Explore
Introduction Architecture Advanced VI StudioMario Gooden, Advanced Sequence Director
1 AFTERIMAGES: ON RESTITUTION, ANIMISM, AND DIASPORAEmanuel Admassu
2 94 daysAnnie Barrett, Stephen Cassell
4 The Removal of Motion (Everything Must Scale 6)Michael Bell
5 RISK | Climate, Architecture, and Uncertainty David Benjamin
6 Bridge StudioPatrice Derrington, Christoph Kumpusch
7 The Space of Water: Coloniality, Water, and IndigeneityMario Gooden
8 THE LA WATER STUDIOLaurie Hawkinson
9 The Institutions We Need: New Museums for New Historical Accounts
Juan Herreros, Ricky Ruihong Li
10 A Factory As It Might BeMimi Hoang
11 BUILDING ON BUILDINGSWonne Ickx
12 Wood & Plants @ AveryGordon Kipping
13 URBAN EXOSTRUCTURES: PRISONS, FOOD, WATER, POWERLaura Kurgan
14 MakergraphGiuseppe Lignano, Ada Tolla
15 Shaping Spaces of SovereigntyJustin Moore, Oscar Oliver-Didier
16 King Kong ManhattanAnna Puigjaner
17 Small FootprintsHilary Sample
18 Architecting: A Think Tank in Los AngelesGalia Solomonoff
Introduction
Architecture Advanced VI Studio
Mario Gooden, Advanced Sequence Director
The Advanced Architecture Studios address an ambitious scope of concerns, considered in relation to architecture’s social, material, environmental, and political potentials, with projects ranging from an addition to Avery Hall that investigates the co-existance of wood and plants in building materials; structures that mitigate and adapt to climate change, informed by research authored by scientists at Columbia’s Climate School; the development of reparative connections between urban and rural New York through architecture; and adaptive reuse of a former factory into an incubator for art and design in Houston, Texas. Studios considered sites in New York City, Upstate New York; Puerto Rico; Honolulu, Los Angeles, and beyond. The studios affirmed the potentials of architecture as a sociopolitical project, one that is committed to the intersectionalities of climate, equity, design & data city and its communities yet remains open to uncertain futures.
Architecture Advanced VI Studio Assistant: Khadija Tarver
1
AFTERIMAGES: ON RESTITUTION, ANIMISM, AND DIASPORA
Emanuel Admassu
This studio foregrounded restitution—linking Western museums to their imperial foundations—as starting points to articulate the intersections of architecture, heritage, and migration. In recent years, global debates with tremendous cultural and political consequences have been brewing over the vast collections of looted African artifacts dispersed across European and North American museums. These debates, augmented by scholarly and artistic interventions are calling attention to critical questions: What can the museum become when it ceases to be an afterimage of coloniality? How can we use this moment of protests, strikes, and direct actions at museums, as counterpoints to the ossification of Western art institutions?
Studio Assistant: Jerry Zhao
Students: Abriannah Aiken, Alexa Greene, Adrianna Fransz, Farouk Kwaning, Gene Han, Keneilwe Ramaphosa, Kylie Walker, Max Goldner, Sonny Han, Siye Huang
Unconditioned Art Space
These are the sites of unconditioning: the land, the objects, the people. The proposal challenges...
Shroud, Bury, Return
Shroud, Bury, Return reimagines the museum typology: what becomes of the museum when it is no ...
Resurrection Museum
The NMAFA’s new radical future starts in 5 years during the construction period of ROHC (Revit...
Palimpsestic Animism
My intervention for a future museum and art cultivation space focuses on a transnational approach...
2
94 days
Annie Barrett, Stephen Cassell
This studio proposed a focus on the construction of a daily practice; a simple, ritualistic process of making and re-making and an exploration of how the work produced therein, recursively reconsidering the same thing again and again, might inherently take on extraordinary, complex and robust properties. The studio began with a focus on our immediate context – the exact effects of the diurnal cycle that defines each single day – as we cultivated a routinized daily practice. During the first half of the semester, each student designed a space that intimately, meticulously, and rigorously engaged the effects of the sun and the interplay of sunlight and space. As the semester unfolded, students took their research in divergent, individualistic directions, yielding a diverse set of interrelated projects.
Studio Assistant: Emily Ruopp
Students: Andres Julian Alvarez,
Iris Hong,
Haotong Xia,
Jiageng Guo,
Jo Hee Lee,
Qijian Cu,
Henderson Beck,
Tianyi Zhang,
Xinan Tan,
Yuchen Huang,
Yang Lu,
Yusuf Urlu
The Box of Secrets
An ambiguous massing located in Bryant Park functions during the day as a secret-telling input de...
The Red Ritual
The boundary between the man-made world and the natural has always been an interesting point of d...
3
THE TOUR 022
Gary Bates
The contemporary commercialized notion of tourism, an economic framework in the guise of culture, job creation, and leisure, simultaneously reflects class alienation, environmental dystopia, cultural homogenization, and commodity fetishism. The imminent return of mobility—car, boat, plane, train—provides the starting point for a new ethical idea of tourism. The Tour can take on a new role: scaleless, restorative, virtuous, invisible, and caring. In this course, students examined an alternative reading of The Tour, exploring its DNA through the lens of living, experiences, energy, motion, transience, food, augmentation, perception, and time to project an alternative future for The Tour. Through The Tour, the studio investigated climate research where climate change is most visible, tourism where the environment is most fragile, food production, clean energy, and alternative forms of living.
Studio Assistant: Elie Zeinoun
Students: Ata Gun Aksu,
Aahana Banker,
Anthea Viloria,
Bisher Tabbaa,
Dhruva Lakshminarayanan,
Fang Wan,
Johane Clermont,
Talia Li,
Rourke Brakeville,
Yi Liang,
Yining Lai,
Yinlei Pang,
The Tesseract
The Tesseract proposes an alternative way of coliving—one that incorporates its surrounding en...
Decentralize LA
Our food system is largely centralized and it’s failing. The agricultural industry is becoming...
Adaptable Archive : Activism Toward Land
The first goal of the project was to build an Art organization center for artists in employmen...
4
The Removal of Motion (Everything Must Scale 6)
Michael Bell
In this course, students designed a new small-scale workplace for remote work or education in the emerging post-Covid era. The studio imagined the workplace in the nascent and diminished and/or newly distributed economy to address long-term transformation in where individuals live, learn and work. Design work was imagined at a high level of detail with a focus on how it is manufactured. The studio focused on how and where concepts of motion are central to architecture and where its acceleration and removal are understood as beneficial and part of contemporary experience. In what ways does one’s movement—to work, to home—in how one works or how architecture works—change? Ultimately, the studio aimed to test an architecture component of a future form of settlement.
Studio Assistant: Magdelena Valdevenito
Students: Bisheng Hong, Enfeng Xie, Han Kuo, Henry Han, Jiazheng Zhang, Jinseon Noh, Muyu Wu, Shikang Ding, Xiangru Zhao, Yaxin Jiang, Yingying Zhou, Yuchen Qiu
Balance of Office Surveillance
Current surveillance is so advanced that it hinders creators from creating great work. Their work...
Everything All on Track
In the wake of the pandemic, more and more people were forced to work from home or elsewhere. Wit...
Revolving House
The current state of living and working conditions are disjointed, resulting in the possibility o...
LightWork - Future Distributed Work Space
The project imagines a network of lightweight inflated temporary distributed workspaces in the fu...
The X
Imagine… the Departure without anxiety; Imagine…the Journey without boundaries; Imagine… the Adve...
5
RISK | Climate, Architecture, and Uncertainty
David Benjamin
How can society address climate risks through narratives and climate models? How can it translate these risks into action? And what can architecture do? What protection do buildings provide in these scenarios? What role do buildings play in creating these crises? This course focused on this territory of Risk, addressing climate change, architecture, and design with uncertainty. Over the course of the semester, students worked with scientists at the Columbia Climate School and learned about modeling and predicting climate disasters while also developing tools for telling stories about climate futures. It explored the architecture of mitigating and adapting to climate change to prototype the buildings and cities of the future.
Studio Assistant: Lucy Navarro
Students: Adeline Chum,
Adam Vosburgh,
Ana Paola Hernandez,
Daniel Kim,
Gejin Zhu,
Kyounghwa Lee,
Ryan Hansen,
Selim Jung,
Takashi Honzawa,
Xin Chen,
Xumin Chen,
Yi Liang
Rebuilding Paradise through the Paradise Human Climate Impact Model
This project speculates on the Rebuilding of Paradise WUI Pilot Project through the combined e...
Extraction Reversal
This project creates adaptive infrastructure based on outdated energy productions using tools tha...
Subterranean District One
Average temperatures above 125 °F like those in Death Valley seem unusual, however according t...
Safe Heaven for Elephants
Africa is the most vulnerable area where the temperature increases due to climate risk and is ...
Spider City
By 2050, the rising sea levels of New Orleans would pressure on the levee and make it more prone ...
Hunts Point 2080
Hunts Point 2080 is a story that explores uncertain climate risks for the future of New York City...
6
Bridge Studio
Patrice Derrington, Christoph Kumpusch
This studio responded to five focal points, or pillars, of development: equity, advocacy, adaptability, variability, and sustainability. These pillars acted as questions to redefine what it means to be a critical developer, an architect, or a participant in the physical and imagined environments. Investigations occurred through research, drawing, modeling, making, collaborating, investigating, interacting, and outreach. From human to non-human (machine learning (ML) and algorithms), this studio offered diverse ways of reading, seeing, and understanding the human condition within the built environment. Apart from the resulting architectural bodies, or archi-types, it focused on interactions between the human body and the urban body: crossing the lines of transportation, adaptation, and configuration to project a future reality of what it means to inhabit the city.
Studio Assistant: Jerry Zhao
Students: Alonso Ortega, Josh Westerman,
Cara DePippo, Graham Drennan,
Kamu Kakizaki, Karan Matta,
Karen Wan Jia Chen, Jason Seung Lee,
Kourosh Fathi, Qingyang Yu,
Josh Bransky, Nash Taylor
Fragmented Inversions
Through model making and quantitative analysis in excel, this project explores the relationshi...
H to N
The ambition of this studio was to bridge the gap between architecture and real estate which e...
Public Building No1
In order to accommodate a growing population and serious housing needs in the community, the exis...
7
The Space of Water: Coloniality, Water, and Indigeneity
Mario Gooden
This studio asked, “what are the spatial practices of liberation before the subjugating forces of property, capitalism, forms of enclosure, and architecture?” The studio examined the transcultural connectedness of liberatory spatial practices with a focus on the ecological spatial practices of the Hawai’i ahupua‘a system and the interdependent relationships between humans, land, water, and non-human species. Through engaging storytelling and alternative methods of research and representation, the studio developed architectural / counter-architectural interventions along the Ala Wai Canal for the radical reclamation and reparation of the ahupua'a ecosystem as well as the radical transmutation of the canal—its spatial, material, and temporal conditions.
Studio Assistant: Sarah Hejazin
Students: Estefania Haydee Serrano Soto,
Henry Black,
Ralph Cheng,
Hazel Villena,
Max Cai,
Jiaying Qu,
Leah Smith,
Yingjie Liu,
Yanan Zhou,
Zhanhao Fan
Pu'uhonua Hale Community
The Pu’uhonua Hale Community is a place of refuge that aims to re-establish connections to ea by ...
Watershed Spines
Throughout the years Waikiki has evolved to be a heavily urbanized area in Oahu. As elements of t...
Blurred Ecologies
This project looks at how the ecology and connection to the natural environment have changed from...
Learn From Hawaii - Counter-Tourism Programming
Following the general research conducted in advance of our trip to Hawaii and the realization ...
minimalistic decolonization
The project mainly focused on three major points to revert the land around Fort Derussy to its...
militourism in Hawaii
Both U.S. military personnel and tourists are a familiar sight in Hawaii. Militarism and touri...
Ola I Ka Wai
Ola I ka wai, in Hawaiian, can be translated as water is life. All life forms on Hawaii island re...
8
THE LA WATER STUDIO
Laurie Hawkinson
This studio, THE LA WATER STUDIO: Speculating on the Convergence of Nature and Culture at LA’s Sepulveda Flood Control Basin, speculated on a site at the Los Angeles River and the Sepulveda Dam in the greater Los Angeles where two large infrastructural conditions converge: suburban sprawl and the 100-year flood control basin. It analyzed this complex and extra-large-scale physical environment through many trajectories: geophysical, historical, environmental, technological, political, cultural, and economic. As a result, students developed proposals beyond the accommodation of the flood control facility and proposed public programs to partner at the site. Designs projected what life will be like in this near-future scenario, speculated changes in lifestyles and social behaviors, and envisioned how the designs may impact California’s growing population.
Studio Assistant: Joel McCullough
Students: Allison Jane Shahidi,
Anays Mical Gonzalez,
Bingyu Xia,
Gizem Karagoz,
Jason Young Kim,
Mu Dong Jung,
Risa Mimura,
Brian Wei-Chun Chou,
Wanqi Jiang,
Zida Liu
SEPULVEDA WATERBASIN: A Climate Park Mediating Between Extremes
‘SEPULVEDA WATERBASIN: A Climate Park Mediating Between Extremes’ centers the Los Angeles River i...
LA Water
Pretentious art on a pretentious wall in a pretentious gallery. Not in this park. The artworks he...
9
The Institutions We Need: New Museums for New Historical Accounts
Juan Herreros, Ricky Ruihong Li
This studio sets out to review and redesign the museum in response to the contemporary conditions of art and cultural institutions. With a critical purview of the extractive histories and institutional architectures of collection and display, the projects of this studio explore the potentials and strategies of spatial intervention in negotiating the (post)coloniality of museological contexts. Varying in forms, techniques, and settings, they propose radical recalibrations of architecture in the social, political, aesthetic, semantic, and programmatic registers for four major museums in Manhattan.
Studio Assistant: Mark Kantai
Students: Chuqi Huang,
Erxiao Chu,
Haoran Xu,
Jonathan Liang,
Luz Auyon,
Mingxun Zou,
Novak Djogo,
U Kei Long,
Wanting Sun,
Xueyin Lu,
Yiheng Lin,
Yilun Sun
Here We ReMet
The MET is never one building but an accretion of multiple buildings that have been annexed an...
El Barrio
Once a place of celebration and education of Puerto Rican Culture, el Museo del Barrio became ...
METROPOLITAN RECOLLECTION
The mission of the Metropolitan Museum of Art, colloquially “the Met”, is an encyc...
The Frick Collection: House for Everyone
As the Frick Collection museum transformed from a luxurious 20th-century residence, the exclus...
10
A Factory As It Might Be
Mimi Hoang
As we continue to raise our collective conscience regarding socially and environmentally progressive production practices, speculating about architecture’s role in shaping the processes and environmental impact of production becomes critically important. What are the architectural corollaries and opportunities for innovation at the scale of the factory, its spatial components and its relation to the city and productive landscapes?
Studio Assistant: Magdelena Valdevenito
Students: Charul Punia,
Danlei Yang,
John Alexander Trujillo,
Malvina Mathioudaki,
Maxim D Kolbowski-Frampton,
Malavika Madhuraj,
SeokHyun Kim,
Siyu Xiao,
Vinay Agrawal,
Xiucong Han,
Yuening Jiang,
Yinlei Pang
Fabric + Furniture Factory
Situated on the edge of the industrially rich site of Red Hook, the factory processes bamboo into...
Under one roof : Material Factory
This project aims to explore the factory as a complex, essentially linking workflow between proje...
Under One Roof
The proposal is located at Bush Terminal, a historic intermodal shipping, warehousing, and manufa...
Redhook bio-char brick factory
The project re-imagines the factory as a park, generator, and demonstration site for carbon seque...
A Vertical Brewery Incubator
The Vertical Brewery Incubator of Red Hook provides aspiring brewers with co-working spaces an...
11
BUILDING ON BUILDINGS
Wonne Ickx
In the studio BUILDING ON BUILDINGS: Art & Design Incubator at former Coca-Cola bottling plant, Houston, TX, students worked on the site of the former Coca-Cola bottling plant in Houston, Texas, investigating the existing structures and the open space in between them. The studio explored different possibilities to incorporate a 10,000 ㎡ “Incubator for Arts and Design” on the site while leaving a maximum of possibilities open for future developments. The title of the studio not only referred—in a literal sense—to the fact that students built on top of previous constructions, but also proposed an architectural thinking that learns from the past and distills lessons from previous building experiences. If architecture is embedded in history, how can architects insert new narratives, ambitions, and values into the established architectural practice & how can the past be included in the design for the future?
Studio Assistant: Jared Payne
Students: Alya James Abourezk,
Aditi Shetye,
Danielle Nir,
Francesca Doumet,
Gustavo Lopez Mendoza,
Bianca Lin,
Nash Gregory Taylor,
Roderick Macfarlane,
Sixuan Chen,
Yunlong Fan,
Vasco Li,
Yukun Tian
Ground Matter
Ground Matter is a prototypical proposal to reimagine the role of adaptive reuse for a decommissi...
Houston Currents
Houston Currents proposes an art incubator at the historic Coca-Cola Bottling Plant in Houston, T...
Art Incubator + Housing in Houston
The studio, “Buildings on Buildings,” asks two main questions: 1) How can we repurpose a forme...
ARTPLANT #2800
ARTPLANT #2800 situated on the site of the former Coca-Cola bottling plant in Houston, considered...
Houston Bottling
The title of our project is Houston Bottling, an arts and design incubator in the former Houston ...
Network (Art & Design Incubator in Houston)
This is a mixed-use art & design incubator project in Houston. The adaptive reuse project ...
12
Wood & Plants @ Avery
Gordon Kipping
Architects are confronted with changing what and how they build to reverse the impending climate disaster. The W&P@A Studio proposed solutions by investigating wood and plants as coexisting building materials. In the first half of the course, students designed and built full-size wood constructions, filling the studio with oxygen and the visual delight of plants. In the second half, students proposed a roof addition to Avery Hall, a programmatic extension of the school, using their acquired knowledge of plants and wood construction with the added element of a power generation apparatus. They built sustainably, mitigating extreme heat, reducing the power demand of the school, and adorning the historic building with a visually dynamic and symbolic hat worthy of GSAPP and befitting of the times.
Studio Assistant: Emily Ruopp
Students: Benjamin Fox,
Alexis Hao Zheng,
Hao Zhong,
Juno Lee,
Kennedy Marie Van Trump,
Qingfan Wu,
Radha Devang,
Zihan Sun
The Living Crown
Baubotanik is a new building method in which architectural structures are created through the int...
Outside-in Studio Space
The intent was to study different plant species and create a plant-inclusive extension of Avery t...
13
URBAN EXOSTRUCTURES: PRISONS, FOOD, WATER, POWER
Laura Kurgan
This studio envisioned new patterns, spatial imaginations, and networked programs for post-prison futures. They addressed prisons not in isolation but as part of a larger series of flows and transfers that connect upstate and downstate, urban and rural. These infrastructures—carceral, water, food, and power, among others—act as urban exo-structures that were considered systemically. Individual projects worked together as a network of interventions in Upstate and Downstate New York, introducing new economies, new networks, and an imagination of alternative architectures for future reparative connections between urban and rural New York.
Studio Assistant: Tung Nguyen
Students: Ethan Davis,
Hyuein Song,
Junho Lee,
Leon Duval,
Sanober Khan,
Shan Li,
Shulong Ren,
Yani Gao,
Zhichen Gong
Re-connecting the Motel
With the rapid gentrification, Kingston’s average home price rose more than 20 percent in 2...
14
Makergraph
Giuseppe Lignano, Ada Tolla
This course used, as an armature, the controversial 1967/68 proposal for a Columbia University Gymnasium in Morningside Park. This ultimately unbuilt structure illuminated structural inequities in Morningside Heights and Harlem and was a catalyst for the 1968 student movements at the school. The studio’s investigation applied tools of architectural theory and practice to the historical complicities of institutions of Architecture and Academy, including their current obligations and opportunities. The students looked at how personal stories are woven into shared stories. They found moments of reckoning and repairing, thinking and making, rethinking and remaking. Ultimately, the studio conceived, designed, developed, and made an intervention into the typology of the monument and the topography of the park—to reveal, to highlight, to focus, to reframe, to radically transform.
Studio Assistant: Jesse Catalano
Students: Aya Abdallah,
Charlton McGlothlin,
Eric Chyou,
Jordan Readyhough,
Kaeli Alika Streeter,
Maria Lina Ramirez,
Mickaella Pharaon,
Nikolas Bentel,
Osvaldo Adrian Delbrey,
Ruben Dario Gomez Ganan,
Yefei Guo,
Zakios Meghrouni-Brown
My Book
Who Is “I”? How did I attempt to find “I”? It is done through a personal ...
Mechanisms and Bodies
“Mechanisms and Bodies” is an exercise of self-knowledge, a situated practice of u...
15
Shaping Spaces of Sovereignty
Justin Moore, Oscar Oliver-Didier
This studio, Shaping Spaces of Sovereignty: Design for Decolonial Realities and Visions in Puerto Rico, identified and further shaped spaces of sovereignty in the context of Puerto Rico’s perennial and extreme conditions of contingency and coloniality. With a grounding in place, local needs, and imagination, students articulated their vision and mission and their understanding of ethics as a basis for their power and agency as an architect. While design is a means for making places, it is also a means for keeping places. The studio aimed to design revolutionary places and experiences that support the process of decolonization and enable greater self-determination in Puerto Rico and its communities. It sought to develop, communicate, and visualize ideas for how various places could transform, be sustained, and thrive to stakeholders and the broader public.
Studio Assistant: Mark Kantai
Students: Aikaterini Papoutsa,
Andrew Magnus,
Shelly Beiyi Xu,
Can Yang,
Meissane Aude Kouassi,
Omar Badriek,
Qiwei Sun,
Stephanie McMorran, Yufei Liu
Land After Luxury
“Land After Luxury” speculates the agro-ecological potentials of Puerto Rico’s rural spaces. It t...
16
King Kong Manhattan
Anna Puigjaner
Studying a fragment of the Manhattan grid as a starting point for an architectural proposal, this studio imagined urban forms and architectures that provide alternative living realities in which disruptive values, new kinships, and commonalities are set for the collective good. Responding to that approach, the students dismantled the preexistent openings that allowed new relations and ways of caring to emerge. They envisioned new ways of producing the island of Manhattan that did not reproduce the former process of categorization and normativization. The otherness, the wildness, the diverse, the complex, the queer, and the unpractical served as paths to explore. Instead of a city run by infrastructure and real estate control, this course imagined a city formalized mainly on care practices and complex social bonds.
Studio Assistant: Jared Payne
Students: Anoushae Eirabie, Ava S. Heckman,
Camille Newton,
Stella Dai,
Jules Kleitman,
Ke Zhai,
Livia Lucia Calari,
Lucia Song,
Meichen Wang,
Tamim Aljefri,
Yunha Choi,
Yutong Deng
Breathe Again
Donna Haraway in her lecture Staying with the Trouble: Making Kin in the Chthulucene states that ...
Urban Fabric
The Urban Fabric District uses the Garment District as a prototype to return life to homogenized ...
Libraries of Domesticities
Libraries of Domesticities proposes an alternative to Manhattan blocks shaped by private, indi...
Pier Escaping
This design focuses on exploring new kinship and chooses Chelsea Pier and the surrounding blocks ...
The Tower of Constellations
The Tower of Constellations explores the relationship between queerness and capitalism, especiall...
A Different Domain: Live-Work
This project focuses on the notion of the live/work typology. As the shift in trend to work from ...
17
Small Footprints
Hilary Sample
This studio looked at the history of New York City settlement housing and working women and childrens’ housing. Architecturally, it worked through a variety of building types and their storefronts as spaces that connect to the street and serve as distinct places from the street and housing above. In response to the ongoing NYC housing crisis, the studio looked especially to the challenge of vacant spaces across the city today. Deeply concerned with how to adaptively reuse, these spaces and their intersection with housing and public health suggest a way to reimagine city and street life. As a result, the studio reimagined how these spaces and other interior spaces remake life through the culture and functions of a clinic and supportive housing for nurses.
Studio Assistant: Joel McCullough
Students: Ryan Alexander,
Santiago Alvarez Santibanez,
Daniela Beraun,
Jiafeng Gu,
Sophia Le,
Yang Lu,
Lichong Tong,
An Wang,
Helen Winter,
Wenxuan Xu,
Zheng Yin, Zenah Sakaamini
When Nurses become Patients
Who takes care of our caretakers?
This project prioritizes members of society who are ...
Food + Fuzz
The topic of mental health has always been a pressing issue, especially within minority groups...
18
Architecting: A Think Tank in Los Angeles
Galia Solomonoff
If everything relates to something else, our sphere, the build environment, relates to all others. It
is in fact connected and central to every other sphere of knowledge and problem. It follows, that
solving one problem, will in fact start to solve other problems.
The Think Tank Studio followed a seminar format for the first two weeks of the semester. In this
seminar, students thought of architecture as a verve. Architecting was the act of learning,
connecting, proposing, designing, controlling, and building all at once.
The studio also studied a variety of existing think tanks, such as the Earth Institute, and Brookings
Institution destined to resolve social, scientific, and economic problems using cross-disciplinary
knowledge.
A think tank is an organized group of cross-disciplinary research with the objective of providing
advice or action on a diverse range of issues using combined specialized knowledge and the
activation of networks. The studio’s premises were:
- As cities and scholarly institutions around the world seek to solve twenty-first century
social, technological, and environmental issues, under severe budgetary constraints, the
need for cross-disciplinary research is everywhere.
- Many of the large-scale problems of today need to be thought of as part of a whole
system and are related to the way in which we build, organize cities, and produce
infrastructures.
- The combination of the data infrastructure and the building infrastructure shape every
aspect of our real and virtual environments from climate emergencies to natural
resources scarcity, to the economic imbalances in our societies between scarcity and
plenty.
Studio Assistant: Tung Nguyen
Students: Ece Cetin,
Hannah Rose Stollery,
Haozhen Yang,
Irmak Turanli,
Jialu Deng,
Kurt Cheang,
Minghan Lin,
Ningyuan Deng,
Peicong Zhang,
Richard Y.H. Sa,
Sunghyun Kim,
Sujin Shim
Data + Ethics
Data + Ethics is a think tank focused on the effective use, outreach, and development of scientif...
The Next Emergency Institute
The Next Emergency Institute will be an institute for research for disaster preparedness, mitigat...
Institute of Water
Los Angeles has long been associated with the water crisis due to its dry climate with little ann...
The Earth Institute (LA)
The new Earth Institute building on the hills of Los Angeles is an active campus that brings toge...
19
Detox USA
Mark Wasiuta
With the intertwining of culture and environment at stake, this studio has analyzed, reconceived, and redesigned the architectures and spaces of the condition we call our “chemical modernity.” “Concentration” has served as a marker of environmentally altered sites, political chemical histories, and cultural institutions. It has also been used as a critical, spatial device that has allowed a complex and perhaps unobserved relation between architecture, environment, chemicals, and artifacts to appear. The studio has asked how toxicity—in all its forms, from petrochemicals to particulates, and from opiates to air pollution—became a salient and defining feature of our modernity and of our architecture, cities, landscapes, and territories. Toxicities may write themselves into the air, soil, water, and buildings around us, but they also accumulate within myriad systems of representation. With and through concentration, we have asked how to work with toxicity, read not only as environmental tragedy, or as the atmospheric unconscious of modernity, but also as sign and materialization of both culture and contamination.
Studio Assistant: Farah Alkhoury
Students: Alyna Karachiwala,
Benjamin Caleb Diller-Schatz,
Leo Wan,
Duo Xu,
Hyosil Yang,
Jean Kim,
Nayef Alsabhan,
Qing Hou,
Rocio Crosetto Brizzio,
Reem Makkawi,
Claire Chen,
Joyce Zhou
1352 Blast Studio
Hollywood was not only the center of filming entertainment movies, but it was also the center of ...
Slow Canal
Cutting across the Suez is a 700-foot wide, 120-mile long waterway connecting the Red Sea to t...
The Oil High
When living among oil infrastructures becomes unavoidable, whether for the livelihood of the whol...
Chroma Counterculture: Paint, Gas & Glitter in Postwar Domestic Interiors
Paint is a substance that covers every surface we touch from coatings to lacquers and varnishe...
EVERYDAYLAND, Living within Disney’s Chemical Spectacle
Chemicals and spectacle are indivisible elements in Disney World. Despite the persistent image...
