Columbia University Graduate School of Architecture Planning and Preservation Overview
Columbia Graduate School of Architecture Planning and Preservation Columbia GSAPP
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Dean’s Statement
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Dean’s Statement
Dean Amale Andraos
The Graduate School of Architecture, Planning and Preservation at Columbia University combines pioneering disciplinary experimentation with an uncompromising engagement with the world and the urgent questions of our time. Located in the heart of the Columbia Morningside campus in one of the most vibrant global cities in the world, Columbia GSAPP is committed to imagining a future where architecture and cities are reinvented and recast in a more symbiotic relationship with the environment. As a leader in shaping the fields of architecture and the built environment, Columbia GSAPP explores questions of global practice and fosters the development of new forms of design research and scholarship, opening up new territories for more meaningful practices of architecture and the design of cities in an expanded field and within a context of social and environmental concerns. In this synthetic moment, we draw together the geographical question of “where” with the temporal question of “when,” making visible the processes of rapid urbanization in a time of climate change. We bring these questions to bear on the thinking and design of everything, from the scale of a brick to that of a city. At Columbia GSAPP, we believe that the expanded Columbia GSAPP
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GSAPP End-of-Year Show 2014, printed ephemera
disciplines of architecture and urbanism — as well as the redesigned figures of not just architects but urban planners, environmental and urban designers, real estate developers, preservationists, critics, and curators — are all formed through relentless probing and focused exploration toward the creation of new relationships, understandings and hierarchies with radically different consequences for research and practice as well as for the future of architecture, cities, and the environment. All of our programs strive to offer the highest standards of expertise and knowledge combined with a generous and open-ended form of education, where long established curricula not only respond to the constant transformation of the world around us, but are also designed to give both faculty and students the means to lead this transformation. With a deep commitment to experimentation and weaving together cutting edge skills and incisive critical thinking, Columbia GSAPP is a laboratory for learning, where students and faculty engage one another in a spirit of intellectual respect and support. We do not believe that schools exist to prepare students for the world, but rather that the world is always already here, inflecting everything we do — from design studios to seminars, and from spaces of discussion and debate to laboratories for research and making. As such, 4
Dean’s Statement
GSAPP Faculty in newly renovated studios
our students believe they can contribute to the shaping of the world from the moment they arrive. As a spatial network, Columbia GSAPP brings together a highly diverse group of people, faculty, and students from around the world at our locations in various cities across continents. In New York, the School’s long commitment to engaging the city’s endlessly vibrant life continues to provide a strong context for understanding our industrialized past while imagining alternate futures. Through its global network of Studio-X locations, the School offers a generous infrastructure through which we might imagine new pedagogical models that undermine notions of center-periphery and promote relational thinking and understanding as both faculty and students navigate this expanded notion of what an architecture school is. Engaging with these various sites and collaborating with our Studio-X directors, new knowledge is produced that expands the canon of architectural and urban thinking while also opening up possibilities for new lines of inquiry and new forms of practice. Our Centers and Labs act as the glue that binds our diverse programs and research interests together, led by faculty and focused on various forms of research into the past, present, and future of architecture, cities, the environment, and technology. Many of these Columbia GSAPP
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Columbia Graduation, Spring 2014
Avery Library
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Dean’s Statement
speculations and investigations enable a feedback loop between teaching and research, where faculty interests create a context for student explorations (with many of them choosing to collaborate with one or more faculty as part of their Centers or Labs). Research at GSAPP not only cuts across the various programs, it extends the school’s focus beyond its own walls to connect to other schools and institutes on campus, as well as institutions and universities globally with a continuously deepening involvement and richer exchanges. Events, Exhibitions, and Publications constitute the heart of GSAPP’s engagement with the public and further contribute to shaping the thinking on architecture, cities and the environment. Through its vibrant events programing, the school becomes a platform for discussion, debate, and the exchange of ideas in New York and across our Studio-X network, with ideas percolating back to every studio, classroom, and workshop at the school and beyond. The Arthur Ross Architecture Gallery and our publishing imprint, Columbia Books on Architecture and the City, act in tandem to further question and expand the canon of architectural and urban education, bridging faculty research and student curiosity with original research into moments of architectural and urban history, often theorized and presented for the first time to international audiences through the highest levels of curatorial and critical practices. Finally, Columbia GSAPP is importantly distinguished by the most outstanding and diverse faculty in the world — spanning a gradient from pure scholarship to pure practice, with many hybrid models in between — with an equally charged, creative, and dynamic body of students. Our students brings together endless curiosity, talent, incurable optimism, and a sense of entrepreneurship, rendering them leaders in the field as they continue to strive to change the world.
Programs
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Programs
HP
UD
UP M. ARCH
AAD RED CCCP
GSAPP Programs
PhD
Scales of Environment
Our programs range from Historic Preservation to Real Estate Development, Urban Planning and Design, Conceptual, Critical and Curatorial Practices as well as Architecture, covering a gradient of scales responsible for understanding and shaping architecture and the built environment. How all of those scales are intertwined and set in relation to one another and how they relate to larger social and environmental concerns are questions which can only be answered through collaborative and interdisciplinary approaches to the design and thinking of architecture and cities, as well as through the production of new forms of research, knowledge, and hybrid practices. As a result, a particular set of concerns cut across and connect the programs, allowing a growing number of crossovers to occur as the future of architecture, cities and the environment are jointly explored, resulting in dual degrees, joint studios, classes shared across the school and campus, as well as interdisciplinary summer workshops. Ultimately, Columbia GSAPP’s spatial network, research centers, and labs as well as its collegial atmosphere increasingly foster the most surprising forms of collaborations between programs, students, and faculty.
Global Engagement
The school’s deep commitment to a globally engaged form of education is not only manifest through its Studio-X network, but also through its generous travel opportunities across the programs. To experience diverse contexts firsthand and learn to think in a relational way is of paramount importance, and the GSAPP prides itself on fostering one of the most diverse educational experiences in the world, both inside the school and across the globe. The school’s global outlook transpires across studios, classrooms, centers, and labs as our diverse body of
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‘We Can’t Breathe’ discussion in Low Memorial Library, January 2015
Advanced Studios Transfer Dialogues, with (l-r) Eric Bunge, Enrique Walker, and Sarah Dunn
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faculty and students move beyond Eurocentric narratives about architecture and cities to shape alternate perspectives and new pedagogical approaches across the programs. Architects don’t build as much as they draw. Across the programs — from Urban Planning to Urban Design and Architecture in particular — how we visualize our context, from representing spatial territory to information data, shapes how we understand the world and how we approach design in fundamental ways. How do we draw together climate change, our global condition, and local effects? How do we make tangible the forces and flows shaping the built and the unbuilt together? GSAPP’s long legacy of radical visualization remains critical to all the programs in transforming our consciousness, imagination, and skill towards building a more sustainable and equitable world.
History/Theory
We cannot imagine an alternate future without rereading the past. Sitting above the largest architectural library in the world, Avery Library, the GSAPP has a long legacy of leading discourse in both history and theory, specifically in Architecture, Planning, and Preservation. Today, it is continuing to redefine those fields while also leading the formation of new disciplines such as Real Estate Development or the field of Critical and Curatorial Practices. Across our programs as well as through the school’s ongoing research, events, exhibitions, and publications, we are constantly expanding the canon of the disciplines by bringing forth forgotten histories and telling stories in new ways to situate our present and future actions while shedding new light on past ones.
Technology
Whether examining the consequences of social media and apps on the urban landscape, exploring new materials’ embodied energies or developing experimental modes of preservation, the GSAPP fosters a combination of cutting edge and critical approaches to technology. From the days of the ‘paperless studio’ to today’s data visualizations, our faculty’s research and practice and our students’ explorations are deeply committed to material and digital investigations and innovation, bringing together experiential and aesthetic qualities with questions of performance and sustainability. Our commitment to exploring the potential of entrepreneurship for the fields of architecture and design is a testimony to the school’s continuing foray into technological innovation. GSAPP alumni have gone on to become world-renown leaders, pushing boundaries in the fields of material fabrication, digital software, and social media.
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Programs
Visualization
Spatial Network
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Mumbai
Johannesburg
Amman
Tokyo
Istanbul
Santiago
Rio de Janeiro
New York
Avery
Fayerweather
Buell Schermerhorn
NEW INC.
Morningside
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Spatial Network
Beijing
Avery Hall entrance
Collective Tables
Models and Storage Architecture Studio, new model
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Meeting and Models
Avery Hall, a space with over a century of history, is the epicenter of the GSAPP. It is home to Avery Library, classrooms, event spaces, and innovative studio space. Bringing a sense of experimentation to our rethinking of the mythical heart of architectural education — the studio space — we have transformed the traditional model of single generic and segregated desks towards a new relationship between individual and collective, giving more space to the collective and carving out a large shared scale model making, storage, and meeting table for each studio of twelve. This new spatial configuration is creating collaboration and conversations in which students are increasingly learning from one another, breaking physical barriers, and engaging in a more rich and shared creative process. Buell Hall is home to Columbia University’s Temple Hoyne Buell Center for the Study of American Architecture and the Arthur Ross Architectural Gallery. Fayerweather Hall hosts studio spaces for three GSAPP programs — Historic Preservation, Real Estate Development, and Urban Planning as well as technology resources for the GSAPP community, including on-site IT assistance, computer labs, and the Visual Resource Collection. Schermerhorn Hall is home to pioneering laboratory spaces for GSAPP, including the Conservation Lab, Spatial Information Design Lab, and the Fabrication Shop.
NEW INC.
NEW INC, the first museum-led incubator, is a shared workspace and professional development program designed to support creative practitioners working in the areas of art, technology, and design in downtown Manhattan. Launched by the New Museum in September 2014, the incubator is a notfor-profit platform that furthers the New Museum’s ongoing commitment to new art and new ideas, with GSAPP as the anchor tenant. The NEW INC/GSAPP partnership will incubate recent graduates, nurturing creative entrepreneurship as well as hosting events and research initiatives from the school, such as the Embodied Energy Initiative.
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Spatial Network
Morningside Heights Campus
Studio-X Global Network locations
Studio-X New York Guide to Liberating New Forms of Conversation
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Studio-X Global In recent years, GSAPP has used the label “Studio-X” to refer to its most advanced laboratories for exploring the future of cities. The label conveys the sense that a whole new platform for research and debate is needed to face the array of urgent questions that will face the next generation of designers. Each Studio-X is organized around the traditional setting of the design studio found in architecture schools all over the world: a simple open loft-like space that fosters collaborative exploration, an empty room that welcomes new people and new ideas. This central workspace is supplemented by: a book gallery and reading room that displays unique research publications from around the different Studio-X locations not found in a typical bookstore; an interactive video interface showing what is happening in the other Studio-X spaces in real time; a gallery space displaying unique exhibitions curated locally or between Studio-X spaces; a space for public lectures; a meeting room for more private discussions or video-conferencing; a kitchen/ coffee shop; and offices for the staff or visiting scholars/ designers. Each Studio-X is a cultural center that supports close personal interactions between people that might not normally come together. At the same time, the space is equipped with the latest technology to take advantage of Columbia’s expertise in digital design and data visualization to draw on the widest array of global resources and communicate ideas to the widest possible audience. The local Director of each Studio-X acts as the curator of a continuous array of projects, workshops, lectures, seminars, symposia, exhibitions, and performances with a small staff helping to tie the daily operations of the space to the surrounding city. In key moments, all the Studio-X spaces are linked in single real-time global workshops allowing unprecedented bursts of creativity.
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Spatial Network - Studio-X
Director: Malwina Łyś-Dobradin
Studio-X Amman at the Columbia Global Center | Middle East
Studio-X Istanbul
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Amman Director: Nora Akawi
Beijing Asia Megacities Lab Director: Jeffrey Johnson Studio-X Assistant Director: Erica Guo
GSAPP will expand regionally to Hong Kong, Shenzhen, Shanghai, and other cities, by joining forces with other institutions and schools of architecture and by engaging Columbia University’s broad network of alumni. As a new regional model, and as a result of increasing and productive collaborations with Columbia’s Global Centers, Studio-X Beijing is now hosted in the Columbia Global Centers East Asia central offices, and programs will be developed in close partnership with Columbia faculty. As the director of Asia Megacities Lab, Jeffrey Johnson will build on the Studio-X Beijing platform developed over the past five years, and will lead GSAPP’s initiatives across Asia.
Istanbul Director: Selva Gürdoğan
Studio-X Istanbul opened in November 2013 in a twostorey building at Salıpazar, in Istanbul’s downtown area. We develop free events such as lectures, workshops, seminars and exhibitions that foster discussion on the built environment and research projects that generate new forms of sharing the urban public space.
Johannesburg Director: Mpho Matsipa
Studio-X Johannesburg will further deepen Columbia University’s longstanding relationship with South Africa and foster new collaborations with partners from across the African continent. Our aim is to create a creative public platform that will explore alternative imaginaries of the city, with particular focus on the future of global connection, individual and collective acts of agency, and productive collaboration. In the face of the official narratives of apocalyptic urbanization and global crisis, Studio-X Johannesburg will cultivate encounters amongst researchers, urbanists, theorists, filmmakers, artists, activists, architects, and policy makers to explore and give expression to creative and emergent urban visions and practices of the future.
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Spatial Network - Studio-X
Studio-X Amman, with studio workshop, seminar room, offices and exhibition space, opened within the Columbia Global Centers | Middle East in March 2009 and has acted as the site for student workshops, public lectures, seminars and exhibitions investigating a wide range of issues in urban planning, historic preservation, and advanced architectural design in Jordan and the region.
Studio-X Mumbai
Studio-X Rio de Janeiro
Studio-X Beijing hosts International traveling exhibition Safari 1 exhibition
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Mumbai Director: Rajeev Thaker
Rio de Janeiro Director: Pedro Rivera
Since March 2011, Studio-X Rio has occupied a threestory building at Praça Tiradentes, a square in Rio de Janeiro’s downtown area. Bringing together professionals, academics, decision makers, students, and the general public, this space is a platform to confront our most pressing urban challenges. We are interested in how cross-cultural, cross-disciplinary, and cross-continental exchanges can affect and inform each other when facing the ongoing urban transformations of the city, the country, and Latin America.
Santiago
The Santiago Research Cell (RC) was established in 2013 as the first attempt to develop a new type of Global Network node aimed to provide for a flexible organizational structure. Santiago-RC deploys a research-based community able to generate its own knowledge and to provide Global Network initiatives with new regional input. Any GSAPP Alumni can plug in to this group, which is based on research projects related to the city, environment, and architecture.
Tokyo Director: Daisuke Hirose
Tokyo Lab is a hub for architectural activity located at Shibaura House, a space designed by Kazuyo Sejima in a lively neighborhood of the city. Since 2011, it has hosted creative events with local and international architects, coders and hackers, as well as numerous parties and gatherings.
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Spatial Network - Studio-X
Studio-X Mumbai opened its doors to the public in February 2011 with “Architecture of Consequence,” an international traveling exhibition about the role of architecture in social innovation and sustainability. The space has quickly become a major hub of vibrant debate. Located on the fourth floor of the Kitab Mahal building near the Victoria Terminus railway station in historic downtown Mumbai, Studio-X Mumbai explores the built environment by hosting a variety of events that address issues such as contemporary architectural practice, sociology, public art, and the impact of technology on the city. It is the most democratic of public spaces for citizens who are eager to engage with issues related to the future of cities.
Events Exhibitions Publications
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Events, Exhibitions, Publications Designing the Venice Biennale, (l-r) Amale Andraos, Rem Koolhaas, Irma Boom, and Michael Rock
Architecture & Representation: The Arab City
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Lectures & Events The School offers an array of lectures, conferences, debates and events that reflect the diversity and interests of its programs. The Monday Evening Lecture Series brings internationally prominent practitioners, historians, and theorists to speak on issues of architecture, planning, development, and urbanism. In addition, the Architecture, Urban Design, Planning, Preservation, and Real Estate Programs maintain their own special lecture series that are open to the School community. In addition, the School and its programs sponsor special symposia, debates, and conferences that draw together faculty, prominent guests, and students to discuss issues of timely and historical importance.
Fall 2015 Lectures and Events
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Lectures & Events
Planning for Climate Change with (l-r) Laura Kurgan, Kate Orff, Naomi Klein
Angela Davis in discussion with GSAPP Professor Gwendolyn Wright and Amale Andraos
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Studio-X Johannesburg Director Mpho Matsipa and GSAPP Professor Mabel Wilson
Lucia Allais delivers the inaugural Detlef Mertins Memorial lecture
Michael Manfredi, critic Justin Davidson, Marion Weiss, and Dean Amale Andraos in conversation
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Lectures & Events
Kazuyo Sejima in conversation with Amale Andraos
Symposium on Experimental Preservation, organized by Jorge Otero-Pailos and Selva G端rdogan
GSAPP Faculty Juan Herreros and David Benjamin in discussion
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Exhibitions Director: Mark Wasiuta Program Coordinator: Adam Bandler Arthur Ross Architecture Gallery
The core of the GSAPP Exhibitions program is the Arthur Ross Architecture Gallery. The gallery is simultaneously a testing ground for exploring new approaches to architectural exhibitions, and a reflexive space for considering and analyzing architecture as it has been formed through exhibition. Different strains of exhibition experiments appear in the gallery, sometimes through the coordination and exposure of archival, historical, or thematic architectural research projects, or through installation and curatorial strategies themselves. The gallery is a site for staging exhibitions that leave the school to travel to other institutions and to museums elsewhere, and is also an aperture through which projects with contemporary artists, filmmakers, scholars, and curators infiltrate the school as provocation to its conventions, practices, and pedagogies.
Pop-Up Exhibitions
All spaces of the school — from Istanbul to Rio to Johannesburg to the central floor of Avery — are inhabited by thematic and timely exhibtions of student and faculty work. The exhibitions rotate on a fast-paced schedule, making the School visible to itself and cutting across the school’s diverse programs to take the pulse of their work and research.
Pop-Up Exhibition on Avery 400 level
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Exhibitions
Environmental Communications: Contact High in the Ross Architecture Gallery
Tony Oursler, UFOs and Other Effigies in the Ross Architecture Gallery
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Columbia Books on Architecture & the City Director: James Graham Managing Editor: Caitlin Blanchfield Associate Editor: Alissa Anderson The books and magazines published through the Office of Publications at Columbia GSAPP are enduring records of the school’s intellectual life. They reflect the diverse strata of the school, ranging from long-term research projects to conferences, exhibitions, labs and studios. In thinking about architecture and the city, they reach out to draw on the knowledge of architects, planners, engineers, computer scientists, artists, politicians, data visualization specialists, scholars, theorists, and curators, among others. The office is committed to new platforms for publishing, and cultivating a symbiosis between the traditions of print and the possibilities of the digital. Along with the GSAPP Books imprint (in partnership with Columbia University Press), the Office of Publications produces pamphlets, journals, and digital periodicals that reflect the activity of architectural thought within the school and beyond its walls. Tapping into the school’s events, the GSAPP Transcripts series expands conversations begun at lectures and talks; the Avery Review offers a new online venue for critical essays on architecture, and the GSAPP Books digital imprint broadcasts dispatches of student and faculty research.
Recent and forthcoming titles from Columbia Books on Architecture and the City
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The Avery Review The Avery Review is a new online journal dedicated to thinking about books, buildings, and other architectural media. We see the genres of the review and the critical essay as vital but still underutilized ways of exploring the ideas and problems that animate the field of architecture, and we hope to push these genres beyond their most familiar forms, whether journalistic or academic. Our aim is to explore the broader implications of a given object of discourse (whether text, film, exhibition, building, project, or urban environment). We are interested in reviews that test and expand the reviewer’s own intellectual commitments—theoretical, architectural, and political—through the work of others. Architecture operates within overlapping frameworks of precedent, adaptation, context, politics, and circumstance, and understanding these interactions is as important as ever. Is there a critical opening between the many different models of architectural writing, where we might explore the stakes of academia and practice through thoughtful, informed, and lively reviewing? Is there room within the field of architecture for a digital culture of criticism and commentary like those that have arisen in other disciplines? We believe so.
The Avery Review online journal of critical essays — averyreview.com
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Publications
Editors: James Graham, Caitlin Blanchfield, Jordan Carver, Jacob Moore, Alissa Anderson
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Publications
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Research
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Research Questions Concerning Health: Stress and Wellness in Johannesburg, edited by Hilary Sample
In the context of a leading research university, what does research mean for a school of architecture and the built environment? As a mode of inquiry that simultaneously sits within each discipline while moving beyond them, research at Columbia GSAPP embodies the maturation of the longstanding spirit of experimentation of the school. Understood as investigative practice, new forms of research fully immerse students and faculty to engage the real issues of our time while also creating the distance for reflection and the projection of alternate narratives: re-reading of the past, critical engagement with the present and new possibilities for the future. At GSAPP, faculty and students engage in relentless probing, expanding, renewing and connecting of the disciplines, of ideas and technologies to create new forms of knowledge and hybridized practices which open up new possibilities for architecture, urban and environmental thinking — past, present and future.
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Temple Hoyne Buell Center Director: Reinhold Martin Program Coordinator: Jacob Moore Columbia University’s Temple Hoyne Buell Center for the Study of American Architecture was founded in 1982. Its mission is to advance the interdisciplinary study of American architecture, urbanism, and landscape. A separately endowed entity within Columbia’s Graduate School of Architecture, Planning and Preservation, it sponsors research projects, workshops, public programs, publications, and awards.
The Buell Hypothesis
House Housing, ongoing research about the intersection of architecture and real estate development, most recently presented at the Chicago Architecture Biennial
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Center for Urban Real Estate / CURE As a center for research and thought leadership, CURE builds upon a platform of direct industry engagement through conferences, symposia, publications and consulting activities and undertakes a dedicated research agenda that advocates for design-intelligent urban development. Building upon CURE’s intellectual foundation, the center offers GSAPP faculty and students a cross-disciplinary approach that integrates theory and practice to solve unique development problems.
NYC 2040: Housing the Next One Million New Yorkers
CURE Symposiums: Building the Digital City, Transit Lessons from New York and London
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Research - Buell & CURE
Director: Vishaan Chakrabarti Research Director: Jesse M. Keenan
Center for Spatial Research Director: Laura Kurgan GSAPP and the Faculty of Arts and Sciences are pleased to announce the creation of an interdisciplinary Center for Spatial Research. Directed by GSAPP Associate Professor Laura Kurgan, the Center will serve as a hub for urban research that links the humanities, architecture, and data science and will also sponsor a series of curricular initiatives built around new technologies of mapping, data visualization and data collection. Data about public health, transportation, economic activity, and demography, have long been used in order to shape urban spaces and change public behavior. From John Snow’s 1854 water well survey of London, which identified the source of a cholera epidemic, to the infamous 1930s real estate maps whose “redlining” facilitated housing discrimination in American cities, data has been a powerful force shaping cities, for better and for worse. The contemporary explosion in data generation, collection and processing has only accelerated these processes. The Center for Spatial Research (CSR) will foster a qualitative and critical approach to this burgeoning field, working with data in ways that open up new areas of research and inquiry with advanced tools in mapping, geo-spatial data, and visualization to help scholars and citizens understand what’s happening in cities worldwide – past, present and future. The Center is made possible through a grant of $1,975,000 from the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation, and its initial research inquiries will focus on “conflict urbanism,” which is described as “the way cities have not only been destroyed but transformed and even created through conflict. From the inner cities of the United States to the refugee camps and urban battlefields of the war in Syria, conflict fundamentally shapes the places where we live.” In addition to its research activities, the Center for Spatial Research’s programs will include lectures, symposia, workshops, web tutorials and classes, including intensive courses in data analysis and visualization.
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Automated rubble detection in Aleppo city using machine learning & image analysis algorithms Date of image: 08 10 14 Image Source: WorldView2, (c) 2014 DigitalGlobe, Inc Image analysis: Madeeha Merchant
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Port to Port, design research on global oil shipping routes by Spatial Information Design Lab
Living Architecture Lab, Embodied Energy Initiative mycelium experiments at NEW INC.
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Research Labs
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Research - Labs
The GSAPP has developed innovative Research Laboratories which augment and complement the research interests and activities of the school’s faculty and programs. Whether building bridges within the School’s programs or between the School and other Schools on campus – the Earth Institute, the School of Public Health, the School of the Arts, and the Engineering School amongst other - as well as institutions in New York and globally through the Studio-X network. Centers, Labs and Initiatives create a complementary space to the spaces of studios and classrooms, one that enables both faculty and students to ask the next questions as the School continues to lead in opening up uncharted territories and become a context for student’s own research and exploration as they prepare to re-enter the world.
Living Architecture Lab experiments
Urban Design Lab, Research partnership with the Millenium Cities Initiative in Kumasi, Ghana
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Living Architecture Lab Director: David Benjamin
Urban Landscape Lab Director: Janette Kim
The Urban Landscape Lab is an interdisciplinary applied research group at GSAPP, focusing on the role of design in the analysis and transformation of the joint built-natural environment. We study ecological processes and urban systems as hybrid phenomenon through targeted pilot projects, practical strategies, and experiments.
C-Lab - Columbia Laboratory for Architectural Broadcasting Director: Jeffrey Inaba
The mission of C-LAB is to test experimental forms of architectural communication. Rethinking architecture at a global scale, the lab sets up creative partnerships to broaden the range and increase the intensity of architectural discourse — launching unique events, provisional networks, special issues of magazines, video streams, television, radio and webcasts. The lab acts as a kind of training camp and energy source for incubating new channels for debate about architecture.
Asia Megacities Lab Director: Jeffrey Johnson
Over the next 25 years, it is projected that China will account for 50% of the world’s new construction. The majority of this construction will occur in existing cities or newly formed urban areas. It is the mission of the China Megacities Lab to become actively engaged with this rapid urbanization and spatial production occurring in China, through both research and design.
Global Africa Lab Directors: Mario Gooden & Mabel Wilson
Through design methods and research aided by new technologies and media, the Global Africa Lab (GAL) explores the spatial topologies of the African continent and its diaspora. GAL’S s innovative research and pedagogical agenda examines
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Research - Labs
Political and cultural conditions change: what if the walls and windows morphed in response? Air and water quality fluctuate: what if a cloud of light above the river modulated its color as a public display of contamination? Demands for occupation of space shift across days, seasons, and years: what if traditionally mute and inert building materials appeared and disappeared accordingly?
Asia Megacities Lab
Radical Imaginaries in an Afro-Future City, Global Africa Lab
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how the unique political histories and the contemporary forces of globalization shape the architecture, urbanism, culture, and ecologies of these places.
The Latin American and Caribbean Laboratory (Latin Lab) serves as an intellectual platform for research, educational, and service initiatives related to architecture and urban planning in Latin America and the Caribbean (LAC). The Lab aims to become a leading laboratory for the study of the built environment and community development in LAC and its diasporas and a premier resource to assist in the just and sustainable transformation of LAC territories and communities. The Lab’s primary lines of work are Migration and Ethno-Urbanism, Urban Resilience and Upgrading, and Transnational and Regional Planning.
Sustainable Urbanism International Director: Jyoti Hosagrahar
Sustainable Urbanism International is a research and design initiative committed to the conservation of cultural heritage, and the development of strategies for promoting culturally and environmentally sensitive strategies for urban development. SUI was established as a non-profit NGO in Bangalore in 2003. SUI works with governments, communities, and private investors to bring about the benefits of modernization while minimizing the cultural dislocations arising from it.
Cloud Lab Directors: Toru Hasegawa & Mark Collins
Clouds have already been utilized to expand the knowledge frontiers of science, medicine, productivity and entertainment. Clouds work through scalability and vast participation. Clouds bring new understanding to old problems and allow us to pose new questions. Our mission at the Cloud Lab is to expand the knowledge frontier of architecture and the environment by examining the applications of unique computing technologies in our urban life.
Conservation Lab Director: George Wheeler
The Conservation Laboratory serves as the primary teaching venue for conservation courses where lectures, demonstrations, and practicums take place. It supports such courses as Structures, Systems and Materials Iⅈ Architectural Metals; American Architectural Finishes; Concrete, Cast Stone & Mortar; Stone, Brick & Terracotta; Conservation Workshop; and is the fundamental locus for Basic Conservation Science and Laboratory course. Thesis research is also conducted in the laboratory.
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Research - Labs
Latin American & Carribean Laboratory Director: Clara IrazĂĄbal
Paint tests in the Conservation Lab
Fabrication Lab
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Death Lab Director: Karla Maria Rothstein
Fabrication Lab
The Fabrication Lab houses research activity at the GSAPP related to the application of scientific, technical and professional issues to the design and construction of architectural projects through advanced techniques and processes. The activity of the LABS is developed independently from, but in collaboration with, the curriculum of the school, related to its industry partners, interdisciplinary collaborations, and partner educational institutions, along with the integration of built work into the program. The Fabrication Lab is realizing its ambition to provide the most advanced applied research culture, with the establishment of a set of material, structural and fabrication research initiatives that link state-of-theart digital design practices to building analysis, modeling, simulation, fabrication, monitoring and interactive systems.
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Research - Labs
Death Lab is a trans-disciplinary research and design space focused on reconceiving how we live with death in the metropolis. Death Lab makes it possible for dynamic minds to come together to engage the complex challenges of our individual and collective mortality. We are changing how people think about death: at the core of DeathLab is a team of leading researchers, scholars, experts, and designers from fields that enable us to engage both intimate and infrastructural urban concerns. Our ambition is to develop design strategies that can be prototyped, built, and experienced by the public.
Black on Black event in Low Memorial Library, organized by GSAPP 6on6
Studio-X Amman and Sharjah Art Foundation screening: Between Past and Future
New York Architecture after 9/11, panel discussion in Brownie’s Cafe
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Renovated Studio collective workspace atmosphere
“Collecting Architecture Territories” Installation during the annual End of Year Show
Cloud Lab’s Code Dojo Workshop at Studio-X Tokyo
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Student Body
Cover Design: Kees Bakker
Countries of Origin, 2012-2014
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2015–2016
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