Questions of Architecture, Form and Representation
An—Other Public: Queer Interrogations, Heterotopic Instigations
Questions of Architecture, Form and Representation
Concrete Caretakers?
Site arch studio i
Introduction
Questions of Architecture, Form and Representation
The first year of the Master of Architecture focused on the disciplinary knowledge of architecture while simultaneously treating the discipline as a contested and uncertain terrain across multiple scales from the architectural detail to infrastructure. In particular, the first semester interrogated and considered specific questions of architecture and its relational conditions at the convergence of modernity and colonialism. The questions point towards the confrontation of environmental, social, and technological changes and the way these manifests in the intersection of bodies, ecologies, the environment, and spatial equity. The second semester of the first year deployed architectural thinking and research to understand architecture as a form of knowledge production while questioning hegemonic epistemologies and systems of knowledge.
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Hidden Toxins: Unmasking Beauty’s Dark Side

The project delved into the nexus of violence and beautification, examining the intricate inte...

Reclaiming Black Geographies in the Context of Harlem’s Black Hair Care Industry
The sequential exploration of figurative mobility navigates the Black hair care industry within t...
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An—Other Public: Queer Interrogations, Heterotopic Instigations

Seeking to question the relationship between bodies (individual, social, institutional, etc.) and the spaces and territories that they occupy, this studio works with the goal of producing new opportunities for a more equitable and inclusive idea of the commons. Architecture and its tangential infrastructures, charged and complex sociopolitical devices that simultaneously operate within the fabric of social governance while reproducing it, are not without their informal, heterotopic appropriations and reimaginations from subaltern actors: from the cruising utopias of Christopher Street Pier—which produced an alternative vision for a society in the 70s and 80s which theoretically transcended notions of gender, race, and class within the sites of dilapidated infrastructure—to the contemporaneous, renegade act of temporospatial appropriation of junkspace throughout the city by queer/trans bodies in the practice of underground raving. By disrupting public space and engendering novel methodologies through which it is inhabited, these acts of alternative and defiant placemaking (simultaneously rooted in the logic of pragmatism and romanticism) allow for the restructuring of social relations; they “queer’’ urban infrastructure’s existing hierarchies of property and ownership and aver an unorthodox model of mutual ownership and care of the collective commons.

In this context, the discourse prompted by the semester’s themes of embodiment, mobility, and fugitivity offer a fecund area of interrogation for the studio’s labor: over the course of the semester we turn our attention to our own ontologies of embodied space and knowledge, interrogate and react to/against our quotidian relationship to the built environment and its engendered politics at the scale of the detail, before finally addressing the latent conflicts these politics embody at the scale of the public realm. How can design and research address and reveal complex entanglements and power structures ? And how can architecture reimagine, exacerbate or remediate them?

Queer sky, appropriation of New York City air rights for queer homeless youth
Serving as a refuge for queer homeless youth from around the country, Christopher street pier isn...
Redefining “House”

This project aims to explore the Queer neighborhoods of the ballroom, vogue dance cultural his...

A Nude Beach for the West Village

If you know, you know. The space is for everyone, and for total bodily freedom. The anti–Ganse...

Geographies of the Urban Night

Nightlife spaces are a form of escape from the mundane, and where people can explore other mod...

Ambigo-us

This intervention aims to merge and bring back different publics onto the pier by reappropriat...

The Art Pier
The Art Pier is an ambitious architectural endeavor aimed at reinvigorating the artistic spirit o...
Aquatic Avenues: Integrating Marine & Urban Ecologies in Manhattan
The study began as an exploration of striped sea bass and development along the Hudson River, rev...
The Blight of Pier 45
Focusing on Christopher Street Pier’s history of evicting the marginalized communities of New Yor...
Weaving Queer Stories

Weaving Queer Stories aims to bridge the past and present, weaving together the rich history o...

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Modernism dictates that form follows function. But who and what determines function, or need? This formula necessitates a determinative mindset, conceptualizing a singular end user inhabiting a choreographed sequence of spaces, and executed with an industry agreed upon series of “best practices”. In this way, time is frozen at the conceptualization of the project. A building is in itself a work of narrative fiction, a period piece.

Architecture should not be resigned to dominant systems of power. To critique established spatial power dynamics is to advocate for change, not just in a progressive sense, but in adaptation and responsiveness to context. This studio sees built form not as a linear conclusion of a totalizing socioeconomic system, but as a nexus within a multivalent network of economic, social, and environmental vectors in flux. The urban condition is an aggregation of disparate goods and services reflecting competing desires and histories.

Mapping a Microeconomy of Waste
Underneath the Manhattan Bridge at 74 Pike Slip sits the DSNY Special Waste drop-off, a collectio...
FM01 Ritual Purification Apparatus

The Manhattan Bridge, an iconic suspension structure traversing the East River and uniting the...

Mechanisms & Mysteries
Many things are vulnerable: as I am to vertigo, as someone is to an invisible threshold, as a ped...
Dumbo: Chasing Spaces
Jumping from the scale of the human body to the scale of the manhattan bridge, this project aims ...
Friends for Manhattan Bridge Gate
From FM01 to FM04, I learned a lot of lessons from New York City. First, the gesture of a hug tha...
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The Filtration Station - Breathing Bubbles
In Harlem, the bus depot stands as a symbol of air segregation, where low-income communities endu...
Dreamscapes: Escapism In NYC
In a rapid paced urban environment like New York where one barely has a chance to catch their bre...
Platform
Platform explores what gradual decommissioning of the highway could do for restitching the landsc...
Smoothly
The range of types of movement and distances as a result of various body shapes are limited by st...
Un / Veiled

Nepali women maintain a conflicting relationship with the sun. This is reflected in the daily ...

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Questions of Architecture, Form and Representation
The Sylvia Rivera Memorial Quilt Project

Centered around LGBTQ+ icon Sylvia Rivera, the project is a framework that provides a platform...

Pipa
The grounded kite, known as PIPA, arranged in a semi-circular formation, symbolizes liberation an...
Party at the Pier

RETURN, REVEAL, RECLAIM: the series of operations that took place in New York City’s Christoph...

Family Ties, reOrder, BLOCK party

reOrder was the final project for the semester, the following is the description for it:

...
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Concrete Caretakers?

Concrete, one of the oldest human construction methods, is a simple composite of lyme, water, and an aggregate (usually sand or gravel). Today, concrete is one of the most plentiful materials on earth—a United Nations report in 2012 estimated that all of the aggregate mined for concrete could form a ring around the Earth 27 meters high and 27 meters wide —yet it’s future in a just transition to a post-carbon world is unclear.

In short, we find concrete at a crossroads of political and ecological imperatives within the discipline of architecture; on the one hand, mitigating the negative externalities of concrete to disadvantaged communities, yet on the other hand, avoiding demolition in order to make the most of the embodied labor and carbon captured in every square inch of concrete.

This studio consider the thorny questions of concrete in New York City. How to remediate concrete’s ills while forestalling excessive demolition? How to leverage existing concrete assets in new ways for local communities? Who has historically felt the negative affects of concrete, and whom has reaped the benefits? How to devise metrics to quantify the embodied labor and carbon costs of concrete in tangible terms? Is there a potential second (or third) act for New York’s concrete assets (buildings, landscapes, infrastructures) to shift their remaining years towards public good?

Recurb

Our modern cities are a very new social experiment. Having only been around for two centuries-...

[Systems] of Resiliency

The focus of this project was to make East Harlem (from 125th Street all the way down to 96th ...

Reallocation through Deconstruction
The Forum requires a radical change in its function and physical manifestations to connect Columb...
Reciprocal Park
St. Nicolas Park NYC was the first established park in the city. Because of the shortage of funds...
Runoff Retention Showcase

While rising sea levels have drawn the attention of the public in recent years, the impact of ...

Harlem Corner University

This project attempts to revitalize the Harlem Center, located at 125th Street & Malcolm X...

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This studio focused on reoccupying the spatial resultants from the imposition of the Manhattan Bridge over historic neighborhoods and communities.

Focusing on the areas around the landing areas on either side of the Manhattan Bridge, the studio explored the resultant boundary conditions created by the top-down urban planning methods, examining which segments of the population had been cordoned off and de-prioritized by the imposition of this infrastructure. Delving into the history by collecting archival materials of tenement populations of predominantly Jewish and Cantonese communities as well as the erasure of some of the earliest African American schools in New York City.

These same overlooked areas act as present day third spaces where marginal communities can congregate. During repeated site visits, students explored both these overlooked areas, identifying and researching populations such as those in the gray-economy informal market vendors and bike delivery workers as well as vulnerable populations such as elderly population in Chinatown and the unhoused.

Balancing shifting scales, research of these under-served communities was conducted at the human scale through in-person observation. This process driven work which included analog hands-on activities, authoring personal documentary techniques such as material castings, animations, relief models, music, food, and person-to-person interviews.

These authored documents served as the basis for the final outcome of the semester - a series of proposed site interventions, activations, and place of assembly located in and around the odd-shaped lots and spatial off-cuts generated by the marco urban infrastructure.

Rethink Skatepark
Focusing on the community of skateboarders, where the project wishes to design a new and innovati...
Foldable Waving Wall for Street Vendors

The Foldable Weaving Wall is an innovative, adaptable structure designed for street vendors un...

Culturally Sensitive Park for Chinatown Elders
In New York’s Chinatown, an immigrant community, the demographics are changing significantl...
Leaning Wall for Manhattan Bridge Plaza

Manhattan Bridge Approach is located at the intersection of multiple mobilities. Traffic and p...

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Pier 45 End-of-the-World Party

“In responding towards the critical reevaluation of the subconscious and hierarchical pr...

The Edge on Pier 45
“The Acies, instead of a steady line, might be a Hetetrapias that is limited to slices in t...
ADAPTIVE INTELLIGENCE - Resilient Architecture System on the Water

“This design is an innovative adaptive architecture system located at Pier 45 on the Hud...

Gallium, Grievance, Growth

This project focuses on the architectural transformation of Pier 45 in NYC, addressing a histo...

Burning Ritual
Due to its under surveillance, Pier 45 has a long history as a liminal space for the queer commun...