Columbia University’s Graduate School of Architecture, Planning and Preservation (Columbia GSAPP) marks the end of the academic year by celebrating the work of its students with the annual End of Year Show. Opening with a public reception on Saturday, May 13 at 7pm, the lively exhibition remains on view for only one week through May 20, 2017.

The outcomes of studios and seminars from all of GSAPP’s programs are on display throughout Avery Hall, capturing the school’s playful experimentation, unbridled imagination, disciplinary expertise, and incisive critical thinking. Models, drawings, digital media, as well as full-scale outdoor installations represent the best work of GSAPP’s diverse and international student body spanning degree programs in Architecture, Urban Design and Urban Planning, Historic Preservation, and Real Estate Development.

At a time when many of the challenges facing the world are inseparable from the built environment, the work of the school acts as an urgent invitation to reimagine infrastructure and housing, to ask questions about density, form, program, and typology, or to project new possibilities for urban ecology, among many other concerns. It is also an opportunity to find intersections and convergences between the practices and disciplines of the school as faculty and students think relationally across cities, cultures, and contexts and recast the changing dynamic between the urban, the rural, and the natural. Columbia GSAPP is committed to exploring the future of architecture, cities, and the environment in a spirit of intellectual generosity that strives to imagine new forms of practice, knowledge, and collaboration for the expanded disciplines of architecture and the built environment.

Most of Columbia GSAPP’s programs are among the first of their kind in the United States and date back to the origins of professional practice in architecture, urbanism, planning, and preservation in the country. From the earliest days of the school, these were incredible experiments weaving together European artistry and American pragmatism, professional training and liberal education, echoing the best Columbia University had and continues to offer. The ongoing work of the school as it is made visible during this annual exhibition is a constant process of discovery and re-invention, as students seek to answer not ‘what architecture is’ but collectively embody the disagreements about what it may have been, debate what it could become, and make passionate pleas for what it could do and how. The idealism and freshness with which our students approach their work and thinking here at Columbia GSAPP is the most important gift they leave us with.