1
Notes on Architecture: Practical theories
Using maps, texts, drawings, and archives, this studio revealed the analogical relations between forms, techniques, territories, materials, and spaces across time and space. Based on the idea that practices result from the accumulation of know-how, the studio linked practices from different theoretical backgrounds to create a new form of knowledge, a new form of practice. The studio focused on specific, contextual, peculiar architectural practices that were then analyzed within each other, theorizing practices to trace cultural, social, political, or economic forms of living.
Notes on Architecture: Practical Theories; One Ecological Community
A new interactive public space is defined by the changing of time, the diversity of actors, and t...
The Tale of Dou-gong
How could a specific structural component from a region inform a new architectural practice on...
The Loess Collector
Home to more than 50 million people, the famous Loess Plateau in north-central China takes its na...
City Upper Layer
Providing affordable houses for migrant workers in megacities like Shanghai is the primary pur...
Unbuilding the Future
As time goes on and technology advances, people’s ways of living are constantly changing. We are ...
2
Parallel UN
In this studio, students re-imagined the UN Headquarters in NYC with the goal of better aligning the iconic headquarters buildings to changing realities and utopian dreams. Much like the UN itself, the studio balanced studio-wide ambitions with individual aspirations as students defined a problem and selected from 3 conceptual frameworks for their intervention: modifications to the existing buildings, a new adjacent building that accommodates expanded functions, or a hypothetical/alternate headquarters for the UN. As such, the conceptual breadth of the studio also aimed to mirror the variety of cultural and political perspectives the UN engages with.
Sovereignty of Voices
The UNHQ North Lawn could offer stages and seats to bring the public back to the discussion ta...
UN Terminal
In this project, we mainly focus on the new headquarters, which will be moved to the High Seas...
UN Hotel
Delegates of the 193 UN Member States gather at the UN Headquarters in New York for conference...
Rewild UN, The UN Climate Council
The proposal of a new Climate Council as a 7th organ to the existing organs of the United Nati...
Forum for Humanities: Culture, Governance and Public Space
Forum for Humanities is a proposal to rethink the United Nations Headquarters, exploring its p...
The Neutral Zone
Seventy years later, the UNHQ exists; however, was the UNHQ ever completed? As with the environme...
Climate Council - The Public Sphere Knot
The proposal designs a council as a new public sphere across the current UNHQ to replace the n...
3
Good or bad natures? (A)cClimatizing species and how to intervene with/in them
The studio focused on who and what migrates because of environmental or social climates; and who has the capacity, the favorable climate/s, or the chance to acclimatize to changing conditions. Students questioned the notions of native, invasive, endemic, or indigenous species; evaluated the role that climate, culture, politics, and society (in the form of power and inequality) play in assigning those categories to different plants and animals; and explored forms of intervention to (a)cclimatize them. In exploring western framings of the environment as good—economically productive, beautiful, or easy-to-control—and bad—invasive, uncontrollable, or dull—nature, they challenged these binaries through an ecological approach to understand the violence and potential of each.
WATERCOLORING THE URBAN GROUND: NURTURING EXPANSION JOINTS FOR A TRANSIENT APOCALYPTIC LANDSCAPE
In the not-so-far-off future, the land will be gray and lifeless, begging for the refreshment ...
The Cursed Eden Garden
This project was inspired by the Bible Genesis, which tells the story of God punishing Adam and E...
Nature’s Trojan Horse
This project, “Nature’s Trojan Horse: Nurturing an ecosystem for nature within the embellishment ...
Dormant Reappropriation of the Golf Course: Turning Around the White Man’s Footprint
Broadleaf Plantain is known as the “white man’s footprint” as came to the US through colonizers b...
4
Proxy Landscapes: Survey, Index, Projection
Proxy landscapes are also used to imagine worlding-other-worlds—and to study climate change. The need and use of proxy landscapes remind us that any view we have of the Earth is always limited: technologies can extend our view in the direction of the past (proxy data to study past landscapes or climates) and across scales (remote sensing to see all of the Earth at once, or using the same remote sensing as an Earth-sized camera like the Event Horizon Telescope), but, sometimes, this is not enough. How might we make projections—of the present and the future—based on what we can see at any given moment? How might the landscapes of New York be seen as indexes of future local or global conditions? This studio will aim to produce new and comprehensive ways to represent the indeterminacy of ecological processes while documenting, with a high level of precision, the current conditions of New York City and New York state’s proxy landscapes and their projective potential to be transformed into new, more imaginative configurations.
5
After the Great Loudreading… On post-colonial reconstructions, repatriation, and reparations
Continuing the legacy of loud reading, a practice originating in tobacco factories of the Caribbean, the studio examined what happens when the anti-colonial, anti-imperialist, transfeminist, and anti-capitalist demands raised by the loudreaders have been accomplished. If the loudreading is about raising class consciousness and awareness of the power of networks of solidarity and mutual aid, the events that follow demark how institutions are forced to cope with their colonial footprint. ‘After the great loudreading’ explored the possibility of reparations, reconstructions, repatriation, and, eventually, disappearance.
6
The Anthropocene Museum 5.0: Reinscribing New York City
The studio speculated on the future of cities as they are increasingly monitored, surveilled, indexed, and targeted by advanced spectral imaging technologies. Students interrogated the geographies of multispectral and hyperspectral visioning and design transformative urban and architectural forms capable of combating spatial and environmental injustice.
Ramble Cave the Abandoned Artifact
Ramble Cave stands in the center of the park map as a buried natural artifact that precedes th...
The Museum of Discomfort
The designer regards Manhattan as a museum of discomfort and envisions three galleries. The first...
Museum of Homecoming
National Geographic defines caves as a veil of darkness that cloaks natural beauty, but Native...
Memorials of Forgotten Words
Martin Heidegger said: language is the house of Being. In its home man dwells. Those who think an...
CAVE PANOPTICON
Based on a topographic scan of the Ramble Cave in Central Park, a series of void spaces with imme...
Symbiosis between Cave and Urban Village
I was motivated by the morphology of the Inwood Hill Cave. The intricate interwoven shapes of ...
Anthropocene Museum - Re-inscribing Cooling in New York City
This project looks into the topography of New York historically and contrasts the natural and ...
Who is a Museum?
In the Anthropocene, there can be no more museums without perpetuating the subjugation harnessed ...
Anthropocene Museum for Women in Manhattan
Beginning with the Ramble Cave in Central Park, this project investigates the indigenous social s...
Anthropocene Museum —— Wollman Loops
The project takes the Wollman Rink in Central Park as the site to narrate the topic of climate...
7
Signature Urbanisms
The studio speculated on the future of cities as they are increasingly monitored, surveilled, indexed, and targeted by advanced spectral imaging technologies. Students interrogated the geographies of multispectral and hyperspectral visioning and design transformative urban and architectural forms capable of combating spatial and environmental injustice.
8
Speculative City: Projections on the 7 Line
This studio engaged changes in the discourse and practice of architecture following the seminal events of 2020 and their influences on speculative architecture and urbanism. Using the 7 subway line and its surroundings in New York as a testing ground and site of projection, the studio sought an architecture that actively challenges the construct of pure utility through a morphological and programmatic investigation of the existing and transformed conditions. The work aimed to explore diverse notions of the common and the collective and their critical implications in the contemporary city in the context of social, economic, and political inequity. The studio strived to bring forward an alternative architecture and, thus, behavior of the city.
9
AND, ALSO: (re)Situating Trans-scalar Urban Constructs
Architects are at heart optimists, grappling with both the real and the ethereal. They structure critically informed positions and take risks to craft opportunities and build better futures. This studio unfurled as an Ode to the City. An ode is praise—an invitation to both question and celebrate. It can also be a confrontation, a calling out, a necessary public correction. Students identified urgent urban realities meriting attention. Substantive (re)search and vision scaffolded propositions situated between the lineage of the present and potent trans-scalar constructs catalyzed by these conditions. Exuberant experimentation and production led to spaces where human-built and natural worlds intertwine, where outcomes are measurable, and where sustainable coexistence has a systemic impact.
Systematic and Flexible Spontaneity
After COVID-19, the distribution of spontaneous activity in New York changed,
mainly because of t...
Resourceful Networks
“New York City produces approximately 14 million tons of waste annually, spreading to la...
(Un) Fortify
Segregation caused by gentrification over the last decade is particularly evident for the inhabit...
Transient Processor
Our project traverses the history and future of Penn Station and the situation of homelessness...
Streaming Machine
Streaming Machine acts as a new data center prototype using water as a media to connect online an...
10
Septic Studio
This studio examined the urban and infrastructural networks connected through the septic system. It looked at the history of sewers and sewage and how the public has interacted and grown fascinated with them. It looked at how architects and artists have addressed infrastructure and sewers in their work from Modernism until today. And finally, it looked at the potential future of the septic system and how it can function as an integral new people of a global green movement to make cities more ecological. To make sewage cool, profitable, progressive, and public, students designed a sewage treatment facility for the future that integrates networks, education, social equity, public space, and design—a new radically green septic icon for the city.
Renew Community Garden
This project re-thinks the public space and private space of community gardens in New York by ...
MOMWP: Museum of Modern Water Park
Water is borderless. Water is trans-scalar. Water is trans-material. Water is transtranscultural....
Water and Data as Public Elements
Water and data are the public resources that we use daily. They are distributed through pipes and...
Hydro-Flow
Studying the New York sewage system from the building scale to the urban scale, we have analyzed ...
The Sludgey-Hydro Hangout
The Sludgey-Hydro Hangout reconnects people to the waste they produce and the infrastructure t...
School surrounded by water
The main function of the building is water retention and water treatment; the two parts are co...
Behind the Wall
A recreational center including climbing, gym, and retails is proposed at Hudson Square cooperati...