Displaying over 1,000 student works, Columbia GSAPP’s End of Year Show occupies the entire Avery Hall at the heart of Columbia’s Morningside Campus in Manhattan from May 13–20, as well as this online platform. The physical and digital exhibition highlights Columbia GSAPP’s continuing pedagogical experimentation responding to contemporary climatic, ecological, societal, and technological challenges; and confronting colonialism and racialization through the built environment. It is a momentous effort that brings together a wide range of student work operating in the entanglement of planetary dynamics, territories, infrastructures, bodies, and microscopic realms, situating action as criticality transitioning across scales.
The End of Year Show includes work from Columbia GSAPP’s degree programs in Advanced Architectural Design; Architecture; Computational Design Practices; Critical, Curatorial, and Conceptual Practices; Historic Preservation; Real Estate Development; Urban Design; and Urban Planning; as well as work developed in their intersections. This show accounts both for what is specific from each field, and how GSAPP works beyond disciplinary silos to claim the inseparability of practice, theory, and activism; offering a broad spectrum of actioned knowledge to address challenges and opportunities that cannot be envisioned from a single perspective. These interactions are further enhanced by the School’s rich context of its research centers and labs, including the Center for Resilient Cities and Landscapes, the Center for Spatial Research, the Global Africa Lab, the Housing Lab, the Natural Materials Lab, the Post-Conflict Cities Lab, the Preservation Technology Laboratory, and the Temple Hoyne Buell Center for American Architecture; as well as its collaborations with other schools across Columbia University.
This exhibition celebrates the successful graduation of the first cohort of the Master of Science in Computational Design Practices, a new program which pioneers critical pedagogies for an integrated multi-scalar approach to computational design at the intersection of architecture, data visualization, and urbanism.