The Advanced Architecture Studio IV framework looks at the varied scales of the environment through the lens of a specific geographic context. During the Spring 2022 semester all studios, with the exception of Stranded Assets studio, focused on the “rural” geography of upstate New York, unpacking its environmental and religious history and its relationship to the city of New York.

Students engaged in rigorous quantitative and qualitative research, while also engaging directly with the representatives of several minority communities throughout the semester. This research entailed mapping exercises, experimentation with renewable materials and construction methods, testing innovative remediation strategies, manipulating topographic terrain, exploring water flows and water holdings strategies, studying the impact of seasonal cycles on built forms, and challenged students to pursue design strategies that operated at multiple scales.

How do we make visible sites of refuge that were meant to be hidden; the sites of sanctuary where fugitives found protection and community? The past and present converge around labor – the forced labor of the 17th, 18th and 19th centuries and the exploitative labor practices on the farms, orchards and wineries of today. This studio investigated the communities and spaces that provided safety both as part of the Underground Railroad and the present-day Sanctuary Movement that support the undocumented. The students engaged with issues of fugitivity and immigration, memory and monument and designed a memorial and sanctuary on the site of a free Black community, New Guinea, in Hyde Park, NY.

The second iteration of the “Sanctuaries” studio continues to explore the multitudinous manifestations of the term and its socio-political and spatial architecture within the r/urban territory. Originating from the religiopolitical zone of “sanctuarium” in the ancient city-states, the contemporary appellation sanctuary came to mean the ground of generosity and protection, and the space of exception and escape at once. Hosting the spaces of privileged leisure and the invisiblized immigrant community and migrant workers at once, and simultaneously populated by cherished ecological preserves, violated Native American sacred grounds, and the locations of pardoned impunity afforded for multinational corporate polluters, the Hudson Valley and the parallel and multiple realities of its “sanctuaries’‘ lend an effective lens to interrogate and challenge the extractive legacy of colonization, and the subjection of nature and other “others” through the built environment. The studio aims to explore new possibilities in the architecture of sanctuaries, while investigating the ideologies of care and sanctity, and challenging their often hardened enclosures.

The studio scope consisted of an investigation of the architectural and “charitable” programmatic capacity of the forms of rural settlement developed by religious communities in Upstate New York. Building upon previous studios’ work, students critically unpacked Islamberg’s historical evolution and probed the hamlet’s architectural and territorial relationships to its physical environment (political, geological, natural, post-industrial, infrastructural). Using the Waqf legal document (religious endowment) as a conceptual framework, the studio identified and proposed a physical intervention (waqf object), and accompanying charitable program (waqf benefits), for the religious Muslim community hamlet of Islamberg (waqf beneficiaries), with the support of charities partners in Upstate New York (waqf donors).

This studio identified physical interventions to the detached house, the landscape in between, and agricultural land that reorganized, transformed, altered, or replaced it, unlocking spatial configurations of alternative forms of social aggregation. To formulate an architectural vision of a new commons, students expanded their understanding of the commons not only as shared domestic and economic space but as space that provides resources beyond shelter and commerce. While assuming that the twenty-first-century commons would provide these resources, in addition to shelter and commerce; the studio devised an architecture that accommodated the requirements of these diverse resources within a framework of shared production and consumption that is physically, economically, environmentally, and culturally accessible to all.

In this studio, students proposed a Hudson Valley Museum of Nature, the “Hudson Ark.” The museums were designed to exhibit the flora and fauna currently thriving in the Hudson Valley with an emphasis on species threatened or close to extinction, some surviving in unusual circumstances. Students aspired to maintain complete symbiosis with all elements of Nature, neither giving nor taking more than their fair share. As architects, they ascribed to tendencies that support this goal including the notions of efficiency, organic design, lightweight and biodegradable structure, and the re-use of structures over time. This studio asked, can architects agree to a dictum similar with one required of medical professionals, that is, (to act forcefully) but “to do no harm”?

The studio studied the impact of abandoned or underutilized public infrastructures to propose policies, programs, and designs that reconcile them with the landscape, natural systems, and local communities. The focus of our studio is the Hudson Valley, a region that experienced rapid growth during the Industrial Revolution followed by decline due to the advent of new technologies,resulting in abandoned infrastructure throughout the region. Students explored different types of “stranded assets” which are public and private infrastructure with communal and environmental value that have been or will become abandoned due to political, economic, environmental, and technological change. They explored how these infrastructures can be rebuilt in innovative ways to address environmental and equity goals and address issues that led to or were caused by their stranding. The studio looked at interventions in the territory—including infrastructures, extraction quarries, landfills, etc.—that have altered its environmental and socio-economic dynamics, analyzing them in terms of their impacts and opportunities. These were understood as assets to promote the ecological regeneration of the region as well as to address the socio-economic and environmental challenges of surrounding communities. The studio’s final proposals promoted new and more holistic ways to connect mankind to nature and to imagine new ways to live under contemporary planetary challenges.

This studio examined mental health care in the Hudson Valley, exploring practices of care that foreground connections between mental wellness and social justice movements. A region with a high number of historical psychiatric hospitals, the Hudson Valley has witnessed the critique and dismantling of those institutions without sufficient replacement in mental health care. Dutchess County, in particular, has been devastated by the opioid crisis and seen significant increases in mental health needs during the pandemic. Through conversations with guest speakers and community partners in Poughkeepsie, students learned about practices of radical mental health and healing justice that challenge conventions of psychiatric systems and support historically marginalized communities. The studio explored how issues of cultural identity, psychology, and spirituality become entangled in visions for transformative care.

In this course, students designed a vertical commons, a community-owned forest, and a research and manufacturing facility that produces mass timber for urban centers in the northeast, using mass timber as the primary building material. After establishing an idealized scale and brownfield site, students analyzed ecological and material flows to propose new methods of generating and distributing renewable materials through new rituals and greater purposes. Students designed an architecture that supports an intentional cadence of life, describing through drawing how the place actively participates in reducing carbon emissions and engages in environmental justice.