Boston | 2016
A roof deck in Boston's South End was both cluttered and underutilized out of the client's desire to accommodate a multitude of activities ranging from work to yoga, intimate dinners and large parties. The variety and amount of furniture needed was overwhelming, leaving a space that couldn't comfortably accommodate any activity.
In order to resolve this contradiction, we removed the furniture and instead transformed the surface of the deck itself into subtly integrated surfaces for sitting, lounging, and entertaining. Areas are sculpted up from the floor to various levels and angles of repose to produce terraced zones for a range of activities ranging from active to sedentary, reducing visual clutter while achieving both intimacy and openness.
The deck itself is crafted out of Sapele and assembled entirely without without screws or nails. Instead, each piece is digitally sculpted with interlocking Japanese wood joints to ensure graceful longevity. The deck is also entirely modular and can be disassembled and relocated easily. In this project, we sought to combine digital tools with traditional craft and materials to produce a space that is both innovative and subtle.
Project Credits:
Design: Jeremy Jih
Carpentry & Install: Jeremy Jih
CNC Milling: Polyfab
Steel Fabrication: Atlantic Steel
Wood Supplier: Kenyon Woodworking
Landscape Install: Carey Erdman
Plant Supplier: Mahoneys
Boston, MA | 2019
Speculative | 2012
METAFICTION: fiction that self-consciously and systematically draws attention to its status as an artifact in order to pose questions about the relationship between fiction and reality.
This project begins with a work of literature by Jorge Luis Borges entitled "The Library of Babel." While the thesis itself doesn't pursue the library typology, out of an obsession with this fictional Universe, a series of architectural questions are explored through the production of an analogous architectural Universe. The beauty of Borges' library lies in its poetic occupation of polar extremes. Its components are both completely real--even banal--and its consequences extreme. The world of Borges' fiction is one in which the reader is caught in a perpetual moment of hesitation between the real and the imaginary, producing a condition of the fantastic. This thesis leverages Todorov's definition of the fantastic in order to maintain an ambiguous relationship to the known and the real, producing a machine framework in architecture that can straddle the territory between the visionary and the banal, instrumentalizing fiction, the imaginary, and the playful for grounded and real ends. The program is a menagerie for animals. Using the structural module of the vault, the requirements of each animal are distilled and scripted into a series of specific design moves. In this way, variation of the structural and geometric system is able to produce typological differentiation, and spawn a field of variations which can then be evaluated and taken into the real world.
Boston, MA | 2019
Stowe, VT | 2016
The Stowe Glass House is dedicated to framing an exquisite view of Mt. Mansfield in the town of Stowe, VT. A continuous living space pivots around a central three-sided stone hearth which forms the structural and conceptual heart of the house. Each wing of the house faces both inwards towards a hearth and outward towards the view, allowing each space to become a viewing area for the mountain. A continuous floor-to-ceiling curtainwall system wraps the entire mountainside perimeter of the house, while the roof sweeps seamlessly from interior to exterior to dissolve the boundary between the two, and bring the view of the mountain into the interior spaces. A wraparound, continuous deck continues the illusion and extends the living space of the house to the exterior.
Project Credits:
Design: Jeremy Jih
Contractor: Cypress Woodworks
Engineering: Harris Structural Engineering
Boston | 2019
A compact space required to house an artist’s studio, gallery exhibition space, and community art classes is resolved by borrowing from the language of set design and Robert Irwin, inserting a system of translucent and mobile partitions that descend from the ceiling.
Taipei | 2018
An apartment in Taipei characterized by a deep, lightless interior is re-oriented around an elevated tea room. The original concrete structure, discovered during demo, is exposed, polished, and paired with white oak.
Project Credits:
Design: J.Roc Design
Prototype | 2012
The Flexible Pavilion combines traditionally contradictory qualities in a structural vaults. Vaults are rigid, opaque, and permanent structures, often seen in monumental spaces. In turning to a durable, flexible, and translucent material, the assumptions of the vault are turned on its head. Made entirely from polypropylene--a flexible and durable plastic--the vaulted pavilion measures 10 feet in width, height, and length. A core of structural ribs slot together as in traditional Japanese joinery, and are covered in a double skin, providing shear resistance and a glowing, translucent canopy. Each leg of the pavilion is able to move up to a foot in any given direction, allowing the pavilion to be placed on uneven terrain. The vault finds its own ideal catenary geometry for each site as a result of its flexible plastic composition. The Flexible Vault is part of Babel, a speculative design for a zoo. The Pavilion is a prototype for the aviary within the zoo.
Pavilion Prototype | 2020
Looking to precedents of dress patterns which democratize and make accessible complex geometric constructions, Instant Assemblies begins with flexible materials and domestic fasteners which can be patterned in the home and assembled onsite in an instant. An assembly of individuals and materials that can gather and disperse.
Marblehead | 2018
A 1920s Georgian revival house surrounded by ocean on three sides in Marblehead, Massachusetts required extensive interior renovation to accommodate a growing family. An existing exterior, renovated and added onto multiple times over the past century is radically reinterpreted through the lens of Adolf Loos’ raumplan to produce a new cohesive parti, bonded together in section through a central firepole shaft, allowing for both distributed and condensed spatial sequences. Billowing, sculpted concrete and marble elements provide local centers of gravity within raumplan segments
Provincetown | 2016
A triangular site anchored by a historic Cape house needed to be transformed into a courtyard. To accomplish this, J.Roc proposed a poolhouse to anchor a central pool and sunken courtyard space. The ground floor of the poolhouse is glass, to allow for continuity with public pool spaces, while the upper levels are rotated 30 degrees to face the existing structure at a perpendicular angle. Public spaces are oriented at the 30 degree angle to allow for oblique three-quarter views to dominate across the courtyard, and to structure viewing relationships within the space. A choreography of entry is produced to allow for a sudden reveal of the hidden courtyard by ascending a stair which becomes a new elevated ground in front of the poolhouse, which continues inside the house itself, lifting the roof for a Richardsonian half-eyebrow dormer.