prarie_slider_grow_img

norman, oklahoma

status : on-going

Prairie Slider was developed as a small-scale architectural framework for fostering presence, connection, and restorative solitude. Conceived as a collaboration between architect and builder, the structure operates as a hybrid enclosure, equal parts greenhouse, studio, and gathering space. Its minimal footprint and simple form allow it to adapt across a wide range of programs, while its detailing and material expression establish it as a crafted, long-lasting intervention within a natural landscape.

Spatial Configuration
The building is anchored by a simple rectangular plan and a single-sloped roof that mediates light and frames the surrounding prairie. The structure is entirely post-and-beam, assembled from dimensional lumber with all structural joints articulated in exposed steel connectors and tensioning systems. This approach not only reinforces clarity and strength, but makes the assembly legible, aligning with the idea of the space as both retreat and tool, functional, open, and honest.

Internally, the structure supports a single-volume space defined by light, structure, and vegetation. Polycarbonate panels allow diffuse daylight to penetrate while offering protection from UV and harsh weather. Interior light shifts throughout the day, creating varied zones of warmth and brightness that respond to seasonal and diurnal change. The rhythm of the wood frame and diagonal bracing establishes an immersive architectural cadence, while also recalling vernacular barn framing and greenhouse construction.

Material Strategy
The exterior cladding system consists of quadruple-wall, UV-resistant polycarbonate sheeting, mounted to a heavy timber frame and backed by a robust substructure. The wall assembly offers thermal performance, weather resistance, and a variable degree of translucency that maintains visual privacy without fully detaching the interior from its landscape context. Steel brackets and turnbuckles serve both structural and expressive roles, detailing that highlights the logic of construction while offering precision and permanence.

Use & Adaptability
Rather than prescribe a specific function, Prairie Slider is designed to support an evolving set of uses: a greenhouse, meditation room, art studio, reading nook, or communal workspace. The space is intentionally open-ended, framed by structure and light, grounded by a durable platform, and left open to interpretation. Sliding panels and operable doors allow for cross-ventilation and varying levels of enclosure, supporting seasonal adaptability.

Context & Landscape
Sited within a prairie biome, the structure is elevated slightly on a timber platform that defines a threshold between cultivated wildness and constructed retreat. The surrounding vegetation, native grasses and pollinators, play an active role in shaping the experience of the space. From within, views are filtered and layered, softening the boundary between architecture and ecology. The building becomes a lens for observing the environment, and a shelter for momentary pause.

Architecture

Design + Fabrication

Art + Code

u00a9 [wpsos_year] Ken Marold USA, Inc. All rights reserved.

featured

oklahoma city, oklahoma

status : completed in 2022

Project Overview
This greenhouse was designed as a purpose-built, utilitarian enclosure to support seasonal plant cultivation and community food production. The structure prioritizes function, economy, and environmental responsiveness, utilizing a restrained palette of raw materials assembled with precision and clarity. Built primarily from off-the-shelf dimensional cedar, mild steel, and translucent polycarbonate cladding, the project reflects a straightforward yet deliberate construction methodology rooted in making with intent.

Structure and Assembly
The primary frame is composed of cedar 2x lumber, selected for its resistance to rot and insects and its workability with basic tools. All joints are reinforced using custom-fabricated mild steel plates and brackets, plasma-cut and welded to support the unique geometries of the sloped roof and wall intersections. These connections remain exposed, expressing the joint logic and construction process. Steel plates serve a dual role, providing structural reinforcement while creating a visual rhythm and point of visual interest along the frame.

A continuous rafter system, spaced and aligned with agricultural efficiency, establishes the greenhouse’s distinctive sloped roof profile, maximizing solar gain while efficiently shedding rain. The enclosure is clad in celluar, UV-stabilized polycarbonate sheeting, installed as a continuous surface from base to ridge. The translucent panels diffuse light evenly throughout the interior while maintaining thermal insulation and weather protection. At full height, the walls allow for flexible growing arrangements and passive ventilation strategies.

Details and Environmental Performance
Every element of the project was designed for clarity and repeatability. The detailing is intentionally minimal: the steel hardware is unpainted, allowing it to patina naturally; the cedar is left unfinished to age in response to its environment. A continuous base sill provides a moisture break, while raised floor beds and integrated cross bracing ensure long-term structural stability under wind load and shifting ground conditions.

The project’s approach was not to romanticize the greenhouse typology, but to reengage it through simple material means and tactical construction. There are no redundant formal gestures, only what is needed to create a protected, light-filled volume that supports both growth and maintenance. Doors and vents are sized for access and airflow; diagonal bracing doubles as shelving supports; and all components are assembled with basic tools and hardware, allowing for future repair or modification without specialized labor.

Conclusion
This project exemplifies a form-follows-function approach tailored to localized needs and material availability. The result is a refined agricultural infrastructure, unembellished yet intentional, modest in scale yet highly resolved. It operates as a working structure: easy to build, easy to maintain, and always engaged in the process of cultivation.

Process

Architecture

Design + Fabrication

Art + Code

© [wpsos_year] Ken Marold USA, Inc. All rights reserved.

crcuit_detail2

albuquerque, new mexico

type : concept
status : completed in 2006

Pedestrian Reclamation and Social Tracing across the Grid

Project Overview
This conceptual proposal inserts a spatial hack into the rigid Cartesian grid of downtown Albuquerque, a nonlinear circuit that weaves above and through infrastructural barriers to reclaim a space for slow, pedestrian interaction. Positioned over Route 25 at the intersection of fragmented neighborhoods and urban voids, the intervention acts as both architectural promenade and data-responsive archive, proposing a new kind of urban interface: one where memory, presence, and passage are made visible.

Conceptual Framework
The design emerged from a desire to recover what is often lost in the urban condition, unplanned social interactions, residual traces of presence, and the layered time scales of daily life. In contrast to the flattened logic of the vehicular grid, this circuit operates at the pace of human movement, creating a space where individuals do not just pass each other, but leave behind spatial imprints, architectural residues of collective presence.

Where sidewalks fail to generate meaningful public interaction, often due to sprawl, scale, or disuse, this structure offers a woven architectural overlay, a new syntax of movement that enables engagement not through direct encounter alone, but through deferred social exchange. Visitors’ movements, gestures, and occupations are cataloged as part of an evolving archive of urban inhabitation.

Design Language and Surface Weaving
The architectural surfaces are articulated as a continuous weave, planes folding and twisting to form occupiable thresholds, elevated paths, enclosures, and overlooks. This weaving strategy serves not only as a spatial organizer but as a conceptual act: stitching together a broken urban fabric while expressing multiplicity and fluidity over rigidity and control.

The surfaces lift and bifurcate, producing variable conditions of exposure, enclosure, and overlap. These forms create nested zones of rest and gathering along the spine of the intervention, shifting in response to flow patterns, sightlines, and programmatic insertions. Landscape, infrastructure, and architecture are blurred, interacting at seams, nodes, and splits within the continuous form.

Site and Urban Strategy
Located at the intersection of downtown, UNM, and the ARTSlab district, the project intervenes in a zone characterized by infrastructural dominance and social disconnection. The circuit burns a path across this condition, elevated above the freeway, suspended over arterial roads, and bridging otherwise disconnected pedestrian environments. It functions not as a destination, but as a tool for re-threading latent public potential into the daily field of the city.

The mapping overlays, referencing circuitry diagrams and heat maps, represent an urban grid reprogrammed for human interaction, not vehicular flow. The intervention establishes a “soft” data network where architectural form becomes an interface for both immediate and residual public activity.

Speculative Technologies
As a research catalyst, the project began a personal trajectory into the intersection of architecture and digital sensing. The idea of collecting ambient social data, through computer vision, motion tracking, or environmental sensing, led to early investigations into projection mapping and responsive façade systems. These technologies were imagined not simply as spectacle, but as architectural media: capable of recording and replaying public memory in real time or asynchronously, allowing ephemeral social interactions to persist in space.

Conclusion
CRCUIT proposes a reprogramming of urban space, not through demolition or replacement, but through spatial overlay and temporal disruption. It challenges the dominance of efficiency and speed in the city’s infrastructure, offering instead a woven surface for public presence, memory, and circulation. Through folded form and digital possibility, the project reclaims a forgotten layer of urban life: one made not of plans and parcels, but of movement, memory, and shared time.

Architecture

Design + Fabrication

Art + Code

© [wpsos_year] Ken Marold USA, Inc. All rights reserved.

featured

old town, santa fe, new mexico

type : proposal
status : complete

The National Institute of Flamenco, previously housed in a repurposed auto garage in Albuquerque, sought a vibrant new identity when it acquired a corner site adjacent to Old Town’s Santa Fe Plaza in 2006. This significant location demanded an architectural response that not only respected but invigorated its urban surroundings.

Responding to these needs, the institute’s new design dramatically expands its facilities to encompass additional performance areas, music spaces, and multimedia/digital choreography studios. Central to the institute’s mission is a cafe and club space with a small sound stage that extends a welcoming gesture towards the bustling public plaza.

Integral to the architectural concept is the theme of “duende flamenco,” the deeply emotive and expressive spirit found in flamenco’s poetry and performance. The building’s cleaved plan symbolizes a pierced heart, a vivid metaphor for the emotional intensity of flamenco. This design not only embodies the art form’s passionate roots but also maintains strong connections to the surrounding urban fabric.

Designed with porosity in mind, the structure invites passersby into public and semi-private spaces, fostering interaction between visitors and artists. Embracing and evolving the traditional Spanish-Pueblo style, the architecture employs familiar regional forms integrated with advanced building technologies and a local tectonic language.

This hybrid approach ensures the new National Institute of Flamenco captures both contemporary expressive freedoms and deeply rooted cultural traditions, making it a significant landmark that celebrates artistic performance and community engagement in the heart of Santa Fe.

Architecture

Design + Fabrication

Art + Code

© [wpsos_year] Ken Marold USA, Inc. All rights reserved.

featured-image

chicago, illinois

status : completed in 2009

Reconnecting Urban Infrastructure with Natural Systems along Chicago’s Lakefront

Project Overview
The Northerly Island Nature Center was envisioned as a civic landscape and architectural complex that reasserts the relationship between built form, ecology, and social life. Located at the southern edge of Chicago’s lakefront, the project navigates the tension between retreat and arrival—providing both refuge from the city and a new civic space for engagement with its natural and infrastructural systems.

The center is composed of four distinct programmatic volumes—restaurant, nature center, science tower, and event space—linked by a series of connective exterior zones. These interstitial spaces function as the project’s circulatory system: gathering decks, exhibit gardens, and shaded paths that transform moments of transition into sites of interaction, education, and pause.

Site Integration and Spatial Strategy
The master plan orients the project to frame views of Lake Michigan, the urban skyline, and adjacent wetlands. Buildings are positioned along a curved spine that echoes the shoreline and visitor approach paths, establishing a rhythmic sequence of entry, encounter, and rest. Pedestrian circulation is intentionally varied—shifting between direct axial promenades and softer, meandering routes through habitat zones, echoing the duality of “urban edge” and “natural interior.”

Sectional design strategies respond directly to environmental performance criteria. Roof forms and shading devices are tuned for solar exposure, passive ventilation, and wind deflection throughout seasonal changes. Deep roof overhangs and vertical fins modulate daylight, while exposed thermal mass and integrated energy systems manage interior climate. Building orientation and elevation changes negotiate shifting topography and hydrological conditions across the island’s reclaimed landform.

Architecture and Envelope
The architectural expression embraces an exposed structural logic, revealing trusses, glazing systems, and mechanical systems in dialogue with the site’s infrastructural character. Curtainwall assemblies, layered with photovoltaic and shading devices, frame long views across the lake while generating electricity and controlling heat gain. The science tower integrates educational programming with technical performance: housing wind turbines, resource monitoring systems, and vertical solar arrays in a highly visible vertical element.

The envelope acts as both a membrane and a filter—glass and perforated surfaces alternate to create moments of openness and opacity, transparency and privacy. Roof canopies and exterior mesh systems are extended to create shaded exterior volumes, supporting educational programs, ecological exhibits, and informal gathering.

Public Realm and Programming
Publicness is a core design driver. The connective landscape is programmed with boat slips, kayak landings, outdoor classrooms, botanical installations, and performance zones. These areas are conceived as shared resources rather than extensions of any single building, enabling unprogrammed and spontaneous occupation by the broader community.

The architecture intentionally resists monumentality. Instead, it is defined by responsiveness—modulating light, movement, and social interaction through adaptable spatial conditions. The complex acts not as a static object in the landscape, but as a living framework that evolves through use and seasonal change.

Conclusion
Northerly Island Nature Center reimagines the edge between infrastructure and ecology as a porous, productive zone of public life. Rather than separating building and landscape, the project binds them through circulation, material continuity, and environmental responsiveness. It becomes not only a destination for retreat, but a platform for reengaging the city’s relationship with its lake, its climate, and its communities.

Process

Architecture

Design + Fabrication

Art + Code

© [wpsos_year] Ken Marold USA, Inc. All rights reserved.

featured-image-2

corrales, new mexico

type : proposal
status : completed in 2008

Project Overview
Set within the rural town of Corrales, New Mexico, this project reimagines a neglected highway shoulder as a civic landscape, transforming a space once defined by automobile dominance into one centered on pedestrian experience, cultural continuity, and environmental integration. The proposal includes a new community park and an enhanced pedestrian pathway, each contributing to a broader vision for safe, inclusive, and contextually rooted public infrastructure.

Challenge and Design Approach
Corrales Road, the village’s main commercial spine, currently functions more as a vehicular conduit than a public street, offering little protection or engagement for pedestrians. The project addresses this imbalance by recentering the corridor around walkability and social exchange. The new pedestrian pathway replaces a hazardous, dust-worn shoulder with a carefully articulated sequence of surfaces, native plantings, seating, and landscape forms that foster both movement and momentary pause.

Vehicular access is restructured to prioritize safety and coherence. Rather than allowing unregulated pull-offs along Corrales Road, secondary automobile circulation is redirected to side streets and shared parking areas, reducing conflict zones and emphasizing pedestrian-first design at the frontages of businesses and civic institutions.

Community Park and Civic Integration
At the core of the proposal is the creation of a new community park, positioned as both a cultural anchor and an infrastructural hinge between the village library, administration buildings, and surrounding commercial activity. The park’s geometry and spatial logic are derived from traditional agricultural systems, specifically the linearity and proportion of acequia-fed farming plots. This formal translation establishes a powerful visual and cultural continuity between past and present land use practices.

The park operates across multiple scales: it supports programmed events and informal gathering, individual contemplation and community interaction. Plantings are regionally adapted and ecologically responsive, reinforcing both sustainability and visual legibility. Gabion walls, shaded seating, and simple furnishings express a material tectonic drawn from soil architecture and rural vernacular construction.

Material Strategy and Pathway Language
The design language is grounded in restraint and regional specificity. Hardscape materials include stabilized decomposed granite and textured concrete, offering durability while recalling the material palette of agricultural working ground. Custom seating, ABQ Ride transit shelters, and pathway installations adopt modular geometries that reflect mechanical forms seen in irrigation and farming equipment.

Landscape strategies merge ecological restoration with pedestrian experience, native shrubs and grasses define spatial boundaries while softening transitions between road edge and walking path. The use of gabions not only anchors seating and shade structures but subtly evokes erosion-control strategies used in nearby arroyos.

Conclusion
The Corrales Community Park & Pedestrian Pathway project is a model for how rural infrastructural interventions can operate as both public space and environmental repair. By drawing from the village’s agrarian history and material culture, the project cultivates a contemporary landscape rooted in identity, resilience, and civic generosity. What was once a fractured, vehicle-oriented corridor is redefined as a shared place, inviting, legible, and socially engaged.

Architecture

Design + Fabrication

Art + Code

© [wpsos_year] Ken Marold USA, Inc. All rights reserved.

IMG_7713

santa fe, new mexico

type : proposal
status : complete

Project Overview
This project explores the convergence of land-form and built-form through a series of strategic tectonic moves that generate both structure and spatial narrative. Conceived as a studio arts building, the project operates as a hybrid of landscape and architecture, an integrated topography where form is derived not from figure, but from deformation, pressure, and fold.

The proposal considers how creative practices can be supported by a spatial framework that is itself expressive of artistic processes: fragmentation, juxtaposition, emergence. A folded horizontal datum gives rise to lifted plates, tapered voids, and embedded masses, creating a sequence of sheltered studios, outdoor courtyards, and informal zones of congregation.

Design Strategy
The building is embedded in a pleated terrain, where sloped planes and planar seams define both architecture and landscape as part of the same operative system. This pleated field is not a literal mimicry of topography, but a constructed ground that negotiates between natural logic and architectural intention. The result is a series of sculpted voids and emergent forms that frame views, shape light, and orchestrate circulation.

Between these horizontal tectonics and the angular surfaces of rising built mass emerges the fissure: a dynamic interstitial condition where architecture reveals its internal structure and spatial relationships. These fissures are not only physical gaps, but conceptual ones, allowing for light to enter, sight to escape, and the rhythms of artistic production to expand outward.

Circulation and Spatial Organization
The layout reveals a sequence of layered public and private zones, academic spaces, art studios, and social gathering areas, stitched together by a series of exterior walks, ramps, and stepped transitions. The use of inclined roof planes and protected undercrofts reinforces the sense of movement through terrain rather than across a floorplate.

Interior and exterior relationships are blurred by threshold conditions: overhangs that press low to the earth, apertures that slice the roof plane, and voids that draw the sky downward into the project’s center. These moves are formal but not decorative, they are spatial decisions driven by light, access, and experiential choreography.

Material Implied Logic
Though rendered here in study model materials, the tectonic expression suggests a dialogue between earthbound mass and industrial surface. The vertical forms read as folded metal, implying a skin that resists and reflects, while the grounded volumes suggest concrete or rammed earth, anchoring the proposal to site and time. This duality of material intent reflects the conceptual duality of the project itself: the structural permanence of architecture and the experimental temporality of creative practice.

Conclusion
This design proposal is a spatial and conceptual landscape for making, a terrain where architecture becomes part of the creative act. Rather than occupying the land, the project participates in it, folding up from the ground and opening itself to the forces around it. Through its careful negotiation of landscape geometry, circulation, and tectonic language, the project becomes both a container for and an expression of the artistic processes it supports.

Architecture

Design + Fabrication

Art + Code

© [wpsos_year] Ken Marold USA, Inc. All rights reserved.

meeting_street_final

providence, rhode island

status : complete

Project Overview
The Meeting Street Center is a 76,000-square-foot, multi-use educational and clinical facility designed to serve over 3,000 children and families annually. The building is sited on a nine-acre campus and supports a range of integrated services, academic, therapeutic, diagnostic, within a spatial framework that prioritizes accessibility, sensory awareness, and spatial diversity.

Design Strategy
The design emphasizes a spatial dialogue between structure and site, negotiating an emerging urban edge and the open landscape it inhabits. This dual condition informs both the massing and the orientation of the building: portions of the structure reach outward into the landscape, while others curve inward to frame intimate, sheltered outdoor spaces. Public zones, galleries, gardens, and shared lobbies, are positioned to blur the boundary between interior and exterior, creating spaces that are porous, visible, and socially engaging.

A key organizational strategy was the modulation of spatial scale. Narrow corridors give way to expanded atria; framed thresholds open into shared gardens; circulation paths fold into meeting spaces. These shifts in scale reflect the varying sensory needs of the occupants while creating moments of surprise and pause within an otherwise efficient layout.

Circulation and Program
Movement through the building blends two types of spatial logic: linear mechanical corridors and more organic, path-like connectors. This hybrid circulation strategy allows the building to serve multiple programs simultaneously while avoiding institutional monotony. Hallways are widened into informal gathering nodes, waiting areas open into daylit garden bays, and access ramps are integrated into continuous, landscaped interior zones. This allows the building to serve as a framework for social interaction, rather than simply a means of navigation.

Visual access and daylight play a central role in the spatial composition. The building is organized around a series of interconnected volumes, articulated through shifts in height, cladding, and transparency. Generous glazing along circulation spines and entry points brings natural light deep into the plan, while creating lines of sight between classrooms, therapy zones, and outdoor learning environments.

Material Palette
The project uses a restrained material palette to unify the diverse programs within. Exterior panels in muted tones are broken up by brighter, warm-colored modules that signify entry and public gathering areas. Inside, exposed structural systems and bright floor finishes establish orientation and character while supporting legibility for diverse users, including those with sensory processing needs.

Color is used not just decoratively, but as a spatial signal, grounding wayfinding and zone identity. Textures are soft, cleanable, and acoustically tuned. Landscape integration includes native plantings, snow- and shade-appropriate paths, and protected play zones, reinforcing the building’s relationship with its environment.

Conclusion
Meeting Street Center is designed not as a single-purpose facility but as a network of interrelated spaces, academic, therapeutic, administrative, and social, united through a commitment to accessibility and community engagement. It prioritizes clarity without rigidity, flexibility without anonymity, and care without compromise. The building serves as a framework for care, learning, and gathering, designed to grow with its community.

Awards

Starnet Design Award
Inspirations Award, Contract Magazine
Silver Design Award, RI Monthly
Outstanding Design, American School & University Magazine
LEED Certified

Architecture

Design + Fabrication

Art + Code

© [wpsos_year] Ken Marold USA, Inc. All rights reserved.

Untitled-3

providence, rhode island

type : built
status : completed in 1997

Project Overview
Set within the vast and endangered volume of the Cranston Street Armory’s drill hall, this exhibition transformed a 38,000-square-foot void into a charged space of public encounter and creative expression. A rapid, site-responsive scaffolding system was used to construct temporary gallery spaces for a group art show, redefining a structure known for its historic grandeur as a platform for contemporary artistic experimentation.

Spatial Strategy
The primary challenge was scale. The armory’s soaring web trusses and cavernous enclosure dwarf human-scaled activities, creating a spatial dissonance between the architecture and the artwork. Rather than resist this monumental scale, the installation leverages it, diagonally slicing through the drill hall with a dense, angular scaffolding array that acts as both infrastructure and spatial frame.

Vertical scaffold elements pierce upward into the lofted volume, creating a sense of vertical continuity that connects the human scale of the artworks to the massive structural language above. This scaffold latticework locks into the existing armature of the armory itself, not by dominating it, but by anchoring moments of inhabitation within it. The resulting geometry operates at multiple scales simultaneously, housing artworks, forming circulation paths, and framing elevated perspectives.

Material Tactics and Construction Approach
The material palette was entirely drawn from donated, salvaged, and scavenged elements, industrial scaffolding, used barrels, construction fencing, traffic mitigation equipment, and projection materials. These components were recontextualized to form display surfaces, lighting supports, and circulation enclosures. The use of modular and mobile components allowed for rapid deployment and post-exhibition removal, highlighting the temporary nature of the intervention while respecting the armory’s fragile condition.

Installation was achieved with minimal tooling and volunteer labor, foregrounding the collaborative spirit of the event and the resourcefulness required for occupation of a space without conventional exhibition infrastructure.

Program and Collaboration
This project was developed in partnership with the Vanguard Group of Artists, Convergence International Art Festival, and the Providence Preservation Society. The installation provided a spatial framework for a multidisciplinary arts exhibition, including painting, photography, sculpture, video, and performance. The modularity of the scaffold system allowed curators to adapt the space as programming evolved, enabling fluid transitions between static exhibition and live activation.

Projection screens, suspended artworks, and layered soundscapes capitalized on the scaffold’s skeletal openness, turning it into both armature and amplifier. The exhibition not only filled the armory, but reactivated it, momentarily transforming an endangered civic relic into a spatial commons for cultural production.

Conclusion
The Construction of Art is an architectural improvisation, a light-footprint framework for creative occupation that resists permanence while asserting presence. By working with found materials and inserting a flexible scaffold logic into a historically rigid envelope, the project reveals how spatial precision and tactical reuse can reengage overlooked civic infrastructure. The installation was less a solution and more a proposal: a reminder of the power latent in big, empty buildings and the communities that are willing to reinhabit them.

Architecture

Design + Fabrication

Art + Code

© [wpsos_year] Ken Marold USA, Inc. All rights reserved.