Experimental prototype design for a chaise lounge in the tradition of two twentieth century cabinetmakers: Jacque Ruhlmann (Paris) and T.H. Robsjohn-Gibbins (Los Angeles and Manhattan). Solid sycamore wood, with various lacquer finishes, stainless steel, walnut, and cushions made in a variety of fabrics: silk, preferably, and in fine leather. Not built.

This master plan of four new public spaces and a tower for the city of Leonforte in Sicily emerged as the result of experimenting with visuality as a design tool for urban design. Here, historic preservation, design, public space, and metaphorical operations are at play. The tower takes its dimensions from a local monumental public water fountain that frames the landscape, and it includes a series of periscopes from where to view the newly designed public spaces in historically significant locations within the city, from where the tower can also be strategically viewed.

This folly was designed as an invited entry for an international exhibition (“Follies: Architecture for the Late Twentieth Century Landscape” at the Leo Castelli Art Gallery in New York). Garden follies are traditionally places of pleasure and escape, existing as well to complete a vista, provide a view, and tantalize the mind, body, and spirit. Duality is a theme throughout. This ambiguity of interpretation coexists with clarity of form: two perfect cubes, interlocking , air in one, water in the other. They interlock Simply, it is a pool house and a bathing pool, set in a garden.

The pool house has a small kitchen and bath with two stretched canvas beds for sunbathing above. Inside are a fireplace and mirror, a cooling fountain, and a picture window that frames a view of the garden. There is also a bench, a table with chairs, and sconce lights with dimmers.

By the pool, a tall chair overlooks the water where a pair of tile benches are provided for reading and chatting. There are also small spaces for concealing pool filters and pumps, and for storing garden furniture. A classical statue, around which the water rises and falls, stands in the pool as a sensuous reminder of the pleasures of the bath.

House in Pergusa is the design for a villa overlooking Lake Pergusa in Sicily a the family of five. As a conceptual design, the project takes advantage of the site’s challenging topography to locate programmatic spaces at different heights and as an opportunity to explore perspectival paradigms (one and two-point perspective) as generative of its architecture. The focus is on perspective as a compositional technique rather than as a representational technique.

Entry for Sesquicentennial Park Competition for the City of Houston in Texas to celebrate 150 years of its independence from Mexico. The proposed park is made of five squares, created by extending the city grid. The first, Houston Square, is located at the corner of the downtown area and is therefore an ideal place to create a marker for the park. The Tower of Houston is such a marker, it rises to provide spectacular views of the downtown from a terrace, which includes a horizontal needle terminated by a lighted sphere that announces the park to local drivers. The tower becomes a scaffold for the lights, flags, and other accoutrements of public events. At its foot is a loggia and a flight of steps that can serve as a stage or seating according to how the park is used.

Entry to an invited competition to design a new student center complex for the northeast side of Carnegie Mellon University’s main campus. Located at the main campus entrance, University Center was to become the heart of the campus as well as exemplar for future university buildings. Given such a prominent location, the new building directly addresses the issue of an institution within an urban context.

The complex program requirements fell into two broad categories: Social facilities (dining facilities, conference complex, student café and lounges with a commons area, rooms for student activities and organizations student services, campus ministries, retail space, administrative offices and storage space) as well as Sports-fitness facilities (large gymnasium, with two smaller ones, indoor swimming pool; indoor running track, squash and racquet ball courts, and ancillary facilities).

The design proposal for University Center is based on typological and iconographical approaches combined with a spatial strategy that addresses the challenges of these complex program and physical requirements. Here a distinctive building type and image is designed for each functional unit, thus organizing the program into ten distinct yet compatible groups of activities; and the entire center operates as one large, complex building organized around a nonhierarchical grid.

La Porta Meridionale di Palermo, presented at the 18th Triennale di Milano, is a proposal for a new southern vehicular entrance to Palermo that sets out to resolve problems of its vehicular access and provide urban equipment to peripheral areas of the city. It consists of several strong formal interventions of an infrastructural nature inserted into the heart of the urban fabric and that are interpreted as “urban architecture”: Le Quattro Foglie (cloverleaf), Le Terraze di via Brasca (with bus station, public office buildings, and housing), and Il Belvedere de la Corona (with tower). They are placed along a new street as extensions of the existing via Maqueda and via Oreto, that ends in via Coronata, against the mountains where the public observation tower is situated to look back onto the city and the sea beyond. Along this axis, and between these three buildings, the Parco del Maredolce is a formal park offered as an urban park, and the other is a picturesque type of park that follows the existing topography up the mountains.  

Il Aprodo dello Sperone, commissioned by the City of Palermo in Sicily as part of a general proposal for the 1991 Italian National Exposition, is an exhibition pavilion featuring cultural, recreational, and sports facilities in the waterfront area of Sperone. The project consists of a cluster of temporary pavilions for Mediterranean arts and crafts, as well as a permanent marina for the district of Sperone. The design consists of an extremely simple infrastructure for the project following the strategy of a strong form that is inserted into the heart of the existing urban fabric and links the residential area of Sperone directly with the sea.

All perpendicular streets serve as access to the shore, and on axis with the principal perpendicular street, the arts and crafts pavilion and the harbor are accommodated in a single structure that surrounds a square water courtyard. The floor below street level is devoted entirely to harbor activities, while the floor at street level contains the exposition’s main concourse, shops, and administrative services. Exhibitions are held on the upper level, that consists of large temporary pavilions constructed of steel beams and connected through bridges. The water courtyard (harbor) consists of a 20 x 20 meter grid of columns each standing 5 meters above high tide.

This design won first prize in the Open International Competition for the redesign of Piazza Dante, a public piazza in the center of old Genoa. The competition was held as part of the city’s celebrations commemorating the 500 anniversary of Christopher Columbus’ arrival in the Americas and included the remains of the Columbus birthplace house and of a medieval cloister. Rather than a complete redesign the proposal consisted in the insertion of an urban fountain as a new element to radically transform the character of the place. Given its architectural scale, the sound of water, and the enticement to climb onto it through a large stair that leads to an upper fountain as the source of the water, the experience allows for a pause to look back onto the city and discover the underside structure that, rather than a temporary structure, recalls the curved members of an old wooden ship.

Additional projects by Jorge Silvetti and Rodolfo Machado completed in the 1980s.