The Core I Studio understands Architecture in its networked condition and the contemporary shift in public space as an opportunity to redefine social structures for better common welfare. The studio approaches Architecture from this perspective, unveiling and breaking down historical racial constructions, those that still remain and those that can dangerously happen.

Participants in the Core I Studio look to actual and close realities, taking the everyday life of the city of New York as a starting point and base for an architectural proposal. They look at buildings and their urban context, understanding the quotidian as a platform for deeper research that allows one to comprehend the the complexity of the built realm, its actual functioning and requirements in relation to economic, climatic, environmental, social and political issues. The studio designs Architectures that answer to those realities: transgressing, empowering, and complementing existing networked spaces.

This studio critically engaged with the tools and methods of architecture taking place. This semester investigated how historically-construed hegemonic acts such as praxis, discourse, discipline, and language have restricted ways of understanding, thinking, and inhabiting worlds.

Architecture operates as a mechanism for the reproduction of meaning and value. Participants immersed themselves in an entanglement of narratives and spatialities that provoke locative notions of belonging. They sought to embrace the territorial as a means to counter binaries of valuation/devaluation, possession/dispossession found among built and natural environments.

The studio summoned cartography as both a device of erasure and a form of storying the world to explore ways to read, reveal, repair, and fabulate spaces of otherwise. It considered how spatialities of rupture challenge architecture’s scripted notions of boundary-marking, citizenship and migration.

To escape the narration of northern Manhattan Island as a less desirable edge, this studio sought possibilities of radicalizing this margin and engaged the elsewheres of Inwood as an amplification of its shared imagining of ecologies and cosmologies.

There are no undesired geographies.

This studio questioned architecture as a way of knowing and engaging with the world. Working within, through, and against the assigned frames, it began to see “Broadway Stories" as an apparatus that constructs possible worlds. The studio read and crafted images of the city, considering whose histories have been rendered legible or illegible, and the ways those histories have been read as fact or fiction; it examined tendencies to believe or disbelieve, in the process questioning the types of aesthetics associated with credibility or lack thereof. Drawing served as the primary site of investigation: the studio drew to better see architecture as material-discursive practice and as an instituting force, and engage with representational tools as they shape the way one sees, understands and operates in the world.

This studio’s site is a space informed by institutions operating at vastly different scales: here and elsewhere, gender, family, health and nationhood are projects crafted between registers as abstract and wide-reaching as international law and as intimate as individual gestures. The wave of a hand, the scanning of an ID, a wink, or a nod mediate access and shape our realities just as much as pipes, bridges, and whatever else might be considered architecture’s primary media.

The studio employed a lens of historical criticality as it analyzed Broadway and its surroundings from Houston Street to 30th Street. The region comprises three major historical districts — Noho, Flatiron, and Madison Square North — that was approached through a series of temporal overlays. Guided by pivotal events spanning from Broadway as a thoroughfare, originally known as the Wesquaegeek Trail, to the 300 acres of African-owned farms known as the Land of the Blacks under Dutch colonial rule which centered around present-day Washington Square Park, and including the impact of the East Village/Noho artist movement of the 1980s in which artists shifted the public consciousness.

Students constructed spatial hypotheses grappling with scale, ownership, property, land, appropriation, center narrative, the concept of ‘for the public good’ and were sufficiently conversant in forces that govern public use in order that final spatial proposals produce expressions that are both imaginative and critically poignant.

Through the use of the orthographic cut, students dissected history as a stack, responding to the figuration and reconfiguration of society as a continuum. Through the study of precedent sites students cultivated an understanding of the flow of placement and displacement, of land and belonging, transpiring over time in the horizontal plane. Finally through the articulation of the section, the theme of the studio, Cutting Through, students’ design proposals sought to reveal and activate historical and contemporary truths hiding in plain sight. Proposals presented concepts utilizing the architectural convention of the cut, namely, techniques of orthographic cuts, in horizontal and vertical planes, to reveal the significance of conceptual provocations on public space.

At a time when the world is in a state of flux and uncertainty, there is a need to reflect upon its varied origins and rediscover life on earth and the greatness of its shared past that defers to truth and equality for all. As during the birth of this diverse nation, it is necessary to recall the freedoms that make New York the epicenter of new thought, culture, opportunity, and change in an illusive city that has died and has been reborn once more.

Broadway cuts diagonally across virtually every major organ of the city passing through the heart of Time Square and continues further beyond the cultural soul of Lincoln Center. Students studied the residual public pockets along this artery and how they are stitched together to become the fabric of the city and platforms for voice. These exchange places are public interventions within the network that become mechanisms for paradigm shifts and where many different levels of interaction occur to provoke change. The government, economy, media, and streets support numerous activities and movements that are the result of both evolution and revolutionary processes. Today it is essential to understand their complexity, and where social technologies such as Twitter, Facebook, and other forms of media can be of avail. Moving between precincts that comprise the institution where people will discover communal places to gather and secret places to be alone in research and contemplation. These local forums are a palimpsest meant to be explored and discovered over time through its history. In doing so these local interventions will be for all who search to belong, a place where alternative positions intersect, friendships are formed, and where the unimagined can happen.

Urban sites adjust to fluxing climates, ecologies, and economies. We offer extraction as a strategy for uncovering future possibilities. We imagine water, wind, and sun to power the city. What effect does it have on its original environment? What does water reveal? What’s the sound of the wind? What do flood patterns foretell? Nature Works proposes a speculative field of what remains and what is possible.

In Nature Works: Situation NYC, the studio began in a the suspended stretch of New York City’s Broadway. The sounds are under water and earth, taken from within the social, architectural, and urban space itself and from multiple non-binary typologies and topologies. In the space of the city, temporal encounters create new associations as the studio imagined new ways of moving through the shifting ground. It engaged in variations of scale including the urban, intimate, and infinite. They were absorbed and invented, appear and disappear:

1:100
1:25000
1:20
3:1
1:50
1:500
1:50000
2:1
1:1
1: ∞ …INFINITY (∞), along with its symbol ∞, is not a number and it is not a place. There is no limit to its values. We then say that the values become infinite, or tend to infinity – a limit is a number. There is no number that we can name.

The studio aims to re-envision the urban voids of Harlem between 120th and 152nd Streets as an opportunity to create new opportunities for the commons. Since urban voids — in the form of vacant land and buildings — directly relate to the gentrification of neighborhoods and the continuous spatial re-arrangement of underrepresented communities in the area, primarily African Americans and Latinx, making the new commons aimed to generate tools to reject the violence of racial capitalism.

Students investigated the history of these interruptions of the city fabric to determine what and who generated these voids, to whom these plots of land belonged before becoming unused. Students articulated strategies to reconfigure the urban fabric of West Harlem along Broadway, enabling equitable and inclusive visions that transcend the nuclear family and facilitate alternative leisure, working, and educating arrangements focusing on spaces of care for local youth. The studio designed safe spaces for LGBTQ youth, sometimes unhoused, and historically important for the local culture of our study area. It targeted discriminatory urbanization patterns that were re-oriented towards collective models of ownership and responsibility for “the commons,” defined as the space that ensures access to food, education, shelter, civic engagement, and meaningful work for all.

This approach to the evolution of the cities can be at the base of the nation’s urban policies and planning revolution, where the collective is at the center of society’s well-being and prosperity.

Broadway provides a direct connection between two real estate titans in the City of New York: the Trustees of Columbia University, and the New York City Housing Authority (NYCHA). Columbia University stands as New York City’s second-largest private landlord by number of properties owned—claiming 246 buildings and vacant lots—and seventh-largest by total square footage. A “city within the city”, NYCHA is the landlord for one in every fifteen New Yorkers, with their 334 developments totaling 178,895 apartments and 2,602 buildings. NYCHA faces a $77 million budget gap and a $40 billion-dollar shortfall in deferred maintenance across its campuses as their residents make do in moldy apartments with uncertain access to air conditioning and heat, unreliable elevators and building systems, and inaccessible gardens. While singular examples of Columbia’s sway over its’ Black and Latino neighbors abound, in many ways access to basic maintenance and high-quality materials within Columbia’s holdings relative to NYCHA provides a more granular, systemic demonstration of this power dynamic on a daily basis. This studio considered the logistics of materials and services, the politics of labor, construction, and development, and mechanisms of land acquisition and control as well as forfeiture and enclosure, as metrics of how political influence (or lack thereof) might be measured within the City.

On paper, NYCHA and Columbia University appear to be similar entities from a design and construction standpoint. Both share access to similar pools of labor, control largely residential portfolios of buildings, and face similar maintenance demands inherent to multi-family buildings (elevators, boilers, heating and cooling, etc): however the reality on the ground presents a different story entirely. Understanding the physical and political impacts of who has access to architectural services to build, repair, and renovate is critical to understanding who wields political power in Morningside Heights and Manhattan Valley.

Lower Manhattan is a dense layering of historic and contemporary spaces and events enmeshed in the creation and protection of value. Along Broadway from Battery Park to Houston, clusters of buildings are currently designated as civic, financial, or manufacturing; some still representing a link to some of the area’s earliest land uses. Outside the wall, from which we now have Wall Street, which used to be The Commons and the African Burial Grounds, two landscapes that were part of everyday life in New York for nearly 200 years. Both sites of extraction were physically external to the city, but functioned as the primary means by which the internal prosperity of the city, private property, and material ownership was enhanced. Over time, extraction sites have been removed further and further outside the city, but are critical to the function of the city. Students were asked to examine accumulation along Broadway, considering the reciprocal sites of occlusion elsewhere, and exposing extraction’s continued adjacency to the erasure of the contribution to the built environment by Black, Indigenous, and People of Color. With this in mind, students responded with arguments for the deconstruction and reconfiguration of this accumulated material to ultimately propose a new material commons.