ABYSSAL DREAM
RE-CONCEIVING DETROIT'S PACKARD PLANT AS URBAN ARCHIPELAGO
Designed while at OMA
The Faena Forum District includes a Performance Space, Retail Bazaar, and a Car Park. The Bazaar is
a renovation of the historic Atlantic Beach Hotel, built in 1939. During my time at OMA, this project
was in its Construction Document phase. I was responsible for completing detailed technical drawings,
collecting material specifications, producing content for presentation, and completing a variety of
design studies that looked at reconciling initial concept aspirations with constructability challenges.
BILLOWING THROUGH THE VEIL
Work by Mara Aumund - Arch 620: Digital Design Morphology
Arch 620: Digital Design Morphology is a Graduate-level architecture course that explores how natural phenomena can inspire new ways of thinking about space, form, and material. Using tools like advanced digital modeling, AI, animation, and physical prototyping, students develop architectural designs that are dynamic—designs that move, change, and tell stories over time, both visually and conceptually.
Mara Aumund’s final animation draws from a 10-second video of mist erupting from a geyser and Gaston Bachelard’s Water and Dreams. Her project features a fabric pavilion supported by a lightweight steel frame, where mist nozzles and wind animate the structure. Billowing fabric and drifting vapor obscure and reveal space, encouraging slow, sensory exploration.
The animation captures the ephemeral quality of the pavilion: fabric sways, mist curls through sunlight, and visitors move quietly through softened, shifting boundaries. Inspired by water’s dreamlike nature, the project turns architecture into atmosphere—an immersive, fluid experience shaped by the unseen.
At the heart of the course is the idea of material imagination—a term borrowed from the phenomenologist Gaston Bachelard—used here to describe the way architectural form can be inspired and shaped by primal elements such as fire, water, air, and earth. The course begins with the close observation of a short video clip (8–10 seconds) capturing an elemental force—such as a solar flare erupting from the sun, a wave crashing onto shore, an avalanche in motion, or a lightning strike. This fragment of reality becomes the conceptual and formal seed for an entire architectural journey.
UMBRAL
Work by Andreea Muresan - Arch 620: Digital Design Morphology
Students are encouraged to push the boundaries of form and time, using motion as a medium of design rather than a byproduct. Johann Von Goethe once said 'Architecture is frozen music'. By this standard, the architecture is not static—it pulses, expands, contracts, flows. Final outcomes culminate in a short animated film that conveys the evolution and performative nature of a speculative architectural pavilion. This pavilion acts as both a spatial artifact and a stage—sometimes literal, sometimes symbolic—for storytelling, performance, and reflection.
Andreea Muresan’s final project transforms the violent beauty of volcanic smoke into a space of calm and shelter. Inspired by a 10-second video of red-hot smoke billowing from a volcano and Gaston Bachelard’s The Psychoanalysis of Fire, her project reimagines fire not only as destruction, but as transformation.
`Sports and bodily exercise mark the threshold between nature and culture, between the body as a manifestation of animal-like nature and the trained body as expression of cultured life.`
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-p.94, The Space of Play
To design the pavilion, Muresan used SubD (Subdivision Surface) modeling to sculpt fluid, smoke-like forms that balanced control with softness. Computational tools allowed her to simulate wind interaction and light diffusion across the fabric surfaces, giving the structure a responsive, environmental quality. Early concept studies were supported by AI-generated imagery that translated volcanic smoke into visual patterns and spatial moods, helping her imagine how fire could be reinterpreted as shelter rather than threat. The result is a pavilion shaped as much by computation and atmosphere as by philosophical reflection.
Set on the edge of a quiet beach, her fabric pavilion rises like a plume of cooled smoke—light, flowing, and protective. Though born from a force of terror, the structure offers reprieve from the heat, casting soft shadows as it gently frames the ocean beyond. In the animation, fabric panels ripple in the breeze while the light shifts across their surface, echoing the memory of fire without its danger. The result is a meditative space where violence gives way to reflection, and architecture becomes a quiet gesture of grace.
ARCH 620 challenges students to think beyond the object and into the realm of durational experience. What does it mean for architecture to embody movement? To suggest rhythm? To carry the memory of a natural force in its very form and structure? These are the questions that drive the course. By semester’s end, students will not only have produced a compelling digital film, but will have cultivated a deeper understanding of how architecture can serve as both interpreter and performer of the natural world.c
