This project explores the principles of form generation and spatial composition through the lens of John Hejduk’s Diamond House, reinterpreting his geometric rigor and poetic abstraction into a contemporary housing complex for Yucca Valley, California. The design aims to establish a new architectural landmark in a desert town with few cultural or visual anchors, transforming it into a focal point of activity and identity.
Using an additive approach, the project assembles a series of geometric volumes that interlock and overlap to create a dynamic, irregular form, sharp, expressive, and deeply rooted in Hejduk’s sculptural sensibility. The process incorporated Grasshopper as a generative tool to rapidly iterate and evolve complex shapes, allowing computational logic to inform the architectural language while maintaining a sense of human scale and inhabitable form.
The resulting composition becomes more than a housing project, it acts as a spatial organism, offering communal and private spaces that respond to the desert environment while redefining the visual character of Yucca Valley. The design celebrates geometry, experimentation, and the transformative potential of architecture to create identity within place.
Location : Yucca Valley, California
Instructor : Erin Wright
Software : Grasshopper, Rhinoceros, Adobe Illustrator, Adobe InDesign, Adobe Photoshop
