Spring 2020 - Columbia GSAPP

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GSAPP Family Updates

Visit this page regularly to stay updated on Columbia GSAPP’s exploration into new forms of expression, creativity, collaboration, and projection during the Spring 2020 Semester. A new series of Broadcasts, Open Classes, Mining the Archive Playlists, Super Crits, and more will be updated each Monday. Follow @ColumbiaGSAPP and #gsappfamily2020 on Instagram for more shared experiences.

May 11, 2020

Read the full Weekly Message from May 11, 2020

May 4, 2020

Read the full Weekly Message from May 4, 2020

April 27, 2020

Read the full Weekly Message from April 27, 2020

April 20, 2020

Read the full Weekly Message from April 20, 2020

April 13, 2020

Read the full Weekly Message from April 13, 2020

April 6, 2020

Read the full Weekly Message from April 6, 2020

March 30, 2020

Read the full Weekly Message from March 30, 2020

March 23, 2020

Read the full Weekly Message from March 23, 2020

May 11, 2020: An Update from the Dean

Dear GSAPP Family,

As the semester and academic year comes to an end, I want to express my gratitude and my thanks. Faculty, administrators, alumni, colleagues, and friends: thank you for carrying the school (and its spirits) to the “finish line” with your care, empathy, and dedication. Students: thank you for your astonishing thoughtfulness, depth, resourceful creativity, and endlessly resilient imagination. The quality of your work and your willingness to stage challenging conversations around it—pushing forward, asking hard questions, staying open—was beyond moving. As your critics, professors, and mentors, the inspiration we felt when we came together to witness your accomplishments in the final weeks of reviews was unequaled.

This time is always bittersweet as we prepare to witness another generation of students graduate and launch into the world. Yet we are also filled with a sense of excitement and anticipation—for we know that all that you have achieved in here will find new expression out there, and that you will no doubt bring the same vitality we’ve come to know in the present to whatever path you find yourself on in the future.

This year, we are deeply saddened by our inability to come together in person to celebrate this crucial moment of transition. But we are holding this sadness together with the knowledge that there will be other occasions to return and come together again. We are also holding all of the uncertainty of this moment with the certainty that our togetherness is more than a ritual we reenact every year: it is a practice that we must actively reconsider and re-invent in the face of a changing world. So while graduation will be different this time around, it will certainly not be any less important. It might even be made more meaningful by our shared circumstances. Certainly, it will be the most creative and unique—again, a reflection of the strength, intelligence, and engaged imagination you have all cultivated during your time with us.

So please know that as you grow from students to alumni in this GSAPP Family, we will still be here on the other side. We will continue to communicate as much we can on our recovery efforts for a safe return in the fall and to share with you the ongoing life of GSAPP: its resolute and creative energy in New York as well as its strong, extended ties around the world. Stay tuned for alumni networking opportunities, for updates on career services, for special events hosted for our incoming students, for original workshops and new opportunities (like crash courses in making and scripting!) for returning students…

Thank you all again for everything you continue to contribute—in work and in thought—to re-imagining possibilities for architecture and the built environment. A huge congratulations to the GSAPP Class of 2020! I look forward to seeing you all Saturday for a magnificent celebration together.

Sincerely,
Amale

Show Less

Sincerely,
Amale

Broadcasts

Professor Steven Holl’s April 16 Broadcast on Ecologics

This weekly series features special all-school presentations by one or more faculty. These lectures, workshops, and performances are an invitation to reflect on where we are today and to ground it more broadly.

April 13 – April 19

Friday, April 16
3:00 PM

Advanced Architecture Studio VI Supercrit

Hosted by David Benjamin, Associate Professor and Coordinator of Advanced Studios at Columbia GSAPP. Guests jurors to the Supercrit are Stephanie Carlisle, Irene Cheng, and Tim Michiels. GSAPP Advanced Studio faculty include (in order of presentation) Jing Lui, Stephen Cassell and Annie Barett, Hilary Sample, Steven Holl and Dimitra Tsachrelia, Galia Solomonoff, David Benjamin, Mimi Hoang, Enrique Walker, Anna Puigjaner, Pedro Rivera, Mark Wasiuta, Sarah Dunn and Martin Felson, Mario Gooden, Olga Aleksakova and Julia Burdova, Michael Bell, Ada Tolla and Giuseppe Lignano and Juan Herreros.

Watch a recording of the Supercrit here.

Thursday, April 16
5:30 PM

Ecologics at Steven Holl Architects 1992-2020

A Lecture by Steven Holl

Hosted by David Benjamin

Steven Holl discusses the topic of ecology as it relates to his firm’s work.

Watch a recording of the Broadcast here.

Wednesday, April 15
1:00 PM

Climate Summit

Andrés Jaque

The Climate Summit convenes students across all GSAPP programs to present specific stories of CLIMATE and CLIMATE CRISIS, to trigger a collective discussion on the learnings that GSAPP, as a collectively inquiring milieu, can extract from the details of climate as it happens. The discussion will focus on rethinking what are the methodological and ontological evolutions design practices face, in entering and operating in a CLIMATE paradigm.

Watch a recording of the Broadcast here.

Tuesday, April 14
12:30 PM

Bulletproofing American History: Race, Remembrance and Emmett Till

Mabel Wilson

Compelling architectural and urban designs like the recent Memorial to Peace and Justice by Mass Design have been erected to aid the public in remembering the historic and geographic scope of America’s legacy of racial violence. As architects, planners, urbanists, and historian how do we commemorate America’s fraught history when recent protests by the white nationalist group Unite the Right at historic sites like the University of Virginia or the need to bulletproof a historical marker at an important site of the Civil Rights struggle tells us that violence still simmers and erupts in the nation’s public spaces?

Monday, April 13
1:00 PM

Passing through Architecture: The Biological Art of Gordon Matta-Clark

Mark Wigley

Gordon Matta-Clark graduated from the architecture school at Cornell in 1968 then spent the 10 years before his early death relentlessly challenging the limits of art and architecture—most famously in a series of vertiginous “building-cuts” that became cult works that continue to inspire artists and architects today. This talk will ZOOM into those transgressive surgical operations to show how they were actually biological works.

Watch a recording of the Broadcast here.

April 6 – April 12

Friday, April 10
1:00pm

The Desire for Communal Form in a Moment of Isolation

Emmett Zeifman followed by conversation with Anna Puigjaner, Jimenez Lai, and Adam Frampton

Since 2008, the field of architecture has engaged the economic precarity, social atomization and privatized “sharing” economies of contemporary society through models of communal work and dwelling, ranging from market-driven co-working and living spaces to renewed speculations on social condensers and phalansteries. At a moment in which physical collectives are being dispersed, and society has reached, almost instantly, a terminal state of precarity, isolation and virtual exchange, what is the status of this desire for architectural forms that contain whole communities and frame new commons?

Watch a recording of the Broadcast here.

Tuesday, April 7
1:00 PM

Towards a Diffuse House

Anna Puigjaner

After the American Civil War (1860-65), in a moment of deep social crisis, cities like New York started to be filled with apartment houses that lacked of kitchens and had collective domestic services and spaces instead. These kitchenless projects, allowed the displacement of some domestic elements, habitually fitted inside the limits of the house, towards the public space, turning the house into a diffuse entity. Home values are always in permanent mutation, and those which deal with the kitchen are precisely the most capable of radically changing preset gender roles and domestic labor structures, still today.

Watch a recording of the Broadcast here.

March 30 – April 5

Wednesday, April 1
3:00pm

Designing for Resilience: Current Work by ORU

Ziad Jamaleddine hosts ORU: Adriana Chávez, Victor Rico and Elena Tudela, with Urban Design and Advanced IV Architecture faculty

Oficina de Resiliencia Urbana (Office for Urban Resilience) is a Mexico City-based urban design and applied research practice that has specialized in resilience and climate-sensitive landscape infrastructures. ORU’s recent work ranges from research to architectural and landscape design strategies.

Watch a recording of this Broadcast here.

Tuesday, March 31
1:00pm

From New Deal to Green New Deal

Reinhold Martin

What can history teach the present? A world facing both pandemic and climate emergency now also faces a global economic crisis. Already, many proposals in the US for economic stimulus and recovery refer to the Depression-era New Deal, on which the most comprehensive proposal to combat climate change—the Green New Deal—is also based. Recognizing the urgency of addressing these compound crises in the short, medium, and long term, this lecture will consider examples of New Deal architecture and infrastructure as object lessons for a Green New Deal and beyond.

Watch a recording of this Broadcast here.

March 23 – 29

Thursday, March 27
1:00pm

Remote Conferencing

Remote Conferencing and Presentation Best Practices
Q&A with students

Andrew Heumann
Laura Kurgan (Director, Visual Studies)
Juan Saldarriaga
Dan Taeyoung (Coordinator, ADR2)
Josh Uhl (Coordinator, Visual Studies and ADR1).

Thursday, March 26
7:00pm

Remote Conferencing

Remote Conferencing and Presentation Best Practices
Q&A with students

Agnes Chang
Philip Crupi
Laura Kurgan (Director, Visual Studies)
Dan Taeyoung (Coordinator, ADR2)
Violet Whitney
Carsten Rodin

Open Classes

All students are invited to participate in and peek into GSAPP’s most coveted classes as faculty open up their most compelling courses to the entire school.
Zoom links can be found in the University’s Canvas course listings.

April 13 – April 19

Friday, April 17
9:00AM

Architect Writers

Hilary Sample

Taking stock of the architecture profession today, this seminar brings together a select group of architects who have written about their design work as a means to better understand the built environment while reflecting on the field of architecture as a whole.

Thursday, April 16
9:00 AM

MSRED Capstone Class

Patrice Derrington

The course synthesizes the analytical, comparative, and critical processes involved in real estate development projects, transactions and investments. Students demonstrate their understanding of the dynamics of real estate development.

Wednesday, April 15th
11am

On Spatial Exclusion and Planning

Hiba Bou Akar

This course investigates the idea of geographies of exclusion through a multi-disciplinary inquiry which locates spatial production and planning practice at its center. The course cross-thinks issues of spatial exclusion and social justice across cities in the Global North and the Global South. This week’s topic is “resistance and change: on current housing take-over movement.”

Tuesday, April 14
5pm

Urban Planning Analytics II

Anthony Vanky

Students are challenged to think about how data can support agendas in spatial and environmental justice, as well as enumerating use of public space. The course asks in what ways sensing technologies can validate or challenge theories of public space and social interaction, and how they can intersect with aspects of environmental quality and justice, sustainability, equity and overall general well-being.

Tuesday, April 14
11:00 AM

Public Space: The Rhetorics of the Pedestrian

David Smiley

“Public space” is among the most widely used tropes in the spatial disciplines and it shapes discussions about control, freedom, status, and identity in the spaces of the city, suburb, and elsewhere. To refine an examination of public space, this seminar focuses on the pedestrian, the walker in the city and the prime user of public space.

Monday, April 13
2pm

Caribbean Reconnections – A Sustainable Future for Puerto Rico

Richard Plunz and Douglas Woodward

This joint Urban Planning and Architecture studio focuses on three sites in Puerto Rico that share transportation problems and general developmental issues, and were heavily impacted by the presence of the U.S. military activities until 2004 by Hurricane Maria in September 2017. This studio engages the study of infrastructure, building, and livelihood futures, while expanding the scope of architectural design to include planning, policy and implementation.

April 6 – April 12

Friday, April 10
9am

Planning the Cultural Space

Douglas Woodward, Vin Cipolla, and Peter Flamm

The practicum provides a comprehensive assessment of the current trends and issues in planning for cultural spaces. As competing options and the increasing accessibility of personal digital platforms are changing the ways the arts are produced and consumed, cultural organizations are facing existential questions about the shape of their future.

Watch a recording of this Open Course here.

Thursday, April 9
11am

Community Development Planning

Moira O'Neill-Hutson

This course explores the history, theory, and practice of community development. It requires students to question the assumptions underlying past programs and policies, identify opportunities, and think critically about the programs and policies that will be needed going forward.

Watch a recording of this Open Course here.

Thursday, April 9
9:00am

MSRED Capstone Class

Patrice Derrington

Wednesday, April 8
1pm

Structural Daring and the Sublime

Rory O’Neill

This seminar invites students to explore the sublime effects of precarious architecture through visual and literary representations; students will use a structural simulation application to provide for a hands-on approach to exploring structural daring in realtime.

Watch a recording of this Open Course here.

Monday, April 6
11am

Recombinant Urbanism and Public Space

Grahame Shane

This seminar examines how cities grow and develop over time. It employs a theory of urban actors and conceptual models as tools for the analysis of the city, its urban systems and design ecologies. The course maps transformations in these actors and their models at various scales over time in a specific locations.

March 30 – April 5

Friday, April 3
9:00am

Architect Writers

Hilary Sample

Thursday, April 2
9:00am

MSRED Capstone Class

Patrice Derrington

Wednesday, April 1
11:00am

Le Corbusier

Kenneth Frampton

This lecture course deals with Le Corbusier’s life and work both chronologically and thematically. In this regard the emphasis is as much ideological as it is architectural.

Watch a recording of this Open Course here.

Tuesday, March 31
9:00am

Architectural Drawing and Representation II

Dan Taeyoung, Andrew Heumann, Lexi Tsien-Shiang, Quentin Yiu, and Violet Whitney

The ADR2 faculty host a Zoom workshop lecture for Core II students around tips, tricks, and experiments on presenting and collaborating together online. They will record part of the class and share resources with the GSAPP community.

Monday, March 30
11:00am

Modern American Architecture

Jorge Otero-Pailos

This course is a survey of American Modern Architecture since the country’s first centennial. As America ascended to its current position of hegemony during the late 19th and 20th centuries, its architects helped refashion the built environment to serve the needs of a growing and ever-diverse population.

Watch a recording of this Open Course here.

March 23 – 29

Friday, March 27
11:00am

Points Unknown: Cartographic Narratives

Michael Krish and Juan Saldarriaga

The course bridges the disciplines of journalism and architecture. Spatial training paired with journalistic techniques serve as a missing “integrator” of data and the real world, providing lessons, stories, and designs that travel beyond NYC.

Thursday, March 26
9:00am

MSRED Capstone Class

Patrice Derrington

Mining the Archive

In lieu of GSAPP’s remaining lectures and conferences planned for the rest of the Spring 2020 semester, we will be re-sharing material from the archive. New selections by members of the GSAPP community will be added each Monday. Please feel free to send us your own favorites and recommendations to events@arch.columbia.edu.

GSAPP Incubator Presentations, 2017.

April 27, 2020: GSAPP Incubator Members and Prize Recipients

A selection of events and podcasts showcasing the work of previous Incubator Members and Prize Recipients.

The GSAPP Incubator Prize
February 7, 2020

A remote dispatch from New York, Texas, California, Brazil, and China by the 2019 Incubator Prize recipients on the status of their projects responding to Climate Change at the Building Scale.

GSAPP Incubator Spring Presentations
April 4, 2019

A presentation at Avery Hall by the 2018–2019 Incubator cohort on the status of their projects.

Labs, Incubators, Colonies
September 7, 2018

A series of conversations convened by GSAPP and NEW INC that address the long and complicated history of innovation, and that discuss the potential of these environments to create the space to change the status quo in art, technology, and design.

2017–2018 Members in Conversation
August 31, 2018

A podcast roundtable led by Michelle Young with Mustafa Faruki, Nile Greenberg, Marcelo López-Dinardi, and Jiuen Yang. The complete 2017–2018 Incubator Cohort is pictured above.

GSAPP Incubator: Design and Entrepreneurship
November 3, 2017

A conversation around presentations by current and former Incubator members on their projects with David Benjamin, Dominc Leong, Tei Carpenter, and Karen Wong.

2016–2017 Members in Conversation
September 26, 2017

A podcast roundtable led by Paul Makovsky with Michelle Young, Bika Rebek, Lauren Johnson, and Chris Barley.

April 27, 2020: GSAPP’s Adjunct Faculty

A selection dedicated to our adjunct faculty, our professional colleagues and friends in New York and around the world.

Mimi Hoang responds to Pezo von Ellrichshausen
15 Feb 2016

Hoang identifies the careful siting and representation of Sophia von Ellrichshausen and Mauricio Pezo’s work, and asks them to expand on their design process in creating buildings as objects with a distinct internal and external hierarchy.

Bryony Roberts in conversation with Andrés Jaque
2 June 2017

Roberts speaks with Jaque about using performance as a medium to critically engage cultural history and the relationship between performance and architectural space in this GSAPP Conversations podcast.

Adam Frampton responds to Urbanus
18 Sept 2017

Frampton considers how Meng Yan’s engagement the urban might be understood as an agenda of moving away from Western models, and pushes the architect to reflect on his role as an urban mediator negotiating the supposed split between city planning and building design.

Justin Garrett Moore moderates “Health Equity: Shaping Just Societies”
March 2018

Moore (‘04 MSAUD) leads an interdisciplinary discussion on global and local efforts focused on addressing health inequities through urban planning and public health practices at multiple scales.

Emmett Zeifman responds to de Vylder Vinck Taillieu
24 Sept 2018

Zeifman prompts Jan de Vylder to expand on the role of references in their work and the tension between the “rules” of material and the unexpected, playful potentials of color and form.

Christoph Kumpusch responds to Kennedy+Violich
1 Oct 2018

Kumpusch leads a conversation with Sheila Kennedy and J. Frano Violich on building a practice embedded in academia and research, and their approach to “material thinking” as a means to negotiate scale and rethink sustainability in the building realm.

April 20, 2020: Thank You

Thank you – to our alumni, colleagues, and friends in Asia and elsewhere, whose support now is carrying us beyond what they imagine and whose work continues to do the same.

Vo Trong Nghia
November 12, 2015

A talk on building sustainable systems that connect mind and body, city and environment, and that undo traditional notions of nature as something separate from our buildings and ourselves.

Studio Pei-Zhu
February 1, 2016

A presentation on working environments and working methods for establishing an attitude towards nature.

Other Desires: The African City
April 8, 2016

A day-long conference on the spatial practices, urban narratives, and manifold identities of African cities as models for thinking through liberation, beauty, memory, tradition, and belonging.

Fulong Wu
November 14, 2016

A lecture on the particular histories and evolutions and manifestations of planning in China.

Minsuk Cho ‘92 M.Arch
March 23, 2018

A conversation that retraces Cho’s personal trajectory, from his time at GSAPP to the founding of Mass Studies, and takes stock of how contemporary Korean architecture differs from the American equivalent.

Neri & Hu
October 8, 2018

A presentation on the duo’s approach to an extensive and expansive notion of “place.”

Eleena Jamil
October 14, 2019

A lecture that emphasizes the climatic as the cultural and that reframes the vernacular as a radical practice of local materiality.

April 13, 2020: Reshaping the Field

This week, I invite you to revisit the work of figures who reshaped the field in their time, and continue to spark different modes of re-engagement in the present and for the future.

What is New?
November 16, 2011

A presentation by Zaha Hadid on the conceptual morphologies of her practice and on building a theoretical and utopian project around the world.

Will You Tell Me a Story?
February 8, 2012

A presentation by Laurinda Spear ‘75 M.Arch and Bernardo Fort Brescia on their “expanded” practice of Arquitectonica.

Fuse: In, Re, De, Pro, Con
October 3, 2012

A lecture by Denise Scott Brown on her eighty-first birthday on five architectural acts: to infuse, refuse, defuse, profuse, and confuse.

Write: Diller Scofidio + Renfro: Architecture after Images
April 29, 2013

A Buell Center conversation with Michael Sorkin and others on the “endangered practice of architectural criticism” – on what it means to think out loud through writing in print and online – assembled around a book on Diller Scofidio + Renfro.

Critical Dialogues on Race and Modern Architecture
February 26, 2016

A panel discussion organized by Mabel O. Wilson on the how “race,” as an aesthetic category, has been deployed to form spaces of modernity from the building to the city to the nation to the planet; from Winckelmann’s idealization of Greek bodies to Le Corbusier’s evocations of the “primal energy” of Black jazz.

April 6, 2020: Engaged Practices

In the hope of inspiring ways to think about what we can invite for the future, we are sharing a selection of engaged practices that emerged in various forms over the past decade.

Seesaw: Piedra, Papel, o Tijeras
November 7, 2014

An exchange between Tatiana Bilbao and Frida Escobedo (in conversation with Galia Solomonoff) on what it means to transform the tectonic traditions of Mexico anew through their respective practices.

OFFICE Kersten Geers David Van Severen
September 14, 2015

A lecture that puts forward a pared down architectural framework for registering and encouraging the complexity of daily life.

Urban Rural Framework
April 3, 2017

A talk that ruminates on working against urban upheaval, looking to the countryside, and designing new institutional collaborations for research.

Andrés Jaque
April 9, 2018

A lecture that resists the idea of architecture as an inert assembly of material and that proposes instead architecture as an interaction between multiple entities with different scales, temporalities, and agencies.

Adrian Lahoud
February 27, 2019

A lecture reflecting on exhibition-making as a cultural project in the context of the first Sharjah Architecture Triennial.

Constructing Engaged Practice
March 29, 2019

A daylong symposium on the political, social, and environmental commitments of “young” firms. We encourage, in particular, re-watching Mariam Kamara’s presentation in “From Observation to Engagement.”

March 30, 2020: A Focus on Climate

It is impossible to talk about the pandemic without facing the historical and contemporary processes of global warming. This week I offer a look at how the School has engaged this over the years:

Climate Change and the Scales of Environment
December 10, 2015

A symposium that critically reframes the term “environment” in order to address the real and lived threat of climate change––moving beyond the technocratic conversations that typically frame the terms of debate.

Resilience by Design
February 19, 2016

A symposium that explores how climate change has altered the conceptual coordinates of building resilience and the social frameworks of design.

Embodied Energy and Design
April 22, 2016

A conference that reconsiders the act of making a building as an act of energy expenditure and asks questions about a variety of related scales, methods of analysis, and design opportunities.

David Benjamin
October 22, 2018

A lecture that proposes new intersections between biology, computation, and design, and that offers us three frameworks for harnessing living organisms for architecture: bio-processing, bio-sensing, and bio-manufacturing.

Climate Change at the Building Scale
February 22, 2019

A series of summits that ask how architects should design for uncertainty and how buildings and building practices can participate in transitioning to a non-anthropocentric paradigm––questions that appear more urgent now than ever.

Offsetted: On the Rights of the Environment
February 22, 2019

A talk on the political, economic, and legal history of trees in New York City, which coincided with Cooking Sections’ exhibition Offsetted at the Arthur Ross Architecture Gallery.

March 23, 2020: Dean Amale Andraos Selects Four Lectures

Dean Amale Andraos’ March 23, 2020 Playlist

Piovenefabi
March 28, 2018

Response by Hilary Sample.

A talk selected in solidarity with our Italian colleagues. This mobile duo shows us what is possible when we work across cities, across modes of production, across ideas, across schools of thought, and so on.

Mario Gooden,
October 21, 2019

Working on Water

A breathtaking and moving performance that left the boundaries of Wood Auditorium and the boundaries of architecture undone––and continues to inspire new forms of connection between histories, geographies, and creative disciplines.

Ananya Roy
February 25, 2019

At the Threshold of Empire: Sanctuary Cities in the Age of Trumpism

Response by Weiping Wu

A lecture on the history and contemporary manifestations of metropolitan segregation, racial banishment, and poverty management. Roy offers us a way to think of cities as enduring sites of resistance and grounds for abolition midst crisis and expressions of state violence.

Evan Sharp
September 7, 2018

A talk by GSAPP alumnus and co-founder of Pinterest on the dangers and promises of technology, on alienation and connection, and on the space of work and the space of home. This talk is especially relevant today as technology becomes an ever greater lifeline and means to bridge to our communities, jobs, families, and peers.

Avery Selects

May 12, 2020

In case you missed it, Avery Shorts Live is officially live (!) with “Tarot Cartography” by Scott Hunter: a short “reading” and text on Tarot as a spatial device for making meaning, making sense, and re-making our intellectual, political, and social terrains.

And, don’t worry, there are still two more issues of the Avery Review coming your way! Keep an eye out for issue 47 this week.

May 4, 2020

This week, we’re happy to share a mixed-bag of essays from the Avery Review, which complicate some of the terms that have come to define the incubator as a site and apparatus, like support, need, and modernity.

We suggest (re)reading Isabelle Kirkham-Lewitt and Wade Cotton’s essay “Model Wombs,” which reflects on their time at the GSAPP Incubator by tracing various histories, promises, and crises of the incubator as a life-supporting infrastructure; Ignacio G. Galan’s “Notes on Crip Camp,” a review of the film that ruminates on networks of assistance; and Zoe Toledo’s “Experiments in Navajo ‘Modernity,’” which demonstrates the settler logics of modernity at work in the demonstration stations of the Indian New Deal.

We’re also revisiting a selection of Avery Shorts that offer recipes for architectural experimentation.

From Season 3, Esther Choi literally illustrates how the work and style of our most iconic architects can be distilled into libation inspiration, like this Lina Bo Bacardi Cocktail.

From Season 2, We Made That offers a more sober blueprint for public architecture, one that insists upon the power of negotiation and confrontation for forging community agency in urban design.

And from Season 1, Garrett Ricciardi of Formlessfinder shares how to cook up architecture “like chefs” in proposing building from food waste.

April 27, 2020

This week, we’d like to focus the attention on the April issue of the Avery Review, which celebrates the students who submitted winning entries to the third annual Essay Prize. The essays are evidence of a commitment to deepening our collective understanding of the objects of architectural thought, and to testing the limits of the essay as a form. We are proud to re-present them here.

In issue 46, first prize winner Athena Do (University of California at Berkeley) parses the design guidelines of the Development Handbook for the Tahoe Reno Industrial Center; second prize winner Sameeah Ahmed-Arai (University of Cape Town) refracts the Sipopo Congress Center in New Guinea, and the development discourse that structures it, through an anti-“anti-politics” lens; second prize winner James Andrew Billingsley (University of Pennsylvania) composes an alternative portrait of Greenland that is layered, complex, diverse, and rogue; and Romy Kießling (Centre for Research Architecture, Goldsmiths) considers whether private property rights might be a way of addressing climate change accountability.

April 20, 2020

This week, we’d like to focus the attention on Avery Shorts, which launched Avery Shorts Live, a venue for off-season Shorts, to continue sharing timely, bite-sized reflections between our usual publication rhythms. Read more about the initiative here.

We’ve rounded up several Avery Shorts that consider (albeit obliquely) what it means to “show up” as a spatial practice and that advocate for methods for global solidarity.

From Season 1, After Belonging Agency exposes the inadequacy of abstract symbols of national production, instead arguing for more material approaches to belonging.

From Season 2, Laura Diamond advocates for the imprisoned activist and artist Shahidul Alam whose work challenges the Western image of Bangladesh.

And from Season 3, Elvia Wilk writes from the protests in Hong Kong, abandoning touristic assumptions of how the city should accommodate visitors, and instead meets the city on its own terms.

April 13, 2020

In the spirit of keeping connected during these extreme times, Columbia Books on Architecture and the City is going digital and uploading chapters from our newest titles once a week. This week, we’ve published excerpts from Ways of Knowing Cities, edited by Laura Kurgan and Dare Brawley.

As for the Avery Review, we invite you to peruse The Institutions of Architecture, a collection of essays that reconsider the professional, pedagogical, curatorial, and critical institutions that construct architecture’s foundations, limits, and ambitions.

We suggest starting with two pieces that evaluate the ideas of two foundational figures: Brendan Cormier’s “I Watched Frank Gehry’s MasterClass So You Don’t Have To” and Amale Andraos’s “Beyond Bigness: Rereading the Peutinger Map.”

April 6, 2020

This week: a hodgepodge of readings from the Avery Review to complement your Weekly Broadcasts and to offer critical positions on the possibilities of a political practice.

We suggest reading Craig L. Wilkin’s piece “Innervisions” on the Equal Justice Initiative’s National Memorial for Peace and Justice designed by MASS Design Group; Anna Puigjaner and Guillermo López’s fresh take on the fraught histories of Ricardo Bofill in their essay “Revisiting Systems”; Camila Reyes Alé’s piece “The Form of Dissent” on dissident architectural practice; and Marcelo López -Dinardi’s review of “Folk Politics at the 15th Venice Architecture Biennale.”

March 30, 2020

We invite you to poke around the Topics on the Avery Review, starting with Climates of Extraction and with essays that explore new planetary perspectives.

In advance of Reinhold Martin’s lecture on March 31, you could (re)read his piece “Sacred Ground: The Big Easy in the Big Apple.”

You might even pair it with Heather Davis’s latest review “To Live in Compromised Worlds,” which evaluates alternate futures of carbon sequestration.

In the same spirit, we’re revisiting season 1 of Avery Shorts with Tei Carpenter’s “A Few Clues From Looking at the Moon,” which zooms out to propose new (extra)terrestrial ways of registering our world.

Super Crits

End-of-year Super Crits and other important reviews across all programs are now open to the entire school—giving students the chance to see each other’s work as well as explore and experience discussions across architecture, planning, urban design, preservation, and real estate.

April 20 – April 26

Wednesday, April 22
3 PM

Advanced IV Studio Super Crit

Ziad Jamaleddine

The Advanced IV studio framework looks at the scales of the environment through a specific geographic context, within which all studios operate. The focus is the rural areas of upstate New York, an entry point to an exploration of the relationship between architecture and nature while unpacking the environmental history of the Northeast region of the U.S.

April 13 – April 19

Friday, April 17
3pm

Advanced VI Architecture Studio Exchange

David Benjamin, Director of the Advanced Studios

MARCH and MSAAD students will present work completed during the Advanced VI studios.

April 6 – April 12

Friday, April 10
3:30pm

Climate Responsive Design and Policy

Thaddeus Pawlowski presents current work of the Center for Resilient Cities and Landscapes in discussion with Urban Design faculty.

Wednesday, April 8
2pm

M.Arch Advanced Studio IV: Studio Exchange

Ziad Jamaleddine (Coordinator)

Ziad Jamaleddine and Nahyun Hwang

Bob Marino and Adam Frampton

Richard Plunz and Lindsey Wikstrom

Lindy Roy and Phu Hoang

March 30 – April 5

Friday, April 3
2:00pm

Erica Goetz (Coordinator, Core II)

Karla Rothstein and Erica Goetz
Guest: Annie Barrett

Emmett Zeifman and Gordon Kipping
Guest: Mitesh Dixit

José Aragüez and Christoph Kumpusch
Guest: Anthony Titus

Benjamin Cadena and Daisy Ames
Guest: Laura Peterson

Wednesday, April 1
2:00pm

Erica Goetz (Coordinator, Core II)

José Aragüez and Erica Goetz
Guest: Lyn Rice

Gordon Kipping and Daisy Ames
Guest: Nicholas McDermott

Karla Rothstein and Benjamin Cadena
Guest: Anda French

Emmett Zeifman and Christopher Kumpusch
Guest: Lizzie Hodges

FINAL REVIEWS

May 11 – May 17

Monday, May 11

CCCP Final Review

May 4 – May 10

Monday, May 4

Advanced Architecture VI Studio

2:00 PM

Makergraph Studio
Ada Tolla and Giuseppe Lignano

Cultural Agents Orange (Vietnam)
Mark Wasiuta

April 27 – May 3

Friday, May 1

Advanced Architecture VI Studio

9:00 AM

Copula Hall
Stephen Cassell and Annie Barrett

The Street Studio
Jing Liu

2:00 PM

Amazonia After Fitzcarraldo
Pedro Rivera

Forest-to-City: Architecture as Open System
David Benjamin

Open Work
Enrique Walker

Thursday, April 30

Advanced Architecture VI Studio

9:00 AM

Mixed-Use, Staircases, Social…
Hilary Sample

The Space of Water
Mario Gooden

2:00 PM

Architectonics of Music
Steven Holl and Dimitra Tsachrelia

Factory
Mimi Hoang

What if…? Then… Urban-scaled Architectural Speculation in Tokyo
Sarah Dunn

Thursday, April 30

M.S. Real Estate Development Program

11:00 AM

Baltimore Capstone Presentations

Wednesday, April 29

Urban Design Final Review

9:00 AM–12:30PM

Water Urbanism Studio: Beira

The Great Rift Valley: Urban Design and Climate Resilience along a Global Transect

Kate Orff, Coordinator
Lee Altman
Adriana Chavez
Dilip da Cunha
Fitsum Gelaye
Johanna Lovecchio
Geeta Mehta
Thad Pawlowski
Julia Watson

Wednesday, April 29

Advanced Architecture VI Studio

9:00 AM

Kitchenless Stories
Anna Puigjaner

Infrastructural Geography
Juan Herreros

2:00 PM

Havana Micro X
Olga Aleksakova and Julia Burdova

Everything must Scale 3: Architecture and the Teacher-less School
Michael Bell

Something of Value
Galia Solomonoff

Tuesday, April 28

Urban Design Final Review

9:00 AM–12:30 PM

Water Urbanism Studio: Addis Ababa

The Great Rift Valley: Urban Design and Climate Resilience along a Global Transect

Kate Orff, Coordinator
Lee Altman
Adriana Chavez
Dilip da Cunha
Fitsum Gelaye
Johanna Lovecchio
Geeta Mehta
Thad Pawlowski
Julia Watson

Tuesday, April 28

Advanced Architecture IV Studio

9:00 AM

Fringe Timber: A Wildland Urban Intermix Laboratory School
Lindsey Wikstrom

2:00 PM

From Landscape to Architecture and Architecture to Landscape
Adam Frampton

In the Name of God: An Investigation into a Rural Religious Settlement, NY
Ziad Jamaleddine

Knowledge Territories
Nahyun Hwang

Monday, April 27

Urban Design Final Review

9:00 AM–12:00 PM

Water Urbanism Studio: Tel Aviv

The Great Rift Valley: Urban Design and Climate Resilience along a Global Transect

Kate Orff, Coordinator
Lee Altman
Adriana Chavez
Dilip da Cunha
Fitsum Gelaye
Johanna Lovecchio
Geeta Mehta
Thad Pawlowski
Julia Watson

Monday, April 27

Advanced Architecture IV Studio

9:00 AM

Caribbean Reconnections: A Sustainable Future for Puerto Rican Islands
Richard Plunz

10:00 AM, 2:00 PM

The Shells of Newburgh: The Newburgh Rowing Club
Robert Marino

2:00 PM

Tomkins Cove Quarry: Extraction, Succession, Retreat
Lindy Roy

Design for Obsolescence: Dual Futures of Parking Decks, Prisons, Zoos
Phu Hoang

April 20 – April 26

Friday, April 24

Core II Architecture Studio

9:00 AM

More School: Integrating School, Life, & City Studio
Benjamin Cadena

Grounds for Play Studio
Erica Goetz

2:00 PM

Tending: Intertwined Impact Studio
Karla Rothstein

Conceptual Architecture Studio
José Aragüez

Thursday, April 23

Core II Architecture Studio

9:00 AM

The XR School Studio
Gordon Kipping

A Building Made of Buildings (and other Readymades) Studio
Emmett Zeifman

2:00 PM

Adaptation Studio
Daisy Ames

School for Outsiders Studio
Christoph Kumpusch

Additional Resources

Tuesday Talks with Alumni

New opportunities for this ongoing series are posted every Monday via a google doc link. Review the list and click on the calendar appointment to confirm your participation. Each student is limited to one conversation. Please contact gsappalumni@columbia.edu with any questions. A list of participating alumni can be found on our website.

Virtual Studios

Virtual studios are accessible to students and faculty for formal and casual discussions on a 24/7 basis. This series of virtual environments are designed to recreate the vitality and collectivity of studio culture at Avery and Fayerweather Halls. Students will be able to stop by “studio” before or after class, see who else is there, share their work, get feedback from each other, stay in touch, and have a coffee.