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Advanced Architecture Studio V
The Advanced Architecture Studios address an ambitious scope of concerns, considered in relation to architecture’s social, material, environmental, and political potentials, with projects ranging from an addition to Avery Hall that investigates the co-existance of wood and plants in building materials; structures that mitigate and adapt to climate change, informed by research authored by scientists at Columbia’s Climate School; the development of reparative connections between urban and rural New York through architecture; and adaptive reuse of a former factory into an incubator for art and design in Houston, Texas. Studios considered sites in New York City, Upstate New York; Puerto Rico; Honolulu, Los Angeles, and beyond. The studios affirmed the potentials of architecture as a sociopolitical project, one that is committed to the intersectionalities of climate, equity, design & data city and its communities yet remains open to uncertain futures.
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Public Infrastructure/Public Health: The Cross Bronx Expressway
This course imagined ways to collaborate and expand the intermarriage of social policy and design intended to re-envision infrastructure that has harmed the well-being of those who are of color or socio-economically disadvantaged. It brought students and faculty from the Mailman School of Public Health together with GSAPP to explore the public health opportunities in capping sections of the Cross Bronx Expressway (CBE). Using the CBE as a case study, this studio explored the cost-effectiveness of implementing a deck that can host subsequent new parks or other programming. The work began with research already completed that proposed and simulated new capping and decking over the CBE.
Students: Jiafeng Gu, Henry Han, Qing Hou, Mu Dong Jung, Junho Lee, Yufei Liu, Stephanie McMorran, Qiwei Sun, An Wang, Gejin Zhu
CBE EQUILIBRIUM
The Cross Bronx Expressway (CBE) has long been disputable for entailing air and noise pollutio...
Running Corridors
This project aims to release the problem of emission and noise within the Hispanic majority commu...
Weaving Bridges
The Weaving Bridges is designed as a light-conscious construction of future mobility above the...
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Reset: Architecture, Environmental Justice, and a Civilian Climate Corps
In the past year and a half, the entangled crises of a global pandemic, climate change, racial injustice, and income inequality have demonstrated that current systems fail to adequately address the challenges of these times. This studio explored these entanglements and intersections through radical imagination and scalable impact. It looked for opportunities like the unprecedented $3.5 trillion infrastructure plan currently being debated in the United States and the historic United Nations Climate Change Conference (COP26). It developed strategies such as materials that act as a carbon sink, buildings that are open systems, and an empowered workforce through a Civilian Climate Corps. This studio sought to prototype the buildings and cities of the future.
Students: Kurt Man Hin Cheang, Adeline Chum, Benjamin Diller-Schatz, Anoushae Eirabie, Zhichen Gong, Gizem Karagoz, Shan Li, Aditi Mangesh Shetye, Bisher Tabba, Leo Wan, Beiyi Xu, Hyosil Yang
Refactoring Farming: Combating Soil Degradation from Meat to Mushroom
In order to meet future federal carbon sequestration, land productivity demands, and the slowing ...
RESET: RUBBER
RESET: RUBBER recognizes the compounding negative impact monoculture farming has on the environme...
Extractions for Tomorrow
This project looks at Nigeria as a microcosm of the future African condition of rapid urbaniza...
A New Vernacular
The research investigates the possibility of scaling Rammed Earth construction to provide afforda...
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Under the Viaduct: Community Well-Being In Bradhurst, Harlem
Within this course, students worked with the Harlem Congregations for Community Improvement (HCCI) on design development of concept strategies for community well-being. The studio used the HCCI Bradhurst Revitalization reports for Brownfield Opportunity Area (BOA) studies as primary guidelines, which outline detailed considerations evolved from an intensive program of community consultation. The studio engaged with HCCI initiatives for hybrid development connecting new housing with education, jobs, and health initiatives.
Students: Henderson Beck, Qijian Cui, Yunlong Fan, Jason Young Kim, Sunghyun Kim, Jean Kim, Xueyin Lu, Yukun Tian, Yusuf Urlu, Fang Wan, Qingfan Wu, Zheng Yin
A Place on Viaduct
NYCHA’s Polo Grounds Towers is a lonely place for 4,000 people with almost no amenities. Ye...
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The Future Public: Public Housing Possibilities
This studio addressed the demolition of public housing and the resulting displacement. It explored solutions to ensure diverse communities remain part of New York’s urban fabric and offer better housing possibilities to low-income tenants free of crime and the stigma of poverty. Students envisioned a radically new future for the existing NYCHA Gowanus Houses housing stock including the redesign of individual units to full building renovations and new site strategies. Students studied existing housing projects and developed scalable solutions that offer a more imaginative, productive, and empathetic response to New York City’s forgotten landscapes of disrepair.
Students: Sarah Abouelkhair, Erxiao Chu, Anays Gonzalez, Siye Huang, Radha Devang Kamdar, Sophia Le, Yingjie Liu, Roderick Macfarlane, Jordan Readyhough, Can Yang
Revive the Community: Remix
After NYCHA (New York City Housing Authority) withdrew investment in public housing projects, the...
Housing Uncertainty
The history of public housing in the US is a history of exclusion, discrimination, patronizing mo...
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One Rock Five Obstructions
This studio investigated granite as a social, cultural, and historical system and as a building block of New York City. We considered how granite might respond to a site like Penn Station, a space perpetually adapting to the city’s civic, cultural, and transportation needs.
Students worked through an iterative method. Projects developed over a range of trials—from material investigations (tracing one kind of granite), to measured additions (adding 30 tons of material), considering appearance (designing a facade) and performance (varying notions of comfort). Ultimately, students combined these into one proposal, reflecting an attitude towards civic space and materiality through ecological, material and historical frameworks.
Students: Nikolas Bentel,
Sixuan Chen,
Xiucong Han,
Sierra Heckman,
Yiruo Li,
Jonathan Liang,
Bianca Lin,
Mickaela Pharaon,
Charul Punia,
Maria Ramirez,
Adam Vosburgh,
Yingying Zhou,
Penn Station Countertop
The studio was staged as a meditation on granite, through an intervention at Penn Station. I chos...
Invisible Grand Wall
My investigation started by looking at the grains and usage of granite on building facades, compa...
Granite Clouds
This project looks at granite through a different lens than its usual architectural uses. Through...
Granite Memorial/A Civic Corridor
The extension of Penn Station should surmount the existing issues, the lack of coherence, connect...
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Transmutation: Reclamation and Reparation
This course examined the reclamation of public space in New York City following the COVID-19 quarantine of spring 2020 and in the aftermath of the murder of George Floyd in Minneapolis, Minnesota. Although these events revealed issues surrounding race and inequality, the studio investigated the city not as a site of crisis but as a site of cultural production and transmutation. It considered sites of removal, displacement, and pandemic abandonment that were reclaimed by Black, Trans, colored, and marginalized bodies specifically through dance, performance, march, and protest. It studied and engaged specific artistic practices that transmute the material, spatial, temporal, or psychic forms of enclosure in the city to produce “spatial choreographies of liberation” and invent new uses, programs, and forms of visibility.
Students: Santiago Alvarez Santibañez, Adrianna Fransz, Hyeon Jin Hong, Farouk Kwaning, Alonso Ortega, Aikaterini Papoutsa, Keneilwe Ramaphosa, Kennedy Van Trump, Ke Zhai, Mingxun Zou
DE-MIRAGE
Is Hudson Yards, the new “glistening” and “sleek” neighborhood on the ...
Spatial Absence
This project intervenes at the intersection where bodies are exposed and opened up to spatial abs...
The Third Space
The High Line Park acts as a neoliberal tool to support the increase in real estate value and ...
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Extreme Scales
This studio, Extreme Scales: Speculating New Futures For Bodies, Buildings, And The BQE Introduction, began by investigating the recently proposed Infrastructure Framework Plan ratified by the US Senate. This legislation served as a catalyst to research, study, and propose new public programs of equity and transformational change in NYC’s own backyard. The studio designed new public programs enabled by a pending major infrastructure project – the reconstruction of the 1.5-mile triple-deck Brooklyn Queens Expressway at the Brooklyn Waterfront. It speculated on ways in which these new programs possess a new architecture in every sense of the term. The studio intended to explore and reimagine that architecture and its role in shaping public infrastructure projects now and in the future.
Students: Alya Abourezk, Vinay Agrawal, Johane Clermont, Ningyuan Deng, Yani Gao, Ryan Hansen, Gustavo Jesus Lopez Mendoza, Andrew Magnus, Asher Mcglothlin, Hazel Villena, Tianyi Zhang, Hao Zheng
The Cathedral to the MTA
The Cathedral to the MTA seeks to be the city’s new seat for equity in infrastructure decision-ma...
Gathering, Reconnecting & Gaining back
The construction of the Brooklyn Queens Expressway (BQE) in 1954 tore the communities on both sid...
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Flooding, Urban Heat Island Effect, & Environmental Justice In East Harlem
This studio, Flooding, Urban Heat Island Effect, And Environmental Justice In East Harlem. Typological Corrections. The Try For Stopping Building, developed Urban and Typological Corrections on the existing city as a preventive tool for flood threats and heat island effects predicted by reports on the future of urban environments. At the same time, the studio investigated the possibilities of architecture to fight against inequality and environmental injustice, as the most segregated and vulnerable populations in NYC are the ones at greatest environmental risk. The projects focused on a fragment of the consolidated city to activate processes of re-programming, re-densifying, re-scaling, and re-signifying. Students imagined the architectural content of “Living Together in the climate change times” to keep architecture as a democratic discipline fighting for the best future for all.
Students: Omar Badriek, Rocio Crosetto Brizzio, León Duval, Ruben Gomez Ganan, SeokHyun Kim, Yiheng Lin, Sujin Shim, Wanting Sun, Lichong Tong, Meichen Wang, Haoran Xu, Jiazheng Zhang
Once upon a time in East Harlem
The project focuses on rethinking New York City’s social housing projects, and the speci...
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Formal / Informal: Migrating Climates in the Immigrant City
The studio engaged with immigrant minority communities analyzing their everyday appropriations and adaptations to formal architecture and infrastructure. Students were tasked with designing for an expanded idea of informal urbanism, focusing on American cities while also rethinking the boundaries between formal and informal. The studio reconceptualized the formal systems of architecture and infrastructure to strengthen informal, or micro, economies and activities. It created architecture or infrastructure that supports immigrant communities still at risk from a slow pandemic recovery, while also understanding the role of design in mitigating hate crimes and anti-immigration policies. Students designed for two extreme limits of scale, simultaneously at an architectural or infrastructural scale and at a climate or planetary scale.
Students: Bisheng Hong, Chuqi Huang, Yuening Jiang, Wanqi Jiang, Alyna Karachiwala, Jiaying Qu, Richard Sa, Zenah Sakaamini, Estefania Serrano Soto, Wenxuan Xu, Duo Xu, Joyce Zhou
All-age Community Center, secretly designed for the elderly
Although seniors make up the majority of Flushing immigrants, problems exist within their livi...
The I Line
The I Line focuses on transportation equity for Queens. Many immigrants work in the city and comm...
Urban Chicks
This proposal examines opportunities for re-introducing farms to an urban setting by producing...
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Plein Air II
Acknowledging the complex material and socio-political performance of air, and the intersectional vulnerabilities and agencies compounded in the corporeality of air, this studio explores the architecture of “open” air, both figurative and literal. While often backgrounded and assumed as passively occupying undefined voids, air builds islands, of heat, and alleys, of cancerous fumes, duplicating the enclosures and lines produced elsewhere. Air forges “black snows” of sugar canes on the streets of Pahokee, FL, and morphs into tears, smoke, and mirrors at the squares and borders across the globe. Innocuously connecting and incessantly shifting, the air is a lifeline and a weapon, and carefully delineated pods and shapey bubbles that might bring “the normal” back. Recognizing air as an elusive yet critical spatial medium, the studio engages air and the variegated materialities and ideologies of “plein/open air” as shared prompts for this semester’s exploration.
Students: Wei-Chun Chou, Eric Chyou, Yutong Deng, Yefei Guo, Se Lim Jung, Daniel Kim, Yi Liang, Zida Liu, Yumeng Liu, Malvina Mathioudaki, Hyuein Song, John Trujillo
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Un-Detailing
Details are complex assemblages of people, industries, practices, non-human forms of life. At a time when a techno-political paradigm based on exploitation, coloniality, segregation, racism, and anthropocentrism is collapsing, the studio Un-Detailing, At The Collapse Of Humans’ Exploitation A Studio On The Power Of Architectural Prescription used details as an opportunity for architecture to grow political alternatives by means that are specifically architectural. It used architecture’s power of prescription to accelerate collapse, to decolonize, to confront racism, to dissent from anthropocentrism, to allow the entanglement of all forms of life, to move from exploitation to care, and from depletion to cyclability.
Students: Aya Abdallah, Nayef Alsabhan, Xumin Chen, Osvaldo Delbrey, Jiageng Guo, Yaxin Jiang, Yang Lu, Yinlei Pang, Yuchen Qui, Bingyu Xia, Haotong Xia, Qingyang Yu
Ecosystems of Dissent
On 33 Thomas Street, a 29-story windowless telecommunications building is the source of many d...
In the Name of Heat - Hudson Yards Platform
Hudson Yards is made when two modes of exploitation collide, where vertical multiplication of ...
Possibility Makers: A New Carrier System Design
What can be done publicly with limited funding of $550 million? The Shed gives one answer: it mob...
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Futurecurrent: Envisioning Emergent Ecologies for Jamaica
This studio made the invisible visible and tangible by harnessing virtual reality as an empathy machine. In the first segment of the course, students brought to life Jamaica’s potential futures in VR to create immersive experiences that spur positive change. The second part of the course focused on the design of an oceanographic and climate research center along with supporting programs, using VR software to bring experiences at 1:1 scale into the design process. Students worked with Fred M. Jones Estate to create a sustainable eco-community, taking the site and the local community into a more climate-resilient future.
Students: Aahana Banker, Gaole Dai, Francesca Doumet, Takashi Honzawa, Yuchen Huang, Jo Hee Lee, Rushdan Majumder, Jinseon Noh, Leah Smith, Xinan Tan, Anthea Viloria, Xiangru Zhao
Bamboo Futurisms
As part of an attempt to diversify Jamaica’s tourist-dependent economy, one that has suffered sin...
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Enacting Our Environmental Entanglements
This studio Enacting Our Environmental Entanglements: Innovation-Renovation at the Columbia Climate School’s Lamont-Doherty Earth Observatory proposed an investigation into the ways design can visibly enact our own and its own environmental entanglements through the design of a carbon-zero interpretative commons-building and the adaptive reuse of the original manor house for the Lamont-Doherty Earth Observatory. The fundamental lessons of ecological understanding have been to make evident these entangled interrelations between species and their environment in terms of behavioral, energetic, and informational exchanges. This studio proposed environments that spatialize these relational circulations of mediated environmental matter (air, water, waste), energies (structural and thermal loads), and information (among the scientists and with the visiting public).
Students: Andres Davila, Cara DePippo, Ana Hernandez Derbez, Maxim Kolbowski-Frampton, Karan Matta, Nash Taylor, Yanan Zhou
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Sensory Publics
This studio explores how public spaces in New York can support the full range of sensory experiences. The studio interrogates familiar ideas of the “sensory” in architecture by approaching sensation as situated, specific, and intersectional. Students learn about the sensory sensitivities that emerge from developmental disabilities such as autism, as well as from mental health conditions such as anxiety, depression, and/or trauma, which have affected an increasing number of New Yorkers with the recent pandemic, economic downturn, and police brutality. The course addresses these topics by learning from discourses on disability justice, intersectional feminism, and radical care. The course centers dialogue and collaboration with self-advocates and community partners to co-imagine new design futures.
Students: Henry Black, Claire Xuanyi Chen, Jialu Deng, Benjamin Fox, Alexa Greene, Yining Lai, Kyounghwa Lee, Camille Newton, Allison Jane Shahidi, Hannah Stollery, Kaeli Streeter, Yilun Jasmine Sun, Hao Zhong
Mixed Street for Neurodiverse Children
The program aims to allow children, especially neurodiverse children, to have a free playground t...
Senior Street
The site is on Amsterdam Ave between 109th and 110 St. The goal of the project is to provide a pu...
Reading Garden and Garden Reading
This project proposes the integration of the George Bruce Library and the adjacent garden with a ...
dept. of care
The water recirculation system at the department of care meets a series of ‘life services’ at the...
Weaving Under
The Henry Hudson Parkway is a busy highway. It becomes a viaduct from 72nd Street and lands on th...
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Unadapted: Social Infrastructure in Brooklyn Armories
Erected during the popularization of the Romanesque Revival, Brooklyn’s armories appear within the city landscape as daunting castles inspired by medieval architecture. As the urban environment around them changes rapidly, they remain as erratic boulders in the landscape, ‘unadapted’ large masses. This studio focused on three of Brooklyn’s armories as a case study and site for intervention through adaptive re-use.
It envisioned a new architectural role as open and inviting community space in structures designed to do the opposite. The studio engaged the concept of the “social condenser” in which contradictory programmatic functions are combined to create new architectural ideas. Within the studio, the idea of ‘unadaptedness’ extended beyond the programmatic aspect to include the spatial, formal, and architectural layering of buildings and cities.
Students: Ryan Alexander, Luz Auyon, Daniela Beraun, Livia Calari, Yunha Choi, Novak Djogo, Jules Kleitman, Danielle Nir, Shulong Ren, Helen Winter, Tamim Aljefri , Danlei Yang
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Island
This studio embraces an apparent impossibility: How can architecture simultaneously address issues that are beyond its scope and turn them into creative interventions? Architecture has been confronted with natural and human-driven disasters starting with the earliest civilizations, yet such constraints have often led to some of the greatest works as extreme difficulty spurs innovation. Within the course, students speculated futures for a new island planned on the Hudson River between Canal Street and 135th Street.
Looking to Little Island’s revival of an existing programmatic typology for the city, the projects proposed a comparable architectural equivalent for experimental space to respond to the following challenge.
Students: Rourke Brakeville, Ece Cetin, Karen Wan Jia Chen, Shikang Ding, Zhanhao Fan, Han Kuo, Yuhong Li, Risa Mimura, Zihan Sun, Muyu Wu, Enfeng Xie, Haozhen Yang, Peicong Zhang
The Lung
The Lung is a factory, museum, and purifier of air. Facing various underlying urban disasters, Th...
The Unburnt Forest
Fire has always been perceived as a dangerous element, causing large-scale, uncontrollable wildfi...
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Cultural Matter
The studio Cultural Matter: Material Economies, Speculative Reuse, and a new Arts Infrastructure for NYC considered the forelives and afterlives of constructed artifacts and the long-term impacts of systems of extraction, manufacture, demolition, and disposal. It revalued the discarded matter generated by these practices as a vital resource and productive constraint. Amplifying the potential of new material economies and logics of re-use, the projects imagined recombinant spatial, tectonic, and programmatic assemblages that engage the uncertainties of the Anthropocene. Proposing new forms of cultural infrastructure in the form of a new network of Arts Resource Centers to support the fragile ecosystem of independent arts organizations in NYC, the projects engaged diverse forms of artistic practice, new conceptions of community space, and emergent logics of architectural and material reuse.
Students: Ata Gun Aksu,
Jiahua Cai,
Xin Chen,
Ethan Davis,
Yong Yeob Kim,
Junoh Lee,
Talia Li,
Minghan Lin,
U Kei Long,
Malavika Madhuraj,
Zakios Meghrouni-Brown,
Irmak Turanli
Staten Island Art Center & Artist Residence
Staten Island in recent years has been a hotspot for artists for working, living, or gathering be...
Greetings from Gowanus
The Gowanus Canal in Brooklyn is considered one of the most polluted sites in the country. It is ...
Above and Under
This project is a mixed-use complex that reconsiders the possibility of reusing a common but s...
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Urban Futures/Future Architectures USA 5.0
Post-Plantation Futures examined the plantation as an evolving typological model and discursive form to understand, undermine, explicate, and complicate the mechanics and techniques of enclosure that structure everyday life. Students studied the form and logics of plantations to develop a lexicon for its various components and dispositions and utilized the terms collected to examine the persistence of the plantation logic in various publicly and privately owned sites around the city. The studio also documented spaces and instances, “double agents,” where the systems of enclosure are subverted, resisted, and refused. These spatial protocols became foundational to ideas surrounding how these sites can be transformed over time for a post plantation future.
Students: Abriannah Aiken, Hao-Yuan Cheng, Max Goldner, Sonny Han, Gene Han, Sanober Khan, Meissane Kouassi, Dhruva Lakshminarayanan, Reem Makkawi, Lucia Song, Kylie Walker, Siyu Xiao
Re-Reverberations
Re-Reverberations is a set of spatial interventions along the Cross-Bronx Expressway that specula...
Mirror(ed) Yards: Returning Extracted Grounds
The elevator replicates the ground on which it sits and positions them high in the air. But when ...
Welcome to Grant Gardens
How can the two systems at Morningside Gardens and Grant Houses together reflect collective ow...
Habit Habitat Habitus: Central Park Futures
Central Park represents a landmark of urban wildlife, tourists, migrating birds, and unseen dwell...