In addition to my studio projects and thesis, I also organized a large event featuring french pastry chef Pierre Hermé, focusing on his creative process, and on the cinematic and architectural dimensions of his work.

M.Arch II Thesis

 Architectural typologies that imbricate the outside in the inside, such as the theater, department store, or hotel, best articulate the surface between our physical environment and our experiencing self.  Alchemical, proto-cinematic devices, they become thresholds from wakefulness to dream, real to imaginary, space to time.

This project investigates the transition phenomena within these combined typologies - all sources of inspiration and meditation (the garden) as well as of consumption (the palace).  This ambiguity of meanings - utilitarian and phantasmagoric - promotes transition as it expands the visitor’s mental projections into proto-cinema, custom experiences in the “theater of our minds”. The amalgam of department store, hotel and theater accentuates this transition phenomena - the department store as a backstage for theater, hotel rooms as changing rooms, theater stage as atrium.  Both the visitors and the architecture become actors of these “projections”.

Meshes of the Afternoon

Catching at the city’s edge, a spider weaves a dreamer’s web. Housing dreams, projecting visions, scaffolding the sky. Their sweeping loops of woven mesh, with fiber warp and timeless weft, write history of transience in tapestry of performance.

During the day, we see the hyper-structure supporting the cable mesh in tension.  The program is fixed to either one or the other. At night, the hyper-structure disappears, and the activities taking place inside the mesh take over, as they seem to float. A mermaid appears to be caught.  Her body is tangled in the ropes, but her spirit wanders and animates the structure - is it not in fact our desire that flutters in those cables?

Museum of Time

In Chris Marker’s film, “La Jetée”, the protagonist navigates the layers of time in between the underground passages of a post-apocalyptic world and the childhood image of a woman’s face on the airport jetty.  He describes these chance encounters through time as the “museum of his memories”.  The Contemporary Art Museum offers a similar time traveling experience - a travel to the immediate future, a depository for messages from the future, which resound with echoes through the distant past by the brilliance of its images.

Architecture of Taste

On November 27, 2012, world-renowned pastry chef Pierre Hermé arrived at Harvard University from Paris. He brought five chefs, two assistants, 600 sheets of gelatin, 150 eggs, 68 pounds of caster sugar, 40 pounds of unsalted butter, 32 pounds of cream, 25 pounds of milk chocolate couverture, 11 pounds of grated wasabi, and the alchemic techniques to transform these ingredients into an elaborate “lecture de pâtisserie.” Together with Savinien Caracostea and Sanford Kwinter, he methodically deconstructed four conceptual desserts for 400 spectator-diners. The Architecture of Tasterecaptures this night and the physiological effects of Hermé’s pastry visions.