this project proposes a new visitor center and workforce housing for the Oasis of Mara at the North Entrance to Joshua Tree National Park. Drawing from Kazuo Shinohara’s House in Karuizawa and Hideyuki Nakayama’s Curves and Chords, the design translates concave and convex geometries into a shared formal language across the site. A sweeping curved roof defines the visitor center, while two circular housing clusters use repeated vaulted forms to establish a smaller domestic scale. Together, the buildings explore spatial tension between enclosure and openness, building and ground, and architecture and landscape.

This exercise uses Kazuo Shinohara’s House in Karuizawa as a tactical precedent to examine how architectural ideas are constructed through form, void, and spatial organization. The house serves as a focused case through which close reading is conducted via redrawing, modeling, and diagramming, emphasizing method over historical interpretation. The study foregrounds the relationship between solid and void, interior and exterior, and the productive role of contradiction in architectural thinking. Through orthographic and oblique projections, the analysis traces how curved geometry generates an ambiguous central space that structures circulation and perception. Rather than aiming for replication, the exercise develops precedent-based architectural intelligence that can be abstracted and applied to new design work.