H. Wyatt Waters Architecture Portfolio 2023-2025

ARCHITECTURE PROJECTS THE ZEITGEIST OF CIVILIZATION ONTO PHYSICAL SPACE.

THIS BODY OF WORK EXAMINES & CHALLENGES THIS DISPOSITION. FOR WHOM DOES THIS ETHOS SERVE? FOR WHOM DOES IT NOT?

AURAL ENCLAVE

Pavilion, Public Space

Chinatown, Boston

Dr. Zorana Matic, Fall 2025

HOW DO WE REPAIR URBAN SCARS WHILE PREVENTING NEW ONES?

Chinatown has the lowest air quality, tree canopy coverage, and open space per capita of any Boston neighborhood— environmental inequities that directly affect health and resilience. These conditions are inseparable from a history of displacement and spatial disruption through highway construction and institutional expansion. Yet Chinatown also remains a vibrant cultural center where public spaces (however limited) are essential sites of everyday health practices,

intergenerational gathering, and cultural belonging. Auntie Kay & Uncle Frank Chin Park, Chinatown’s gateway park, hosts much of the neighborhood’s cultural activities and serendipitous encounters. However, vulnerable populations activate this space in spite of the poor air quality, high car traffc, and plantings that lose their foliage for half of the year. Aural Enclave addresses these challenges while further preserving Chinatown’s cultural heritage.

Shelter & Porosity

INITIAL CONCEPT SKETCH

PROVIDE0’-7”RISE,3’RUNSTEPSACCESSIBLE,GENTLEWORKING,SLOPESFORSITTING, ANDLOUNGING

STRUCTUREYOUTH

The adjacent arterial road is reimagined with only two lanes of one-way traffc, rather than the previous three. To further protect pedestrians and park-goers, the road gains a double bike lane protected with street parking (in alignment with Boston’s Complete Street Guidelines).

FACILITATING SOCIAL CAPITAL ENABLING ACTIVITY

Let’s share a meal!

Exhaust tower marks the underground highway beneath the park.

URBAN RENEWAL SPATIAL RECLAMATION.

Laundry and garment loft, demolished in 1959 for I-93 Extension.

RENEWAL RECLAMATION.

AN INDIVIDUAL INTERVENTION IS NOT SYSTEMIC CHANGE. SO, WHAT’S NEXT?

A CHINATOWN WITHOUT CARS

Urbanism & Adaptive

Reuse

Chinatown, Boston

Prof. Paxton Sheldahl, Fall 2025

WHAT IF CHINATOWN HAD NO CARS?

It’s a radically simple question, but despite several bus and subway stations being within walking distance of the neighborhood’s commercial core, Chinatown has some of the highest vehicular traffc of all Boston neighborhoods. Paired with its scarcity of open green spaces, everyday neighborhood activity spills into the roads, unable to be contained within the narrow sidewalks. Jay-walking and heavy car traffc lead to gridlock, exacerbating

air quality, noise, and road hazards. What if that were to change? This speculative project pedestrianizes several Chinatown streets, closing them off to cars completely, allowing life in the public realm to expand. Furthermore, surface parking lots undergo phased tactical urbanism, transforming from urban scars of asphalt to a network of pocket parks.

Top: Illustration for T-Shirt Design, 1993

Pedestrianizing streets enables the transformation of infrastructure originally constructed to serve an automobile society into solutions for the 21st century. For instance, this eightstory parking structure is retroftted to hold twenty-four housing units, an open-air ground foor community space, public produce garden, and rentable space for small businesses to grow.

Chinatown residents have historically fought against the construction of car infrastructure. In the early 1990s, community members successfully protested against a garage proposal on Parcel C.

Top: Parcel C Demonstration, 1993

Middle: Beach Street Garage, H. Waters 2025

Bottom: Parcel C Demonstration Signs. 1993

PEOPLE

SOCIAL CAPITAL ACTIVITY & LIFE

B.O.H.

COMMONS

Boston Globe, 1924

Innovation had a different look a century ago. Solving contemporary solutions requires both adaptations in form and ethos.

Typ. Plan of Adapted Program Beach St Garage Plan, Boston Public Library

SMALL BUSINESS INCUBATION

ATRIUM

SINGLE-LOADED CORRIDOR

RESIDENTIAL

Parking Structure turned Community Hub

The converted garage’s central location centralizes a phased cyclical greening operation. Street vendors become market vendors, afforded the space and facilities to both grow and sell their produce.

Aural Enclave as a Sapling Incubator

As pollinator perennials, deciduous, and evergreen trees reach a functional adolescent size, they’re moved to Auntie Kay & Uncle Frank Chin Park to continue growing while shielding the gateway park.

Pocket

Once redistributed network sites provide

Once plants outgrow Chin Park, they’re redistributed to vacant surface lots, creating a network of frequent green spaces. Previously the sites of demolished homes, these pocket parks provide formal space for informal activation.

TREE SAPLING INCUBATION

ESSEX STREET PARK

OXFORD PLACE PARK

STANHOPE PARK

PHILLIPS SQUARE EXTENSION

BEACH ST. COMMUNITY PLANT NURSERY

LAGRANGE POCKET PARK

Preserved + Expanded Structure

Design began with thorough archival research and feld verifcation of the existing structural systems, revealing a framework for surgical vertical and horizontal massing subtractions without compromising tributary or load-bearing members.

Six Over Two; Three Over One

By applying a double-height scale reads as a three over one relationship architecture in Boston and the neighborhood’s

to levels one and two, the facade relationship to match vernacular mixed-use neighborhood’s historic garment lofts.

Ground Floor + Beach Street Activation

The level two foor plate is removed within the central structural bays to brighten the space and invite activity from the street to seamlessly seep into the open-air atrium within.

Second Skin

Operable trellises are layered onto the facade, providing surfaces for climbing plant species to grow and cool the interior during summer months.

Adaptive Reuse

The proposed retroft takes advantage of the southern exposure for residential units and subtracts the central ramp bay to create a longitudinal light well and division between living and working.

Continuous Public Realm

A double-height atrium seamlessly expands the pedestrian street into the building, inviting passerby into the informal farmers market before reaching formal brick-and-mortar businesses.

RESIDENTIAL SHARED CORRIDOR

FARMER’S MARKET

ROOFTOP GARDEN

OPEN-AIR ATRIUM RENTABLE COMMERCIAL SPACE

Personal, long-term involvement in the cultivation of nature is a core tenet of biophilic design. The structure’s facade employs a system of posable trellises and narrow platforms for residents and neighbors to grow their own herbs and vines.

RESIDENTIAL

Revived Stoop Culture

Single-loaded corridors are constructed wider than usual, transforming a circulatory realm to space for gathering and communal planting.

CHINATOWN DESERVES TO HAVE NO

POCKET COMMUNITIES

Urbanism

Roxbury, Boston

Prof. Matthew Moffitt, Fall 2024

Pocket Communities revitalizes the Mission Hill neighborhood with a network of pocket parks and rowhouses, providing the community with accessible and plentiful moments of gathering within intimate green spaces. The project’s concept roots itself in the belief that nature should not be visited, but lived in. The Mission Hill and Roxbury neighborhoods are only afforded large neighborhood parks that are only within walking distance to the immediate

residents along the parks’ perimeters. Residents who live farther away must rely on vehicles to access green space, which exacerbates air quality and neighborhood safety. Pock Communities models itself on a equally weighted relationship of green space and architecture to enable pedestrianism, social capital, stoop culture, and neighborliness.

Small blocks of four-story rowhouses form alleys and lanes flled with landscaping, seating, and public infrastructure like playgrounds and community gardens. These medium density homes naturally ft in with the surrounding vernacular developments. Rowhouses are offset to create alternating front and back gardens and stoops. Interior streets slow traffc, with coplanar paving to blur the boundaries of the pedestrian realm.

The proposed master plan caps a portion of the Orange Line and Commuter Rail tracks to extend the Southwest Corridor Park along the neighborhood block. Bike and pedestrian lanes surrounded by greenery seamlessly continue down to Roxbury Crossing Station, forming a border between the busy arterial road and the residential neighborhood.

Unlike other rowhouse-abundant neighborhoods in Boston, the project takes advantage of the back alleys formed between the rows. These alleys foster quieter, more insulated activity and serendipitous encounters between neighbors. The fronts of each rowhouse interfaces with busier activity. Large median planters break up the open space in front of the residences, providing screening and lanes of slower foot and bicycle traffc.

WOOD MATTER(S)

Case Study, Adaptive Reuse

Barcelona, Spain

Prof. Santiago Pradilla Hosie

Fall 2023

CASE STUDY: SCAFFOLDING AS A (RE)CONSTRUCTION

After the earth tremors that hit Catalonia in the 1500s, one of the faces of the watchtower from Merola’s Castle fell apart, hence the need to guarantee the preservation of the monument. Carles Enrich Studio designed a supporting structure to preserve the ruin and reinstate its previous program.

Merola’s Tower construction consists of spruce and douglas fr bilaminated glulam scaffolding modules stacked and connected together via a variety of steel knife plate connections. These modules are constructed off-site and then placed atop one another via crane. Like scaffolding, it structurally stabilizes and reflls the volume of the pre-existing construction.

HOW IS IT CONSTRUCTED?

Process Inventory of Module Construction

Merola’s Tower construction process involves fabricating the tower modules off-site and stacking each module atop each other with a crane. Module assembly begins with the columns, followed by bottom diagonals and beams, then the upper diagonals and beams.

From left-to-right and up-to-down: horizontal single-branch, horizontal triple-branch, horiztonal triple-branch (foundation), vertical single-branch, vertical double-branch, vertical triple-branch (foundation), vertical triple-branch, vertical double-branch (diagonals), vertical quadruple-branch.

HOW CAN WE RECYCLE THESE MATERIALS AND TECHNIQUES?

NOS LEVANTAMOS

Pavilion, Adaptive Reuse Segovia, Spain

Prof. Santiago Pradilla Hosie Fall 2023

Design Excellence Award 2023-24

“NOS LEVANTAMOS,” WE LIFT OURSELVES.

The Roman Aqueduct in Segovia spans over 16 kilometers, carrying water from the deltas of the nearby mountain to the historic town on a hill. Our team tasked ourselves with designing a structure that reveals the path of the mountain to the Old Town of Segovia. We sought to design an elegant solution that celebrates the history of the aqueduct and the techniques and materials of Merola’s Tower.

The aqueduct reaches its tallest depth at the main plaza of Segovia. It is the frst plaza you see when entering the Old Town and the frst you see of the aqueduct. Naturally, shops, restaurants, cafes, and small businesses cluster around this central point to cater to the dense amount of people bustling in the plaza. Upon analyzing the site at different times during the day, our team found that the point at which the aqueduct turns is not nearly as busy as the main plaza.

Through observing activity and different demographics of people throughout the day in the surrounding area, we mapped this discrepancy of life and movement between the main plaza and our site. By choosing to build our project at the corner, we attract movement, activity, and economic growth to stimulate the surrounding businesses, institutions, and bring people closer to the point where the mountain connects with the city.

A TOPOGRAPHICAL PROJECTION OF HISTORY

TO LIFT WATER, PEOPLE, WOOD

INTERVENTION: SCAFFOLDING AS A (RE)TELLING

Celebrating Structure and Technique

The modularity of the case study is applied to the structure’s construction. To climb up the aqueduct, modules consisting of trussed arches and platforms alternate all the way to the top of the aqueduct.

Section Fragment

TOUCH, WOOD, & STONE

776 SUMMER STREET

Residential, Concept Design Article 80 Large Project Review

South Boston, Boston

Utile

776 Summer Street Block A is a seven story residential development in South Boston, part of a Planned Development Area Master Plan. The building’s footprint flls the block, consisting of three bar volumes, each with its own material character and facade composition. In preparation for a Boston Civic Design Commission full committee review, I was tasked with composing facade designs options for each volume. These iterations investigated dynamic relationships of

material, color, scale, texture, fnish, and form within each volume, seeking distinguishable identities while preserving a through line of a characteristic Boston vernacular. After several iterations, the team and clients landed on a monochromatic scheme of various materials. My contributions to the project culminated in a series of render perspectives, elevations, material studies, and physical facade mock-ups to be used in client and city meetings.

When operating within a limited color scheme, material texture and fenestration patterns become the key parameters to play with depth, shadow, and scale. For one of the three massing volumes, the client wished to use only metal panel on the facade while avoiding monotony. To achieve this, punched windows alternated rhythms every other foor while pairs of only four profles of extruded metal panels

tessellated in repeating combinations of three. The lower foors employed the busiest profles, decreasing in textural density with every subsequent foor. This resulted in a seamless, organic gradient of texture while still optimized in cost and assembly, only requiring four types of panels.

ANIMAL RESCUE LEAGUE

Medical/Clinical, Concept & Schematic Design, Article 80

South End, Boston

JGE Architecture + Design

Located at the corner of the South End’s historical landmark district, The Animal Rescue League’s Boston facilities was due for a redesign. Working in collaboration with Animal Arts Design Studios, the design team created a new vision for this historic South End institution while preserving the neighborhood character. From conceptual parti to schematic design, the design team faced challenges of multiple edge conditions, site preservation, and material identity.

The team at JGE Architecture + Design was particularly challenged with designing a building that serves not just humans, but a variety of animals and their caretakers.

Due to the site being located at the edge of the South End historical landmark district, the question of neighborhood identity drove facade and massing concepts.

Boston’s South End Neighborhood

WHAT DEFINES BOSTON’S SOUTH END?

Abstracting the Townhouse

HOW CAN WE EXPRESS THE BAY WINDOW?