Past Members

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Initiatives

2016-17

Animate Lot

Animate Lot is an idea-driven spatial design practice bringing together art, architecture and computation. Its aim is to provoke the parameters of culture, organization and economy with design research focusing on methods for perceptual stimulation, gradients of function and material fact. Its practice has a passion for inputting data into form while outputting strategies for superimposition, reorganization and intervention as exploits for the city. Animate Lot’s founder Allen Ghaida is a New York City based designer and theorist focused on architectural projects linked to formal strategy and urban intervention. His current project to be lead during the incubator, titled “Containers for New Contingents”, seeks to augment current approaches to occupying and sharing commercial space, aiming to make the corporate open floor plan more executable to the new contingencies of nimble work environments, assemblies and exchanges.

www.anim-l.com

Ashley Simone

Ashley Simone is a New York City based photographer, designer, editor and educator. She received an M.Arch from the Graduate School of Architecture, Planning and Preservation, Columbia University and teaches in the School of Architecture at Pratt Institute. She is a fellow of the Consortium for Sustainable Urbanization, run in tandem with the United Nations. Her recent editorial work includes the books A Genealogy of Modern Architecture: Comparative Critical Analysis of Built Form by Kenneth Frampton (2015) and Absurd Thinking between Art and Design by Allan Wexler (2016). Her practice is centered on architecture and visual communication. While at the Incubator she will continue her work in graphic design and photography of the urban and built environments. At the same time, she will edit Two Journeys, a book on the work of Michael Webb (Archigram) and begin a collaborative curatorial project for an exhibition on the graphic design of Kenneth Frampton, which will focus on the design and production techniques of work he executed as the editor of Architectural Design (London) during the 1960s.

www.ashleysimone.com

Bika Rebek

Bika Rebek’s work at the GSAPP Incubator questions the relationship between museums and technology using the Incubator as a testing ground for collaborative models between institutional structures and communities engaged in the research of novel digital technique. Projects range from streamlining exhibition design processes to fostering discourse and publishing on the use and display of computing in museum practice. Bika Rebek is an architect practicing within heterogeneous formats- as an integral part of her work performances, installations and writing act as catalysts for open ended thinking about architectural production. She is an adjunct assistant professor at Columbia GSAPP and a principal at Studio SibilaSoon. Her work has been featured in the New York Times and Fast Company and her writing published in The Architect’s Newspaper, Bartlett’s Lobby magazine, and the Estonian architectural newspaper Maja. In the past year Bika has worked at The Met as an Exhibition Designer with special focus on the Met Breuer. Previously she has worked for Asymptote Architecture in New York as well as a number of architecture offices internationally.

www.bikaa.net

Consortia

Consortia is a creative and strategic consultancy in New York City, focusing on projects that connect design, branding, and culture. Founded by Christopher Barley, the office works with academic and cultural institutions as well as leading brands and corporations. They have recently completed digital strategy for the Chicago Architecture Biennial and are developing research projects for Audi on big data, the connected car, digital lifestyles, and the future of retail.

www.consortia.net

Dan Choi

Dan Choi is an architect, artist, real estate developer and professor based in New York City. He is currently working on several NYC based real estate development & architecture projects investigating new potential strategies for design, marketing, acquisition and financing. Dan is currently a professor at Columbia University’s real estate program and has worked in NYC for 12 years as an architect and as a developer.

https://www.danchoiarchitect.com

f-architecture

f-architecture (alt: feminist-architecture collaborative) was founded by Gabrielle Printz, Virginia Black, and Rosana Elkhatib, all recent alumni of GSAPP’s CCCP program. f-architecture is figured as an enterprise for architectural research aimed at disentangling the contemporary spatial politics and technological appearances of bodies, intimately and globally. At the GSAPP Incubator, these f-architects will develop their current project “Post-Fordist Hymen Factory,” which maps the un/making of virginity across legal, medical, and cultural registers, by examining the circulation of an artificial membrane manufactured and sold as the “Virginity Hymen.” Intervening in both the design and distribution of this product, they will see the hymen’s transformation from cultural fixation to global commodity.

http://f-architecture.com

Forrest Jessee

Forrest Jessee continues his ten years of research in communicating architecture to the public, often collaborating with designers, artists, educational institutions, cultural institutions and other architects. His body of work situates itself between two-dimensional and three-dimensional representation, and his passion for publishing books strives to express architectural ideas in the materiality, layout and design of these publications. Aside from his professional work, he serves as Director of the Graphics Project at GSAPP, which aims to inspire and support students with studio work and portfolios due at graduation. This initiative questions what it means to translate an architectural idea into visual material, whether it be a drawing, presentation or book.

www.forrestjessee.com

Dimitri Damiel Kim

Dimitri Damiel Kim is an architect, educator, and founding member and principal of XMANIFOLD Applied Design Research Laboratory (ADRL), a cross-disciplinary design and research practice working in all scales of architectural, urban, landscape, and interior projects. Current projects in the lab include publication work for international architecture journal ‘Prototropic’, an on-online platform for sharing design ideas (patronarch.com), prototype designs for wearable technologies, concept designs for a feature sci-fi film, and a residential design project in Hawaii. Dimitri Damiel Kim is interested in geopolitics, speculative technologies, iconic fashion, and religious philosophy. He lives in Williamsburg and teaches design studios and visual studies at CUNY and NJIT.

www.xmanifold.com

Marty Wood

Marty Wood is a writer, researcher, and curator who brings different communities, methodologies, and ideas into contact. He believes that varied forms of engagement and practice— from research to history and criticism produce new ways of thinking about design and enriching creative cultures. Marty Wood is launching General Economy, a new, multi-channel platform for critical conversations at the intersection of art, architecture, and urban spatial politics. With the rapid acceleration and constant churning of the cultural and aesthetic fields, General Economy hopes to circulate new ideas and foreground new voices within larger artistic, social, and theoretical contexts.

http://www.mwood.xyz

Poché Arts

Ye Zhang (MSAUD’15) is a project designer at Gluckman Tang Architects, She is currently leading the design for a 10,000 sqm contemporary art museum in China. Zhang seeks opportunities for projects that blurs the boundary between art and architecture, and she will be the chief managing partner for Poché Arts. Poché Arts aims to re-appropriate existing urban conditions by inserting art, architecture and design works from emerging young professionals and outstanding students. Each show will feature parallel and collaborative curation between two different art and design disciplines, joined together by a common theme.

www.pochéarts.com

QSPACE

QSPACE makes questions of gender and sexuality visible to a field that has traditionally subverted such questions. In the absence of a centralized voice, QSPACE is a hub for students, professionals, and academics to connect and collaborate. QSPACE produces research and outputs on topics such as gender inclusive bathroom design, LGBTQ homelessness and housing, and queer histories in architecture. QSPACE is a platform for research projects by students and professionals working on queerness in the built environment. We push for organized action through exhibitions, publications, digital archiving, design guidelines, and events on queer topics. QSPACE was born out of Queer Students of Architecture, Planning, and Preservation (QSAPP), an LGBTQ group from Columbia University.

www.qspace.lgbt

Untapped Cities

Untapped Cities is an online publication about urban discovery and exploration which unearths the most surprising places in NYC and around the world. With a focus on how design and history affect architecture and urban development, Untapped Cities is more than a standard media company – it also connects with readers in real space through its ongoing tours series. Untapped Cities is a community of over 500 contributors, ranging from crowdsourced residents to experts in city building. At the GSAPP Incubator, Untapped Cities plans to develop its first series of New York City tours using augmented reality to better showcase past, present and future development in the city. The team also plans to expand their event programming to include talks and panel discussions about urban issues.

www.untappedcities.com

Xin Wang

Xin Wang is Design Principal at DesXY design studio based in New York and Shanghai. Based on the socio-environmental theory of Urban Acupuncture, Xin Wang explores how small scale interventions transform the larger urban context and solve urban problems through design of strategic architecture.

www.desxy.com

: [pronounced colon]

: is a collective workshop on architectural practices and ideas. Our aim is to carve out a space for critical reflection within architecture by interrogating the vocabulary, rhetoric, and boundaries that constitute it. We believe that the nuance of an idea only reveals itself in conversation, when we raise questions, assume a position, and invite another level of criticism and judgment. : materializes this discourse into printed records, exhibitions, and architectural interventions.

www.c-o-l-o-n.com

2015-16

A(n) Office

A(n) Office is an architectural practice based in Detroit and New York, founded by Marcelo López-Dinardi and V. Mitch McEwen. Their work engages issues of migration and democracy through political economy, urban design, architecture, exhibition and installation work. A(n) Office was commissioned along with eleven firms by the US Pavilion at the 2016 Venice Architecture Biennale to develop a speculative design project for a 7 acre City-owned property in Detroit. In addition, the group will prepare Methexis: The Algorithmic Recitative, a solo exhibition at Museum of Contemporary Art Detroit that expands its House Opera project into new urban research.

http://anofficeus.tumblr.com

Consortia

www.consortia.net

Hana Petrik and Martin Kropac

Hana Petrik and Martin Kropac are two young architects and scholars constantly pending between Prague and New York. While having built projects on both continents they are intensively engaged in academic work as well. With the Academy of Art, Architecture and Design (with prof. Ivan Kroupa) and New York Institute of Technology they established City and Disaster, a series of international student workshops under the patronage of the United Nations, focused on inventive solutions for natural and man-made disasters in urban contexts.

www.martinkropac.com www.cityxdisaster.org

Family + Pool

Columbia GSAPP alumnus Dong-Ping Wong is a partner at Family and a founding member of a group of architects, designers, engineers, strategists and scientists building + POOL, the world’s first water-filtering floating pool.

www.familynewyork.com www.pluspool.org

Forrest Jessee

www.forrestjessee.com

Iris VR

George Valdes is VP of Product at IrisVR, a company building software to edit, visualize, and share 3D CAD models in virtual reality. Iris VR leverage the immersive power of cutting-edge virtual reality headsets. Their software enables the user to make immersive, true-to-scale VR walkthroughs on its own computer in one-click. Their easy to use software is being used in hundreds of offices around the world empowering teams to communicate more effectively with each other, with their clients, and with project stakeholders.

www.irisvr.com

Kosmos

Founded by Nikolay Martynov, Artem Kitaev and Leonid Slonimskiy, KOSMOS is a research-driven architectural practice that addresses density and urban issues. They include the competition-winning project Foam Space at the 2015 Ideas City Conference in New York. KOSMOS aims to develop a new form of spatial practice on the edge of physical and digital architecture. Columbia GSAPP alumnus Martynov’s focus is “Anonymous architecture” – used by masses while remaining constantly mute.

Dimitrios Spyropoulos

Dimitrios Spyropoulos is a Gsapp Incubator member whose current research aims to document the evolution of self-driving cars and the possibilities of how an automated mobile transportation network can affect the existing urban fabric.

www.dispyropoulos.tumblr.com

Dimitri Damiel Kim

www.xmanifold.com

Xin Wang