For one week each spring the Columbia GSAPP End of Year Show converts the seminar rooms, hallways, and stairwells of Avery Hall into temporary exhibition spaces. The show organizes the work of students across all programs into a comprehensive image of the school’s present research interests, conceptual orientations and design approaches.
For nearly 30 years, the annual End of Year Show illustrates how the school has been establishing new directions and agendas while responding to shifts in architectural discourse and to transforming political, social, and technological conditions. Students at Columbia GSAPP are both focused on their work inside the school and connected to the world beyond the campus through research travel and through the international orientation of the school and its Studio-X network. This attention to global migration, borders, conflict zones, and ecologies, as well as to the evolution of architecture and cities globally, is one of the most legible aspects of the school’s current priorities.
Students in each studio or program conceive, design and install their exhibits for the End of Year Show. This format underscores the independence with which students are able to pursue their own direction at Columbia GSAPP, and the results yield a glimpse of the exploratory culture and the vitality of debate at the school. This pamphlet lists primary information for each installation, including faculty, students, course title, and location within Avery Hall. Individual installations in the show articulate course objectives and methods in more detail.
The End of Year Show includes two exhibitions in Buell Hall—Every Building in Baghdad: The Rifat Chadirji Archives at the Arab Image Foundation in the Ross Gallery, and Iraq Damage Surveys in the South Gallery. These two exhibitions highlight the tensions that historical, archival research sparks in relation to contemporary architectural concerns, and the critical importance of sites such as Baghdad for the school as it seeks to foster new forms of intelligence about architecture and urban developments globally.