The title Prescribed, Spontaneous ritual speaks to the notion that each school day is unique. Despite certain fixed points in students’ schedules, no two days are the same. Through the studio’s topic of kinetic analysis, the project analyzes the Chinese tea ceremony, extracting ideas about the importance of order between vessels and unpredictability even in highly controlled ceremonial rituals. The result is a curriculum that both recognizes the importance of a structured, foundational knowledge base, as well as independent, project based learning. Younger students experience classes as a series of pods, each with repetitive form yet unique organization specialized for specific topics or methods of teaching. Students’ schedules and journeys through these pods are reorganized weekly, reaffirming the multitude of ways to experience the school. For older students in 7th and 8th grade, these same pods dissolve into library and workshop spaces that may help students develop their projects. For these students, the spontaneity of school comes from the discoveries in their research, different ways they approach their work, or unexpected results of collaboration. Rather than determine any particular schedule, the school acknowledges the productive nature of irregularity and offers a framework to celebrate the uniqueness of each day.

School plays an essential role in cultivating community atmosphere, especially for the next generation. Moreover, it is beneficial for students to root deeply into their local community, creating more coherent ties between family life and school. To promote interactions between community and school, I hope to turn the courtyard from a solid bar into a series of spaces, encouraging students and community members to get involved in several programs. Hence, the entity boundary is transformed into a soft and kinetic boundary. The form obeys the rule resulting from kinetic analysis of a game called freeze tag, which is one of the most popular games in my childhood memory. By paralleling the teacher to the chasing one and the student to the chased one, I got the prototype of form.

For the Kinetic Intelligence studio, I decided to study the movement of swimming. Breaking down different swim strokes by arm movements, kicking, and breathing patterns, this analysis was used to help guide the building’s design. The school has a curriculum focused around STEM classes and is meant to create an educational experience for students to interact with water at varying scales.

The 24-Hour School in Manhattan’s Lower East Side has been guided by considerations of analog movement, site, and daylight conditions. My analog movement for the semester’s study is skateboarding, a sport that thrives off of mixed materiality, unique intersections, reinterpretation of use, and equilibrium of the body. It has inspired a school and pedagogy based on balance and spontaneity. The school provides balance in a variety of scales of spaces, hard and soft materials, prospect and refuge, indoor and outdoor, and day and nighttime activity. The school enables spontaneity in its non-prescribed interstitial spaces, which provide for the creative and interpretive use of the student. Similar to how skateboarding focuses on balance and spontaneity, the school intends to provide informal and curious learning opportunities for students. Formal operations rely on balancing new masses and carving existing masses—as balance and carving of volume are two verbs central to skateboarding activities.

The Learning Field seeks to create fluidity between the different learning spaces to allow for a back-and-forth passing of knowledge among different classes. An analysis of the impact point of a soccer ball and the effect it has on the arc of a ball’s path informed the carving of the arched and lofted learning spaces. These spaces are visually connected—horizontally across the two end bars of the building, and onto the central, multifunctional soccer field, and vertically within the end bars—to inspire students to learn and experiment through observing the movements and actions occurring around them.

Intuitive dance has no choreography. Anyone who moves is a dancer and there is no right or wrong way to intuitively dance. This school extends intuitive dance as a teaching pedagogy and suggests that movement, dance, performance, and trust at the center of the design of a school can foster academic, emotional, physical, and spiritual well-being in the student body. Through the use of different prop types, IS-1 aims to provide the structure to change the learning environment to the needs of the students as they are each day. Throughout the day, students will move through the floor with their classmates, co-creating spaces with their teachers and peers based on their needs and learning styles.

My project analyzes the mechanics and philosophy behind the movements in the game ultimate frisbee, informing a school of spatial and emotional connections. In a game of continuous catch and throw, the disc flies between players through a flick of the wrist where, based on experience and knowledge, teammates react instantly to each other’s movements. In translating to form, carving the mass places central communal areas within the core where different grades mix and interact between classes. Implemented interactions across years strengthen the links between individual students, making a network of emotional strings that joins all grades—a summer intro to kindergarten, reading partners twice a week, teaching a class. The unseen bonds formed between students through a curriculum of connections allow the open space to act as a place for instinctive reaction and movement. Large and small voids open lines of sight that create split-second opportunities for friends to see each other from long distances as they leave classrooms and turn corners. In a school that fosters the individual while emphasizing the importance of kinship to the whole, the curriculum prioritizes creating strong emotional bonds between all students that can inform even the brief chance hellos between classes.

Momentum Liberation takes inspiration from the movement of bike coasting, which involves the constant charge and release of energy. The school incorporates the transition into its structural configuration and public accessibility. The shift in enclosure creates a more fluid identity of a school as an academic institution and a community center. Simultaneously, the school’s project-based curriculum allows for public engagement, emphasizing the point that the students are the driving force of community development.

How do we keep the memory of P.S. 64 while moving forward? This proposal for the new P.S. 64 is based on the premise that the essence of education is outside of the typical classroom, where the students are engaged with their community. In the new P.S. 64, the traditional classrooms are kept in the partially modified original building while the new annex functions as the heart of the school. The annex provides students with a learning environment through engagement and interaction with their city and community; it connects the school to the community through the visual arts and music. In the art and music studios, gallery, and auditorium, students are both the performers and artists as well as the audience and viewers. The annex is a symbol of moving forward from old to new, shown by the evolution of the vault to an archway and the dichotomy between rigid and light.

At the same time that P.S. 64 is much like other schools built in New York City at the turn of the century, the building has been “officially” vacant since 1977 when the school closed its doors. Since then, it has been occupied and unoccupied by various squatter groups, eventually becoming the Charas/El Bohio Cultural Center and an informal shelter for homeless individuals. The last 30 years of inactivity is a testament to the political failures of the local government and further, the importance of the building to the community. Given this importance, a serious level of sanctity is taken to the existing load-bearing masonry shell of the building while programmable CLT volumes on the interior are arranged like intricate three-dimensional puzzle pieces to test new spatial relationships. The volumes are clarified from the street by new window frames and rely on a new mass timber structural system for support and façade stabilization. With new plaza designs fronting 9th and 10th streets, with their own programmable volumes emerging from the depths of the after-school program in the basement, the project becomes a statement on designing in, out, and around the void of a highly-treasured West Village artifact, the existing masonry shell of P.S. 64.

With the current H-plan of P.S. 64, the middle bar of the existing building physically partitions the courtyards, limiting the blending of atmosphere and accessibility between 9th and 10th Street. In this project, the most prominent architectural move is to replace the existing middle bar with a conceptual “border” that divides two worlds––an open school space and an interactive community public space. Inside the architecture, new typological intervention creates dynamic spatial dialogue by purposefully misaligning between school level and public space level. On the exterior, the rippling glass façade not only functions as an urban interface by visually and physically connecting streets at each side, but it also blends with the interior programs, inviting daylighting and natural ventilation to the inside.

The P.S. 64 structure and the surrounding community gardens have been symbolic centers of local efforts to restore and invest in the public spaces of the Lower East Side neighborhood. The K-8 School of Timber Conservatory aims to continue on that legacy by providing public gardens and communal kitchens at its core. This new central insertion enables harvesting, cooking, and eating healthy food to be the main pedagogical framework of the new school. The students will learn to take care of the gardens and shape their school, growing with belief that taking care of life around them is inherently important. This aspiration will extend outside the school to taking care of their own historically significant community and ultimately transforming the public realms of the neighborhood and the city at large.

Classroom, Courtyard, Community reimagines the idea of community gardens––that established the revitalization of the East Village in the 1970s––as a new structure of how schools can foster education through community engagement. The school proposes to keep the existing outer corridors of old P.S. 64 and add two street front corridors to create a porous public courtyard building, making the school a central node for the neighborhood and encouraging engagement between the students and the community. The Triple C School is an advocate for allowing children to forge a sense of belonging within the education system by stripping the idea of the square classroom and creating both collective and private spaces for students to inhabit. The school aims to fuel the child’s imagination through a series of curved partitions that invite students to learn, play, rest, retreat, collaborate, and engage with their academic surroundings while also teaching students about the historical importance of the East Village through active community engagement. Maintaining the history of old P.S. 64 was important to the project, so The Triple C School proposes to repurpose the historic demolished brick as a new porous brick façade that will connect the inner life of the school with the existing community.

Educational buildings nowadays no longer only serve as a place to attend school and study, but as a spot to memorize and acquire inspiration. This project explores a potential methodology to transition the outdated learning environments by activating volumetric space and introducing new geometries. The proposal started from inserting new boxes into the regular and highly accessible spaces, resulting in more explorative space. With these new massings, students are motivated to continuously explore their school. Thus, architecture becomes a means to inspire their creativity and imagination. By combining learning space and playing, the school aims to give students a carefree childhood and aid in cultivating their great personalities.

P.S. 64 is ultimately political. Stuck in between multiple interweaved layers of an interest/power network, it is the rotting meat hanging on spider webs. Despite its deliciousness, for almost over 30 years it is still hanging there. Not because there are no predators, but because there are too many of them threatening each other. As enemies of each other, what is common between Gregg and Lopez is that for decades, they are both still waiting. In a way, both of them are victims of time. There is no winner, everyone loses. Lopez still lives in the building opposite the school, staring at the unfinished work every day from her window. To rescue P.S. 64 from its current situation, I argue that an architectural disruptor should be introduced to the site immediately, tomorrow, to break the dilemma of infinite waiting.

Homeland combines the history of P.S. 64 with the legacy of anarchist education and the free school movement, serving as a base for autonomous learning. Students are encouraged to make choices, take responsibility, and develop a sense of ownership of their learning space rather than being passive receivers. Adapting to the existing structure, new blocks are inserted as partitions, amenities, and characters in order to generate a range of spaces for future programming. The new ground landscape extends to the street and leads down to the atrium, turning the central zone into a space of encounter and spectacle. The people reclaim the building. The city becomes the school.