Columbia University will be closed this Tuesday, July 4, in observance of Independence Day. Enjoy the long weekend!

Mid-semester reviews for the Advanced Architectural Design, Urban Design, and Intro to Architecture Programs continue this week. Faculty and students are invited to join the sessions, which are posted on the GSAPP website and include:

• Advanced Architectural Design Studio: July 6
• Urban Design: July 15
• Intro to Architecture: July 17
  

Kate Ascher, Milstein Professor of Urban Development at GSAPP, and Andrew Smyth, Professor of Civil Engineering and Engineering Mechanics at Columbia Engineering, have been awarded a Cross-Disciplinary Frontiers Courses grant by Columbia University’s Office of the Provost. This program, launched in 2022, supports the development of innovative new courses that span multiple schools. The courses, which will launch in the 2023-2024 academic year, intend to pool scholarly strengths across Columbia’s 17 schools to create new fields of knowledge and solve societal challenges.

Their course, “The Future City: Transforming Urban Infrastructure,” will introduce students to technological innovations that are helping cities around the world create healthier, safer, more equitable, and more resilient futures. Its foundation is based on two sets of traditional disciplines – architecture, urban design, and real estate development, and structural, civil, and mechanical engineering – but also incorporates newer areas of study – such as data analytics and smart communication technologies – that offer opportunities for major advances in the quality of municipal service delivery.

Read the Provost’s announcement.

Cruz García and Nathalie Frankowski, co-founders of WAI Think Tank and GSAPP Faculty, will deliver the lecture “Not a test lab: Loudreading, Spirals, and Post-Colonial Methods” on their recent work, including the text “Narrative Architecture: A Kynical Manifesto.” Oscar Oliver-Didier will provide the introduction and later be joined by Uriel Fogué to provide a response and host a Q&A session.

Organized by the M.S. in Advanced Architectural Design program.

The latest issue of the Avery Review features the winners of the journal’s 6th annual Essay Prize, which celebrates students’ critical writing on architecture and the built environment. The winning essays are remarkable for the vantage points they offer onto communities, sites, and materials that are often overlooked, whether incidentally or by design.

In the first-place winning essay “Staff Needs: The Spaces of Hospice,” Clare Fentress (Yale University) reopens a much-needed forum for the concerns of hospice care and its architectures in the United States, directing our attention to the needs of care workers.

Second prize is awarded to Yakin Ajay Kinger (CEPT University), who writes a decolonial historiography of Indian baghs from pre-revolution to present day, studying archives, image circulation, and physical sites to counter-read the legacy of a colonial military geography; Mariam Aref Mahmoud (Columbia University), who drives Cairo’s Ring Road, through the politics of displacement, the aesthetics of modernization, and the making of Egypt’s housing crisis across regimes; and Sonia Sobrino Ralston (Harvard University), who reveals the histories of extraction, exhibition, science, and empire hidden within the Stone Exposure Test Wall, a construction of 2,352 individual stones that stands in Gaithersburg, Maryland.

Vice Provost and University Librarian Ann D. Thornton has announced the appointment of Teresa (Teri) Harris as Director of Avery Architectural & Fine Arts Library. Harris will assume the Director role on August 1, overseeing all aspects of Avery’s operations, including collection development, research services, access services, art properties, digitization and exhibition loan programs, facilities management, and the Avery Index.

Read Columbia University Libraries’ announcement here.

• “Giving Light / Bidding for Change” co-curated by Cait Campbell ’21 MSCCCP and Beverly Emers at the BronxArtSpace in Hunts Point will host a closing conversation this Saturday, July 1 at 6pm. The interdisciplinary exhibit confronts and exposes how slavery has been reenacted in America as mass incarceration through the hypocrisy of the 13th Amendment, impacting generations of local communities through various systems of containment, oppression, and different forms of direct and indirect systemic violence. Learn more here.

• The exhibition Breach produced by Ricky Ruihong Li ’21 MSCCCP, Isabelle A. Tan ’20 MSCCCP, and Fernanda Carlovich ’20 MSCCCP as part of the group Workshop for Environmental Technik (WET) opens at 80WSE on July 6. Breach gestures to the ruin of climate catastrophe, historically situating a crisis by design. It examines the self-published archives of the United States Army Corps of Engineers, a pervasive yet inconspicuous design agency established in the early 19th century. Learn more here.