GSAPP Housing Studios

This exhibition surveyed the work from the Columbia housing studios over the past 40 years, from its origins, through its successive iterations under new directors, to its current form. A team of student researchers hunted for traces of the GSAPP housing debate, and the work of the evolving housing studios, in school publications, university depositories and archives. They consulted former students, faculty and directors of housing to locate some of the most important moments in the development and stabilization of the program. Their research and this exhibition represented an effort to grasp how the school has treated housing as a seismograph of some of the most urgent social, cultural, formal and political questions facing architecture and urban design. The exhibition also marked another moment of transition for the housing studio as it expanded its scope from New York City to a range of international cities. This new orientation asked how housing can serve as a lens for glimpsing and responding to formations of collective habitation, patterns of financing and occupation within a global context.