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21 projects

The Thoughts

  1. behavior information modelingJAN 2026For thirty years we've been getting very good at Building Information Modeling: every beam, every duct, every clash, tracked to the millimeter.
  2. neuroaestheticsDEC 2025Neuroaesthetics is the unglamorous name for a question everyone already feels: why does one room settle you and another keep you on edge?
  3. physics solversAPR 2026A physics solver is the most honest collaborator I have: it doesn't care what I intended, only what I actually built.
  4. generative aiJUN 2024Generative AI made the inspired gesture free. Anyone can produce a thousand renders before lunch, and a render is a promise, not a product.
  5. extended realitySEP 2022I started in a lab strapping headsets onto students to see whether a lesson lands harder when you can walk around inside it.
  6. comfort as dataMAY 2026You don't walk into a room and average your experience. You walk in and the thing that's wrong is the thing you notice: the glare, the echo, the cold draft on the back of your neck.
  7. drawing as interfaceMAR 2026For most of my life the drawing was the output. You designed the thing, then you drew it to prove it existed.
  8. evolutionary searchNOV 2025Evolutionary search is what I reach for when a problem is too tangled to solve head on: describe what good looks like, then let a population of designs breed, mutate, and compete until something clever falls out.
  9. heritage meets new techAPR 2026The usual choice with an old building is a trap: treat it as a museum piece no one may touch, or drop a glass-and-steel box in the middle and call it modern.
  10. buildings that respondJUN 2026Right now a building is a fixed guess. Someone chose the ceiling height and the window size years before you arrived, and you live inside their averaged assumptions whether they fit you or not.
  11. connecting the dotsJUN 2020When the art class was asked who here dislikes drawing, mine was the only hand that went up. Awkward.
  12. pelagñouJUN 2026Some projects hand you a tool; Pelagñou handed me a library card.
  13. explaining thingsJUL 2026How do you explain a complex, honestly boring technical subject so someone leans in instead of glazing over?
  14. adjacency is not accessJUN 2026A floor plan tells you which rooms touch. It will not tell you which rooms you can actually reach, and the gap between those two drawings is where the architecture is hiding.

Tsukiji Fish Market

RESEARCH

Can environmental analysis keep up with weather that changes its mind by lunch?

Tokyo’s climate stress-tested a 19-hectare market hall, and the polite tweaks changed nothing: the form itself had to give.

MACAD ENVIRONMENTAL · TEAM OF 4

LADYBUG · INFRARED.CITY · GALAPAGOS · SIMULATED · 19 HECTARES

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WHAT

A computational environmental analysis of the proposed 19-hectare redevelopment of Tokyo’s Tsukiji fish market site. We simulated thermal comfort, daylight, wind, and heat mitigation under a climate that swings from wet and cold to hot and humid inside a single day. A team of four, all hands on everything: María Sánchez Domínguez, Charles Abi Chahine, Lakzhmy Mari Zaro, and me.

WHY

If it is hard to simply dress for Tokyo’s weather, imagine designing a 19-hectare venue for it. Environmental analysis is where a form’s good intentions meet a climate that does not care.

HOW

  1. Model the site and venue in Rhino and run Ladybug and Infrared.City across thermal comfort, daylight, wind, and heat.
  2. Test the starting hypothesis: that minor modifications to the original form would be enough.
  3. When they were not, reshape the form itself, with Galapagos searching the roof geometry for a shape that performs.

WHAT CAME OF IT

The simulations killed the polite version: minor modifications had minimal impact on environmental performance, so the massing changed. The honest lesson is that environmental analysis is a design partner, not a report you attach at the end.