1
In the Name of GOD
This studio investigated the architectural and charitable capacities of the Islamic communities embedded within the fragmented landscape of Staten Island, New York City. Students identified a site and proposed a physical intervention and accompanying program that served Staten Island’s religious Muslim groups and responded to the borough’s expanded territory. Through spatial techniques, this studio explored and probed questions of (in)visibility to imagine new networks that reestablish cross-communal ties. Students challenged the canonical framing of “Islamic architecture” by redrawing religious spaces rooted in a specifically American context. The studio addressed how the catastrophic impacts of climate change have exacerbated Staten Island’s urban and ecological fragmentation to the detriment of the landscape and its inhabitants. Working with representatives from the Muslim communities of Staten Island, the class explored their “charitable” programatic capacities as a means through which to address the island’s current environmental and social challenges through a design proposal.
The Deck: Prayer Space from Reused Materials
An adaptive reuse project that increases available prayer space for the growing Islamic commun...
to garden a prayer rug
The increasing growth of the Muslim population on Staten Island coincides with a historic imag...
Building Dignity
An educational institution that provides essential labor training for newly-arrived immigrants aw...
Waqf Archive
There is no public library in the Staten Island neighborhood of Rossville, where the Islamic C...
Congregating Grounds: Activating lands through camping pedagogies & practices in the Islamic Community
This project serves to activate contested grounds through camping pedagogies and practices in ...
2
Sites of Memory, Sites of Sanctuary
New York was one of the largest slave-holding northern states with its heaviest concentration on the plantations of the Hudson Valley. The hamlet of New Guinea attracted recently freed and self-emancipated black migrants who were navigating the transition from slavery to freedom. By the late nineteenth century, most of the members of the New Guinea community had moved to Poughkeepsie or New York City and the settlement disappeared. This studio focused on investigating how monuments and memorials connect the future to the past in remembering spaces of refuge while, at the same time, creating spaces of sanctuary. Students designed a memorial sited within the environs of the New Guinea settlement, the site of an archaeological dig in Hyde Park, New York, to provide a place of sanctuary and a safe retreat for Black youth in the Mid-Hudson region. The studio worked alongside a parallel studio at Cornell University exploring the same issues on a site in Ithaca, New York.
The New Hearth
In free Black communities, the hearth was seen as a space of individual refuge, a communal spa...
Walkscapes of Sanctuary
This project immerses itself as a sanctuary through walking for healing. Situated in the historic...
More Than My Skin: Retreat & Memorial
“Who taught you to hate the texture of your hair? Who taught you to hate the color of your ski...
A Good Cry
We store trauma in our bodies. Whether this trauma occurs from emotional, physical, or generat...
A New Way of Water
Water is essential not only to the operations of the final memorial but also in guiding viewer en...
Invisible Networks
This project honors invisible networks of support, past and present. The New Guinea free Black...
3
Designing with/for Uncertainty
This studio studied and experimented with utilizing uncertainty in social and environmental contexts as a generative design process. Students studied interdisciplinary processes that supported a level of uncertainty within complex and dynamic systems, which was further investigated in their proposals. The studio’s site was in the South End neighborhood of Bridgeport, CT, and each student designed a proposal for a region within the neighborhood. Central to the studio was the prompt living commons; an open collective facility defined beyond fixed programmatic needs; a place not self-contained but part of its surrounding environmental eco-system; a non-singular space that contains habits and habitats in equal measure, housing the ability to accommodate uncertainty itself. Each student spatially interpreted living commons into their thesis on designing with/for uncertainty.
Warnaco Ruins: Nature’s Reclaiming of Warner Factory
Bridgeport, once an industrial hub, is filled with many vacant factories. With anticipated ris...
Park-ticipation
Our project is rooted in the legacy and history of Bridgeport, a city that once thrived as a h...
Buoyant Commons
To respond to the socio-economic and environmental vulnerabilities that affect the South End i...
Uncertain Density
The project responds to the issue of emptiness and underutilized land that induces negative migra...
MARSH(O)POLIS
Marshopolis is a water treatment plant that acts as an event and ecology condenser. Located in th...
4
Ecologies of Future Belongs
With the term “collaborative survival” in mind, this studio reevaluated the future of agriculture through the lens of multispecies care. Current industrialized agricultural practices are one of the global leading sources of environmental damage. Monocrops and factory farms not only aid the spread of disease but also change the possibilities for disease evolution. Chemical fertilizers, pesticides, and other toxins mix, circulate, remain, and further develop in our more-than-human environment for generations. The studio aimed to subvert the exploitative nature of the current food system and become a key part of ecological preservation by designing the architecture of agriculture. Rather than regarding humans and nonhumans as alienated nodes of a profit-driven agricultural system, students designed a farm that centered around more-than-human kinship and collaborative livelihoods, defying monoculture practices. The program was closely related to Hudson Valley’s local biodiversity and existing ecosystem, aiming to improve welfare and livelihood practices for BIPOC farm owners and workers
A Long History of the Atlantic White Cedar
Our project is focused on drawing out the long history of the nearly extinct, yet presently re...
Porkopolis: The American Industrial Agricultural Phenomenon
Our theory, The American Industrial Agricultural Phenomenon, and what has become to be our pro...
Eco-winery +
The global industrialization of trade has facilitated the movement of goods and people across the...
5
Sanctuaries
This studio aimed to investigate possibilities of the new architecture of sanctuaries, interrogating the ideologies of care and sanctity, and questioning their often hardened enclosures. Simultaneously populated by cherished ecological preserves, violated Native American sacred grounds, and the sites of pardoned impunity afforded for multinational corporate polluters, the Hudson Valley is also a provisional yet romantic respite for the urbanites who fled the city to avoid the pandemic, while at once much more isolated shelters and camps for migrant agricultural workers’ permanently transient rests. Engaging the legacy and complexity of “sanctuaries” in the Hudson Valley, the studio explored the disparities and disjunctions as well as hidden continuities and potentials manifested at the intersections of different notions and spatial typologies of sanctuaries.
6
Liquid Asset: From Land Dispossession to Mutual Care
New York City has used eminent domain and other forms of land appropriation to obtain space for reservoir construction to provide drinking water to its urban environment via a surface infrastructural system that avoids the use and subsequent costs of water filtration. This system, through the years, has displaced communities and created environmental and financial instability throughout the Catskills/Delaware region of the watersheds. This studio studied the water politics and the relationship between the New York State upper territory and its dispossession, extraction, and subdivision processes that allowed the city to create large voids, open spaces within the territory, with the goal to protect the reservoirs’ water quality. Liquid Asset studio investigated how to unfold spatial narratives that can foster activities, such as work, education, healthcare, community gathering, communal food provision, and cultural production that oppose the isolation and financial instability generated by dispossessed land. Students worked on designing physical interventions that give accessibility of the land back to the communities, through reorganization, transformation, and alteration, accommodating a more equitable and inclusive vision of living.
Excavate, Extract, Create
This project seeks to create an alternative architecture school network that integrates with the ...
Badlands (A Water-Based Commons)
This project proposes a series of counterbalances to water fluctuation extremes, set along the Lo...
7
Ocean studio
Future sea level rise will necessitate special methods of construction. While building on the ocean is not recommended, some structures are necessary. Their necessity allows us to demonstrate possibilities in extreme physical situations. This studio acknowledged a plethora of concerns related to oceans, and instead of proposing a solution to beach erosion, the studio aimed to collectively offer an architecture that allowed free movement of the environment. The studio’s site was on the eastern tip of the south fork of Long Island, New York, at the sea-land boundary, in a village called Amagansett. The class was briefed to design a space for personnel, emergency equipment, and training in a new structure on the ocean off the coast of Amagansett.
Shelter For All
The oceanfront is a particularly complex and ever changing environment. With challenging weath...
Modular Construction for Lifesaving Infrastructure
The lifeguarding occupation has always been positioned on the precipice of feasibility, torn in c...
Lifeguard Refuge and Rescue Station
The proposal aims to resurrect elements of the Atlantic Double Dunes preserve into a place of ref...
In Dune
The project begins as two walls weaving together, held together by a calibrated balance of for...
Trans Time
In understanding the concepts of permanence and transience, this piece of architecture on the bea...
The Mangrove
The project is inspired by the unique and beautiful ecosystem of mangroves. The design features a...
Marooned: Life-Guarding facilities for a threatened shorefront
This project seeks to provide life-saving facilities on the border between land and ocean. The...
8
Infrastructures of Autonomy
This joint urban planning and architecture studio was part of a series of joint studios in the islands off the east coast of Puerto Rico. The focus of the studio was to develop architectural and planning interventions in the small island of Culebra in Puerto Rico, to build resilient design systems that bring autonomy to a place largely reliant on outside influence while understanding the need for resiliency in an age of climate change. This studio continued to build on previous work to engage the study of infrastructure and resilience in Culebra, exploring opportunities to expand on previous work and to create new ideas that incorporate architectural design, planning, policy and implementation. Students were challenged to work with a wide array of site-specific concerns to propose architectural proposals within a larger planning strategy to make a collective impact on local life.
Plaza Del Sol
La Plaza Del Sol Borincano is the proposed adaptive reuse of abandoned steel structures first ...
Centro de Resiliencia Costera
This project aims to create a Center for Coastal Resilience in the island of Culebra in Puerto...