Its inspiration comes from the crystalline landfill; the infinite textural reciprocity of the lagoon surface and its vibrant Venetian skies. Sited on the the water surface using recycled barges, its movement is mediated by the moods of the lagoon. And like Venice, its living reflection is identity.

The Murano Glass Museum reappropriates a former Venetian glass landfill. The landfill has been accumulating glass scraps from hundreds of years of the worlds’s best artisan glass blowers. It’s sand is crytalline glass, and its dirt contains gems of ancient broken shards of venetian chandeliers, glassware and sculpture.

The Murano Glass Museum is a competition entry for the Venice 2G competition, and was developed with Glen Karpf for UC Berkeley Architecture Studio taught by Nicholas Demonchaux and Tim Culvahouse.

The Visual Voice is really just a portable, democratic billboard. Its strength lies within its simplicity. It’s made of repurposed electronics from nearby offices and configured geometrically for making public statements. It’s a remanifestation of the public forum– a grassroots broadcast in a city where so many subordinated citizens strive to be heard. It’s a simple conduit for communication at the scale of the landscape.

In the case of San Francisco, modern urban ‘renewal’ has left tens of thousands of its residents unable to afford basic shelter. How is it that a city as economically prosperous socially progressive as ours
can still not adequately address the most basic human needs of its citizens? It is clear that ‘renewal’ in San Francisco does not include everyone. This simple installation is a last-resort gesture at getting the attention of the city, its policy-makers, and the public, in an effort to recontextualize and synthesize the necessary conversation between the city and its citizens.

This project was installed at the AIA San Francisco “Architecture in the City” Festival in 2008.

Design: Yes Duffy
Inspiration: Chris Weinman
Build: Yes Duffy, Julian Fulton, Patrick Surdoval, Uriah Duffy

Michael Southworth’s urban design studio at UC Berkeley.

For Geoff Gibson’s Design Studio, mid-review focusing on programmatic hybridity.

Design: Bamboo DNA
This work is from working with Gerard Minakawa and Kevin Rowell of Bamboo DNA at Electric Daisy Carnival in Los Angeles, CA.

The project utilizes custom-milled reclaimed Cypress trees from Bolinas, CA.

Design: Yes Duffy
Build: Kevin Clarke

Triangulated 4′, 6′ and 8′ lengths of 2x4 Douglas Fir, and solar powered lighting.

Design/Build:Yes Duffy and Alex Yarovoy

This design is a creative response to rigid site restrictions and a tight budget. We could not exceed the existing footprint of the existing garage (12′ x 18′), and the facade had to maintain a double-door facade facing the driveway in order to preserve its previous function as a car garage and landscaping storage.

Features: All natural materials, heated bamboo floors, a lofted sleeping area for a king bed, cathedral ceilings, natural ventilation, heated stonefloor bathroom, and multiple skylights make this room seem larger and cozier than its modest footprint implies.

Design/Build: Yes Duffy

It mends Emeryville’s urban fabric into a green, mixed use, pedestrian civic center. Its axis and orientations are rewoven into the waters edge, and laced with public spaces that elevate views, celebrate the bay, the bridge, and our precious sunset.

This work is from a 2-week project working with the City of Emeryville Planning Department to develop a scheme for the redevelopment of Emeryville Marketplace. This was part of a UC Berkeley Planning Studio taught by Professor Michael Southworth.

This project was designed and built by my Graduate Collaborative Design Build Class that I taught at Berkeley in Spring 2010. Funded by a 8K grant from The Beatrix Farrand Fund. For more images, check out this project on the Open Architecture Network.

Process
Our solar studies revealed that sunlight is scarce in this sunken north-facing courtyard, which had been appropriated mostly as project storage and garbage area by graduate students. Our response elevates users up off the ground, offering a variety of positions to congregate and enjoy the sun. We salvaged an existing grape vine and incorporated it into the project as a subtle canopy of dappled shade when the sun is highest and brightest.

Construction
This project is made of 100% recycled redwood from Green Waste Recycle Yard. The steel frame is welded to exact digital specifications by welding over the full scale plots of each custom rib joint. The wood infill is a replaceable panel-system of 2″ x 3″ x 4′ redwood boards.

Sponsors: Green Waste Recycle Yard and The Beatrix Farrand Fund.

Fabrication
Each tile is slip-cast in a CNC-milled ingot to exact specifications. This combination of centuries old ceramics and contemporary digital CNC manufacturing enables the production of a more climate responsive building system, while capitalizing upon upon the ease of fabrication that could be easily replicated in developing countries with little or no modern technology.

This work is from a studio with professor Ron Rael at UC Berkeley. For the real deal on this cutting edge research, check out: www.rael-sanfratello.com

Construction: 100% recycled wood scavenged from the site.
Client: Blake Garden. Kensington, CA.

Designed and built by Yes Duffy and a host of other UC Berkeley graduate students.

Photo Credit: Peter Suchecki, RedStartStudio

It’s form is derived from minimal surface geometry theories. It can repeat in a variety of methods, creating a skatepark that can be reconfigured continually. Each piece is the same, and can easily stack for storage and transport. The material is Ductal, a super-high tensile strength concrete invented by LaFarge. The thin shell is only 2cm thick, and has performance characteristics more akin to steel than concrete.

Design/Build: Yes Duffy and the UC Berkeley Arch269x graduate students with Mark Anderson of Anderson/Anderson.

Each station is custom-crafted by hand from locally scavenged materials such as pallets, futon frames, shopping carts, bike wheels and milk crates.

They are deployed at public events to teach, empower, and share local tool resources.

The Tool Kitchen is a simple means for grassroots neighborhood upgrading. It enables local residents to fix up their homes on their own or with minimal help. By sharing tools and skills, neighbors are able to collectively upgrade their properties on their own terms, in an effort to keep the neighborhood affordable and accessible to local residents.

This model can also be useful in disaster relief, as residents often wish to fix their homes rather than be relocated far away in a camp. And by staying in their neighborhoods, they have the best options to rebuild their lives because they have access to their social capital and family ties.

The Tool Kitchen took approximately 2 full days to build, after all the free materials were sourced. In its first week, had over 60 instances of tools checked out, and 48 tools donated. Coming to a street corner near you.

The Cloud is an algorithm for creating and controlling 3D topographies from 2D images. The image controls the porosity of the surface, regulating light and air, as well as overall structural form and topography.

Each cloud is unique, born from each of their own ‘genetic’ images, in direct response to the performative needs of its site.

Developed and fabricated by Yes Duffy with Christian Cutul at UC Berkeley.

All prints are 8″ x 10″, hand-processed and printed by Yes Duffy, on Ilford stock photo paper.

A self-made cave, so consumed with creation itself that it was built without a door to exit.

This is a room with only one small window, and no doors. Its sole window is humbly hung inside the gallery wall, and the secret room can only be experienced by peering voyeuristically inside. Surprisingly, its interior billows with beats of music and lights inside swing as if someone had lived there for years.

This is an installation at MillionFishes Collective.

Help reclaim the streets.  The birds were here first.

1999

These are some murals from my mural workshops working with The Truth Campaign.  For more work and workshops on creative youth activism, visit my other website: www.creativeyouthactivism.com

Mystery ingredients.

Put in a piece of paper, dial in your personal attributes, issues and preferences, and the box will emote sounds, smells, and other mysterious stuff, while it paints you your very own personal visual fortune.  It has been known to predict the future.

Box O’ Fortune questions the means in which we value art production, while playfully capitalizing on people’s faith and belief in the power of personal fortune.

Design/Build: Yes Duffy

Design/Fabrication: Yes Duffy

Redwood and oak, custom wood joinery.

Ideal ergonomic 110 degree angle between thighs and torso, curved for the spine and sacrum.  Variable flex of oak crossbars, and infinite seating positions, providing optimal comfort.

design/build with Noah Sherburn

2001

Prefabricated Tig-welded components, assembled on site, with treads of Russian birch plywood.

Design/Build: Yes Duffy

For pics of the art collective in action, and the kitchen transformed, www.millionfishes.com

Design/Build by Yes Duffy, Mike Shankman, and Kevin Clarke

2003

These swings are made of recycled rope and wood, and serve as a call to action for the public, whether it’s to sit your butt down and swing, or to go out and make some of your own.  It’s that simple, and it’s all about you.

Brought to you by your neighborhood activist.

This project explores translucency and transparency used for spatial combination and separation between bedroom, living room, office and street.

Features:
Recycled industrial scraps from cut glass block, recycled steel, recycled antique track wheels, repurposed doors, glass and hardware.

Structural glass ceiling serves as a walkway/loft area above bedroom.

Natural light penetration and visibility regulated by interchangeable screens and partitions, in multiple combinations.

Design/Build by Yes Duffy

Million Fishes is a gallery, event space, and dance studio that serves and provides access for the local art community. Most of all, it is a framework for members to intersect, collaborate, develop, and unleash their creativity, with each other and the communities with which they connect.

Designer/Builder/Co-founder: Yes Duffy
In collaboration with Kevin Clarke, and Mike Shankman

Location: Berkeley, CA.

38 units, sited on a corner lot.

This housing development is a design response to the major shortage of Single-Room-Occupancy housing stock in the Bay Area.

This project focuses upon the gradient between private and public utilizing democracy and choice to foster community relationships between individual users and their neighborhood.  Each individual has their own private bedroom loft, with subtle integrations and overlaps of other amenities to provide social opportunity if desired.  Each bedroom has its own private half-bath on one side, with a shared shower (lockable doors, one shower for every two units).  The porches, entry and kitchen and yard are shared by four units on the opposite side, and serve as a community-regulated opportunity.

Location: Berkeley, CA

Recycled/renovated existing structures and public park.

Daylighting and restoration of local creek.

Neighborhood focus groups were crucial in design development and implementation.

The design focuses on utilizing ‘process spectrums’ as the primary user experience.  Processes such as:  Weather -(rain, draught, fog, light, wind and sound), the creative process of art-making, the demolition/restoration process,  as well as natural processes including food growth, preparation and consumption.  This distillation and exploration of each ‘process spectrum’ pertaining to building, site and its users becomes the dynamic educational, environmental backdrop for this progressive art school.

Reviewing for graduate studio taught by Friedman professor Francisco Pardo of at103 Mexico City.

The Venetian Lagoon has been an engineered landscape for hundreds of years. Private property boundaries and engineered prosthetics continue to impede upon the natural resilience of the tidal lagoon edges, leaving entire islands at risk of of sinking and flooding. The Glass Island is designed for flooding, and celebrates the shifting shores in a responsive, resilient, ever-changing condition.

The Murano Glass Museum is a competition entry for the Venice 2G competition, and was developed with Glen Karpf for UC Berkeley Architecture Studio taught by Nicholas Demonchaux and Tim Culvahouse.