1
Architecture in Mid Air / Capping the Cross Bronx Expressway
This studio explored, designed, and offered techniques to span the Cross Bronx Expressway (CBE) as a prelude to the NYC interstate roadway being possibly enclosed or “capped.” The 6.5-mile-long freeway was constructed over a five-year period between 1959 and 1964. The opportunity to imagine it being partially enclosed has become more realistic as the recent Biden-Harris Administration Infrastructure Bill included funding for an initial feasibility study and up to one billion dollars to both enclose the freeway and subsequently provide new public park space above it. As patterns of mobility and commerce and vehicles shift in the next decade, the studio asked what is the wider future of major roadways such as the CBE? The studio worked with an array of guests who gave their vision and expertise and, in particular, with WSP Engineering who included Michael Bell and Peter Muennig in a team for future phases of the feasibility study.
Students: Elaine Yu, Juhi Kamra, Vishal Benjamin Panicker, Haolan Luo, Lingfan Jiang, Huifeng Zhang, Shuhan Liu, Namrata Pradeep Dhore, Yangxi Liu, Marcus Pak Hei Chan, Jacob James Makani'ok Kackley, Yuntian Zhang
AirCO
AirCO is a future cyborg company taking advantage of automation and machine labor to create cy...
2
Below Zero: Climate Change, Architecture, and Uncertainty
In April 2022, the first document to advocate for the necessity of carbon removal was published by the United Nations Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change. The report declared that widespread use of carbon removal is unavoidable if the world is to cut greenhouse gas emissions in half by 2030, and reach net-zero emissions by 2050. The term “carbon removal” refers to both natural and mechanical processes that result in less carbon in the atmosphere than before the process was run; this studio explored the territory of below zero. Working with scientists at the Columbia Climate School, the studio simultaneously designed materials, labor, buildings, and ways of life. In modeling supply chains and measuring carbon footprint, students created physical experiments with carbon-sequestering materials to prototype the buildings of the future. This studio was structured as a mini-thesis project where each student designed their own site, program, position, and 10-year future in terms of both carbon and equality.
Sargassum Futures
This project explores a new urban community deeply tied to Sargassum, a natural, carbon sequester...
Hemp House
Residential construction market constitutes 59% of all construction. And within it, single-family...
From Urban Feed Urban: the Biochar Metabolism in A New Building System
Municipal Solid Waste can be converted into biochar, the negative carbon additives, and its uniqu...
Rice Ecology
The world is suffering a food crisis nowadays. There is no doubt that rice takes the most appr...
3
Accessibility
Accessibility can be seen as a quality or a possibility of being able to access physical time and space, public space, housing, education, healthcare, childcare, mental health support, transportation, work, culture, equity, justice, diversity, public safety, democracy, technology, food–allowing for a reevaluation of public policy and decisions made by design professionals. The studio explored what the material and immaterial barriers are that impede accessibility. Starting by exploring the various meanings of accessibility–from the physical realm to more cultural, social and political arenas–the studio projects were shaped as students studied contemporary design and artistic practices addressing similar issues, including conversations with professionals of different fields. The studio investigated new ways of dealing with limits, divisions and raptures within the urban fabric of East New York and transforming the environment of the area to propose projects to transform conditions of exclusion into possibilities of building community through networks of support and care.
Whose air is it anyway?
Whose air is it anyway? proposes a new type of “infra-sculpture” that can be localized, visualize...
4
Are Icebergs Free?
The arctic is a land of contradictions, an often-tense relationship between finite boundaries and migratory flows. As the ice recedes due to global warming, nations surrounding the area draw new lines across the ocean floor to claim additional territory, potentially reaping wealth and power through the extraction of natural resources. The challenge for this studio was to bind global awareness to the regional and local while asking the question: what are we preserving and what are we advocating for? Over the semester, students developed an architectural proposal in two parts: the first was a seasonally deployable field station for data collection, designed to support research of the Arctic Circle’s increasingly fragile ecosystem; the second was a civic project derived from each student’s individual interests which took the human, animal, mineral, and plant into consideration in an effort to effectively promote and protect the biodiversity of this globally significant region for future generations.
5
Everything/Everything: Alien Epistemologies from the Still Present
What does it mean to be an alien? In the popular mindset to be an alien is to be a negation: a non-human and a non-being in contrast and opposition to an ideal subject located between Hegelian philosophy and the Vitruvian imbrication of an ideal male European body. The studio troubled the conceptualization of an ideal universal subject whose architectural gaze has been complicit at the convergence of colonialism and modernity. Instead, the studio posited an “alien” subjectivity working across various scales and terrains to confront crucial environmental, social, and technological changes and the ways these manifest in the intersection of bodies, space, ecologies, politics, and aesthetics. Taking the 12th Edition of the Berlin Biennale “Still Present” as an intellectual prompt, the studio used autobiographical methods to acknowledge relationships to the earth, water, and air and to make a collective set of architectural proposals that were epistemic rather than typological or formally based.
After Lights [Passage to Opacity]
Tapuhue (Place of the Gods) of the indigenous people, has witnessed the expansion of Santiago ...
Vaporized Vandalistic Voyeurism
Scarred and scarce through US militarization, the erasure of Bikini Atoll has been fetishized to ...
6
Extreme Scales: Speculating New Futures for a Post Post Office
What does it mean to be an alien? In the popular mindset to be an alien is to be a negation: a non-human and a non-being in contrast and opposition to an ideal subject located between Hegelian philosophy and the Vitruvian imbrication of an ideal male European body. The studio troubled the conceptualization of an ideal universal subject whose architectural gaze has been complicit at the convergence of colonialism and modernity. Instead, the studio posited an “alien” subjectivity working across various scales and terrains to confront crucial environmental, social, and technological changes and the ways these manifest in the intersection of bodies, space, ecologies, politics, and aesthetics. Taking the 12th Edition of the Berlin Biennale “Still Present” as an intellectual prompt, the studio used autobiographical methods to acknowledge relationships to the earth, water, and air and to make a collective set of architectural proposals that were epistemic rather than typological or formally based.
Post Office X Clinic
The driving force for this proposal is the belief that medical services should be just as availab...
The Public Domain _ Transformation of the Post Office
Privatization exposes racial, cultural, and economic polarization and allows us to identify th...
Post Office for Gig Workers
How could a piece of infrastructure/architecture celebrate the movement of physical material b...
7
Worlding Watersheds
This studio stood as a transdisciplinary investigation into the relationships between a river and its watershed. As the domain where different vectors of the current climate crisis meet and interplay and where conflicts around its management are emerging, rivers and their watersheds produce multiple localities where transformations can be observed, understood, and where sites of intervention can be imagined. This studio questioned current understandings of planetary-scale ecosystems and their metabolisms, and outlined the ways in which vast areas of the planet are being transformed through the combined action of climate change and various forms of infrastructure. Students worked closely with cartographic and statistical datasets, historical documentation, engaged in conversations with scientists and environmental agencies, and studied perspectives of indigenous communities, activists, and local researchers. The studio aimed to produce new ways of visualizing ecological processes both through mapping and detailed design outputs, while maintaining a speculative approach.
8
Plein Air
The term “En Plein Air,” often associated with 19th-century Impressionist painters, describes a mode of investigation and production that occurs in the open air. Throughout history, air and the ideas of the open and raw environment–at times perceived as free, pure, and complete and other times uncontrollable and fearsome, for example–quietly but actively shaped the built environment and its discourse. While the practice of “En Plein Air” itself might have become outdated, today the notions of “being in the open” are much less innocent, and the implications of “full” and “raw” air are much more complex. Acknowledging the complex material and social performance of air, and the intersectional vulnerabilities and agencies compounded in the corporeality of air, the studio explored the architecture of “open” air, both figurative and literal. Recognizing air as an elusive yet critical spatial medium, the studio engaged air and the variegated materialities and ideologies of “Plein Air” as shared prompts for this semester’s exploration.
9
Volume to Content: Adaptive Reuse of AT&T Long Lines Building
This studio looked at the AT&T Long Lines building in Lower Manhattan, a radical example of brutalist sculptural architecture designed by John Carl Warnecke & Associates as a vast, windowless tower of concrete and granite that soars 550 feet into the New York skyline. The building was designed as one of the most important telecommunications hubs in the United States as the world’s largest center for processing long-distance phone calls in 1979. Today, as digital data banks require exponentially less space every decade, and cheaper off-site locations are more economically viable, the A&T will soon become an empty urban sculpture: an opportunity to retrofit a resilient structure in the heart of Lower Manhattan. Through the sequential process of research into the building and study models of interventions into concrete, students designed adaptive reuse projects consisting 70% affordable housing and 30% social programming.
Inversion, Conversion, and Adaptation of the AT&T Long Lines Building
Since construction completed on AT&T’s windowless, 30-story tower at 33 Thomas Street in 1...
33 Thomas Street, 2022
Although keeping the building’s monolithic beauty in mind, action is needed to provide affo...
33 Thomas St. Adaptive-reuse
Structure has long been understood as the bone of a building. Typically, we consider programma...
Re-assembled Brutalist
Based on the concept of re-assembling the existing condition of the AT&T long lines buildi...
Unfinishing the Finished
As the longline technology became obsolete and the nuclear threat disappeared, the fortress-like ...
10
The Right to the (dual)City
The studio investigated the architectural, urban, and landscape capacities of Tunis’ current hybrid Islamic-Colonial core. This collective project aimed to map, identify, and propose a physical intervention and accompanying program for the interstitial spaces of Tunis’s medieval Islamic city medina and the French colonial quarter (Ville Nouvelle) that surrounds it. Interventions were proposed after critically analyzing the historical evolution of the dual city and probing the relationship of the districts to their environments–political, natural, urban, and infrastructural. As part of the studio, students attended lectures on the history of Islamic architecture, conducted workshops with scholars of and experts in the field, and traveled to Tunis, Tunisia.
Book Street Medinatization
Once a high-end residential area for international expatriates and businessmen from all over the ...
Karraka Fort’s Renovation
La Goulette is a town famous for fish culture between the Lake of Tūnis and the Mediterranean sea...
Olive Trading Center: (re) Constructing the obsolete
The proposal aims to (re) construct what is perceived as non-desirable from the western perspecti...
A Memorial to the 2011 Tunisian Revolution
Avenue Habib Bourguiba can be read as a scripted infrastructure for a display of power both histo...
11
FutureCurrent Year 2180 Brazil
This studio was informed by the themes of Indigenous Futurism, decolonization, and nascent ecologies. At the intersection of climate action, sustainability, and racial justice, the Yawanawà Center for Education and Sustainability will contain educational outreach, exhibition, and retreat programming as well as permaculture and agro-food forestry, and will adhere to the seventh-generation principle to build a sustainable and viable future for all. The studio was developed in collaboration with distinguished co-creators who are leaders of Indigenous communities and took inspiration from emerging green technologies and Indigenous knowledge and practices put forth by the partners. The studio It will address current and future issues relating to flooding, availability of potable water, food, and energy, and the celebration of culture through ancestral knowledge, stories, and rituals that create meaning. São Paulo and Yawanawà Shukuvena Village are envisioned as two interconnected sites that bring to life the principles of re-indigenization and re-wilding.
Grecale 2180
This research institute is located in a wetland park and works closely with the wind and sun. In ...
The Word for World is Forest
Flooding and deforestation resulting from illegal logging and infrastructure construction pose...
The Watcher
Climate installations, drone stations, and visitor centers are combined together to form an inter...
The Above and Below
Standing at the intersection of past, present and future, in the year of 2180, Brazil is facin...
Envisioning new futures for the Yawanawá tribe
Indigenous communities in the Amazon Forest currently face numerous difficulties originating from...
12
The Street Studio
This studio is about Community Engaged Design in the Public Realm, and centers on questioning the definition of these terms: Who is the community? How to engage? What is design? Does the Public belong to the “community” or anyone and everyone? The studio worked in the colorful neighborhood of Jackson Heights where the students embedded themselves in the community and on the streets, talking to strangers to listen, learn, and think carefully and intently before drawing. The work revolved around three main topics: People, Places, and Things, and began with students undertaking field research and precedent studies. Students worked to make design proposals of systems, things, and events that improve upon identified deficiencies or realize untapped potentials. The interventions layered onto a collective 3D model to form an atlas of possible “real” futures.
Eat Jackson Heights
Jackson Heights has become a clear example of an Anthropocene landscape, where the city has wi...
Women’s support Network
The Jackson Heights neighborhood has the largest number of undocumented immigrants, and beyond al...
Infla-tecture: Street as Cultural Space
The project criticizes the current situation that streets only serve as urban networks. By studyi...
Taking public spaces back one pollinator at a time
This project envisions a future of care where humans and nonhumans act as a singular unit to demo...
Vernacular Infrastructure for Resilient Streets
This project establishes symbiotic relationships among the retails, individuals, private busin...
Urban Tree Houses
According to a report in the Jackson Heights Post, the Jackson Heights community suffers from a s...
Using the Unused Airspace
The local shops of 82nd Street have invariably been susceptible to economic inequity and clima...
13
Enacting our Environmental Entanglements
This studio engaged with the climatic and cultural entanglements of Venice, Italy, through the adaptive redesign of the Green Theater (Teatro Verde) on the island of San Giorgio Maggiore. Designed by Luigi Vietti and Angelo Scattolin, the open-air amphitheater was inaugurated in 1954 by the Cini Foundation. As wind, rain, hail storms, and heat waves have become more sudden, unpredictable and violent in Venice, the Green Theater’s initial design needs to adapt to these uncertain changing conditions. The Cini Foundation, as part of a long-standing collaboration with GSAPP, asked the studio to further its thinking for this site in reactivating its contemporary programming. In collaboration with students from Historic Preservation and the GSAPP Preservation Technology Lab, the studio proposed experimental designs for climate mitigation, including a new retractable canopy for stage and seating, accessible evacuation circulation, and technologies for on-site production of renewable energy.
14
Reproductive Justice Network
This studio addressed reproductive justice at a moment when reproductive and sexual rights in the U.S. were under fierce attack. With the Supreme Court giving state governments control of reproductive rights on June 24, 2022, the rights of cis, nonbinary, and trans people to shape their reproductive and sexual futures are continually being challenged, and these restrictions compound existing barriers for low-income communities and people of color to have bodily autonomy. As part of a collaboration with Syracuse University, City College New York, and FLUFFFF Studio, this studio gathered knowledge on the role of architecture in reproductive health care to develop design proposals for alternative models of care. Intentionally multiscalar, the studio considered the relationships between systems and bodies, exploring how systems of regulation impact the embodied experiences of individuals in spaces of health care. Combining analytical skills with a tactile material experimentation, students were tasked with developing a rigorous approach to collectively create a network of care at their chosen sites of intervention.
Ethno-Botanic Laboratory
At the moment when reproductive and sexual rights in the U.S. are under fierce attack, the projec...
Journey of Care
According to a report published by the UNFPA, 1 in 7 out of the 121 million unintended pregnancie...
Sex-Ed School for the city of New York
Sex education is not a mandate in all the states in the USA, but abortion rights are fully pro...
The Purple Houses
In the wake of the Supreme Court’s decision to overturn Roe v. Wade, Mississippians are left w...
15
if/then: Navigating a Nervous Ecology
Just as the current state of the human nervous system has been shaped by evolution to manage the uncertainty and unpredictability of our world, so too will future states of the brain be molded by a rapidly changing environment. Today, as cognitive, bio-based technologies infiltrate life and reshape architectural thought and production, emerging concepts in neuroscience could provide insight to designers negotiating the socio-political, ecological, cultural, economic, and technological into melded assemblies of matter and data in which artificial intelligence and human experience commingle. Working with the site of Tromkins Cove Quarry–an abandoned 199-acre limestone quarry on the Hudson River about 10 miles north of NYC–the studio developed if/then scenarios and designed for multiple possible outcomes. Moving beyond ‘metaphors and mechanics’ of ecological models, students worked in transdisciplinary modes to develop a proposition for occupying the site through the following three lenses: nervous systems, steady-state economics, and biogeochemical.
Life: Propagated
Just as humans accelerated existential change to our world’s ecosystem, our project hopes to a...
The Cognitive Cradle —- Training Terrain for a Collective Brain
The cyclic flow of calcium at different scales and in both biotic and abiotic matters proves that...
Infrastructural Proposal to Restore Balance of Earth System
The proposal is primarily for other beings rather than humans, who have brought huge imbalance...
De-Mining Tomkins Cove
De-Mining Tomkins Cove transforms a defunct quarry into a site for soil reconstruction and rem...
16
Studio on Studio
The studio as a space emerged in the 19th century. Today, we know it as the place we share, educationally and professionally, which also defines and questions architectural practice by delimiting and expanding its boundaries and concerns. It is dynamic, conceptually and contextually, and emerges from the architect in the same way the architect emerges from it. The studio is simultaneously a space and an activity, both constantly in the making, especially in our current climate of uncertainty. Students examined the design of a new school of architecture that will embrace the mutability of contemporary life. By closely inspecting the anatomy of the studio, students questioned the assumptions that orbit the practice; the ultimate aim of the project was to delineate a new type capable of redrawing the figure of the architect, the past and future of the discipline, and its pedagogy as a crucial space and moment of formation.
17
Mass Effects: Reinhabiting Thickness: Biogenic Materials and Spaces of Refuge in an Age of Radical Uncertainty
A dominant trajectory within western architecture has been the impulse toward attenuation: the progressive thinning of building skins and construction envelopes from the massiveness of load bearing masonry to the transparency of the modernist curtain wall. This attenuation came at the price of exponential increases in energy consumption, the proliferation of mechanical space, and devastating climatic consequences. This studio explored how an architectural thickness can be leveraged to create new spatial, performative, programmatic, social, and environmental benefits? Engaging a range of programs and spatial typologies, the studio interrogated architectural thickness and sought to catalyze this material condition; assuming a range of interiorities and inhabitations and problematizing questions of served and servant, inside and outside, structure and skin, mass and void, exposure and protection. Working through both precise tectonic investigations as well as speculative explorations, the studio re-imagined the potentials for an architecture of thickness in an age of radical uncertainty.
Public Library/Cooling Center
In New York City, most public library branches must operate as Cooling Centers in the summer m...
Re-(carving/claiming/constituting) Penn Station
Beneath a mega-block in midtown Manhattan lie the remains of a once-grand Pennsylvania Station...
Water Insulation
A cooling center is a place for people to escape the summer heat. The municipality opens libra...
18
Post-Plantation Museum(s)
The studio examined the plantation’s architecture and spaces as an evolving typological model and discursive form to understand, undermine, explicate, and complicate the mechanics and techniques of enclosure and circulation, and to eventually imagine new architectural protocols for a post-plantation future. While museums may appear arrested in time, as repositories for historical and cultural cross-sections, activists and fellow artists have shown how these institutions function according to the continued circulation of objects, labor, meanings, ideologies, and wealth—a model developed via the logic of the plantation. The studio sought to understand the contemporary museum within the longer history of its colonial and racialized development and how those histories have formed its current condition. The status of the body, tied to the enclosures of property and racialization, was deeply interrogated in each student’s studio project. The studio evolved through three research investigations and a final project situated in relation to each student’s chosen institution.
The (Un)natural History Museum
The American Museum of Natural History manifests the Plantation Logic by dehumanizing and demarca...
Queens not a Museum
Queens not a Museum is a post-plantation museum that decentralizes and decolonizes th...
The MET : Department of Research and Repatriation
The Department of Research and Repatriation is the newest department at the Metropolitan Museum o...
