BIW_BODY IN WHITE

This project envisions a futuristic communitarian housing model designed to transform the way urban communities live, move, and consume energy. Sponsored conceptually by Tesla, the development proposes multiple housing clusters strategically located across the Venice Beach area, wirelessly interconnected to function as a shared energy and data grid. Each site is self-sustaining, yet collectively they form a distributed urban ecosystem, demonstrating how architecture can replace extractive infrastructures with regenerative, interconnected networks.

Advisor - Lawrence Blough

SPRING | 2017

WORK SPACE

LIVING QUATERS

Concept + Vision

In a near-future reality where fossil fuels and isolated consumer living are no longer viable, this project recalibrates domestic life toward collective sustainability and energy independence. It proposes urban micro-grids where each building produces and stores its own energy, and wireless interconnection allows clusters to share power and resources in real time. This transforms the Venice Beach neighborhood into a living laboratory for post-carbon urbanism, demonstrating how housing can become an active agent in the city’s ecological resilience.

Form Development + Constructive Logic

The architecture emerged through a process of kitbashing and reassembly, using existing automotive components as the raw vocabulary for a new spatial language. By repurposing car parts—chassis fragments, light housings, ventilation units, aerodynamic shells—the project reinterprets industrial forms as inhabitable infrastructure. This method positions the architecture as a hybrid: part machine, part dwelling, part speculative artifact.

Rather than drawing from traditional typologies, the form evolves from the logic of performance design—where airflow, structural efficiency, and movement inform the final geometry. The result is a system of interlocking structural bodies, at once familiar and alien, that evoke both speed and stillness.

Construction follows a modular, prefabricated logic, with an exoskeletal steel frame supporting lightweight composite panels embedded with energy systems and infrastructural networks. This approach allows for efficient on-site assembly, scalability across multiple locations, and formal consistency across the distributed housing grid.

In transforming the language of mobility into a new syntax for domestic space, the project proposes a future in which the relics of past industrial paradigms become scaffolds for ecological and communal reinvention.

The architecture serves as a social and environmental interface:

Wireless Energy + Data Grid: Each building is part of a distributed urban network, sharing excess power and environmental data across the Venice Beach cluster.

Renewable Energy Integration: Tesla-powered solar arrays, battery storage, and micro wind collectors allow the development to operate entirely off fossil fuels.
Sustainable Mobility: Electric vehicle docking, shared micromobility, and autonomous charging infrastructure redefine urban transport while eliminating carbon emissions.
Communitarian Living: Interlinked residential clusters include co-living amenities, public terraces, urban gardens, and cultural nodes, blurring the line between domestic space and public life.
Public Engagement: The design educates and inspires the community, making energy flows and sustainable practices visible as a tool for cultural transformation.

Architectural Expression

The building’s angular, aerodynamic geometry embodies movement and transformation, with faceted planes and glowing seams expressing the flows of power, people, and light. At night, the structures become illuminated beacons, symbolizing a connected network of ecological architecture along the Venice Beach coastline.

Urban + Social Proposition

This is more than housing—it is a prototype for distributed urban living. By linking multiple self-sufficient sites into a cohesive energy and cultural network, the project redefines domestic architecture as a system of interconnected public benefit. It envisions a future Venice Beach where housing, infrastructure, and public space operate as one living organism, creating a model for global cities transitioning to a post-fossil-fuel era.