Merriam-Webster offers two main definitions of ‘reception’: 1: the act or action or an instance of receiving; and 2: a social gathering often for the purpose of extending a formal welcome.

The studio critically examined the spatial and programmatic transitions between emergencies and daily life by focusing on reception. Through new architectural typologies, the studio aims to challenge the current mono-functional and time-limited displacement management practice, by proposing architecture, landscape architecture and urban design that benefit both new arrivals and their host community. Furthermore, the studio applied the dual meaning of ‘reception’ to explore the transitions between emergencies and daily life.

Using the site of Floyd Bennett Field in Brooklyn, this studio investigated whether it is possible to spatially mediate between international, federal, state and city authorities, community residents, and new arrivals. The studio explored whether the area is suitable for emergency reception while maintaining – and potentially improving – daily life for both groups and protecting the area against climate change-induced natural hazards.

As the environmental justice movement is both a necessary and powerful framework to remedy both the human and ecological health disparities in “othered” communities, so is intentionality with highlighting Black communities centered on pro-environmental behaviors such as sustainable agriculture, recycling, climate change mediation, and food sovereignty.

The thesis of this studio posits that a stronger positively racialized Black sociospatial imaginary might happen in the context of an intentional Black-centered community whose rurality, or rural adjacency, provides an ideal landscape for restorative environmental justice, autonomous identity formation and expression, and a return to a Black ecological connectedness – all of which are also symbolic of the “40 acres and a mule” promise of The Emancipation which was broken. This speculative studio asked students to consider how the sociospatial imaginary of Blackness can be positively developed and materialized at the intersection of both the built and natural environment.

Architecture, if relevant, might be seen as a tool to help address and intervene in social, ecological, political, or technical realities that might not be obvious at first glance. As contemporary inhabitants of a capitalist and consumption-centric reality, there is a complex network of dependencies that deeply define our territory – understood as the environment we inhabit and alter both physically and socially. The ultimate goal this studio was to unpack some of the dependencies embedded in our daily operations to critically question them through architecture.

The architectural conversations we engage with those realities, by nature cannot be definitive, since we confront ever-evolving conditions, yet should not be paralyzing. Architecture must propose a material resolution able to trigger scenarios for life to unfold, coming from a critical assessment of the question at hand.

The “forgotten borough”, Staten Island, and in particular Freshkills was the object of this studio. Before the well-known landfill opened in 1948, the Fresh Kills site, located at the center-east portion of the island was primarily tidal creeks and coastal marsh. Only looking back at the past century, Freshkills has gone through several transformations, with deep implications for the Staten Island territory and its communities. The studio proposes alternative readings rooted in a deeper understanding and critical assessment of the multilayer complexities of the territory. Using Bruno Latour’s theories in book Habiter la Terre, as a counterpart, this studio rethinks Freshkills’ dependencies, processes, and networks, to reimagine a potential new civic and collective territory.

The word ‘wild’ may be derived from the German ‘wald’ (forest or wooded upland), with trees evoking a perception of wildness. Some claim its connection to the English ‘willed’ (past tense of ‘will’), as in the will of the land or a wild, self-willed land.1 Traditional environmental conservationists reinforce a certain idealized state of landscape, which prioritizes a particular animal or plant species over others.2 In contrast, the rewilding movement projects a utopia suspended in a moment without humans, where the land is self-willed. Paradoxically, this re-wilded state requires human intervention to re-introduce lost species, to break down private boundaries that impede migration, or to regulate biodiversity. But seen through the opposing lens of extreme climate change, our new normal state of sea level rise and storm surges can be understood as nature’s revenge, returning low lying wetland areas that were willfully infilled to their previous aqueous state. This contradiction in terms forms the basis of our inquiry. To what extent is the relationship between architecture and landscape willed or seemingly wild? To what extent is it controlled by humans or by nature? Rather than a binary imaging of wildness in opposition to civilization, how can architecture be conceived as open-ended armatures that support all life forms? How we live and build impacts is inextricably linked to local and global ecosystems. This semester, we will explore the many interfaces between architecture and landscape that highlight the ways in which both are in constant formation, mutually benefiting and shaping each other. Through intensely material and technical imaginaries, from the detail to the regional scale, you will intervene on an existing building by exploring a middle ground that is ambiguously willed by humans and natural habitats.

The brutal North Atlantic attacks its malleable sand shorelines continuously, both eroding and depositing the sand substance below the sea in unpredictable ways. The boundary between sea and land is constantly changing. When an urban area abuts the ocean, the omnipresent danger at the seashore presents an uncomfortable physical and political reality. Nature presents us with a problem.

As with any detailing challenge, prefabrication or modularization presents us with both opportunities and restrictions. The work of Italian architect and teacher, Carlo Scarpa, has remained an inspiration for designers tasked with the assembly of parts. His work resonates in two ways. One is in the self-revelatory nature of his drawings, at once precise, but also questioning, constantly involved in discovery, each exploration showing a history of thought. Scarpa’s work is also a treatise on joinery, how dissimilar materials, (sometimes modules), be put together in such a way as to both facilitate construction, and to simultaneously create beauty.

The goal of this studio is to propose an ocean architecture that is as dynamic as the forces of the sea acting upon it. This studio proposes an architecture that can migrate.

The physicist Werner Heisenberg’s uncertainty principle states that in the extra small scales of nature, there is a basic limit to knowing how particles will behave. In quantum physics, indeterminism is the most fundamental law of nature. At the medium scale of things, in which we architects and engineers operate, humanity has long studied the “rules of the game.” We learn that classical physics is rooted in the notion of an ordered universe. We respond to issues of energy, mass, gravity, space, and time with great specificity and control of the built and natural environment.

This studio studied and experimented with utilizing uncertainty in social and environmental contexts as a generative design process. The students examined interdisciplinary processes that support a level of uncertainty within a complex and dynamic systems, to be further investigated in students’ proposals. The design was for a non-singular space that contains habits and habitats in equal measure to support the community and propose a design that can accommodate uncertainty itself.

Should infrastructure have morals? If so, should the designs of infrastructure account for nonhuman rights?

Being a large estuary mostly enclosed by land, the distinctive geographical formation of Jamaica Bay Wildlife Refuge—both naturally and artificially—renders its flora and fauna highly vulnerable to the surrounding urban development. To name a few: John F. Kennedy International Airport, the formal Edgemere Landfill and Pennsylvania and Fountain. Avenue landfill turned into public parks, and a cluster of wastewater treatment plants dotting around its periphery. These infrastructural developments, whether historical or ongoing, have resulted in continuous ecological threats to the wildlife community in Jamaica Bay, such as flooding, erosion, and pollution. Indeed, the danger of “feral” impacts of infrastructure is that they flow, accumulate, mix and infiltrate in hidden, slow, and perpetual ways that render them so easy to be neglected. Though known as a “refuge”, the site and its nonhuman habitants suffer from persistent industrial and capitalistic violence. In this studio, you will be encouraged to re-evaluate the design principles of infrastructure by integrating considerations for nonhuman rights into the discourse. Drawing on Cary Wolfe’s perspective on multispecies justice by seeing nature not by “it” but “they”, you will be prompted to advocate for specific species’ or ecosystem’s rights through infrastructure design: Whose rights are you advocating for, and through the design of which infrastructure?