Atlantic Engineering Group, North Kansas City, MO, US, Design Engineer
At AEG, I assisted with the design and construction management for the Google Fiber network, on thousands of acres in Kansas City and Austin. I created preliminary and final fiber layouts, construction documents, and splice sheets, and managed a team of field engineers to ensure that the design meshed with current conditions, minimizing costly change orders and time-consuming permits. Design problems occasionally arose, and I had more than a few late nights creatively rerouting cable to work with existing permits and meet impending construction deadlines.
The University of Kansas, Lawrence, KS, US, MArch, Architecture
During my time in the MArch program, I brought KU two awards in design competitions, and gained a deeper understanding of the ways architects are able to influence inhabitants. In 2012, Paola Sanguinetti (now chair of architecture) pushed me to learn 3D parametric modelling within the Revit interface. While still learning the program, I and a team of three other students received an honorable mention in that year's ACSA competition.
In the summer of 2013 I began an internship at Atlantic Engineering Group. At AEG, I worked on multiple phases of the design and construction of the Google Fiber Network in Kansas City and Austin. I spent a little over a year there, and gained a good deal of experience in the design-build process, though the end product was vastly different to what I had been studying at KU.
I returned to KU for one last semester to finish my degree in the fall semester of 2014 with Joe Colistra. This class was wildly different in scope from my previous studios, and he taught me a great deal of architecture-specific realism, such as contracts, zoning, parking requirements, real-estate development, and proforma analysis. It was the perfect capstone to my education, bridging the gap between the aesthetic-centered studio projects and the efficiency-centered internship.
The University of Kansas, Lawrence, KS, US, BArch, Architecture
I dabbled in economics, and even took a few econ-flavored graduate-level Urban Planning classes, one with Kirk McClure.
AIA Central States Student Design Competition, 3rd Place
A team of myself and three other students represented the University of Kansas at the AIA Central States Conference in October of 2014. The 16-hour student design competition presented us with the challenge of creating a "makerspace" and FEMA storm shelter within the urban fabric of Downtown Springfield. Our approach was heavily based in historical research, and addressed the languages of the locale, both ancient and recent.
ACSA + I2SL Student Design Competition, Honorable Mention
Under the guidance of Paola Sanguinetti, my team earned an honorable mention in the 2012 ACSA competition. Since the site was located in the Virgin Islands, we tried to utilize the natural forces on the site to minimize energy usage. I used the wind tunnel in Vasari to explore the ways in which airflow could inform both the building's form and its structure. After several iterations, I came up with a model that both cooled the air of the prevailing winds using thermal mass at the building's "front" and pulled it out of the "back" of the building using negative pressure generated by the roof form. Since we only spent four weeks on the project, I did not have time to explore the form further, but I would have liked to use FloVENT to further tweak the design with more advanced fluid dynamics. Though we only received an honorable mention, it should be noted that we were all first-year graduate students and spent only four weeks on the project, while the other teams recognized spent a full semester on the project during their fourth and fifth years.
