Calls for the restitution of looted African artefacts dispersed across European and North American museums has generated decades of debate across cultural and political arenas. Critical questions have been framed through scholarly and artistic interventions: What can museums become if they cease to be afterimages of colonialism? When will the escalation of protests, strikes, and direct actions at museums, produce counterpoints to the ossification of Western art institutions? What would it mean for an art space to genuinely experiment with notions of restitution and animism?

We will examine various sites of diasporic placemaking across London; as transitional spaces for the restitution of the loot that is currently locked in the storage rooms and vitrines of the British Museum. The history of the museum, and the artefacts in its collection, will be explored in conjunction with various sites and institutions beyond the European continent. This studio foregrounds repatriation and reparation—linking Western museums to their imperial foundations—as starting points to articulate the intersections of architecture, heritage, and migration. The aim is to experiment with art spaces as transnational sites of prefiguration. This work will be done by identifying and translating anti-colonial imaging practices in contemporary African and African diasporic art that challenge the nation state as a project; operating in contradistinction to museological traditions of taxonomizing, encapsulating, and preserving racial hierarchies. Afterimages Vol. 3 imagines aesthetic and spatial interventions that dissolve boundaries between art and architecture.

In the 1960s a form of journalism emerged that came to be understood as a new form of literature and nonfiction writing. It acquired the title New Journalism. One of its founding and most formidable voices was Joan Didion whose 1968 collection of non-fiction short stories, Slouching Towards Bethlehem, were at times derived from stories that began as news. Both local and national stories including the first entry in the collection titled “Some Dreamers of the Golden Land”—a story that began as news and in Didion’s writing became a surreal and violent impression of a then new suburban utopia in San Bernardino County, California.

Didion’s stories of this era took the form of non-fiction; Didion was at times assigned as a journalist for magazines to cover news stories but unlike reporting where the journalist seeks to be a non-story in the story Didion’s very form of description and organization of detail became in itself a form of literature. She did not abandon journalistic distance and transparency but she did elevate language giving it a transmissive quality well beyond facts. Her writing was a challenge to fiction, to nonfiction and to journalism.

Our studio will take a lead from New Journalism but more specifically its focus on detail and the seeming norms of everyday life. Architecture is inevitably a form of nonfiction and explicitly tied to norms and material/ economic practices. At scale and in housing it becomes a form or mediated broadcasting and politics.

Two months ago, air quality in New Delhi ranked in the “hazardous” category for more than 20 straight days. Even in a city known for high levels of pollution, this was grim. It meant levels of asthma and carbon were heading in the wrong direction. Like many of the challenges of climate change, this problem does not have a simple cause and it does not represent an isolated system. Exhaust from cars is part of the problem. Geography contributes as well. Factories play a role. But another piece of the puzzle is agriculture.

In November alone, farms in the Punjab and Haryana regions burned more than 8 million tons of rice stubble, creating thick clouds of smoke that drifted over New Delhi and also added 4 million tons of carbon dioxide to the atmosphere. India grows hundreds of millions of tons of rice each year, and produces about an equal amount of agricultural waste. Most of the agricultural waste is burned, releasing both pollution that affects human lungs and carbon dioxide that contributes to climate change.

But what if the rice straw could be used instead of burned? What if the carbon could be locked in instead of released? What if the local construction materials could be carbon-negative instead of high in carbon footprint? And what if the farmers could share in the innovation and economic rewards of addressing climate change and transforming agriculture and the built environment at the same time? This is the territory of Open: an architecture studio about designing systems for carbon removal, buildings, and equality.

This studio examines the architectural identity in the Indigenous community of Round Rock, AZ. We will explore what it means to create contemporary design in a place inhabited by timeless cultures. While this community is rooted in a worldview that predates what is now known as the United States, it also has the challenges of existing in the 21st century. One area of concentration for the studio while be the area that is where the former Trading Post existed in Round Rock. The Trading Post was a center of community as well as a place of commerce. It was an integral part of their identity and an essential part of life in Round Rock. The Trading Post was destroyed by fire around 2014.

This studio also builds on work that has been completed by the Indigenous Design and Planning Institute (iD+Pi) at the University of New Mexico. The Indigenous Design Studio in the Department of Landscape Architecture at UNM has also complete work and research on Round Rock. This studio will be the first time an architecture studio is augmenting and extending the work that has been previously completed.

The studio will examine the various kinds of flows, migrations, movements, and displacements of human / non-human beings and sentient beings —- at the convergence of colonialism and modernity. However, rather than perpetuate the lens of crisis and abjection within these conditions, the studio will examine these conditions as sites of cultural production, transmutation, and liberation. Taking the 35th Bienal de São Paulo as an intellectual prompt, the studio will study and engage specific artistic practices that transmutate the material, spatial, temporal forms of coloniality and their psychic forms of nihilistic enclosure to produce “spatial choreographies of im/possibility and liberation.”

In succession to the Spring 2023 studio, Not Elsewhere Now: Choreographies of the Im/Possible, this studio seeks to reclaim embodied knowledge systems and to make a collective set of architectural proposals that are epistemic and result in new definitions and new kinds of architecture. The studio is conceived as a thesis studio whereby students conduct independent research and define their own design strategies and actions within the context of the prompt and the spatial and cultural context of Bahia, Brazil.

The starting point for this studio is the Federal Statute enacted by the 117th U.S. Congress that ratified the Bi-partisan Infrastructure Bill, committing substantial resources to renewable energy sources. This legislation will serve as our catalyst to research, study and propose new public and private programs of equity and transformational change on NYC’s waterfront.

With projects of this scale, what are the opportunities for alternative power generation together with cultural production, transportation as well as public/private housing? Can these systems synthesize sustainable development and provide public amenities as well? Is energy generation more likely to shape the urbanisms of the future in the globalized “instant age”? Are there clever methods of reuse that anticipate new hybrids and social arrangements?

We will look to develop proposals that go beyond the accommodation of the implementation of infrastructure; to include programs that would partner at the site. Designs should project what life will be like in this near future scenario, speculating changes in lifestyles and social behaviors and envisioning how your designs may impact New York City’s growing population.

After the first series of explorations on the Metropolitan Museum (the most visited in the United States); the Salomon Guggenheim by Frank Lloyd Wright; the (Latin) Museo del Barrio; and the private Frick Collection; and the second on The Museum of Modern Art MoMA, the MET Cloisters, The American Museum of Natural History (the second most visited in the city); and the Brooklyn Museum; the quest for a set of well documented cases to help plan an exercise both speculative and realistic concludes in the third edition. This third edition, set in Madrid, Spain focuses on the refurbishing of four existing structures and their open spaces around in Madrid: The Hydrographic Institute by Miguel Fisac The Parking of the Government by José M. Sainz-Aguirre The Chrystal Palace in the Casa de Campo de Francisco A. Cabrero The National Postal Service “CentroCentro” by Antonio Palacios The Research Center of Metallurgical Sciences by Alejandro de la Sota

For these sites, this studio imagines a new generation of institutions conceived as an extension of urban space of recurrent use, inserted into the life of the city. Such projects take into account the diversity of expressions and formats of contemporary art; the impact of global warming to guide the construction of a second-chance for the existing buildings; and the new ingredients of urban culture, from gender policies to the most advanced forms of socialization, from the positive incorporation of new technologies to concerns for labor conditions.

The studio “Celebrating the Monsoon” focused on the global crisis with water, as it manifests in the monsoon-affected regions of north-west India and cities like Ahmedabad, whose planning process has disrupted the environmental wisdom of water harvesting and management developed by centuries of agricultural practices.

The title acknowledges the deep social, cultural, and emotional resonance of this seasonal phenomenon, which sustains life yet also causes floods and droughts. The studio raised questions about the negative effects of top-down logics of transformation that produce aggressive disruptions through large scale capital-intensive and mono-functional infrastructural interventions. The studio’s double title aimed at testing the possibility of “De-linking the Olympics” on the eve of Ahmedabad’s choice as site for the 2036 events. We chose instead as the locale of study Godhavi, a peri-urban village constricted between the new national Delhi-Mumbai freight corridor, the local branch of the Narmada Canal, and a regional railroad line. The goal was to identify strategic nodes of interface between this village’s historical talavs (ponds) and a larger environmental context, in order to intervene in limited areas with architecturally-scaled projects, engaging contradictions between the current logic of development and larger systemic flows.

The students “live” the question raised by the studio by exploring the micro-topography of Godhavi’s surroundings through a constellation of opportunities based on the de-colonizing effect of pluriversal visions. The resulting projects, in which architecture can operate as an environmental apparatus rather than as object, acknowledge and engage the volatility of the terrain, contributing to a productive convergence of trans-scalar factors that re-orient design negotiations towards terrestrial political actors, rather than persistent rhetorics of modernization. Focus on this locale’s ecosystems articulates human and not-human coexistence, manifesting a rationality that exceeds the architectural conventions of site and program, in projects that emphasize the materiality of the terrain embedded in multiple techniques of representation.

The studio began by departing from the idea of a building as a picture perfect right at its completion. We imagined life of a building after and will explore a strategy of how a building withstands or yields with unprecedented climate change through lenses of impermanence and transformation. How long a building would last and how it would become in different stages of its own life especially in climate crisis of tropical environment. The studio also examined several aspects of vernacular architecture in Southeast Asia to develop alternative models of collective living space capable of adapting to the radical uncertainties.

Using artist residence for Jim Thompson Art Center at Jim Thompson Farm and Nakorn Rachasrima as a design brief, this studio experimented with various possible built forms that involve materiality and tectonic.

Times of civilizational uncertainty require posing and pursuing radical questions, commensurate with the challenges and opportunities we discern. Fresh, critical thinking offers the potential to transform ossified conditions and catalyze new networks of repair.

Initial student research was fueled by individual curiosity and motivation, to inform the nature and capacities of an impermanent archive - an infrastructure simultaneously negotiating ephemerality and accumulation. Projects explore tensions of coexistence across scales, themes, and durations, including positions on: What we should value. Where we can reflect. Who, what, and when will we remember? How do we prioritize? Why do we collect? How will we manifest remembrance?

In its most varied manifestations, modern architectural knowledge-practice – as a political technology of the body and a discursive apparatus – has been instrumental in shaping such ideological frameworks and making them operative on the ground. In the conceptual-research front, the studio. Reparation Architecture questions such categories that underlie architecture’s ethics, probing the social-economic, political and ideological structures that sustain them.

In the intervention-design front, the studio adopts an on-the-ground, situated approach in which theory follows practice, proposing to draw – that is: to imagine, plan and design – spatial strategies to rethink the relationships between architecture and its inherent social-political dimension. To do so, the studio suggests an approximation between architecture and questions/sites of repair, reparation, restoration, restitution and reconstruction.

This clinic is an interdisciplinary exploration of our shared environment through the lens of disability, beyond access. The current intersecting crises of health, social justice, and climate bring into acute focus how we live, work, play, and relate to each other and to our environment. What does it mean to share space today, and to try to build a common world?

This studio starts from the recognition that space is not neutral but is inherently biased, containing a myriad of visible and invisible mechanisms that determine who is visible, valuable, and enabled. Perspectives of disability and impairment expose these inequities and challenge the notion of a standardized architectural inhabitant, with idealized proportions and codified behaviors, needs, and pleasures.

Drawing on multi-disciplinary expertise, this studio reimagines the intersections of individual and collective experiences. Students invented new strategies and tools to create essential infrastructures for physical and mental health capable of supporting both our independence and our interdependence.