Studio Description Please Note: A full Studio Syllabus, Site Information, Schedule and Assigned Readings are  posted under Shared Files. All files are in PDF format and can be downloaded.

Studio Introduction:

Housing: Hunters Point South, Long Island City New York

The studio will explore the design of urban housing in relation to density and connectivity to transportation infrastructure and the East River waterfront. The studio site is at Hunters Point, in Queens, New York. With a focus on issues central to post-war housing in the United States including the rise of the suburban model, mass production, commuting, and relationships of housing to economic markets as well as government intervention, the studio will propose new forms of housing that are simultaneously local in scale, but also designed with a deep awareness of New York City, national and global issues. Particular attention will be given to the role of time in commuting--relationships between housing and infrastructure, and increasing energy costs at all levels of design.  The studio will offer design for the City's development goals for Hunters Point in Queens.

Our studio site--Hunters Point South in Long Island City--is according the city planning "the largest housing development planned in NYC in over 30 years." This is a very big project and it is backed with a broad convening of many city agencies. The site is proposed as a "mixed-use, middle-income housing development" that will site on "prime waterfront property in Long Island City, Queens." Of the potential 5,000 housing units planned on this site as much as 60 percent will be developed as "affordable to middle income families." The details of this proposal are included in the planning documents. Background material to situate these goals historically is partially included in our studio syllabus and is outlined in two of the three chapters we present here.

Key factors include a studio-wide examination of United States housing paradigms in relation to a range of technologies that are at times literally architectural in character, or just as often, financial, social and ultimately political in nature but organized in instrumental ways as virtual "architectural" technologies. The driving force behind the studio is a hypothesis that the architect is poised at a threshold of new technical means and capabilities, and that the deep array of financial and political infrastructures that support housing are simultaneously facing immense demands to reorganize. This is a threshold moment in housing and urban design.

Studios will follow unique paths dependent on faculty and student initiatives but each studio is expected to address issues of mass housing such as means of construction and material choices and their impact on design; aspects of energy demands and how these are factored into the macro-scale aspects of transportation and commuting; social factors such as development models and their anticipated relation to household incomes and poverty; and attempts to deliver design in a way that positions the architect as a key participant in what is possible.

Each studio will follow unique methods and means, but the overall goals of the studio will focus on projects for the same site and with the same schematic programming giving comparability to our work. The studio is broken down into five research segments and each segment will offer input from a series of consultants. This will be material that is both technical and directly architectural as well as focused on the financial impact of development and how these issues can impact design and indeed how design can lead financial planning.

You will work closely with architects and policy experts in Public Housing, Affordable Housing and new aspects of the Obama Administration Stimulus funding as it applies to all strata of housing but in particular to Public and Affordable Housing.