Taking Pierre Koenig's mid-century Case Study 22 house as its design inspiration, the Bel-Air house arrives at dramatic views of the Los Angeles basin from a dramatic site within Bel-Air. In moving from west to east the building's mass progressively lightens, culminating in a glass pavilion that springs from its foundation. Structural challenges included massive sitework, a dramatic cantilevered base, and special-steel-moment-frames to provide seismic stability. 

Architecture: KAA Design
Engineering: executed while at Structural Focus
Contractor: Richard Holtz
Awards: Long Beach/South Bay AIA Design Award

This comprehensive interior design included furniture and art selection, space layout, and paint selection for a renovated farmhouse in the City of Charlottesville. The design was featured in 2012 in Abode's monthly article, A Room of One's Own.  

Interior Design: Constructure
Noted: Abode 2012, Playroom with a View

Coincident with the twenty-fifth anniversary of the fall of the Berlin Wall, the Berlin Wall Pavilion is a temporary installation to display four panels of the Berlin Wall on loan to the University of Virginia. The panels feature Dennis Kaun's 'Kings of Freedom' graffiti mural. The installation juxtaposes a larger steel pavilion - on axis with the Jeffersonian grid - with an inner display case rotated along with the panels and symbolically faccing due-west.

The intentionally bare steel continues to change over the course of the exhibit, mimicking the deterioration of the Wall and contrasting with the permanence of the surrounding campus. The limited material palette and connection details of steel, glass, concrete and gravel were selected for dis-assembly, recyclability, and reuse.

Design: Kathy Grove - AIA & Ben Hays - SE
Structural Engineering: Ben Hays
Contractor: UVA Project Services
Artwork: on loan from The Robert and MeiLi Hefner Foundation

The Shangri-La hotel, designed in 1939 by William Foster, was named for the earthly paradise described in James Hilton's 1933 novel Lost Horizon. The poured-in-place concrete structure is excellent example of modernist art deco and was the first Class A apartment building constructed in Los Angeles following the Great Depression. After decades of various uses as a hotel, boarding house, and air force rehab station during WWII, a comprehensive renovation was needed. Structural challenges included strengthening the 1930s era concrete for new gravity and seismic loads using carbon fiber as well as creating a tightly integrated patio structure above an existing thin-decked parking garage. Upon completion, the designated historic landmark in Santa Monica won an "Excellence in Engineering" award from the Structural Engineers Association of Southern California. 

Architecture: HLW International
Engineering: executed while at Structural Focus
Contractor: Omnibuild
Awards: SEAOSC "Excellence in Engineering"