Past Members - Columbia GSAPP

This website uses cookies as well as similar tools and technologies to understand visitors' experiences. By continuing to use this website, you consent to Columbia University's usage of cookies and similar technologies, in accordance with the Columbia University Website Cookie Notice

Incubator

GSAPP Incubator Members

The GSAPP Incubator seeks to expand the territory between academia and the profession, and promotes new models of practice by supporting alumni in the development of a wide range of new ideas and projects about architecture, contemporary culture, and the future of the city. Initially founded as a co-working space in 2014 at the New Museum’s NEW INC platform, it was relaunched as the GSAPP Incubator Prize in 2019.

2018-19

A+A+A

Andrea Chiney ‘18 MARCH
Arianna Deane ‘18 MARCH
Ashely Kuo ‘18 MARCH

A+A+A is interested in work that is fun, accessible, and grounded in the social impact of design through a community-driven approach. The teamA+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.

A+A+A

Architecture and Advocacy

Caitlin Blanchfield ‘14 MSCCCP
Farzin Lotfi-Jam ‘11 MSAAD

Architecture and Advocacy (AAA) is a not-for-profit design, research, and media practice. 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, was published by Columbia Books on Architecture and the City in 2019.

Blanchfield is a PhD candidate in architectural history and theory and preceptor at Columbia GSAPP and an editor of the Avery Review.

Lotfi-Jam is principal of Farzin Farzin, adjunct assistant professor at Columbia GSAPP, and faculty at the Cooper Union.

Datalink to Unobstructed Observations (DUO): A Memory Care Project

Yung-Yi Juliet Chou ‘00 MSHP, ‘16 PhD Cognitive Psychology

DUO aims to demonstrate how and where to extract new ideas from old knowledge through persistent observations of mundane activities in the human mind. At the GSAPP Incubator, they have worked to develop a neural network decision support system that helps connect laypeople with architects, preservationists, and conservators alike to answer some fundamental questions concerning judgment and measurement in good design in public/private spaces. For example, what is a timeless way to preserve sites and buildings? What kind of added value can crowdsourced knowledge from different perspectives (professionals versus laypeople) provide on evolving preservation concepts and treatments? How do we map emotions and sensations in the memory structure of places?

Chou is the founder of glyfeinLab.

Epic Architecture: The Book of Sins

Cristina Goberna Pesudo ‘09 MSAAD

Taking Bertolt Brecht’s Epic Theatre as a 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 artifacts that do more than resolve problems and render them visible and that do more than show good intentions. The aim is to explore artifacts that raise questions that instead of being pragmatic are designed to create an estrangement effect, or 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), which are a collection of typologies that have been systematically overlooked by the discipline due to their historical bad reputation. The project 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.

Goberna Pesudo is a PhD Candidate at Escuela Técnica Superior de Arquitectura de Barcelona (E.T.S.A.B), as well as a practicing architect, educator, and critic.

Image Credit: The Book of Sins: Tokyo’s Love Hotels

Lil’ Icon

Rajiv Fernandez ‘10 MARCH

Lil’ Icon was founded in 2017 as a children’s brand, which morphed into an activism platform, and is now an artist moniker. Using their signature style of bold colors and iconographic images, 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. Fernandez is the author of Baby to Brooklyn and Baby to Big, contributor to Posters for Change and The Alphabet that Changed the World. His work has been featured in The Washington Post, WSJ, Refinery29, Buzzfeed and the MoMA Store among others.

Lil’ Icon

+ADD

Laura Gonzalez Fierro ‘08 MSAAD

Established in 2010, this heterogeneous practice operates in different formats, scales and geographies in the fields of architecture, design, urban planning and curatorial work. They collaborate with disruptive clients, talented makers, and professionals to conceive and activate spaces and conversations. The practice is human-centric and global, with a strong presence in New York, São Paulo, and Mexico City. Primary areas of focus include:

Practice: architecture and design work for clients.
Research: curatorial work and experiments in multidisciplinary collaborations through exhibitions and events.
Products: bespoke furniture and modular systems, from workstations and benches to light fixtures and art installations.

+ADD is now Studio Fierro Architecture

Granha: Workspace and Wellness Resorts

Stephen Sanchez McEvoy ‘16 MSRED

Granha is fundamentally grounded in two things: the way technology is transforming collaboration in the workplace and the changing attitudes towards work and life integration. With recent organizational changes dramatically altering companies’ real estate requirements, 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.

Sanchez McEvoy is the founder of Branches, a brand that combines the design and technology of an activity-based office, a boutique hotel, and a wellness retreat in order to nurture productivity, work/life balance, and human connection in inspiring remote locations.

Visit Branches

Housing India

Ramya Ramanathan ‘18 MSUP

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.

Ramanathan works as a Planning Analyst at Atzl, Nasher, & Zigler.

Knitknot Architecture

Diana Cristobal ‘13 MSAAD
Alfonso Simelio Jurado ‘13 MSAAD

Knitknot architecture is an award-winning international collective based in New York and London. Founded in 2013, Knitknot has developed projects across different mediums and scales, combining practice with academia. After riots and political instability in Nicaragua, the collective was formed and they began to research earth construction techniques intended to assist in building schools in rural areas of Managua. Knitknot’s 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.

Knitknot members have taught and conducted research in Columbia GSAPP and Pratt Institute in New York, Princeton SoA in New Jersey, USC Los Angeles, the Bartlett in London and Akademie der Künste in Berlin. Their work has been published in magazines such as AVProyectos, Revista PLOT, MONU, Public Journal Design+Humanity and POST.

Knitknot is currently made up of Diana Cristobal Olave, Gonzalo J Lopez Garrido, Alfonso Simelio Jurado, and Tania Oramas Dorta.

Knitknot Architecture

Karen Kubey

Karen Kubey ‘09 MARCH

Karen Kubey is an urbanist and architectural educator specializing in housing and health. She is a Fellow in Design for Spatial Justice at the University of Oregon, the editor of Housing as Intervention: Architecture towards Social Equity (Architectural Design, 2018), and served as the first executive director of the Institute for Public Architecture. Kubey co-founded the New York chapter of Architecture for Humanity (now Open Architecture/New York) and co-founded and led the New Housing New York design competition.Karen guest-edited the July/August 2018 volume of Architectural Design (AD), Housing as Intervention: Architecture towards Social Equity, and 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 developed her practice towards its goal of ridding New York City of its racial and economic health disparities.

Karen Kubey

Architecture Unseen

Emily Oppenheim ‘16 MARCH
Sharon Leung ‘16 MARCH

Architecture Unseen’s work and research addresses various building typologies that emerged during the first half of the twentieth 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 investigates building systems, such as air conditioning, as a transformative force of modern architecture.

Moment Architecture / ReDO Terminal

Joseph Brennan ‘13 MARCH

Moment Architecture (MO.A) is an integrated design and architectural technology practice based in New York City. MO.A seeks to part ways with endemic inefficiencies within the industry. By leveraging responsive analytics, BIM, complex financial algorithms, and socially-oriented design, MO.A is able to offer its partners superior outcomes, processes, and quality. As a part of the GSAPP Incubator, they developed the beta version of their first product, ReDO Terminal, which 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.

Brennan is a Project Architect and Design Technology Specialist at Gensler and an Adjunct Assistant Professor at Columbia GSAPP.

Our Co

Marlisa Wise ‘11 MARCH
Benedict Clouette ‘11 MARCH
Nile Greenberg ‘16 MARCH

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.

Clouette is a PhD Candidate in Architecture at Columbia GSAPP and the co-founder of Interval Projects with Wise.

Greenberg is the founder of NILE.

Territories of Territory Extraction

Galen Pardee ’16 MARCH

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.

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.

Territories of Territory Extraction

Technological Resilience

Marcella Del Signore ’07 MSAAD

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.

Del Signore is an architect, urbanist, educator, scholar, and the principal of X-Topia.

SOE

Halley Ramos ‘18 MSHP
Andre Paul Jauregui ‘18 MSHP

SOE is a historic preservation and reality capture studio that partners with forward-thinking clients to solve problems in the space between cultural heritage and technology. The studio 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.

Soe Studio

Wolfgang and Hite

Greta Hansen ‘09 MARCH

Wolfgang and Hite is a design practice composed of architects, builders, and engineers that specializes in interior architecture, exhibition design, and art production. Their goal is to produce immersive projects that entertain and enhance everyday life. Recent work includes a project for the Van Alen Flatiron Public Plaza Holiday Design Installation competition, an industrial design project for Red Bull, and a large-scale art installation in Southampton, NY, in addition to independent projects on the concept of pleasure and public space.

Hansen is a Visiting Assistant Professor at Pratt Institute.

Wolfgang and Hite

2017-18

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 at Columbia GSAPP, A-Frame has realized projects in a broad range of media, including conferences, workshops, publications, websites, open source tools, and graduate seminars. At the GSAPP incubator, A-Frame investigated alternative means of housing in the US through academic research and venture capital pitching (see @building_equities and CoHN). A-Frame’s conference series called “Future of Alchemy” studies materially inventive contemporary practices to expand the agency of the GSAPP skill-set.

A-Frame includes:
William Bodell ‘17 MARCH
Elizabeth Cohn Martin ‘17 MARCH MSUP
Clara Dykstra ‘17 MARCH
Rick Fudge ‘17 MARCH
Styliani Ioannidou ‘17 MARCH
Nishant Jacob ‘17 MARCH
Julia Pedtke ‘17 MARCH
Nabila Morales Perez ‘17 MARCH
Valerie Lechene ‘17 MARCH
Matthew Lohry ‘17 MARCH
Matthew Ransom ‘17MSAAD
Violet Whitney ‘17 MARCH
Da Ying ‘17 MARCH MSRED
Taylor Zanke ‘18 MARCH MSRED

Watch a video of A-Frame’s 2017 presentation at the GSAPP incubator.

CYMK Space

Kamilla Csegzi ‘15 MSAAD
Nicole Mater ‘15, MSAAD
Dong Joo Kim ‘15, MSAAD

CMYK Space 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 as they respond 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.

Csegzi is an Architect at Kohn Pedersen Fox Associates (KPF), Mater works as an architect at HOK, and Kim serves as a Project Leader and Designer at BIG - Bjarke Ingels Group.

Josh Draper

Josh Draper ‘08 MARCH

Draper 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 Rensselaer 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 won the 2017 City of Dreams Pavilion competition, with schlaich bergermann partner and other interdisciplinary collaborators, for the proposal Cast & Place.

dtls.ARCHITECTURE

Mark Bearak ‘08 MARCH
Kate Samuels ‘14 MSAUD

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 of their projects are built on the belief that consensus creates the strongest projects. The principal, Mark Bearak, is an Adjunct Assistant Professor of Architecture at Columbia GSAPP and a licensed architect who has worked in residential and commercial for 15 years in New York City. Collaborator Kate Samuels has led multiple dtls projects and continues to work around the country in a variety of scales, from the urban to installation projects.

dtls.ARCHITECTURE

Inés Esnal / Studio Esnal

Inés Esnal ‘08 MSAAD

Through temporary and permanent installations and a dedication to building, Studio Esnal aims to cross the boundaries of art and architecture in order to produce creative and inspiring spaces. The studio has worked 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.

Inés Esnal / Studio Esnal

Julia Molloy Gallagher

Julia Molloy Gallagher ‘07 MARCH

At the GSAPP Incubator Gallagher produced multidisciplinary projects in the realms of 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 experiences in the places that 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?” Her project J Training is a research documentary looking at the development of commercial real estate on church properties near the J Train in Bushwick, Brooklyn.

Gallagher continues to work as a designer, architect, and educator.

Julia Molloy Gallagher

Habitat Workshop

Jieun Yang ‘08 MARCH

Habitat Workshop is a New York-based architecture and urban design practice promoting design as a framework for positive change in our communities. The studio creates spaces and objects that activate human connection and reveal the 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 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 while providing speculative strategies that maximize resources for the specific needs of the community. In parallel, the studio continues the development of “Mediated Spaces”, a book examining Russia’s post-industrial cities through the lens of adaptive social, economic, political, and cultural spaces.

Yang is an Adjunct Assistant Professor at CUNY City Tech and Lecturer at Parsons the New School for Design.

Habitat Workshop

Naomi Hersson-Ringskog

Naomi Hersson-Ringskog ‘09 MSUP

Hersson-Ringskog develops art-based strategies for community building, neighborhood revitalization, and creative placemaking. Sheco-founded No Longer Empty, a New York City non-profit that revives underutilized properties and sites with large, community-responsive art exhibitions, cultural collaborations, and educational programming. Under the name of Dept of Small Interventions (DoSI), Hersson-Ringskogthen shifted her focus to Newburgh, New York, where she continues to develop initiatives focused on distressed properties while producing smaller cultural interventions to build social infrastructure and tourism. She’s involved with APA, GSAPP, and Coro New York. She is also a fellow at Urban Design Forum, a board member at No Longer Empty and The Fullerton Center, and advisor to Institute for Public Architecture.

Dept of Small Interventions

Interval Projects / Interval Office

Marlisa Wise ‘11 MARCH
Benedict Clouette ‘11 MARCH

Interval Projects is a non-profit design advocacy collaborative based in New York City. 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 work includes a community health clinic, a gallery, and several private residences.

Interval Projects
Interval Office

Mustafa Khan

Mustafa Khan ‘17 MARCH

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, an 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 the 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.

KINDERPUBLIC

Cevan Castle ‘12 MARCH
Annie Chen ‘12 MARCH

KINDERPUBLIC 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 intervention, and design consultancy. The certification program applies to public and private spaces, including commercial, institutional, and outdoor places that meet specific design guidelines for family accessibility. Their digital platform utilizes relevant spatial data and research along with a directory of certified members for users (parents) to aid in the planning of family outings. With New York City as their experimental hub, KINDERPUBLIC intends 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.

Castle is the President of Cevan Castle Environment & Design Inc.
Chen is an Architect at WDG Architecture.

Alejandra Navarrete Llopis

Alejandra Navarrete Llopis ‘11 MSAAD

Llopis 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 the US. She was chief curator of the Oslo Architecture Triennale 2016 along with the After Belonging Agency. Her work has been funded by NYSCA, the Graham Foundation, and by other European institutions. Navarrete has taught studios and seminars at Columbia 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.

Nami Studio

Marcelo López-Dinardi

Marcelo López-Dinardi ‘13 MSCCCP

Marcelo López-Dinardi is an immigrant, in-part designer-theorist, and educator based in Texas. He was a founding Partner of A(n) Office (2013-2020). López-Dinardi is interested in the multiple scales of design; biopolitics and agency in design and education; and architecture as expanded media (publications and curatorial practices). His work as partner of A(n) Office was exhibited in the Venice Biennale of Architecture in 2016 and has written for Avery Review, The Architect’s Newspaper, Domus, Planning Perspectives, Art Forum (China), and lectured at The Cooper Union, Princeton University, RISD, GSAPP, among others. López-Dinardi works as an Assistant Professor in the Department of Architecture at Texas A&M University.

Marcelo López-Dinardi

NILE

Nile Greenberg ‘16 MARCH

NILE is a modernist design studio that pursues those antiquated lessons about structure, utility, and beauty. While we’re all living together, we might as well live in utopias, oases, and other beautiful, clear constructions. Selected projects include an ADU in Denver, an exhibition at the Storefront for Art and Architecture, an installation at Otis College of Art and Design, and an exhibition at the Yale School of Architecture. Greenberg is an Adjunct Assistant Professor at Columbia GSAPP and has previously worked at MOS Architects, SO – IL, and Leong Leong in New York and Los Angeles. His past experience focused on cultural, public, and residential architecture. His book, The Advanced School of Collective Feeling, was published by Park Books in 2018, and co-authored by Matthew Kennedy.

Nile Studio

SS Columbia Project

Liz McEnaney ‘04 MSHP

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.

McEnaney is an Adjunct Assistant Professor at Columbia GSAPP teaching urban design and historic preservation.

SS Columbia

Superform

George Valdes ‘12 MARCH

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 New York City devoted to fostering entrepreneurship within the A/E/C industry. The Built-In by Superform initiative brings data-driven strategies to architecture and design practices, working collaboratively to accelerate growth, productivity, and success.

Valdes works in growth and product development at Monograph in San Francisco, CA.

Superform

theLab-lab for architecture

Mustafa Faruki ‘10 MARCH

theLab-lab is a New York-based practice that strives 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 the GSAPP Incubator, the Lab-lab developed existing projects for 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.
theLab-lab

2016-17

Animate Lot

Allen Ghaida ‘14 MSAAD

Animate Lot is an experimental practice threading together the parameters of culture and technology with the built environment. Merging design, information, and narratives; The work touches on topics about the city and the spaces of disenchantment, the transience of the present, and the digital platforms informing future aesthetics. Ghaida, Principal and Founder of Animate Lot, is a New York City based designer focused on urban infills and interventions. His project, “Area OS,” is a transparent platform for live commercial plans automating the configuration and management of permeable workspaces adaptable to change and user types.

Animate Lot

Dan Choi

Dan Choi ‘13 MSRED

Dan Choi is an architect, artist, real estate developer, and professor based in New York City. He has worked on several New York City-based real estate development and architecture projects investigating new strategies for design, marketing, acquisition, and financing. In 2017 Choi founded the design-driven and civic-minded real estate company Logos Development. Dan has taught at Columbia GSAPP in the Real Estate Development program.

Logos Development

Consortia

Christopher Barley ‘09 MARCH

Consortia is a strategy and design office based in New York City that is focused on developing new frameworks for communication around design, technology, and culture. They are interested in exploring how new ideas are created and their ability to shift and broaden perception. Working with academic and cultural institutions as well as leading brands and corporations, and working through hybrid structures for dialogue and thinking, Consortia seeks to build spaces where ideas can gather meaning and generate impact. They created digital strategy for the Chicago Architecture Biennial in 2015 and 2017 and have developed research projects for Audi on big data, the connected car, digital lifestyles, and the future of retail. Consortia works in partnership with Are.na, which Barley also co-founded. The platform is meant for collaborative research, along with a network of artists, designers, and thinkers to develop multidisciplinary projects for institutions, brands, and other organizations..

Consortia

f-architecture

Gabrielle Printz ‘16 MSCCCP
Virginia Black ‘16 MSCCCP
Rosana Elkhatib ‘16 MSCCCP

f-architecture collaborative is a three-woman research enterprise aimed at disentangling the contemporary spatial politics of bodies, intimately and globally. Their projects traverse theoretical and activist registers to locate new forms of architectural work through critical relationships with collaborators across continents and an expanding definition of Designer. Gabrielle Printz, Virginia Black, and Rosana Elkhatib maintain their wily practice and their deep friendship in Brooklyn, New York. f-architecture works both through architecture and its refusal. Together and separately the team pursues an activist spatial practice, one that is grounded in research and, perhaps more importantly, in the production of things that situate that research in public forms and in the cultural and political contexts from which it emerges, where it is most salient, where it acts and is made actionable.

Printz is a PhD candidate in Architectural History and Theory at Yale. She co-edited the books Bodybuilding: Architecture and Performance (Performa, 2019) and Beyond Patronage: Reconsidering Models of Practice (Actar, 2015). Black is a Visiting Assistant Professor at Pratt Institute. Elkhatib has recently authored numerous articles in publications such as MIT Thresholds, Log, E-Flux, and The New York Review of Architecture.

F-architecture

Forrest Jessee

Forrest Jessee ‘09 MARCH

Jessee’s work was situated between architecture and graphic design and between two-dimensional and three-dimensional representation. His passion for publishing strived to express this tension by translating architectural ideas into the materiality, layout, and design of the books. At GSAPP, Jessee directed the Graphics Project, which aimed to inspire and support students with studio work and portfolios due at graduation. The initiative pushed students to question what it meant to translate an architectural idea into visual material, whether it be a drawing, presentation, or publication.

Poché Arts

Ye Zhang ‘15 MSAUD

Poché Arts aims to create opportunities for interdisciplinary collaboration between emerging young professionals in the arts, architecture, design, and technology realm. The collaborations aim to blur genre boundaries and re-appropriate existing urban conditions by inserting art and design works into unconventional spaces. By bringing together creative minds Poché hopes to inspire and transform the arts landscape. Poché Arts also facilitates exchanges between Chinese artists and creative communities in New York in the hopes of bringing international attention to contemporary Chinese art and design. Previously, Zhang worked as a project designer at Gluckman Tang Architects, where she led the design for a 10,000 sqm contemporary art museum in China.

Poché Arts

: [Pronounced Colon]

: [Pronounced Colon] is a collective workshop on architectural practices and ideas based in New York City. It is a publication and a platform that aims to carve out a space for critical reflection within architecture by interrogating the vocabulary, rhetoric, and boundaries that constitute it.. : believes 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. They materialize this discourse into printed records, exhibitions, and architectural interventions.

: [Pronounced Colon]

Wade Cotton ‘15 MARCH
Cecil Barnes ‘15 MARCH
George Louras ‘15 MARCH
Lily Wong ‘15 MARCH
James Quick ‘15 MARCH
Isabelle LeWitt ‘15 MARCH
Ricardo Leon ‘15 MARCH
Lorenzo Villaggi ‘15 MARCH

QSPACE

Lauren Johnson ‘16 MARCH
Ryan Day ‘16 MARCH

QSPACE is a queer architectural research organization that pushes for organized action through exhibitions, publications, digital archiving, and design guidelines. The organization aims to make questions of gender and sexuality visible to a field that has traditionally subverted such inquiries. In the absence of a centralized voice, QSPACE is a hub for students, professionals, and academics to connect and collaborate on LGBTQ topics in the built environment. QSPACE produces research and outputs on topics such as gender inclusive bathroom design, LGBTQ homelessness and housing, and queer histories in architecture. QSPACE was born out of Queer Students of Architecture, Planning, and Preservation (QSAPP), an LGBTQ group from Columbia University. Day also continues a design practice and has worked at firms such as Industrious, Triarch. Inc., and Design Haus Liberty.

QSPACE

Bika Rebek

Bika Rebek ‘15 MSCCCP

Bika Rebek’s work at the GSAPP Incubator questions the relationship between museums and technology by using the platform as a testing ground for collaborative models between institutional structures and communities engaged in the research of novel digital techniques. Projects range from streamlining exhibition design processes to fostering discourse and publishing on the use and display of computing in museum practice. Rebek is a partner at Some Place Studio (SPS), a New York City-and Vienna-based architecture practice. Her work as an architect, educator, and curator is defined by an expansive interest in contemporary issues through the lens of architectural discourse and technology. Rebek is also an Adjunct Assistant Professor at Columbia GSAPP.

Some Place Studio

Ashley Simone

Ashley Simone ‘07 MARCH

Ashley Simone is a New York City-based editor, writer, photographer, and educator whose practice investigates intersections of architecture, art, and culture. Her photography, which explores the built environment, has been exhibited in New York and London and featured in journals and magazines. Simone has worked on the production teams for a variety of exhibitions such as Home Delivery: Fabricating the Modern Dwelling (MoMA, 2008), Private Choices, Public Spaces (The New School, 2014), and Bernard Tschumi’s Architecture: Concept and Notation (Swiss Architecture Museum, 2015). Simone is the editor of A Genealogy of Modern Architecture: Comparative Critical Analysis of Built Form by Kenneth Frampton (Lars Müller, 2015), Absurd Thinking Between Art and Design by Allan Wexler (Lars Müller, 2017), and Michael Webb: Two Journeys (Lars Müller, 2018). Simone also teaches courses in drawing and writing at Pratt Institute.

Ashley Simone

Untapped Cities [Untapped New York]

Michelle Young ‘12 MSUP

Untapped Cities (now Untapped New York) is an online publication about urban discovery and exploration which unearths New York City’s secrets and hidden gems. Discover the city’s most unique and surprising places and events for the curious mind. 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 developed 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 expanded their event programming to include talks and panel discussions about urban issues, and launched a membership program, Untapped Cities Insiders, to offer access to the city’s most off-limits places. The Insiders program partners with organizations like The Museum of the City of New York, NYC Parks, New York Public Library, Brooklyn Historical Society, and more.

Untapped Cities

Xin Wang

Xin Wang ‘08 MSAAD

Wang is Design Principal at DesXY design studio based in New York City 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.

Marty Wood

Marty Wood ‘15 MSCCCP

Marty Wood is a writer, critic, and educator interested in the critical intersections between art, architecture, and technology that bring 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. Wood launched General Economy, a 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 works to circulate new ideas and foreground new voices within larger artistic, social, and theoretical contexts. Wood has published reviews, essays, and criticism in a variety of publications, most recently in Metropolis and The Architect’s Newspaper.

Wood is a Visiting Instructor in Humanities & Media Studies at the Pratt Institute in New York.

Marty Wood

X-Lab

Dimitri Damiel Kim ‘12 MSAAD

X-LAB is a trans-disciplinary design and research practice working in all scales of projects in architecture, interior, product, and brand environment. Operating as both laboratory and design studio, X-LAB is engaged in research and practice of emerging issues and projects related to technology, design, and built environment. The lab has developed prototype designs for interior green spaces, wearable technologies, concept designs for a feature sci-fi film, and a residential design project in Hawaii among others. It has also produced publication work for Prototropic, an international architecture journal. X-LAB founder, 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.

X-Lab

2015-16

A(n) Office

Marcelo López-Dinardi ‘13 MSCCCP

A(n) Office is an architectural practice based in Detroit and New York, founded by López-Dinardi with 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 presented Methexis: The Algorithmic Recitative, a solo exhibition at Museum of Contemporary Art Detroit, expanding its House Opera project into new urban research.

López-Dinardi is an architect and educator based in Texas, and an Assistant Professor in the Department of Architecture at Texas A&M University.

A(n) Office

Consortia

See year 2016-2017

IrisVR

George Valdes ‘12 MARCH

George Valdes served as VP of Product at IrisVR, a company building software to edit, visualize, and share 3D CAD models in virtual reality. IrisVR’s mission is to give professionals the necessary VR tools for making design and model review fast, accurate, and collaborative. IrisVR leverages the immersive power of cutting-edge virtual reality headsets and the software enables users to create true-to-scale virtual reality walkthroughs on their own computer in one-click. The easy-to-use software is being used in hundreds of offices around the world, empowering teams to communicate more effectively with each other, their clients, and project stakeholders.

Valdes lives in San Francisco, CA where he contributes growth support at Monograph.

IrisVR

Forrest Jessee

See year 2016-2017

K O S M O S

Nikolay Martynov ‘14 MSAAD

K O S M O S Architects is a virtual collaborative studio, bringing together partners based in Basel, Moscow, Bangkok and New York. K O S M O S designs projects and environments of all types and scales: from a door handle to a city; from hardcore architecture to pop-up art installations. The office combines art and technology, global experience with respect to local context, European professionalism and Russian drive. K O S M O S has received awards and prizes in various competitions, including the Hans Christian Andersen Museum Competition in Denmark; Queensway Competition in New York, landmark Nike Sports Center in Moscow; Street Architecture Competition for Storefront for Art and Architecture; got nominated to Swiss Art Awards. Their competition-winning project, Foam Space, was included at the 2015 Ideas City Conference in New York.

K O S M O S was founded by Martynov along with Artem Kitaev and Leonid Slonimskiy. Martynov also works as an Architect at Skidmore Owings & Merrill LLP (SOM) in New York, NY.

K O S M O S

Dimitri Damiel Kim

See year 2016-2017

Hana Petrik and Martin Kropac

Martin Kropac ’10 MSAAD

With Hana Petrik, Kropac co-directs Architecture Acts, a multidisciplinary and award-winning platform for Art and Architecture based in Prague. Architecture Acts is an open-ended dialogue and rigorous exploration of the field made up of an international team of talented collaborators, current and past. Currently the office is working on a multitude of projects ranging from exhibition design, residential and cultural projects, workshops, lectures to urban plans, and large-scale developments.

Kropac is currently working in New York at Steven Holl Architects and teaching at the School of Architecture and Design NYIT. He is also a doctoral candidate at the Academy of Arts, Architecture and Design in Prague.

[Architecture Acts] http://acts.archi

+Pool

Dong-Ping Wong ‘09 MARCH

+POOL is a non-profit organization that is creating a public, water-filtering, floating swimming pool in the East River. This is a civic project that engages public space, culture, and the environment. The plus-shaped pool is designed to filter the very river that it floats in through its walls, making it possible for New Yorkers and its visitors to swim in clean river water. + POOL strives to reclaim the river as a recreational resource for the city, while educating the public about issues affecting our water quality.

Wong is also the founder of the New York-based studio Food New York.

+Pool

: [Pronounced Colon]

See year 2016-2017

Dimitrios Spyropolous

Dimitrios Spyropoulos MSAAD

Dimitrios Spyropoulos’ research aims to document the evolution of self-driving cars and the ways in which an automated, mobile transportation network can affect the existing urban fabric.

Spyropoulos

Xin Wang

See year 2016-2017