Past Members - Columbia GSAPP

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GSAPP Incubator Members

2018-19

A+A+A

A+A+A is Andrea Chiney, Arianna Deane, and Ashely Kuo. As a team, they are interested in work that is fun, accessible, and grounded in the social impact of design through a community-driven approach. A+A+A is passionate about pursuing projects that bring agency to underserved communities. They look forward to developing a practice of process-based architecture that is both socially responsible and economically sustainable. Ultimately, A+A+A is interested in small interventions that create a large impact by enlivening everyday experiences.

https://rural-assembly.com/

Architecture and Advocacy

Architecture and Advocacy (AAA) is a not-for-profit design, research, and media practice founded by Caitlin Blanchfield and Farzin Lotfi-Jam. Understanding architecture as a representational and analytical tool often leveraged to the benefit of both clients and developers, AAA proposes a model by which architectural practitioners can direct their services towards the communities, coalitions, and causes they want to support. Operating through partnership and collaboration, AAA directs architectural knowledge and practice to social and political urgencies by allying with grassroots and activist organizations in spatial advocacy projects—from tactical media campaigns, to drawing sets, to white papers. Initial ventures include an audit of predatory eviction tactics used by New York City landlords and an investigative report into the contracted companies participating in the creation of migrant detention facilities on the US-Mexico border.

Blanchfield and Lotfi-Jam’s work has received support from the Graham Foundation, the Architectural League of New York, Akademie Schloss Solitude, and the Onassis Foundation, Their co-authored book, Modern Management Methods, will be published by Columbia Books on Architecture and the City next year.

Cristina Goberna Pesudo

Epic Architecture: The Book of Sins

Taking Bertolt Brecht’s Epic Theatre as primary reference, Epic Architecture aims to encourage architects to address current polemical issues from the discipline, the city, and beyond. The idea is to create and explore architectural artefacts that do more than resolve problems and- render them visible, more than show good intentions. To explore artefacts that raise, questions that instead of being pragmatic are designed to create an estrangement effect, that is, moments of revelation that will transform their users into critical observers of architecture and reality. The Book of Sins, is a project that explores architecture traditionally associated with the seven deadly sins (lust, greed, sloth, envy, gluttony, wrath, pride), a collection of typologies that have been systematically overlooked by the discipline due to their historical bad reputation. The Book of Sins is also an initiative that vindicates the construction of desire in architecture as a driving force for design, giving special attention to the technologies of negotiation that these spaces develop in order to relate to their users and the urban environment.

www.fakeindustries.org

DUO.SPACE

How can nature be introduced into our built environments and fit it into our busy urban lives? Behind and beyond keyboards, screens and realities of physical or virtual kinds, we are, nevertheless, hard-wired to crave love and need nature to touch our neurons and senses, imagination and humanity. In pursuit of growing organic bonds between architecture and nature, space and mind, design and wellbeing, Yung-Yi Juliet Chou, Valerie Lechene and Lily Kwong formed a bio-inspired design team and seeded a project called DUO to harvest their expertise in cognitive psychology, data science, urbanism, architecture, and landscape design.

In DUO, we seek to understand breathing, living patterns using machine learning and wearable sensors that model our real-time physical and psychological experience with nature in visiting public and private spaces. Ultimately, this model will mature in its predictive power through substantial data and become a neural network-based decision support system to help architects, designers and laypeople alike make well-informed decisions to preserve our inborn affiliation for nature and promote well-being.

https://theduo.space/

Emily Oppenheim and Sharon Leung

Architecture Unseen is an initiative founded by Emily Oppenheim and Sharon Leung. Their work and research address various building typologies that emerged during the first half of the 20th century. The research project is positioned on the periphery of architectural discourse, at the intersection of established fields of the profession of architecture. It focuses on the history and reasoning behind the tower typology, widely rejected in major cities across Europe while embraced in America during the same era. The work will investigate building systems, such as air conditioning, as a transformative force of modern architecture.

Galen Pardee

Galen Pardee is a designer, educator, and researcher living in New York City. His research and design explores the issues of character and placemaking, as well as the cultural and political forces that shape architectural and urban practice. The project Territories of Territory Extraction explores the Singapore Strait: a unique pressure point in the international sand trade, an area where economics, environmentalism, and geopolitics are made manifest through architecture. Singapore is the largest global importer of sand, using aggregate for landfill, infrastructure, and cultural projects to maintain the city-state’s standard of living and international influence. As sand miners dredge islands beneath the waves, national borders are being re-drawn wholesale, with economic, spatial, and political aftershocks on both sides of the ledger. Singapore’s tale should be precautionary. Territories of Territory Extraction examines a future that has arrived ahead of schedule, and lays the groundwork for architecture in an era of fundamental scarcity.

www.galenpardee.com

Granha: Workspace & Wellness Resorts

Granha is fundamentally grounded in two things: the way technology is transforming collaboration in the workplace and changing attitudes towards work and life integration. In the next five years, organizational changes will dramatically alter company’s real estate requirements. For companies, providing flexibility for where, when, and how work happens will be critical in attracting the best talent. Granha is developing a new typology of real estate, combining the design and services you’d find in a “Googleplex” style office (collaborative workspaces, quiet areas for deep thinking, and amenities focused on employee experience) with wellness resorts on the outskirts of major business hubs. We want to create new spaces where today’s urban workforce (employees, freelancers, entrepreneurs, and creatives) can be productive but also removed enough in nature that they break from the stress of their everyday routine and replace it with a sense of wellness, wellbeing, and community.

www.granha.co

Housing India

Housing India is a fortnightly blog, which delves into the existing housing policies of India. Taking each policy at a time, this blog aims to suggest ways in which these policies can be made more efficient to make room for more quality, affordable homes in India. The vision that is the driving force behind this blog is providing each Indian with a place to call home. Combining in-depth policy analysis with gripping visuals, the blog targets a diverse range of people, cutting across language, culture, and socio-economic standing. The end product is a feature article that conveys the current housing scenario in the country, and the ways in which it can be improved ahead of the general elections in 2019.

www.issuu.com/ramyaramanathan

Karen Kubey

Karen Kubey is an urbanist and architectural educator specializing in housing and health. She co-founded the Architecture for Humanity New York chapter and New Housing New York, and was the first executive director of the Institute for Public Architecture. Karen guest-edited the July/August 2018 volume of Architectural Design (AD), Housing as Intervention: Architecture towards Social Equity, and has recently led a series of projects that address social equity through design in partnership with the New York City Department of Health and Mental Hygiene, Department for the Aging, Housing Authority and Public Design Commission. While in residence at the GSAPP Incubator, Karen will further develop her practice toward the goal of ending racial and economic disparities in health in New York City. Amidst appalling health disparities and dwindling public support for well-designed housing, Karen can think of no more urgent issue in architecture than asserting our discipline’s value in the realm of public health.

www.karenkubey.net

Knitknot Architecture

After the recent riots and political instability in Nicaragua, the Knitknot Architecture collective has begun researching earth construction techniques that aim to assist in building schools in rural areas of Managua. Knitknot’s current research project, From prototype to type. A Building-Manual for collaborative design, aims to merge collective thinking with an investigation of construction systems, materials, and practice organization. It also works to improve upon the earthbag construction techniques that were used in El Jicarito School, taking into account the lack of accessible construction materials and tools, and incorporating more efficient responses to earthquake risks. With the economic support of Pratt Institute’s Faculty Development Fund, Knitknot will test some of the manual’s propositions. By Spring ’19, Knitknot will build an earthbag structure to help raise awareness about the current deadly protests in Nicaragua, and fundraise for the NGO Seeds of Learning, the organization responsible for constructing El Jicarito School.

www.knitknotarchitecture.com

Laura Gonzalez Fierro +ADD

+ADD’s line of work is anchored on the understanding of the built environment as a physical and cultural landscape with material and social repercussions. Reacting to aspects of place, time, function, and client goals we place materials and methods of construction above formal assumptions. The studio aims to identify and employ relevant crafts and technologies, through an ongoing research complemented by the built work, which provides a three dimensional laboratory that cannot be represented through other modes of practice. In this context, aspects like functionality and efficiency are given priority over design theory, ensuring a successful physical experience. Good design should be forceful but not imposing; it should both structure and improve lives. Good design should possess tenacity but must also transcend that determination to enrich the human experience. Our objective is to understand our clients’ needs, apply our knowledge in construction and fabrication, and pay attention to details to discover new approaches toward design. Laura Gonzalez Fierro’s practice is complemented by built projects from the studio and research and proposals from the Lab. For the last decade they’ve been consistently involved in both aspects with the ambition to bring them together, rethinking architecture’s frontiers in the physical environment and in relation to other disciplines.

www.plusadd.org

Marcella Del Signore

The leveraging of Information and Communication Technologies (ICTs) at the intersection of architecture and urbanism allows for imagining scenarios for future resilient cities. The systemic integration of ICTs in cities has started to catalyze urban strategies that respond to today’s social and ecological challenges. The practice of designing cities is increasingly responsive, adaptive, and networked to propose a model beyond the ‘smart city’ as a result of a pure technological deterministic approach. On the contrary, we are witnessing urban protocols that are soft, receptive, reactive, and most importantly, grounded in local urban challenges. Marcella del Signore’s work focuses on the notion of ‘TECHNOLOGICAL RESILIENCE’ as a set of strategies and urban protocols that investigate how ICTs implemented through systemic approaches can be a powerful tool to foster resilience in vulnerable ecosystems. In particular, their research will focus on the development of a TAXONOMY of RESILIENT ICTs integrated design strategies through key topics of investigation: DATA tracking and visualization, SENSING/ACTUATING technologies in territorial systems, CITIZEN-ENGAGED SCIENCE, SMART ENERGY GRIDS and SENTIENT MOBILITY.

ReDO Terminal

ReDO is an integrated design technology and product development practice based in New York City. Founded by Joseph Brennan, Michael Curwood and Mark Madera in 2017, ReDO seeks to part ways with endemic inefficiencies within the industry and develop technologies which streamline the way the industry operates. They are currently developing the beta version of their first product, ReDO Terminal. ReDO Terminal combines the initial zoning and financial analysis aspects of the real estate acquisition process into a single, easy-to-use, web-based application. This application visualizes geometric and financial data instantaneously, measures thousands of scenarios against each other, and provides the most profitable development solution in a matter of seconds.

www.getredo.com

Our Co

Our Co is a cooperative design practice with expertise in design strategy, architecture, urban design, graphic design, fabrication, research, and communication. Our Co’s participation in a project can be specific to a phase or specialty, working anywhere from concept to completion with an expanded network of collaborators and partnerships. Uniquely adapted teams are assembled to the demands of each project, allowing the cooperative to undertake complex work requiring a diverse range of knowledge while retaining the agility, value, and responsiveness of a small office. Our Co’s organization as a cooperative aims to support equity, shared ownership, and collaboration at a time when power is more often designed to be centralized and exclusionary.

Our Co: Melissa J Frost; Marlisa Wise, RA; Benedict Clouette; Nile Greenberg
NEW YORK / LOS ANGELES / PHILADELPHIA

Lil’ Icon

Rajiv Fernandez illustrates icons and publishes them in themed sets, most notably by city. They are playful representations of the places we find ourselves and experience. He is currently developing two books on new architectural icons and the NYC subway system. He is experimenting with product development through means of technologies such as laser cut and 3D printing. In his children’s book, Baby to Brooklyn, he illustrates how structures and buildings can be viewed from different perspectives.

www.lil-icon.com

SOE

SOE is a preservation studio that tackles experimental projects at the pivotal intersection of technology, architecture, history, and culture. SOE aims to develop strategies to further democratize architectural heritage and serve the communities in which they work by increasing access to and inclusion in preservation projects, and brings the field into the twenty-first century by testing and utilizing emerging digital technologies such as laser scanning, photogrammetry, photography, and mixed/virtual reality. In addition to designing an Augmented Reality application for the San Baudelio de Berlanga Hermitage in Spain, SOE will also develop innovative educational programming, exhibitions, and publications related to our preservation efforts.

www.soe.studio

Wolfgang and Hite

Wolfgang and Hite is a design practice composed of architects, builders, and engineers. Their goal is to produce immersive projects that entertain and enhance everyday life. For the 2018-2019 season, their work will focus on the Van Alen competition for the Flatiron Public Plaza Holiday Design Installation, an industrial design project for Red Bull, and a large-scale art installation in Southampton in addition to independent projects on the concept of pleasure and public space.

www.wolfgang-hite.com

2017-18

A-FRAME

A-Frame

A-Frame critically investigates the social, economic, and political issues that frame the fields of architecture and development. A fourteen-member collective, A-Frame aims to establish a cooperative platform for young architects to share resources, incubate projects, and engage with alternative forms of practice. Since its beginning in 2014 in the studios of Architecture, Urban Planning & Real Estate programs at Columbia GSAPP, A-Frame has realized projects in a broad range of media: conferences, workshops, publications, websites, open source tools, and graduate seminars.

At the GSAPP incubator, A-Frame is investigating alternative means of housing in the US through academic research and venture capital pitching (see @building_equities and CoHN). A conference series called “Future of Alchemy” studies materially inventive contemporary practices to expand the agency of the GSAPP skill-set.

William Bodell ‘17 M.Arch Elizabeth Cohn Martin ‘17 M.Arch MS.UP Clara Dykstra '17 M.Arch Rick Fudge '17 M.Arch Styliani Ioannidou '17 M.Arch Nishant Jacob '17 M.Arch Julie Pedtke '17 M.Arch Nabila Morales Perez '17 M.Arch Valerie Lechene '17 M.Arch Matthew Lohry '17 M.Arch Matthew Ransom '17 MS.AAD Violet Whitney '17 M.Arch Da Ying '17 MArch MS.RED Taylor Zanke '18 MArch MS.RED

www.a-frame.work

dtls.ARCHITECTURE

The work of dtls.ARCHITECTURE reflects a dedicated approach to collaboration which can be experienced through multiple scales, typologies, and programs. The firm is interested in an academic approach to the design, fabrication, and construction of installations, interiors, and buildings. All their projects are built on the belief that consensus creates the strongest projects.

The principal, Mark Bearak (M.Arch ‘08) is an Adjunct Assistant Professor of Architecture at Columbia GSAPP and a licensed architect that has worked in residential and commercial for 15 years in NYC. Fellow collaborator/alumni Kate Samuels (MS.AUD ’14) has worked around the country in a variety of scales from the urban to installation projects.

www.dtlsarc.com
www.mbearak.com

KINDERPUBLIC

KINDERPUBLIC, founded by Cevan Castle (M.Arch ‘12) and Annie Chen (M.Arch ‘12), aims to improve accessibility of public and private spaces for parents and caretakers with small children in cities. Their goal is to create a kinder public for families in New York City and beyond, improving accessibility of family amenities through a certification program, spatial interventions and design consultancy. The certification program will certify public and private spaces, including commercial, institutional and outdoor places that meet our specific design guidelines for family accessibility. Their digital platform utilizes relevant spatial data and research with a directory of certified members for users (parents) to explore the planning of family outings. With New York City as their experimental hub, they intend to provide more transparency for families navigating all the complexities of raising children in an urban area and to create more inclusive and equitable environments for all families.

www.kinderpublic.com

CMYK | Kamilla Csegzi + Nicole Mater + Dong-Joo Kim

CMYK Space, founded by Kamilla Csegzi (MS.ADD ‘15), Nicole Mater (MS.ADD ‘15), and Dong-Joo Kim (MS.ADD '15), is a design and research group dedicated to the cultivation of an Atlas of Impermanence – a trans-disciplinary dialogue of interconnected, global dynamics exploring a network of architectural and urban environments responding to states of performance. Their mission is to provoke collaboration across boundaries by recording and curating interactions through a variety of formats: exhibitions, installations, publications, and online platforms.

www.cmyk-space.com

Josh Draper

Josh Draper (M.Arch ‘08) is an architect and designer working at the intersection of computation, fabrication, and material logics with a primary focus on advanced forming techniques. He is the founder of PrePost, an award-winning New York-based firm. He is a Lecturer at the Center for Architecture, Science and Ecology (CASE) a joint venture of Rennsaeler Polytechnic Institute (RPI) and Skidmore Owings and Merrill (SOM). At CASE, Josh is both a professor and a researcher, leading grants concerning agricultural waste for building materials, data analytics, and green wall technologies. He recently won the 2017 City of Dreams Pavilion competition, with schlaich bergermann partner and other interdisciplinary collaborators, for the proposal Cast & Place.

www.studioprepost.com

Ines Esnal / Studio Esnal

Inés Esnal (MSADD ‘08) founded Studio Esnal in New York in 2014, expanding on her ongoing work as an artist. Through her temporary and permanent installations and her dedication to building, her practice truly crosses the boundaries of art and architecture to produce creative and inspiring spaces. The studio is currently working on a series of ground up mix-used developments in New York City, various interior architecture projects, as well as multiple art installations around the world. In both the art-focused and the architecture-focused sides of the practice, Studio Esnal combines scientific strategies and artistic approximations in the creative process in order to achieve a final product which is at once geometric and atmospheric, logical, and experiential.

www.studioesnal.com
www.inesesnal.com

Habitat Workshop

Habitat Workshop is a New York-based architecture and urban design practice promoting design as a framework for positive changes in our communities. Founded by Jieun Yang (M.Arch ’08), the studio creates spaces and objects that activate human connections and reveal intrinsic value of a place. By combining research and practice to continuously refine and expand ways of knowing, asking, learning, and making, the studio’s work explores potential in the ordinary and the unseen.

The studio’s current work, “Agency for (im)Possible Spaces”, catalogs abandoned and underutilized resources in New York City. With topics ranging from unrentable spaces to undevelopable lots, the project investigates motivations and methodology for their potential and provides speculative strategies that maximize resources for the specific needs of the community. In parallel, the studio continues the development of “Mediated Spaces (working title)”, a book on Russia’s post-industrial cities through the lens of adaptive social, economic, political, and cultural spaces.

www.habitatwksp.com

Naomi Hersson-Ringskog

Naomi Hersson-Ringskog (MS UP ‘09) develops arts-based strategies for community building, neighborhood revitalization, and creative placemaking. Since co-founding No Longer Empty, Naomi has shifted her focus on Newburgh, NY where she is developing initiatives focused on distressed properties while producing smaller cultural interventions to build the social infrastructure and tourism. She’s involved with APA, GSAPP, and Coro New York; a fellow at Urban Design Forum; a board member at No Longer Empty and The Fullerton Center; and advisor to Institute for Public Architecture.

www.dosmallinterventions.com

Interval Projects / Interval Office

Interval Projects, founded by Marlisa Wise (M.Arch ‘11) and Benedict Clouette (M.Arch ‘11), is a non-profit design advocacy collaborative based in New York City. Current and recent projects include an arts space in Queens, an adaptive reuse plan for a rail line in Long Island City, a community garden and gathering space in the Bronx, and a public park on a Superfund site in Butte, Montana. Their first book, Forms of Aid: Architectures of Humanitarian Space, was published in late 2017 by Birkhauser. Their projects have received awards from the Graham Foundation, the Architectural League of New York, and Deutsche Bank Americas Foundation, among others. In 2016, the founders formed a separate but aligned for-profit design practice, Interval Office, whose recent work includes a community health clinic, a gallery, and several private residences.

www.interval-projects.org
www.interval-office.com

Mustafa Khan

Mustafa Khan’s work looks at socioeconomic, cultural and racial tension in our current climate through the process of fictional writing and rational architectural design. It involves the collection of facts and data related to these events. His work also uses the virtual space of the Internet, the most accessible platform that propagates the extremes of these tensions and phobias, as a space for study, community engagement, and understanding. The end products are short stories that act as propaganda, questioning these tensions produced through the easy dissemination of “information” by the media, people, and other entities. Khan’s project opens a dialogue between the oppressed and the oppressors. The shape of the dialogue: violent, civil, rational, irrational, might be inconsequential, the key is to start one. The project aims the oppressors to create a form of understanding through education and provocation.

Marcelo Lopez Dinardi

Marcelo López-Dinardi

Marcelo López-Dinardi (MS.CCCP ‘13) is an architect and educator based in New York interested in themes around architecture and political economy, as well as the intersection of art and architecture. His writings have been published in The Avery Review, The Architect’s Newspaper, and GSAPP Books among others. As Partner of A(n) Office, a design and curatorial practice, he has exhibited at the US Pavilion in the 2016 Venice Architecture Biennale and MoCAD in Detroit. He has taught at Barnard + Columbia, NJIT, Penn Design, RISD, and Pratt. He is currently working on a research project about the spatial impact of Puerto Rico’s fiscal debt.

Spatializing Debt: A Visual Audit Spatializing Debt: A Visual Audit examines the intersection of architecture, political economy and city making with the logics of state-financial debt under Puerto Rico’s current status (originated pre-Hurricane Maria), by giving territorial and spatial dimension to the so-called public debt.

www.marcelolopezdinardi.com

Alejandra Navarrete Llopis

Alejandra Navarrete Llopis (MS.ADD ‘11) is a New York based architect and principal of Nami Studio, an architecture design and curatorial office working on public and private projects in Europe and in the US. Her work has been granted by NYSCA, the Graham Foundation, and by other European institutions.

She was Chief Curator of the Oslo Architecture Triennale 2016 together with the After Belonging Agency. Navarrete has taught studios and seminars at Columbia University GSAPP, Pratt Institute, New Jersey Institute of Technology and Virginia University School of Architecture. Her ongoing research focuses on the spatial implications of the mechanisms of inclusion and exclusion in the contemporary city.

www.namistudio.com

NILE

NILE is an architecture studio founded by Nile Greenberg (M.Arch ‘16) with the belief that modernism is a starting point for design. It’s a good thing that those antiquated lessons about structure, utility and beauty are still pretty useful. Since we’ve all agreed to live together and we might as well live in utopias, oases and other beautiful and clear constructions.

www.nile.studio

SS Columbia Project

The SS Columbia Project is restoring the 1902-built steamboat Columbia—the last of her kind—to revive the great tradition of day excursions on the Hudson River. Once in service, the SS Columbia will be a moving cultural venue for arts and education, reconnecting New York City to Hudson Valley’s cities and towns. The SS Columbia, the oldest remaining excursion steamship in the United States, was listed in the National Register of Historic Places in 1979 and designated as a historic landmark in 1992.

www.sscolumbia.org

Superform

Superform is a new type of consultancy, operating at the intersection of design, technology, and marketing. The office has applied innovation with clients in various industries, including architecture, and real estate to build smarter, more resilient organizations. In 2013, two of its members, Adrian von der Osten and George Valdes co-founded Built-In, the largest meetup in NYC devoted to fostering entrepreneurship within the A/E/C industry. The Built-In by Superform initiative intends to bring data-driven strategies to architecture and design practices, working collaboratively to accelerate growth, productivity, and success.

www.built-in.co
www.superform.co

theLab-lab for architecture

Founded by Mustafa Faruki (M.Arch ‘10) in 2010, theLab-lab is a New York-based practice that wants to completely reinvent the potential outputs of architectural design. To this end, the office produces work that positions architecture as the conveyor of imagination, the garden of proposition, and the battleground of proof. Design projects by theLab-lab have appeared in or received support from the Drawing Center, the Queens Museum, Log, the Lower Manhattan Cultural Council and the Norwegian Ministry of Culture. The firm was awarded the Architectural League’s Prize for Young Architects in 2017.

At GSAPP Incubator, theLab-lab is further developing existing projects for upcoming exhibitions and publications, creating the first-ever online archive documenting the work of Asian American artists, and reflecting on new strategies to save the architectural profession from itself.

Mustafa is a Lecturer in the Asian American Studies Program at CUNY Hunter College and was named the 2018-19 Reyner Banham Fellow at the State University of New York at Buffalo.

www.thelab-lab.com

Julia Molloy Gallagher

Julia Molloy Gallagher (M.Arch ‘07) is a designer, architect, and educator. While at the GSAPP incubator she produces multidisciplinary projects including architecture, interior design, participatory workshops, and art installations. Inspired by nature, the city, and white noise - she specializes in curating engagement between cities, organizations, designers, and individuals to improve people’s experience in the places they visit, live, and love. Her studio focuses on cultural, sustainable, and transformative environments that interface between historic spaces and the transient communities who create them.

With her speculative projects she asks questions like “Who owns the city?”, “How can architects be agents of change?”, and “What actually is sustainable development?” The images shown, are excerpts from J Training: a documentary research looking at the development of commercial real estate on church properties near the J Train in Bushwick, Brooklyn.

www.juliamolloygallagher.com

2016-17

A-FRAME

www.a-frame.work

Animate Lot

Animate Lot is an idea-driven spatial design practice bringing together art, architecture and computation. Its aim is to provoke the parameters of culture, organization and economy with design research focusing on methods for perceptual stimulation, gradients of function and material fact. Its practice has a passion for inputting data into form while outputting strategies for superimposition, reorganization and intervention as exploits for the city. Animate Lot’s founder Allen Ghaida is a New York City based designer and theorist focused on architectural projects linked to formal strategy and urban intervention. His current project to be lead during the incubator, titled “Containers for New Contingents”, seeks to augment current approaches to occupying and sharing commercial space, aiming to make the corporate open floor plan more executable to the new contingencies of nimble work environments, assemblies and exchanges.

www.anim-l.com

Ashley Simone

Ashley Simone is a New York City based photographer, designer, editor and educator. She received an M.Arch from the Graduate School of Architecture, Planning and Preservation, Columbia University and teaches in the School of Architecture at Pratt Institute. She is a fellow of the Consortium for Sustainable Urbanization, run in tandem with the United Nations. Her recent editorial work includes the books A Genealogy of Modern Architecture: Comparative Critical Analysis of Built Form by Kenneth Frampton (2015) and Absurd Thinking between Art and Design by Allan Wexler (2016). Her practice is centered on architecture and visual communication. While at the Incubator she will continue her work in graphic design and photography of the urban and built environments. At the same time, she will edit Two Journeys, a book on the work of Michael Webb (Archigram) and begin a collaborative curatorial project for an exhibition on the graphic design of Kenneth Frampton, which will focus on the design and production techniques of work he executed as the editor of Architectural Design (London) during the 1960s.

www.ashleysimone.com

Bika Rebek

Bika Rebek’s work at the GSAPP Incubator questions the relationship between museums and technology using the Incubator as a testing ground for collaborative models between institutional structures and communities engaged in the research of novel digital technique. Projects range from streamlining exhibition design processes to fostering discourse and publishing on the use and display of computing in museum practice. Bika Rebek is an architect practicing within heterogeneous formats- as an integral part of her work performances, installations and writing act as catalysts for open ended thinking about architectural production. She is an adjunct assistant professor at Columbia GSAPP and a principal at Studio SibilaSoon. Her work has been featured in the New York Times and Fast Company and her writing published in The Architect’s Newspaper, Bartlett’s Lobby magazine, and the Estonian architectural newspaper Maja. In the past year Bika has worked at The Met as an Exhibition Designer with special focus on the Met Breuer. Previously she has worked for Asymptote Architecture in New York as well as a number of architecture offices internationally.

www.bikaa.net

Constortia

Consortia is a creative and strategic consultancy in New York City, focusing on projects that connect design, branding, and culture. Founded by Christopher Barley, the office works with academic and cultural institutions as well as leading brands and corporations. They have recently completed digital strategy for the Chicago Architecture Biennial and are developing research projects for Audi on big data, the connected car, digital lifestyles, and the future of retail.

www.consortia.net

Dan Choi

Dan Choi is an architect, artist, real estate developer and professor based in New York City. He is currently working on several NYC based real estate development & architecture projects investigating new potential strategies for design, marketing, acquisition and financing. Dan is currently a professor at Columbia University’s real estate program and has worked in NYC for 12 years as an architect and as a developer.

https://www.danchoiarchitect.com

F-Architecture

f-architecture (alt: feminist-architecture collaborative) was founded by Gabrielle Printz, Virginia Black, and Rosana Elkhatib, all recent alumni of GSAPP’s CCCP program. f-architecture is figured as an enterprise for architectural research aimed at disentangling the contemporary spatial politics and technological appearances of bodies, intimately and globally. At the GSAPP Incubator, these f-architects will develop their current project “Post-Fordist Hymen Factory,” which maps the un/making of virginity across legal, medical, and cultural registers, by examining the circulation of an artificial membrane manufactured and sold as the “Virginity Hymen.” Intervening in both the design and distribution of this product, they will see the hymen’s transformation from cultural fixation to global commodity.

http://f-architecture.com

Forrest Jessee

Forrest Jessee continues his ten years of research in communicating architecture to the public, often collaborating with designers, artists, educational institutions, cultural institutions and other architects. His body of work situates itself between two-dimensional and three-dimensional representation, and his passion for publishing books strives to express architectural ideas in the materiality, layout and design of these publications. Aside from his professional work, he serves as Director of the Graphics Project at GSAPP, which aims to inspire and support students with studio work and portfolios due at graduation. This initiative questions what it means to translate an architectural idea into visual material, whether it be a drawing, presentation or book.

www.forrestjessee.com

Dimitri Damiel Kim

Dimitri Damiel Kim is an architect, educator, and founding member and principal of XMANIFOLD Applied Design Research Laboratory (ADRL), a cross-disciplinary design and research practice working in all scales of architectural, urban, landscape, and interior projects. Current projects in the lab include publication work for international architecture journal ‘Prototropic’, an on-online platform for sharing design ideas (patronarch.com), prototype designs for wearable technologies, concept designs for a feature sci-fi film, and a residential design project in Hawaii. Dimitri Damiel Kim is interested in geopolitics, speculative technologies, iconic fashion, and religious philosophy. He lives in Williamsburg and teaches design studios and visual studies at CUNY and NJIT.

www.xmanifold.com

Marty Wood

Marty Wood is a writer, researcher, and curator who brings different communities, methodologies, and ideas into contact. He believes that varied forms of engagement and practice— from research to history and criticism produce new ways of thinking about design and enriching creative cultures. Marty Wood is launching General Economy, a new, multi-channel platform for critical conversations at the intersection of art, architecture, and urban spatial politics. With the rapid acceleration and constant churning of the cultural and aesthetic fields, General Economy hopes to circulate new ideas and foreground new voices within larger artistic, social, and theoretical contexts.

http://www.mwood.xyz

Poché Arts

Ye Zhang (MSAUD’15) is a project designer at Gluckman Tang Architects, She is currently leading the design for a 10,000 sqm contemporary art museum in China. Zhang seeks opportunities for projects that blurs the boundary between art and architecture, and she will be the chief managing partner for Poché Arts. Poché Arts aims to re-appropriate existing urban conditions by inserting art, architecture and design works from emerging young professionals and outstanding students. Each show will feature parallel and collaborative curation between two different art and design disciplines, joined together by a common theme.

www.pochéarts.com

QSPACE

QSPACE makes questions of gender and sexuality visible to a field that has traditionally subverted such questions. In the absence of a centralized voice, QSPACE is a hub for students, professionals, and academics to connect and collaborate. QSPACE produces research and outputs on topics such as gender inclusive bathroom design, LGBTQ homelessness and housing, and queer histories in architecture. QSPACE is a platform for research projects by students and professionals working on queerness in the built environment. We push for organized action through exhibitions, publications, digital archiving, design guidelines, and events on queer topics. QSPACE was born out of Queer Students of Architecture, Planning, and Preservation (QSAPP), an LGBTQ group from Columbia University.

www.qspace.lgbt

Untapped Cities

Untapped Cities is an online publication about urban discovery and exploration which unearths the most surprising places in NYC and around the world. With a focus on how design and history affect architecture and urban development, Untapped Cities is more than a standard media company – it also connects with readers in real space through its ongoing tours series. Untapped Cities is a community of over 500 contributors, ranging from crowdsourced residents to experts in city building. At the GSAPP Incubator, Untapped Cities plans to develop its first series of New York City tours using augmented reality to better showcase past, present and future development in the city. The team also plans to expand their event programming to include talks and panel discussions about urban issues.

www.untappedcities.com

Xin Wang

Xin Wang is Design Principal at DesXY design studio based in New York and Shanghai. Based on the socio-environmental theory of Urban Acupuncture, Xin Wang explores how small scale interventions transform the larger urban context and solve urban problems through design of strategic architecture.

www.desxy.com

: [Pronounced Colon]

: is a collective workshop on architectural practices and ideas. Our aim is to carve out a space for critical reflection within architecture by interrogating the vocabulary, rhetoric, and boundaries that constitute it. We believe that the nuance of an idea only reveals itself in conversation, when we raise questions, assume a position, and invite another level of criticism and judgment. : materializes this discourse into printed records, exhibitions, and architectural interventions.

www.c-o-l-o-n.com

2015-16

A(n) Office

A(n) Office is an architectural practice based in Detroit and New York, founded by Marcelo López-Dinardi and V. Mitch McEwen. Their work engages issues of migration and democracy through political economy, urban design, architecture, exhibition and installation work. A(n) Office was commissioned along with eleven firms by the US Pavilion at the 2016 Venice Architecture Biennale to develop a speculative design project for a 7 acre City-owned property in Detroit. In addition, the group will prepare Methexis: The Algorithmic Recitative, a solo exhibition at Museum of Contemporary Art Detroit that expands its House Opera project into new urban research.

http://anofficeus.tumblr.com

Consortia

www.consortia.net

Hana Petrik and Martin Kropac

Hana Petrik and Martin Kropac are two young architects and scholars constantly pending between Prague and New York. While having built projects on both continents they are intensively engaged in academic work as well. With the Academy of Art, Architecture and Design (with prof. Ivan Kroupa) and New York Institute of Technology they established City and Disaster, a series of international student workshops under the patronage of the United Nations, focused on inventive solutions for natural and man-made disasters in urban contexts.

www.martinkropac.com www.cityxdisaster.org

Family + Pool

Columbia GSAPP alumnus Dong-Ping Wong is a partner at Family and a founding member of a group of architects, designers, engineers, strategists and scientists building + POOL, the world’s first water-filtering floating pool.

www.familynewyork.com www.pluspool.org

Forrest Jessee

www.forrestjessee.com

Iris VR

George Valdes is VP of Product at IrisVR, a company building software to edit, visualize, and share 3D CAD models in virtual reality. Iris VR leverage the immersive power of cutting-edge virtual reality headsets. Their software enables the user to make immersive, true-to-scale VR walkthroughs on its own computer in one-click. Their easy to use software is being used in hundreds of offices around the world empowering teams to communicate more effectively with each other, with their clients, and with project stakeholders.

www.irisvr.com

Kosmos

Founded by Nikolay Martynov, Artem Kitaev and Leonid Slonimskiy, KOSMOS is a research-driven architectural practice that addresses density and urban issues. They include the competition-winning project Foam Space at the 2015 Ideas City Conference in New York. KOSMOS aims to develop a new form of spatial practice on the edge of physical and digital architecture. Columbia GSAPP alumnus Martynov’s focus is “Anonymous architecture” – used by masses while remaining constantly mute.

Dimitrios Spyropoulos

Dimitrios Spyropoulos is a Gsapp Incubator member whose current research aims to document the evolution of self-driving cars and the possibilities of how an automated mobile transportation network can affect the existing urban fabric.

www.dispyropoulos.tumblr.com

Dimitri Damiel Kim

www.xmanifold.com

Xin Wang