Housing Lab

The Columbia GSAPP Housing Lab, located in 320M Fayerweather Hall, brings together faculty and students from across the disciplines represented at the School and Columbia University at large to leverage expertise around some of the most critical challenges facing urban housing today. Working from a design-centric perspective, the Lab creates meaningful collaborations and practical opportunities for architects, developers, and planners to advance interdisciplinary work and promote creative methods and bold interventions for affordable, adaptive, and resilient housing. The Lab is a locus for testing and demonstrating methods of practice-based scholarship and pedagogy.

The GSAPP Housing Lab is participating in the 17th International Architecture Exhibition at the Venice Biennale. The proposal will reflect historical research on an overlooked housing type which rose as a result of the New York State Tenement House Act of 1901, “The New Law.” By analyzing the material, design, finance, and planning innovations within certain housing examples, the Lab will re-assemble the multidisciplinary extracted elements and demonstrate how these can be deployed to create a future vision towards resilience, inclusion, and access in 2050, and potentially a “New” New Law.

2019-2020 Affiliated Faculty
Daisy Ames
Adam Snow Frampton

IDC Fellowship Recipient
Bernadette Baird-Zars, PhD, Urban Planning


Graduate Research Assistants
Juan Sebastian Moreno ‘21 M.S.UP
Erin Purcell '20 M.S.RED
Ericka Song '20 M.Arch

Launched with support from the IDC Foundation.