During the first three semesters of the Master of Architecture studio sequence, students enroll in Core Studios. Structured to build knowledge on the fundamentals of architectural design through the theme of “Architecture and the City,” the curriculum emphasizes an inclusive and expansive understanding of history, cities, typology, and performance.
Introduction
Core Architecture Studio II
Environment as the Third Teacher
A school is more than just its students, teachers, and textbooks; it also includes a building, which is essential to a child’s education and personal growth. Loris Malaguzzi, founder of the Reggio-Emilia educational philosophy in the early twentieth century, called the environment the “third teacher,” together with a student’s parents and teachers. In its full manifestation, the multi-dimensional school environment inspires and nurtures children by activating all their senses—a position that Core Architecture Studio II explored this semester.
All eight Core II studios focused on the design of a K-8 public school on the site of P.S. 64, located on the Lower East Side of Manhattan. Designed by C.B.J. Snyder in 1906, P.S. 64 served as a New York City public school for seventy years before it was shuttered. Today, the building remains abandoned. As part of the research for their design projects, Core II students visited the vacant building, studied its history, and evaluated its current condition in order to envision ways to revitalize the site as a contemporary school.
How can a building both react to and affect pedagogy? When a child feels safe and supported, he or she will take risks and embrace challenges. How do we design spaces that nurture and inspire individual children so they can reach their fullest potential? At the same time, how does a school, as a civic institution, connect to its community and promote fruitful interactions between the students and the community? How do our schools reflect our cultural values and prepare children for their own futures (not just our present)? How do we build a school today that will not only serve this generation of children, but also the next?
Through many scales of engagement—from the site in general to the detail of a brick—students devised careful interventions in the existing structure. An essential aspect of the curriculum prompted students to emphasize low-embodied carbon structural design. In response, projects reused the existing building or elements of it, integrating new materials with low-embodied carbon footprints and thoroughly considering the future use and lifespan of the structure.
The 2020 Spring semester proved to be a transformative one, as we dispersed from our own learning environment—notably, our studio spaces in Avery Hall—to many corners of the globe. But remarkably, we created a new environment across the filigree of the ether: a “fourth teacher” that emerged in the form of a virtual forum in which those key tenants of community, cooperation, and life folded together into a tactile space of our own.
Core Architecture Studio II TA: Alek Tomich
1
Adaptation
This studio explores how society might transition from outdated learning environments and outdated construction processes, toward new learning and construction processes for the future. While there are many definitions of the term adaptation this studio engages specifically in the general, biological, and evolutionary interpretations. This studio acknowledges that given the fast-paced nature of the current social, educational, and environmental climates, society is in a constant state of transition between what was and what will be. Therefore, thinking simultaneously about what we can learn from the past and what we imagine for the future is necessary. Students are asked to consider various adaptations, or flows, through a building - from spatial/bodily flows to experiential/physiological flows.
Students: Nayef Alsabhan, Anays Gonzalez Sanchez, Alexa Greene, Xiucong Han, Sierra Heckman, Jinseon Noh, Charul Punia, Yuchen Qiu, Nupur Roy Chaudhury, Hannah Stollery, John Trujillo, Peicong Zhang
The Guidance School prioritizes mental health and the accessibility of guidance counselors for students. Studies have shown that walking releases stress and helps students learn better. The organic and meandering pathways allow students to get lost in the green space, slowing down the process from getting to class for moments of reflection. With the insertion of this green guidance walkway, the Guidance School facilitates mental and physical flow which will lead to students with healthier minds, clearer thinking, and reflective experiences.
The project is a response to the observation that continually evolving pedagogies often come into conflict with the architecture of schools. The school takes on the definition of “building” by deploying curtains with various acoustic, transparent, translucent qualities. Creating and dismantling interactions throughout the spaces of the building, across the courtyards, and the urban realm.
Recalling the 1970s occupation of P.S. 064, this project will return this building to the local community and act as both a nature-oriented school and an artists’ nesting space—an incubator. Guided by angled walls, students will co-construct their knowledge through social interaction by learning a universal language: music.
The School for Cognitive Health addresses common musculature weakness within the eyes that can cause the debilitating “post-concussion syndrome” following a mild or severe head injury. Eye muscle weakness is typically diagnosed in children, and can be preventatively treated by spatial eye function exercises, eliminating possible symptoms later in life. The School for Cognitive Health incorporates these eye strengthening exercises into the building fabric, passively healing students as they move through the space. The building is a healing tool, and an equalizer, in preparing students for stronger, healthier lives and providing all students the potential to thrive.
Given the diverse demographic of the Lower East Side community, the School for Empathy is a new educational typology to break the cultural, language, and social barriers through a sensorial learning process. When the curve interweaves with the existing building, it injects fluidity to accommodate a child’s ingenuity, and defines spatiality with intentional program. The education of empathy will be implemented through these sensorial spaces to achieve the goal of cultural exchange, recognition of identity, and imaginative expression.
Mind, Body, Classroom reinforces the importance of associative learning, beginning with recycling the structural form of arches into a catalyst for shelter, play, and embrace. These formal principles, along with the fabric tissue which saturates the levels of the existing building, craft multi-sensorial experiences of movement, texture, light, transparency, and permeation to foster unique connectivity between each student and classroom.
This proposal aims to bring the experience of being surrounded by nature into the heavy-packed urban context. By hanging a glulam structural grid in the middle of the two existing wings, different types of modules can be inserted into the grid to cultivate outdoor gardens. These modules are designed to be replaceable which makes the gardens adaptable to future-usage. By cultivating outdoor-green space in school, this project explores a new way of making interaction with the natural environment.
At the largest scale, the Scalable School performs vital ecological and social services, such as filtering/collecting rain water, recycling/reusing grey water, and rooting green walls. These functions create spaces for community gathering through sharing resources and allowing for programs such as community gardens, and public kitchens. The buildings green and wet operations are then further deployed to create flexible classrooms that are defined by moveable and flexible walls. These walls made of vegetation, and water allow for students to determine the scale, and orientation of their learning spaces.
The School of Methodology reoccupies the two existing wings as instruction on the west side, and practice on the east side. This new dynamic of learning weaves these methodologies together at the center. The intervention creates a dynamic flow throughout the building and becomes a communal space for students to be able to be constantly exposed to an atmosphere filled with communication and discussion.
Referencing Hertzberger’s ideas of an educational promenade, this project challenges the notion of the physical dissociation between the school and the neighbourhood by demonstrating the potential to integrate community activity into the framework of an educational institution. Through an assembly of curvature, rigidity, transparency, and solidity, a fluid datum of play serves as a physical medium that facilitates the democratization of today’s sequestered schoolyard.
The School of Focus proposes cognitive training bolstered by visual cues to empower students with ADHD to meet targeted levels of concentration. Individual-learning units encircle communal areas, allowing the students to alternate between the group and independent study. The units’ interior hues change to indicate each student’s level of attention.
The Flow-Art School uses circulation as the medium of teaching and learning by challenging the traditional experiences where students receive instruction within a single room. Physical and visual connections are the prominent design motor in the school. By slicing existing floor plates and shifting them to different elevations, the addition of half-floors and ramps guides visual flow between levels.
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To learn more about each project, view the presentation booklets below.
2
Conceptual Architecture
This studio explores a conceptual approach to architectural thinking on the grounds that such an approach, when rigorously undertaken, is particularly effective for finding alternatives to received modes of spatial organization in architecture. As a particular heuristic device toward conceptual architecture, the section focuses on the notion of spatial infrastructure. Spatial infrastructure refers here to the ensemble of three-dimensional material elements providing a building’s primary articulation of space, before the introduction of partitions. The school happens to be a very flexible programmatic package and therefore lends itself to be explored through the notion of spatial infrastructure (one that rejects any identity between spatial typology and program) in especially productive ways.
Students: Johane Clermont, Chuqi Huang, Jo Hee Lee, Yi Liang, Shuhan Liu, Gustavo Lopez Mendoza, Nash Taylor, Duo Xu
Buildings can be roughly divided into three parts: envelope, functional space, and void-in-between. This school project makes use of the “void,” which is supported by the lattice structural system, to stimulate the interactions between people and people, people, and the city.
The school is housed within a cube-like enclosure subdivided by two diagonals rotated at 45 degrees to the axes. The resulting void spaces represent the “on-zone” where active and noisy school programs are located. The two diagonal dividers are themselves habitable and represent the “in-zone,” where activities requiring silence and concentration are located.
This project is aimed to provide a fluid continuity structure and a widely accessible openness to reflect on the spatial connection. The continuous network gives students both horizontal and vertical freedom to experience art, music, and other activities during school hours.
This project, primarily a trial for exploring an architectural concept based on a pre-determined and intersecting spatial grid, confronts the re-institution of a K-8 school whose structure has laid dormant for years. In activating the site, the existing and new structures confront each other in a clash of materials, style, and space.
The building incorporates one of the existing wings but uses the site to fully array the spatial infrastructure of pylons that touch at each base and the tops in order to form a full structural assembly. Across five floors, the school'ss programs vary in scale and organization due to the resulting formal implications of the pylon’s organization. The rooftop serves as a playground and urban farming lab for the children’s recreation. Below the school, there is a public bath with its own entrance and circulation as a separate public amenity.
The project generates from individual units to the whole building: four different basic units are designed for various school activities and get repeated to make up the building. Every unit includes a specific portion that can automatically compose both level and vertical circulation of the building when units are all piled together.
This school project combines program, circulation, and structure. Collective programs like a library, cafeteria, and gallery inhabit in or orbit around the gigantic tubes, offering encouraging access from all floors. The tubes become part of the pedagogical experience and contribute to collective cultural memory.
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To learn more about each project, view the presentation booklets below.
3
More School
Integrating school, life and city, this studio focuses on designing for a new type of educational facility that extends its program to double as a community hub for the neighborhood. Revisiting, reinventing, and expanding on historical examples, students devise contemporary alternatives for learning and civic life. The studio explores form and structure at various scales, and against the measure of different senses, as a means to deliver multivalent environments able to recast the school as a place of community and exchange. Negotiating inherent conflicts and contradictions that arise from the classroom to the street, students define a new spatial ecology for the school that enables it to become a more active part of the public realm for all.
Students: Agnes Anggada, Nikolas Bentel, Gizem Karagoz, Farouk Kwaning, Asher McGlothlin, Danielle Nir, Mickaella Pharaon, Estefania Serrano Soto, Adam Vosburgh, Yue Zhou
This design centers around the idea and activity of learning through play. The school interfaces with the public on street level, while the vertical spaces are activated through voids and netting, enabling play to ensue throughout the structure. The pedagogy is exercise and project-based learning, hence the flexibility of the open floor plan to facilitate a wide range of learning possibilities.
This project introduces a series of ‘learning platforms’ for a K-8 school and the local neighborhood, which currently lacks safe and active community learning spaces. This is achieved by a unique spatial typology and new educational experience for students and the local community, which is centered around flexibility, collaboration, and openness.
A revitalization of the old PS 64 building by reimagining access throughout the building’s structure. The goal is to create a new classroom organization to facilitate novel instruction methodologies.
The new proposal for PS 64 operates on the premise of “it takes a village to raise a child.” The organizational framework creates a network of spaces and peoples, building an interior urban environment where community members can participate in the education of the students. The central common areas are surrounded and shaped by a periphery of more enclosed units. This sequence of inside and outside contingent units interlock, creating scalar relationships between the city and the building, and the building and its interior furniture.
Kinesthetic School provides children an environment that fosters each child’s curiosity and sense of self, thus nurturing their growth into the future leaders whose creative thinking and compassion will solve the problems of tomorrow.
Classrooms are often explicitly defined spaces that designate an area for learning. This traditional sense of the classroom implies that children learn mostly within those four walls. However, the act of learning is not confined to an enclosed classroom; it is developed through a series of interactions, relationships, and situations that are encountered throughout the day. This proposal for a new PS 64 incorporates a continuity of spaces with a fragmentation of vertical platforms to shape a school that is informed by human activities and relationships.
PS64 provides NYC kids with a home base—their own little world and communitythat is their classroom—for a sense of comfort and stability within the concrete jungle. It keeps the structure from the old building’s bars to organize the new school into three parts: program, egress, and classrooms.
The project restores the former PS 64 school by transforming the existing structure into a space that integrates nature and community in education. The intervention carves the existing H-plan structure to create different spatial experiences, inserting open-air, green spaces as part of each classroom and play spaces along circulation paths. The aim is to integrate nature as an essential part of the child’s education in order to promote sensibility with the natural environment, which is difficult to achieve in New York City. The project approaches education through a playful manner by looking at it as a landscape. The school is a space where the community can gather and use for different activities.
The New P.S. 64 provides an answer to two questions: How can an old building be new? And, what can a public building be in an age of privatization?
The New P.S. 64 is the by-product of radical reassembly, its constituent parts a mix of old and re-constituted new. Also, while the New P.S. 64 belongs to both the students and the larger public, the architecture addresses the vastly different needs of each through a series of drawbridge-like stairs regulating access to a terraced facade.
The new PS64 is an educational facility that extends its program to double as a community hub. Through a series of large massing moves and small programmatic decisions, the site is opened up to allow for the school to embrace the daily life of the city.
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To learn more about each project, view the presentation booklets below.
4
Grounds for Play
Play is our human instinct. We play to experience joy, to exercise our creativity and to explore the world. We play to learn cooperation, flexibility and grit. And, perhaps most critically, it is through unfettered play that we learn. Over the last three decades, there has been a growing body of research on the emotional, social and neurological benefits of play for children.
In the context of a New York City school today, the available space and time for play is limited. Our studio will explore materials and geometry to activate volumetric space for play and learning experiences to co-mingle. We will propose new typologies of play spaces by deliberately bringing the public realm into the walls of the school – the child’s realm— in hopes of nurturing the next generation of great minds.
Students: Alya Abourezk, Henry Black, Sixuan Chen, Adeline Chum, Benjamin Diller-Schatz, Takashi Honzawa, Jules Kleitman, Yumeng Liu, Camille Newton, Lucia Song, Yerin Won
This project restores the historical ecology that Manhattan was built upon. It integrates a wetland and living machine teaching through the lens of coastal landscape resiliency, adaptivity, and regeneration. The open atrium creates a continuous playscape from the wetlands to the roof garden. Suspended pods and open walkways provide intimate moments for students to fully immerse themselves in this environment.
The Recess School transforms the center of Snyder’s H-block into a large breakout space: the groundscape transects the original building: the surface becoming a large playscape and the underbelly a branch of the NY Public Library. The school emphasizes time in between class as an opportunity for physical movement, social interaction, and a mental break.
The City School brings the community into the school through architectural events that break down the line between the school and the surrounding neighborhood. The public programs are extracted from the building, reorientated to the neighborhood, and then reinserted back into the school. This reorientation skews the public program from the building and city grid and its heavily axial views, creating a new perspective on the city and a visual and physical connection between the school and neighborhood.
Rather than inhabiting the existing structure with solitary programs, this project interprets the old as an envelope and interweaves a series of interconnected void spaces as a new learning structure. It provides a counterpart to the enclosed educational rooms in the form of ‘weaving playscape’.
The Illumination School reorients the educational experience around a series of six glass tubes serving as organizational cores: the existing masonry is removed and the wood-framed glass cylinders are inserted. The existing building houses open-plan school facilities, while the tubes create unsupervised zones for students to explore their curiosities.
The school draws from the experience of cyclical reflexivity that occurs during childhood development by interlinking the new and the existing via multiple thresholds. Programs permeate the existing shell, which is wrapped by a tensile structure protecting and defining play. Catwalks link thresholds together, creating inner sanctums that juxtapose program, tectonics, and experiences.
The Fieldwork School recognizes and embraces its location in a flood zone while centering around experimental learning, community, and play. Labs sit below a folding river that filters greywater and provides continuous play and tactile learning from the top floor to 10th street, where education spills out onto the city.
The project uses the CBJ Snyder scissor stair to establish new meandering landscapes for play between the existing H-plan wings, interweaving two paths throughout the addition while opening a mid-block connection underneath. The building becomes a three-dimensional playscape while supporting the play-based, child-directed curriculum, and programming for the socio-economically diverse student body and public.
The Boundless Grid School explores spatial and programmatic flexibilities: with a pivoting wall and grid system, the layout of the school can be changed daily according to a student-directed schedule. Allowing students to manage the processes of change blurs the boundaries between education and grounds for play, while simultaneously placing responsibility in students’ hands. The project aims to ask questions regarding efficiency and the meaning of school spaces in future cities and education systems.
The design starts from weaving the new structure and the old construction together, and
then capsulizes the classrooms into the boxes supported by the beams, allowing them to
float in the vertical landscape of play. They are shaping each other as different sides of the
partition. Kids will be able to enjoy these segments of release and playtime in between
the study space where they are more concentrated. During the journey through space,
the existing shell serves as the backdrop of this recreational space with exposed structure.
Two things that drive the development of the interior space are relativity and curiosity.
About relativity, this project uses the differentiation of scale as the tool to divide space. At
the same time, elements in uncommon scale such as giant doors might remind the adults
of their childhood when they were kids, where all the other things were so much bigger
than themselves.
About curiosity, colorful circulation elements run through inside and outside the shell, connecting
the experience of interior and exterior environments. These components create a
series of triggers along the passage, attracting people to explore by stimulating their curiosity.
Imagine when you see a tail of some unknown object from a peak, then you might
have the willingness to step forward a little to check out what is going on, then you find out
that it is a spiral staircase, and it allows you to go outside of the building.
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To learn more about each project, view the presentation booklets below.
5
The XR School
Climate change represents the single largest threat to our planet and humankind today. We have seen monumental efforts to reverse this by international organizations, governments, corporations and individuals but these efforts are simply not enough. Those in a position to mitigate this disaster are letting us down. As we have seen of late, youth are emerging as the greatest hope for change and survival. While we can only hope that the situation doesn’t get too disastrous before it gets better, it is the education of the next generation that will eliminate the pending disaster and establish a climate neutral planet. Our project for the studio is the design of The XR School. The XR School is a New York City public elementary school with a curricular focus on climate change – its causes and the paths to stabilize it. The school building is designed as an integral tool to these lessons for the students. The XR School is to be the first net zero energy building in New York City, generating its own energy, storing it and feeding it into the grid when possible. The XR School plants and harvests its own food for school breakfast and lunch. A teaching kitchen is staffed by the students to prepare and serve the meals.
Students: Karen Wan Jia Chen, Cara DePippo, Minghan Lin, Andrew Magnus, Stephanie McMorran, Allison Shahidi, Jingyi Shao, Bisher Tabbaa
Teaching young students lessons on tackling climate change, Public School In&Out rethinks the school’s indoor/outdoor space relationship that plays crucial role in defining student’s experience. Breaking through the bulky building envelop, In&Out invites plantation indoors and introduces classroom teaching outdoors, ultimately transforming the school as part of the site’s green space network.
In addition to fighting climate change, School With A View aims to fight another crisis that is going on—childhood obesity. In keeping with sustainability, the existing building is going to be kept and an addition is going to be built on top and off the back. The roof addition will accommodate the gymnasium and the rear addition will accommodate a grand staircase that will act as the main form of vertical circulation for the building. Both additions will be entirely glass to capitalize on the unobstructed, panoramic views of the entire city.
The XR school is conceived as part of the urban landscape with an open-air 24/7 ramp carving out and overlapping with the existing building, connecting a series of shared programs between the public and the school itself from the ground to the wheatfield farm on top.
The XR school encourages student activism by proximity with nature to engender a sense of environmental responsibility. Bridging traditional pedagogy with more radical community involvement, the existing wings of the school are interjected by woven mass-timber spans. This establishes a dynamic axis for occupants: community activities at the center operate year-round, school activities at the wings offer more specialized programs, and the terrace platforms persuade students and the community to embrace stacked vertical farming.
The central unifying principle of the project is flow. Whether it be the flow of air through the central stack and throughout the building, the fluid dynamism of the interaction between the public and private spheres, or the fluidity of spatial boundaries, the aim was to create a school that maximized the potential for community/school interactions.
Water is the main consideration which determines the form of the project. A rainwater capture system, urban farm, and wetland serve as both practical and pedagogical tools, providing a dynamic academic experience.
This is a bird-friendly school using the strategy that students engage with the natural environment while the birds become the residents of the artificial structural forest. It is a realization of mountain forest within an urban location where the sustainability concept from the XR movement is implanted.
The Farming School passively responds to the climate to create a relationship between farming and pedagogy. The classrooms are organized as staired terraces where the rooftop of each classroom is used for planting, creating an non-hierarchical urban farm that impacts the environmental and social aspects of the neighborhood.
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To learn more about each project, view the presentation booklets below.
6
School of Outsiders
American public school systems are unable to adjust and account for the societal, cultural, and socio-economic pressures applied to its student bodies. As a result, many groups fall outside of the conventional curriculum and structures of public schools. These are students underserved by current curricula and protocols of their local school. Studio participants are encouraged to identify and advocate for people or persons in their project. This process serves to not only develop and refine the design skills of each participant, but is an exciting opportunity to focus on challenging yet wholly meaningful design questions requiring the meeting of architecture and advocacy. In conjunction with this work, students envision and integrate the architectural elements necessary to adapt the curriculum and spatial logics of the school. Each work should also incorporate a component of public space and programming of the studio members’ choosing. By folding the public into our projects, an opportunity to devise a productive interchange between the school constituents and the community appears.
Students: Thomas Beck, Xuanyi Chen, Osvaldo Delbrey, Max Goldner, Gene Han, Seungmin Han, Alyna Karachiwala, Meissane Kouassi, Reem Makkawi, Keneilwe Ramaphosa, Ansel Sidiadinoto, Kylie Walker
10% of students in New York City Public Schools are currently experiencing homelessness. Young homeless New Yorkers are predominantly affected by local displacement, immigration policies, and LGBT related issues. The Sanctuary School is a 1:1 project: in addition to the usual educational functions of a school, it offers a combination of 73 student dorms and 97 affordable housing units for housing 300 students.
The Outsider School redefines the relationship between the outside and the inside. By introducing dynamic building envelopes and sky bridges into the existing rigid floor plan as another layer of circulation, it provides more opportunities for interaction and self-exploration, encouraging the coexistence of some binary contradictions.
The project is born from a critical look into the migration patterns of Puerto Ricans which scholars have called the Commuter Nation.
The School for the Commuter Nation questions the traditional spaces and experiences that are admitted into the school program in order to tackle issues of American colonialism affecting Puerto Rican cultural and political agency.
“Disability does not reside in or with an individual, but arises from an interaction between a person with an “impairment” and an environment that is not suited to their needs.” (Dr. Kate Sang)
The School of Equilibrium recalibrates the existing inaccessible datum, establishing a neutral environment that enables the impaired mobility.
The School for Autism is a school of sensory processing. Through designing means of controllable stimulation, different sensory environments can provide solace and support for children throughout the spectrum.
The School of Insight focuses on the reality of visually paired and impaired students by redefining the concept of universal design. Re-imagining typical spaces such as classrooms, corridors, playgrounds, etc., the design wants to challenge our understanding of space that mainly relies on sight. By playing with gravity, colors, light, and forms, the aim is to equalize the experience of seeing and non-seeing individuals.
How can a school simultaneously insert itself and spill out into the existing urban fabric? While the skin and bones of the existing Snyder building are surgically and systematically cut, a gantry crane is embedded to slide modules all over Manhattan. These re-configured shipping containers fulfill a variety of community needs, from public bathrooms placed in nearby parks, outdoor public libraries, to science labs mounted on a barge creating a floating summer school on the East River.
For the outsider, the uncanny is a lived experience. For a burns survivor, the uncanny is often an embodied lifelong existence. A School for Outsiders is a school for entry and re-entry: the School for Burns Survivors becomes the point of entry, providing a refuge for survivors, designed to facilitate their re-entry into society. Their journey through the school becomes part of their recovery: a return from the uncanny; a home-coming and return to self.
A school of outsiders is a school without language and cultural barriers. The rich processes involved in cooking can be used to teach foundational knowledge. Instead of cooking as a goal like in traditional culinary institutes, this school uses cooking as an educational process.
The school for the arts + domestic abuse center is a space that allows individuals agency and support at every stage of their recovery through integration into a dynamic community. This approach to a school for outsiders is two pronged. The school of the arts features programs in fine arts, music, and performance while having an on-campus initiative serving survivors of domestic abuse. Both a school and a shelter have the capability to act as a supporting base for the user. The urgency of the experience of seeking shelter in contrast to the routine and structure that a school offers led to the incorporation of the arts programming. By doing so, the community is able to share a specific passion, skill, or interest that acts as a beacon that further coalesces the two programs. This allows any user–whether it be a student, survivor, artist, or patron– to be welcomed into a safe, dynamic space.
The project retains the strength and intimacy of the existing structure by keeping the bookends of the original C.B.J. Snyder H-block plan and respecting the allotment courtyard spaces. The project includes an embracing u-shape to the upper levels which is reserved for the users who occupy campus the most–the shelter residents. The form is lifted up and pulled vertically in opposite directions to optimize the views of the living spaces while creating a new public area below with the enclosed open airpark.
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To learn more about each project, view the presentation booklets below.
7
Tending: Intertwined Impact
To tend is to pay close attention. To contribute. To cultivate. To grow. To produce.
This studio designs social infrastructures that are resilient to the unstable and unpredictable contexts of our time. Democracy requires recognizing and strategically opening edges and borders—sometimes to embrace things we do not fully understand. Architecture frames diverse activity to support civil behavior, critical discourse, contemplation, celebrations, and mourning. Learning at all stages requires attentive engagement—tending to the work at hand. In this studio, schools are immersive yet porous oases comprising both interior and exterior spaces—environments benefiting from integration with restorative landscapes and the city at large.
Students: Aya Abdallah, Guohao Chen, Novak Djogo, Yang Lu, Zakios Meghrouni-Brown, Kaeli Streeter, Hazel Villena, Muyu Wu, Ruisheng Yang, Hao Zhong
The existing building is eroded to create an intermittent marsh, an alluring terra incognita for children to discover a respect for the natural world around them. As the school becomes obscured beneath the accumulation of a vertical ecology, it comes to constitute a pedagogy of germination, growth, and decay.
“Displaced Together” is a school that brings two populations of kids together—healthy and sick—allowing an uninterrupted course of education for both simultaneously. The architecture of the building enhances a parallel existence that keeps everyone safe and educated. The “parallel” school (in dialogue with the “normative” school) resides in the middle of the building. It is simultaneously physically disconnected and intertwined with the rest of the school, allowing visual and social connections between both populations. In an alternate near future, I imagine a world where episodic displacement will become part of our daily life, and terms like “social distancing” regularly merge with our previous life. Movement across scales and speeds creates a blur between the immobile and the mobile, the clustered and the dispersed, the permanent and the temporary.
Perspectives oscillate and the horizon summons as students and the community navigate fissures and bridges within a field of nesting, weaving, interlocking, and sheared spatial conditions. This project adapts the existing patio to an urban garden, which also welcomes the people who live in the neighborhood to utilize this communal space.
An adaptive reuse proposal for a school situated at the edge of Manhattan’s Alphabet city: this proposal seeks to introduce flexibility, openness, and even arbitrariness into the formal, grid-bound space of the existing school.
Continuous loops are modified to create spaces of different qualities and behaviors. A continuous and open structure at the center creates an open space experience for the whole project. The facade of the project enlivens the local streetscape, inviting the public to engage with the life of the school.
A school is intrinsically a place of growth and tending. Educators, students, parents, and community members engage in conversations that demand patience, empathy, and respect. TENDING is a tool to translate (RICE PLANTING) the study of life, growth, and transparency and (MOUNTAIN BUILDING) the interference and celebration of structure. Through a study of DISTORTION, these non-normative landscapes manifest into the building. Architecture and landscape are intertwined.
School as Playground redefines spatial experience by reframing thresholds and is informed by the haptic memory of a laser maze. Inclined and curved surfaces that define habitable spaces, fully accessible circulation, and programming is explored. Students move up and down through the building where inclined landscapes support an interior experience of play.
In the form of permeable clusters, new classrooms blend individual and collective aspects of early education as students are asked to frequently move between instructed sessions and self-guided study or play. The existing institutional school boundary is therefore rendered permeable as school activities are exposed and connected to each other.
The proposal introduces a new elastic giant to carve out the existing building and merge with the left-over part to become a new school. The elasticity is represented in both material usage and spatial quality. A gradient of spaces from normative to elastic/regulated to autonomous is embraced.
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To learn more about each project, view the presentation booklets below.
8
A Building Made of Buildings (and Other Readymades)
This studio makes a building, a primary school, out of other buildings, among them: significant historic and contemporary examples, generic types, and the former school building that occupies the site. Through a variety of techniques involving the selection and combination of readymades—objects found on site, in studio, in books and magazines, on the internet, in stores and product catalogues, at home—the studio challenges tendencies towards synthetic part to whole relationships, repeated spatial modules, and geometric motifs. It strives wherever possible not to design buildings in the conventional sense but to find them, to collectively construct rules and methods rather than pursuing singular expressions of individual authorship. It considers the studio a form of play, an experiment in pedagogy about pedagogy.
Students: Ryan Alexander, Andres Alvarez Davila, Livia Calari, Jiageng Guo, Jean Kim, Maxim Kolbowski-Frampton, Jiafeng Li, Bianca Lin, Yiheng Lin, Jordan Readyhough, Aditi Mangesh, Aditi Shetye, Hao Zheng
The project derived from previous readymade models and the theory by John Dewey that education is life itself. It aims to broaden the boundaries of education and provide a new community center to the neighborhood by creating a continuous sequence of program and space that can be shared by both the school and the community.
By grafting a set of residential spaces onto the current school building, a contrast is created between the expansive classrooms and the more intimate additions. These domestic nooks, balconies, mezzanines, and bays are arranged around a series of new staircases that individually access each classroom. This reconfiguration circumvents the need for a typical corridor layout, allowing the entire floor area to be utilized by classes with flexible boundaries created by sliding bookshelf walls.
This project calls for the preservation of former Ps 64 as a significant local landmark while proposing an addition, woven into the existing fabric, that would create spaces conducive to contemporary pedagogical practice and emerging trends in schooling that blend community advocacy and childcare.
The existing building is treated in three phases of demolition and openness, from fully restored and private to gutted and exposed.
Preserving half of the existing building that fits all classrooms, accepts and retains the traditional learning experience &rituals.
Freeing the other half, establishing a counterpart ritual where public gathering may occur.
This renovation sets up a dichotomy like an oxymoron to redefine their relationship between the traditional and alternative.
School Triptych is a building made of buildings: three distinct insertions into the urban fabric that propose three spatial typologies that inform and enable different pedagogies, ways of learning, and interactions between students and the city.
Rather than re-inhabit the skin of the gutted school building I propose to reanimate the site in relation to the school as a ruin, imagining how this gesture might orient the student’s mind toward the history of the site as a structure caught between multiple states of being.
Transplant a dynamic core system into the original building to contrast with the Renaissance facade. Classrooms are squeezed by existing brick walls and inserted atriums directly to evoke a pedagogy revolution. All classrooms are arranged in two wings, and public spaces like the library and studio are set in the middle bar.
The New P.S. 64 enables a new layer of transparency to the community by opening up the plinth and basement for visual and physical connectivity. The above-existing building is designed with acupuncture addition of the flexible system that allows for responsive class spaces. Students are able to experience different occupations and identities through the assistance of the partition system arrangement.
This project explores the role of the image of the historic building through the delamination of the existing walls. Leaving the existing facade suggests that the building is still there, while the delamination of the wall systems reveals the facade is functionally meaningless and creates a new organization of spaces and experiences driven by the materiality of the project.
The new PS64 integrates itself into the Lower East Side as a mega green infrastructure that is able to participate within the community by being more than just an educational institution. The integration of green strategies like bioswales, rainwater collection, and on-site composting not only creates a sustainable pedagogical shift within the school but also allows it to serve the community as a whole.
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To learn more about each project, view the presentation booklets below.
