.

To take words into actions, landscape designers and architects submitted design ideas and elaborations exploring ways that the Park could have been designed differently, how to redesign it as a healing space, complete reconfiguration of the Park, understanding public memory, and series of installations to remind visitors of the Village and its stories.