Corrales, New Mexico

type : proposal
status : completed in 2008

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.

Corrales, New Mexico

type : proposal
status : completed in 2008

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.

voyeurism

wire, paper

status : complete in 2007

Paper Strips, Conceptual Model

Project Overview
This speculative project examines how architecture can embody narrative, tension, and perception through the act of weaving and layered transparency. Drawing inspiration from Alfred Hitchcock’s Rear Window and its exploration of voyeurism, performance, and psychological unease, the model operates as both a formal study and a conceptual springboard for a pavilion-scale installation. Its central theme is the poetics of looking and being looked at: the interplay of concealment, revelation, and fragmented storytelling made spatial.

Design and Material Strategy
Constructed entirely from thin, pliable white strips, the model develops a field of intersecting lines, woven planes, and warped volumes. These strips function as both structure and skeleton, creating varying densities of enclosure. Tight nodes of woven convergence suggest spatial “rooms” or observation posts, while looser zones offer diffusion, blurring sightlines and producing threshold-like conditions. The weaving thus oscillates between exposure and concealment, echoing the psychological duality of voyeurism: watcher and watched, subject and spectacle.

Conceptual Framework
The woven composition imagines architecture as a system of vantage points. Each nodal cluster could expand at pavilion scale into inhabitable micro-environments — veiled capsules or chambers that allow for observation without direct connection. The interstitial weave acts as a permeable membrane: porous to vision yet resistant to passage. This establishes a narrative choreography where occupants remain visually linked yet spatially distinct, reinforcing themes of isolation, surveillance, and fragmented narrative.

Spatial Performance and Atmosphere
The strips arc, fold, and sweep dynamically, evoking a sense of frozen movement. In some areas, the weave spirals inward, intensifying focus and drawing the eye into tight, concealed moments. Elsewhere, it flares outward, dispersing tension into a looser, more ambiguous field. Shadows cast by the model extend these patterns beyond the physical structure, layering the ground plane with secondary geometries of light and absence. This interplay of material and shadow suggests an optical architecture where perception itself becomes material.

Speculative Pavilion Application
Scaled up, the pavilion would choreograph experiences of glancing, peering, and crossing sightlines. Visitors would move through a fragmented environment where visual access is constant but partial, always layered with awareness of being seen in return. Semi-permeable architectural surfaces could be augmented with digital projections, responsive materials, or interactive systems. Projections might reveal silhouettes, fragmented dialogue, or subtle animations triggered by movement, heightening the cinematic atmosphere and embedding narrative into the act of inhabitation.

Conclusion
Exploring Spatial Weaving situates architecture as both physical and narrative medium. By weaving together form, shadow, and perception, the project proposes a new way of inhabiting psychological space — one where architecture functions as both stage and script, performer and observer. The resulting pavilion is less a static structure than an evolving scene of encounters: an architecture of glances, echoes, and fragmented stories.

voyeurism

© [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-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.

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.