A small urban garden a few steps east of the Detroit/Gross Pointe Park border, the Backyard Plot was designed as a simple space to relax and experiment with the offerings from the local seed library. One long raised bed, built of eastern red cedar, is situated near the Northern edge of the site with room left for a walking path and a border planting of giant sunflowers. Sling-chairs on the deck, a fire ring, a custom picnic table, and a barbecue grill in the garden offer multiple ways to lounge, share meals, welcome guests, and enjoy the ever-new environment. It’s the start of a simple urban garden that will grow into a lush, verdant respite as its caretakers edit and curate its contents into the future.
Schemed by Tyler Klifman and Lia Greenwell with design and construction assistance from Christopher Reznich.
The LakeShed is a compact studio and accessory space designed to efficiently accommodate the needs of a growing family near their modest lakeside cottage. It is nestled against an original 1938 stick-framed garage structure on the front edge on a narrow, wooded parcel. With windows positioned to frame calming views into the forest, the studio space is designed to be thoughtful, efficient, and simply beautiful while providing an entry point to an underutilized part of the family landscape.
To save space in the compact studio, the design incorporates operable furniture that transforms the interior from living and working space to an overflow sleeping area. Additional sleeping and play space for the younger generation is located in a small loft, which also provides cross-ventilation and natural light to the interior. The east wall is thickened with built-in casework from floor to ceiling to provide storage proximate to all uses accommodated and avoid wasted space.
Designed by James Chesnut and Christopher Reznich.
The Power House is a reignition - culturally, that is - of a 1956 coal-fired power plant at the Grand Traverse Commons, formerly the grounds of a Kirkbride mental asylum known as Traverse City State Hospital. Many of the original Kirkbride buildings have been developed into a thriving economic center and the extensive grounds still feature specimens of an arboretum including exotic tree species collected by a previous proprietor.
The extant Power Plant building, designed by Louis Kingscott and Associates, is among Michigan’s newly acknowledged abundance of midcentury modernist architecture though certainly not one of the more celebrated buildings. That said, the industrial workhorse that once provided energy to sustain the operations of the asylum and nearby neighborhoods stands as a monument to the strong-but-refined industrial aesthetic that defined its time. The building is immensely valuable for the opportunities it provides, but not so precious to be frozen in a bygone era.
The renovation of the Power Plant building aims to transform it into a cultural hub, anchored by the largest performance venue in the area, in order to expand the site’s attraction to a broad and diverse audience. As a central tenet to the operations, in addition to the live music, theater, dancing, and general merriment, the spatial breakdown guarantees that there will always be something free and open to the public.
The design will provide strategic insertions, ephemeral interventions, and re-programming that juxtapose the industrial aesthetic to contemporary style and perpetual newness. This contrast performs an aesthetic attitude where the old and the new operate independently yet appear as a cohesive assemblage.
This project is currently in the early concept design and fundraising phase. Please don't hesitate to contact Little Brother with any inquiries.
Designed by Christopher Reznich and James Chesnut.
The Cedar Homestead is located on 45 acres of former forestry and pasture land in Cedar, Michigan. Already home to trillium, ramps, morel mushrooms, and sugar maples, the resurgent diversity of the once-managed land offers a rich palette of species to be curated as the clients make their new home. As the homesteading plan is developed, the land will be treated as a continuous patchwork of biodynamic gardens, cultivated to enrich the local ecosystem.
The home itself is built into a hillside that provides natural insulation and protection from harsh north winds while accommodating an easily accessible root cellar and cheese cave. Deep overhangs on a highly-glazed southern exposure block hot summer sunlight while allowing warm winter sunlight to wash the polished concrete floors' colorful local aggregate. Said concrete floor provides even, temperate climate control through a geothermal radiant heating system.
Douglas fir structural elements, maple surfaces, and steel components orchestrate a contemporary and warm assemblage that is born from local materials and building technique. Our holistic design approach - from selection, sourcing, and longevity of materials, to landscape integration, open loop geothermal system feeding a biodynamic trout pond, passive solar orientation and formal principles, active solar array, and electric car charging - reflects our clients' aspiration for their home to embody their ecologically sensitive lifestyle.
Designed by James Chesnut and Christopher Reznich.
Designed to seat 6-8 comfortably with room to squeeze in friends, the Farm Table is a classic trestle table built for our Cedar Homestead. With a solid maple surface and douglas fir timber structure, the table continues the material motif of the home.
The formal simplicity, minimalistic joinery, and generous proportions allow the table to express the warm tones and richness of the local material palette while guaranteeing its durability and sturdiness as the family grows into the future.
Designed by Christopher Reznich and James Chesnut in collaboration with Paul May of Glen Arbor Artisans.
Fabricated by Paul May.
Sunlight is the fundamental driver of Earth’s ecology, energy, and economy. Heliomorphism – the explicit entanglement of solar energy and form – has recently re-entered design discourse as a clear link between thermodynamics and ecological performance in the built environment.
Ralph Knowles first proposed the solar envelope as a novel regulatory mechanism, designing buildable volumes with the sun’s rhythms to ensure access to light, air, and energy in future urban environments. Since cities’ energetic performance relies on the coordination of localized impacts across complex, uneven systems, the solar envelope o ers the critical advantage of being necessarily collective.
Situated between the complex foundations of zoning practices on one end, and contemporary design heuristics on the other, Solar Frameworks proposes a solar envelope as a generative tool for a counterfactual reconception of collective urban form in Chicago. Heliomorphism is a fundamentally ecological paradigm: regulating energetics through collective form exposes the cultural entanglement of architecture, socioeconomic structures, technological ‘progress’, and public space.
Christopher Reznich independent thesis completed at the Harvard Graduate School of Design, advised by Charles Waldheim with support from the Office for Urbanization.
The Squarehouses are a collection of live/work units near the southern end of Boardman Lake in Traverse City, MI. Formerly a car wash, the extensive infrastructure already in place - floor drains, high-pressure water supply, and vacuum systems - makes these units particularly useful for the untapped population of “makers” in northern Michigan. Ideal for bespoke manufacturing, art and design, ‘how-to’ instruction, and any number of other uses from to simple storefronts to light industrial spaces, the operations strategy guarantees a dynamic mix of users. To add even more excitement to the new home of multiple young businesses, an anchor food-and-beverage tenant and designated collective workspaces in close proximity create an environment for mixing friends, clients, and potential collaborators. With connections to downtown and the wider region via paved pathway and public transit, respectively, the Squarehouses provide a site for an urban lifestyle that doesn’t exist anywhere in the state north of Grand Rapids.
This project is currently in the early concept design and fundraising phase. Please don't hesitate to contact Little Brother with any inquiries.
Designed by Christopher Reznich and James Chesnut.
In consideration of a wholly integrated and sustainable human environment, we begin with the house. It is within this unit of dwelling that we draw careful thought for the increasing scales of our ecological footprint. Starting from the basic social unit of the house: the family, the proposal also looks to the neighborhood, the community, and the territory, in which a group of people may come to invest their livelihoods.
By repositioning the humble, but technologically robust hoop house, this proposal combines the use of sustainable materials with an organizational strategy invested in the simultaneous production of food and civic culture. Not only does the base function of a hoop house contribute to higher food security in this frigid, isolated region, the hoop house unit’s flexibility extends to provide the space of the community. The hoop house becomes the connector of neighborhoods, not just a thermal technology, nor a mechanism for increasing food production. It is all of these. It becomes the glue that fixes families, livelihood, and community aspirations together.
OikoHouse won first prize in the 2016 Turtle Mountain Housing Prototype competition.
Collaborative project designed by Christopher Reznich and Justin Kollar.
Christopher Reznich designed this model with Collin Cobia under the advise of Robert Gerard Pietrusko.
Migrations is a conceptual agent-based model illustrating the recursive relationship of human population growth and land use transformation. Historical and projected prehistoric population data and corresponding land use data create the landscape to which agents respond. As population density increases, agents cross thresholds that trigger transitions between different proto-behaviors, expressed in clustering and wandering tendencies. As the density of agents changes, traces of agent location signify lasting effects of occupation, even from transient populations. Multiple runs of the model show variability of outcomes where population centers aggregate unevenly, despite consistent underlying data.
Migrations Processing was published in the February 2019 issue of Landscape Architecture Magazine in Mimi Zeiger’s piece LIVE AND LEARN.
The Swagwagon is a nomadic information center commissioned by the Lausanne Jardins International Garden Festival. A mobile branding kiosk and a podium by which passer-bys and festival participants can speak to an audience, the Swagwagon is formally a flight of stairs modified to become deceptively comfortable seating. Two folds, one of wood and the other aluminum, create the base form while a series of trusses act as both structural core and handrail. Each side is programmed differently to support its own agenda. Signage, seating, storage, and merchandising create the wagon that will travel from garden to garden and in various parades during the quadrennial festival.
The wagon was designed and constructed over the course of three weeks in an empty barn in Switzerland with three main tools: chop saw, track saw, and screw gun. Conceptualized as a large piece of furniture, particular attention to craft and joinery was employed to construct the Swagwagon as an exquisite object.
Thanks to Adrien Rovero, Christophe Ponceau, and Beatrice Durandard for support!
Designed by James Chesnut and Christopher Reznich.
At once performative thermodynamics and a microclimatic landscape, Local Cooling sets the spectacle of public thaw against the backdrop of high design at the threshold of one of the most prominent international design fairs.
For a duration of one week in Miami’s winter heat, an inhabitable, monolithic cube of ice sits in the heat of the sun. As heat penetrates the volume, fresh meltwater flows down its sides and registers the lost volume as pools form in a gently sloped, shallow topographic basin. As the icy water spreads, pools, and overflows its basin, occupational boundaries are redrawn and the dynamic thermal gradient activates the surrounding space as a fluid site. A uniquely ephemeral experience that changes literally by the moment, the resulting landscape is a playful environment for socializing shaped by puddles, paths, and cool breezes. Eventually, the volume of meltwater breaches the basin’s edges and overflows into the public realm. At this point, the value of fresh water as resource and commodity is rendered explicit. As sea level rises globally, national and territorial freshwater reserves continue to fall. Local Cooling is positioned between these current events: not only a visceral analogy to the impacts of global climate change, but also a public plea for attention to fresh water’s importance and imminent scarcity.
Local Cooling was a finalist for the 2015 Design Miami entry pavilion.
Collaborative project designed by Christopher Reznich, Mark Jongman-Sereno, and Timothy Nawrocki.
Duplex Re-Mod is the first phase of the conversion of a split level duplex to a single family residence. A modern galley style kitchen replaces the party wall to unify the interior space. A light material palette balances the existing darker wood tones throughout the 60s-built home. A long window displays a wooded Michigan to expand the interior space to a large deck that performs as an extension of the kitchen and entertaining space. The renovation uses color, material, and lighting to accentuate darker wood tones, producing a cool space that is inviting and pulls the user through the space to dwell inside and outside as weather permits. The changing seasons are framed as a prominent feature in the long galley window; a celebration of cool and colorful scenes from the warmth of a midwest home.
Photographs by Peter Baker.
Designed by James Chesnut.
In Lausanne, Switzerland the harmonious relationship of material densification and nature is challenged in the nooks and crannies where a so-called delinquent population vandalizes the built environment.
Tag, You’re It! challenges the ownership of the urban landscape design process by offering up control of material and vegetal palettes in the city. In recognition of the passivity of existing planting schemes and the aggression of emergent delinquency on the site, Tag, You’re It! joins in the most basic form of offering agency back to the public.
By acknowledging both that cities grow from conflict and that emergent paradigms are revealed by challenging the status quo, the site is activated via a participatory process that places landscape at the center of the conflict. We provide only techniques and materials, and the public chooses how and where to deploy vegetation, proliferating the city in a form that does not rely on a preconceived planting scheme. The contradiction of planned landscape is challenged by the emergent possibilities of public agency in the urban environment.
Tag, You're It! earned an Honorable Mention in the 2014 Lausanne Jardins International Garden Festival.
Designed by James Chesnut and Christopher Reznich.
Houston’s Buffalo Bayou is an environment in transition. Upstream of the city center, its edges not only teem with plant and animal life, but spurred by recent investment, have grown to be an important civic asset and public promenade. The life of the river is once again becoming the life of the city. In an attempt to leverage current upriver momentum to improve downstream environments, we propose a phased settlement strategy to stitch the west branch of Buffalo Bayou back into the city.
Phase One establishes primary links between our downstream sites and the recently upgraded upstream section through low-cost maintenance shifts. Ongoing operations are moved onto the river as a spectacle - the daily rhythms of riverboats pulling rafts of flowers, grasses, and trees to restoration sites makes a display of necessary phytoremediation work and newly vibrant public spaces. Partnered with a small fleet of water taxis, the river itself becomes both a connective infrastructure and a site of cultural exchange.
Phase Two capitalizes on the river’s new connectivity, not only closing transit gaps for underserved communities, but providing access to new sites and experiences along the bayou. To spark new uses and civic engagement, a series of cultural programs – a plant nursery, markets, events, festivals, concerts, temporary installations, and pop-up eateries – is choreographed and implemented on a yearly basis to take advantage of the latent opportunities the wide array of sites and structures along the bayou offer. In this experimental space of temporary engagements, previously unknown and underutilized sites become destinations. Economic strategies can be tested cheaply with low risk serving as an incubator for sparking and spreading the impacts of new economies beyond the bayou.
Designed by Christopher Reznich with Yuxi Qin, Harvard GSD Options Studio advised by Chris Reed.
Food Field Farmhouse is a slow-growing living unit, made possible by an open collaboration between designers, farmers, and community members. The project makes no effort to speculate on proper tactics for Detroit’s revitalization but rather facilitates a collaborative offensive of urban agriculture, planning, design, and construction from the bottom-up. Food Field Farmhouse is designed for off-the-grid performance. A butterfly roof system acts as a water harvesting system that will gravity feed water to the field and modest living quarters. The 40-foot shipping container is slowly evolving into architecture that facilitates residency, agricultural production and community supported agriculture.
Designed by James Chesnut.
The Dentolutions lounge was a scheme to transform a dental office basement that currently houses inefficiently organized mechanical services into a multi-use lounge and meeting area.
One large space is lightly partitioned by a system of moveable curtains and distinct flooring materials. . The program requirements vary widely, including a staff lounge, locker room, study hall, yoga studio, kitchen, laundry, and emergency sleeping quarters for the not-so-rare Northern Michigan snow storm; each of these programs requires a different aesthetic environment and a varying level of privacy. The curtain system allows for a large degree of flexibility of activities happening in close proximity, as well as the ability to create "right sized" spaces for each activity. Key elements within each space signify these overlapping activities: the conference table rises to the ceiling to clear the floor for the yoga studio; a mirrored wall hides mechanical services and extends the galley kitchen’s length; and a generous picture window allows natural light into the lounge, mixing interior and exterior space below ground level.
Designed by Christopher Reznich and James Chesnut.
RGB-DIY, a collaboration with Virginia Black of feminist architecture collaborative, is an analog video-mixing tool, allowing users to swap color channels manually on the fly. RGB-DIY was an element of Ruin Porn @ Federal Screw.
Ruin Porn @ Federal Screw was a series of small independent and collaborative installations at the defunct Federal Screw Works factory, orchestrated by Anya Sirota of Akoaki. The temporary event highlighted the sublime condition of the factory’s slow retreat to the elements.
Slowstorm was a time-stretched video of a thunderstorm over Lake Michigan. The stretch revealed glitches - fingerprints of lost information - made by the digital sensors failing to record natural phenomena with fidelity. It was installed in a perpetually wet utility corridor of the Federal Screw Works, heightening the reverberations of the storm.
Ruin Porn @ Federal Screw was a series of small independent and collaborative installations at the defunct Federal Screw Works factory, orchestrated by Anya Sirota of Akoaki. The temporary event highlighted the sublime condition of the factory’s slow retreat to the elements.
Phytoremediation Doppleganger, also collaborative with Virginia Black, was an installation of illuminated weather balloons marking the location of future trees planted to remediate industrial contaminants in the soil.
Ruin Porn @ Federal Screw was a series of small independent and collaborative installations at the defunct Federal Screw Works factory, orchestrated by Anya Sirota of Akoaki. The temporary event highlighted the sublime condition of the factory’s slow retreat to the elements.
James Chesnut designed and built the PCER School for Pantanal Partnership in Pocone, Brazil, with consulting help from student engineers.
Low-Rise-Plug-In is one possible assemblage of four interlocking unit types designed for accessibility and diversity with sensitivity toward the positioning of public and private space. Exterior space is revealed through the void at the scale of the city block, building, and unit. The four combinable unit types allow for a semi-standardized construction logic while producing dynamic spaces for communal activity, family function, and individual privacy.
Designed by James Chesnut in collaboration with Bryan Alcorn.
James Chesnut designed and built the PCER Water Tower for Pantanal Partnership in Pocone, Brazil, with consulting help from student engineers.
Each year following the 2010 PCER pilot project in the Pantanal, a collective of designers, architects, environmentalists, and engineers continue to build and educate communities. PCER - H2O is a solar powered gravity feed water delivery system that uses a fast-sand filtration system to reduce the heavy iron content and bacteria in the water that is drafted from the surrounding wetlands. This, in conjunction with a bio-sand filtration system, provides the needed water for utility and consumption.
