During the summer I enrolled in a three-week intensive design program in Harvard’s Graduate School of Design. It was an incredible, immersive experience, and I walked away with pages of sketches, a handful of photographs, and a bunch of new friends.

Architecture is a cycle of learning and unlearning, zooming out and zooming in, putting things together and taking them apart; it’s something that completes me even though it’s endless!

Community Pavilion Project: The Trellis

We were tasked with designing a small community center that would be built on a plat in a local Cambridge suburb. The brief asked us to construct a space in which residents could freely and easily work, converse, eat, and rest. We also needed an area that had a special and specific purpose; it could be anything, from painting to reading to napping! I chose to attach a greenhouse at the rear of the site.

My design was inspired by my grandmother’s sunroom, a popular hangout for family and friends; a room illuminated by ample sunlight streaming in through the windows and brought to life by a collection of wooden bird statues and potted plants.

My design intended to reflect the vitality and togetherness of my grandmother’s sunroom, but I desired a visual vocabulary that was compatible with the surrounding neighborhood — something eye-catching yet approachable.

The pavilion’s motif is based on the garden trellis: a framework of latticework used as a support for climbing plants. The trellis’ grid layout has a dual purpose: it effectively divides and supports the floor plan and creates windows for natural light to enter.

From ideation to creation, please see the development of my “Trellis.”