Introduction
Architecture Studio II: Damage Control
Damage and damage control are the terms and tools through which Design Studio II encountered and analyzed our buildings, cities, environments, and the state of our world. The eight design studios approached and explicated damage in its multiple and many forms. Together, we considered environmental damage, political damage, technical damage, reputational damage, cultural damage, informational damage, and more.
Derived from the maritime military term for emergency measures taken to avoid sinking, in its media spin version damage control describes the effort taken to stay afloat in the turbulent waters of public opinion. Fittingly, media documents, public narratives, news events, and political tensions populated and animated much of the work this semester. Yet our understanding and use of damage control substantially departed from its sly and opportunistic public relations formulation. Rather than disguise or minimize damage, our work attempted to understand, articulate, expose, and critically intervene in the myriad spaces and multiple sites of damage. We did not engage damage control as a cover up but as the opposite. Together, we researched, thought, and designed damage control as an uncovering, intervening, architectural transformation.
Our research revealed that the conditions we identified through and as damage are not alien to architecture. Nor are they alien to our environment, to our political apparatuses, to our cities, or to our museums and cultural institutions. Indeed, damage might be the most common currency and condition of our time. To set about controlling damage is to acknowledge that damage is not an aberration or an exception—it is the persistent companion to our architectural histories, futures, and imaginaries. Damage is imminent to modernity, not the accident that befalls it.
1
Regenerative Damage: Fire in Koski National Park
Drawing from the Finnish cultural tradition of koski, which uses selective forest burns to sti...
Forest City Tower
Engaging the widespread issue of overbuilt, under-inhabited development, this project addresse...
Phytoremediative Landscape, Gibbsboro, New Jersey
Situated on the former location of a Sherwin Williams paint factory, the project proposes a ph...
Ice Reservoir + Encampment, Ladakh
Located in the upper Indus Valley in Northern India, the region of Ladakh has experienced the ...
The Continuity of Shali Fortress
Shali Fortress, a UNESCO World Heritage Site in the Siwa Oasis, Egypt, was constructed using a...
Bridge of Wetlands, Lake Sevan
Lake Sevan in Armenia has been subject to a complex chain of environmental effects stemming fr...
Domino Sugar Refinery: Ruins of Labor and the Afterlife of Industrial Architecture
Proposing an alternative to the recent reinhabitation of the refinery’s shell by a conte...
Earth Park, NYC
Underneath the artificial crust of our sidewalks and streets lies the original earth of the is...
2
Drifting Ecotopia
Drifting Ecotopia: a Social-Ecological Park by Yuyuan Chen (2025) is a speculative public syst...
The New Babel: A Floating Future for Arctic Species
The New Babel envisions a future shaped by Arctic collapse—where sea levels rise by 67 meters,...
Textile Exchange: an Environmental Utopia
Textile Exchange: an Environmental Utopia is a proposed system to disrupt the fast fashion ind...
Circus of Objects
Circus of Objects (2025) by Wei Li is an urban allegory that frames architecture as a new mode...
EARTH, UNDONE
This project responds to the environmental damage caused by mining and construction, focusing ...
Self-sufficient Exchange
Self-sufficient Exchange (2025) by Zhiwen Guan is a utopian urban intervention proposing a sel...
Mud City
Mud City is a proposed urban system which turns flash floodings into bricks.
Flash flood...
Shifting Shelter
Shifting Shelter (2025) by Meredith Magness responds to a dystopia where existing towns along ...
Sight to Site
We stand at a crossroads, where digital advancements have led us to an era of unprecedented co...
Instant Shelter
This project starts from the research of the nuclear radiation and its spatial consequences in...
Wreck-Reaction
Wreck-Reaction is a project proposal that utilizes inflatables to occupy existing shipwrecks, ...
3
Bertha Beit
“Bertha Beit is an examination of damage caused by the construction of the Grand Renaiss...
The Rhine Timber Corridor
People along the Rhine have long understood that rivers don’t just pass through, they return. ...
Ukraine Culture Preservation Center
This project addresses the cultural erasure unfolding during the Russian invasion of Ukraine, ...
Transient Shells
In the southern marshes of Louisiana, the Pointe-au-Chien, a community of Indigenous tribespeo...
Rhythms of Resilience: A Floating Station for Tonle Sap
Rhythms of Resilience is a multifunctional floating station designed for Zone 3 of Tonle Sap L...
Rings of Remembrance
The design functions as a public facility open to all, and reimagines the handling of ashes as...
Floating Emergency Hub
This project began by looking at the paradox of water in Bangladesh. On one hand, floods bring...
The Louisiana Archival Memorial of Black Resilience
Situated in Norco, Louisiana—at the intersection of racial history and environmental degradati...
4
Pier 16_Collective Memory of NYC
Our contemporary cities increasingly reflect controlled spaces—regulated and commercialized to...
Power House
Walking on 14th Street in Manhattan, I started noticing certain things, changes and transform...
5
6
Installed on the 566th day of the U.S.-Zionist genocide in Gaza, this project is a historical ...
Chernobyl-Polesie Unified Experimental Zone For Radioecological Interspecies Mutualism
This project proposes an architectural intervention within the Chernobyl Exclusion Zone (CEZ) ...
Solar Experiment for Loiza, Puerto Rico
On an island of turbulent climate and energy crises, power infrastructure remains rigid. Exist...
Reefs of Resistance
“Reefs of Resistance” is a community-led intervention that reclaims threatened maritime territ...
7
Snow Mo
My project investigates the environmental impact of winter tourism in Vail, Colorado—particula...
Highland Grove: A Conservation Community in St. Petersburg, FL
This project proposal reimagines residential life in St. Petersburg, Florida, by addressing fl...
Frame, Shield & Enhance: Rethinking American Mobile Homes
Mobile home parks house over 20 million Americans, many of whom are among the most economicall...
8
Regina Teng
(Im)material Boundaries
Territorial boundaries are often immaterial, yet this aspect significantly influences transbou...
Architecture Grafted
A tree would live for hundreds of years while the timber buildings have much shorter life. Des...
Wind Wells
Trapped humidity in dense tropical urban environment, this project aims to elevate the pedestr...
Eaton’s Fireguards and Corridors
The Eaton’s Fireguards and Corridors project is an ecological and fire management initia...