INPROCESS 20

GRADUATE

INPROCESS 20 GAUD + PSPD School of Architecture Fall 2013 - Spring 2014

INPROCESS

is the yearly publication of student work from the Pratt Institute School of Architecture Editor: Maria Nikolovski Assistant Editor: Sandra Berdick PSPD Archival Coordination: Jose Ramon Grande Undergraduate Archival Coordination: Taylor Sams, Intiporn Rojanasopondist, Mari Kroin, Shaked Uzrad, Russell Low

Pratt Institute School of Architecture Administration: Thomas Hanrahan, Dean Kurt Everhart, Assistant to the Dean Pamela Gill, Assistant to the Dean

Pratt Institute Administration: Thomas F. Schutte, President, Pratt Institute Mike Pratt, Chair to the Board of Trustees Peter Barna, Provost

Graduate Administration: William Mac Donald, GAUD Chair Philip Parker, Assistant GAUD Chair Erin Murphy + Erika Schroeder, Assistants to GAUD Chairs

PSPD Administration: John Shapiro, Chair of City and Regional Planning Eric Allison, Coordinator of Historic Preservation Jaime Stein, Coordinator of Environmental Systems Management Harriet Markis, Chair of Construction Management

PCCD Administration: Adam Friedman, Director of Pratt Center for Community Development

Additional Image Credits: Cover Image: Megan Hurford Vito Acconci, critic Interior Cover: Lauren Kirk Sulan Kolatan, critic

The following hardware and software was used for this publication: 3 Apple Mac Pro 3 desktop computers 5 Apple iMac desktop computers Canon EOS 6D camera Adobe Creative Suite CC Hewlett Packard Color LaserJet 5550dn Hewlett Packard Color Laser Juet 6015dn Netgear ReadyNAS Duo 500gb network drive Western Digital 4TB network drive Type Set to font families Interstate and Gotham Printed in Canada

The student staff of InProcess 20 would like to extend a thank you to the Fall 2013 - Spring 2014 student body and professors for their astounding contribution of over 122 gigabytes of work as well as many outstanding models and drawings.

Additionally we would like to thank Kurt Everhart and Pamela Gill for their tireless efforts and Thomas Hanrahan, William Mac Donald and Philip Parker for their invaluable input and guidance.

And finally, we would like to say farewell to Maria Nikolovski, Intiporn Rojanasopondist and Taylor Sams who after many years of exceptional dedication to Archives and InProcess are graduating.

Forward

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Design Studios Semester 1 Semester 2 Thesis Semester 3

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Master of Science in Architecture and Urban Design

Design Studios Semester 1 Semester 2 Culmination Project Semester 3

Seminars

Core Media Core Elective International Programs

PROGRAMS FOR SUSTAINABLE PLANNING AND DEVELOPMENT

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Master of Science in City and Regional Planning Master of Science in Historic Preservation Master of Science in Urban Environmental Systems Management Master of Science in Facilities Management Bachelor of Science in Construction Management International Courses

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Interdisciplinary Studios

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RESEARCH

Forward Parametric Form Green Infrastructure DILE Green Week PrattSIDE

COMMUNITY

Community Projects K-12 RAD Exchanging Contexts RAMP SAVI Pratt Center Lectures, School Culture, Events and Exhibitions Lecture Series Faculty

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161 163 165 167 169 171 1 75 1 76

COMMUNITY

Master of Science in Architecture

RESEARCH

Core Design Studios Semester 1 Semester 2 Semester 3 Comprehensive Design Studios Semester 4 Advanced Option Design Studios Semester 5 Semester 6

PSPD

Master of Architecture

GAUD

TABLE OF CONTENTS GRADUATE ARCHITECTURE + URBAN DESIGN

Pratt School of Architecture

DEAN’S FORWARD This issue of Graduate InProcess 20 marks two decades of publishing the student work of the School of Architecture. The first volume of InProcess was a single book of 60 pages, while today we publish Undergraduate InProcess with 256 pages and Graduate InProcess with 178 pages. That first volume, while slender in size, nevertheless established the direction and vision for all of the subsequent volumes which remains in place today. The work from that book was deeply engaged with the disciplines of design, urbanism and planning, but was also profoundly challenging and experimental, reflecting the ambition of all of our students to transform their respective professions through, talent, dedication and idealism. This 20-year volume celebrates these emerging leaders with equally new and visionary work that promises to re-make buildings and cities for the next generation.

Graduate InProcess 20 is composed of the work of eight programs in the School of Architecture at Pratt Institute’s Brooklyn and Manhattan campuses, a school embedded in the two most creative urban communities in the world. Three of these programs form the GAUD, or Graduate Architecture and Urban Design, known for advanced design methods and design research. Four other graduate programs, together with the undergraduate Construction Management Program, make up the PSPD – the Programs for Sustainable Planning and Development - distinguished by their progressive urban and ecological agenda. Together they comprise over 450 students focusing on virtually every aspect of the design, planning, building and ecological challenges facing cities today.

The GAUD is composed of three separate courses of study; a three-year professional Master of Architecture program and the three-semester post-professional programs of Master of Science in Architecture and Master of Science in Architecture and Urban Design. The two postprofessional degrees began as a single program in the 1960’s, eventually reaching their current articulation in the 1980’s. They now offer students with professional degrees the opportunity to re-think the disciplines of urban design and architecture and strike out in their own original research directions. The professional Master of Architecture was founded in 2000, and brings together students of all collegiate backgrounds. In recent years, the Master of Architecture has been recognized with high rankings, and now offers students a sophisticated and diverse range of design tools and experiences. The GAUD stresses advanced computation techniques, new collaborative teaching models and an emphasis on meeting the social and ecological challenges of the day. All GAUD students share advanced studios in the latter semesters, exploring research themes reflecting our rapidly changing urban culture and the particular interests of the design critics.

The PSPD (Programs for Planning and Sustainable Development) are a unique cluster of 4 graduate programs together with the single undergraduate program of Construction Management. The PSPD represents many interests, but has a common goal in advancing a vision of a just and ecologically responsible society while using the most advanced tools and techniques available in their respective field. Several of the PSPD programs have a highly developed research agenda with a strong record of sponsored research.

The Master of Science in City and Regional Planning is the oldest and largest of these programs, founded in the 1950’s and now grown to 100 students. Graduate Planning attracts a diverse enrollment dedicated to an equitable, diverse and economically dynamic city.

The Pratt Center grew out of this program and is a nationally recognized model for urban research. The Master of Science in Urban Environmental Systems Management also grew out of Graduate Planning, developing its special emphasis on green infrastructure for 21st century cities. This program is relatively new but already has developed impressive research initiatives.

The other three programs, the Master of Science in Historic Preservation, the Bachelor of Science in Construction Management and the Master of Science in Facilities Management are more focused on individual structures, but their emphasis on urban buildings and their understanding of management as an aspect of contemporary urban culture offers them many opportunities to share courses and professors with all of the other programs in the PSPD. Construction Management and Facilities Management are both several decades old and draw upon the expertise of New York City’s building and construction industry leaders. Many of these leaders are graduates of these programs. The most recent addition to the PSPD is Graduate Historic Preservation, offering a unique perspective on preservation, emphasizing both conservation and community, culture and its context. Graduate Preservation benefits from a very diverse group of students sharing a passion for cities and their history.

All of these programs in this volume of Graduate In Process 19 share the same commitments to urban culture and a belief that their discipline can make a difference in meeting the challenges of the future through innovation, creativity and an ethical understanding of society. The following pages offer an extraordinary glimpse into that future.

Thomas Hanrahan, Dean

InProcess - 1995

Graduate Architecture and Urban Design

CHAIR’S FORWARD InProcess 20 Graduate Architecture publication introduces Graduate Architecture and Urban Design’s (GAUD) progressive design environment for advanced architectural research. The GAUD proposes speculative debate and experimental architectural production based on a relational construct among theoretical inquiry, computational research, digital design, and technological investigation. To this end, GAUD seeks to formulate a contemporary approach to architecture that is “ecological” in the sense that it provides collective exchanges which are both trans-disciplinary and trans-categorical. This ecological approach encourages feedback relationships among architecture, landscape, urbanism, technology, software programming, industry, manufacturing, political agencies, theoretical studies, as well as categories and disciplines that are newly emerging in contemporary culture. This approach seeks to productively intensify heterogeneous interests and agencies through an integrative model of education.

Students in all three GAUD programs, Master of Architecture, first professional degree; Master of Science in Architecture and Master of Science in Architecture and Urban Design, post professional degrees, are immersed in an exploratory design studio culture. The three distinct degrees in two programs - Architecture and Urban Design - resonate through shared coursework, students, faculty, and events, intensifying the School of Architecture’s unique position within an art and design institute. This mix supports the ability to integrate diverse theoretical and technical knowledge in speculative design work while emphasizing critical thinking and critical making. Students and faculty are engaged in the design of contemporary experimental architectural projects and the integration of academically rigorous history and theory, computer media, and technology seminar courses.

The program understands innovation, in both architectural theory and practice, as inextricably interconnected with phenomena out of which it emerges. Recent courses in GAUD have investigated such topics as iterative processes, fluid systems, emergent phenomena, logics of organization, complex urbanisms, globalization and politics, computational logics, material performance, and speculative fabrication.

New initiatives in the GAUD have resulted in enhancing the International Study Abroad Programs [ISAP] in the contexts of both Rome and Istanbul. The Istanbul program, in particular, has strategically partnered with Bilgi University in Turkey. This collaboration provides one example of our investment in investigating shared ecological issues confronting architecture and urbanism internationally. These ‘watered’ venues construct a parallel case study for the examination, analyses, and proposed design for New York City and Istanbul, as ‘world cities’. Initially, working with New York City and Istanbul, eCODE, the Ecology and Design Research Center, supported by an Innovation Grant at Pratt Institute, is dedicated to initiating a new discourse in ecological thinking. eCODE will situate new research models at the evolving nexus between architecture, design, and technological innovation in urban and media ecology. This hybrid research model proposes cogent alternatives to what have become anachronistic approaches in many current practices of ‘sustainability’. This research emphasizes new more aggregative forms and projective methods of practice where collaboration occurs across levels and regions of different expertise towards a generative open-ended systems of architectural and urban production relative to time. Establishing a relation between design and education, our new RAD_K-12 [Rising Architects and Designers K-12] Program provides an opportunity for GAUD students to examine the role of contemporary design education across three generations.

The production of new learning environments is explored through the collaboration between the students and faculties of GAUD and several Elementary Schools in New York City, Battery Park City School [PS/IS 276] ; Brooklyn School of Inquiry [PS 646]; Blue School, William Penn School [PS 321], along with New Dorp High School.

William J. Mac Donald, Graduate Chair

Christian Porfido Philip Parker, critic

Master of Architecture

In the fall of the second year, studios build in complexity, with a mixed-use housing project located in Hallets Point, Queens that investigated the relationship between the site and the complex matrix of multiple programmatic conditions. This studio seeks to apply technical concepts introduced in the material assemblies and environmental controls seminars to the development of building envelopes and environmental systems in the projects.

Alexandra Barker, coordinator

DESIGN STUDIO FACULTY Carlos Arnaiz Alexandra Barker Gisela Baurmann StĂŠphanie Bayard James Garrison Theoharis David Craig Konyk Carla Leitao

M. Ludovica Tramontin Peter Macapia Philip Parker Richard Scherr Erich Schoenenberger Maria Sieira Jason Vigneri-Beane

COMMUNITY

The spring context studio highlights issues of context as a topological condition and a programmatic one of circulation and accessibility. Digital techniques are further developed and diagramming becomes more advanced. This year the program was a Montessori school in Brooklyn Heights.

RESEARCH

The core sequence comprises the first three semesters of the six semester program. The first year begins with investigations of material, form, and conventions of representation that use physical and digital formal manipulations to explore tectonic conditions of structure, envelope, and programmatic potentialities. These studies are parlayed into projects exploring program and context that consist of small scale interventions into New York City infrastructural networks. This year the studios developed infrastructural projects to be implemented along the waterfront regions hit by Superstorm Sandy.

PSPD

The three-year M. Arch 1 program guides students through an interdisciplinary approach to architectural education to prepare students to become professionals that can accommodate current issues of inhabitation and anticipate emergent conditions of site and program. Our studio sequence is the fundamental mode of instruction in architecture. Studios work in a variety of media, from physical material explorations to digital modeling, imagery, and fabrication. Studio projects cover a range of topics, from explorations of techniques as generators of new formal and tectonic systems to investigations into issues of contemporary culture and emerging spatial, social, and political structures.

GAUD

CORE DESIGN STUDIO

Master of Architecture | First Semester

009

GAUD CORE DESIGN

Waterfront Infrastructure Project Far Rockaway, Queens, NY The studio introduced the students to concepts, processes, and methodologies that are fundamental to contemporary architectural design. These themes are introduced through a series of studies that investigate the architectonic potentialities of different types of materials ranging from planar to volumetric, open to closed, and structure to surface.

Students translated physical models into parametric digital models that could explore calibrated ranges of tectonic conditions and produced aggregated systems that could be manipulated to respond to imagined external pressures of site and internal programmatic potentialities. Students analyzed the systems they developed and generated graphic notation strategies.

In the second half of the semester, students applied these techniques to the development of an intervention into the strata of the urban street edge or boundary condition.

Boundary conditions in architecture are examined as spatial zones with subdivisions that overlap and change according to daily or seasonal shifts. The tectonic units developed in the material study were aggregated and manipulated at the local and global level to be employed to generate intricate, multivalent spatial conditions that could be employed to address issues of site and program discovered through research and testing.

The program this year was the design of support spaces for visitors to Rockaway Beach, Queens, an area devastated by the storm surge of Superstorm Sandy. Snack bars, bathrooms, first aid spaces, and community rooms were incorporated into a series of infrastructural interventions into the boardwalk strip along the beach.

Alexandra Barker, critic a b c d

Kealy Vaughan Wayne Erb Sarah Young Emma Spilsbury

a b c

c

c

d

Master of Architecture | First Semester

011

GAUD CORE DESIGN

Community Center Far Rockaway, Queens, NY This studio is an introduction to the fundamental concepts, processes, and skills required for first-year graduate architectural design. At first, students investigated conceptual and spatial relations through exercises abstracted from architectural context. They were asked to dissect and represent vegetal species in specific ways and then create a 3D print of a new species that would share some performative -but not necessarily formal- qualities. Students then developed a threedimensional framework that would contain and calibrate the model.

The second part of the semester focused on the introduction of site and program with the design of a Community Center and shelter on the beach of Far Rockaway, NY. The changing coastal edge as well as the possibility to be hit by another hurricane became a framework of research, focusing on scale, movement and infrastructure. Students studied the evolving conditions of the site and program, and reused their previous material explorations to link conceptual ideas and form through architectural design.

StĂŠphanie Bayard, critic

a Steven Woo b Fayad Shahim c Hannah Soard

a b

c b

c

Master of Architecture | First Semester

013

GAUD CORE DESIGN

Conflicts of Combinatorial Formalism Red Hook, Brooklyn, NY Computation, Geometry, Architecture – fundamentals and fundamental conflicts. We develop procedures examining the given-ness of geometry as the “soul” of architecture relative to the recentness of computational media. The harnessing of algorithmic functions and increasing investment in digital fabrication technologies is reorienting architecture’s fundamental categories – so this is, in an isolated formal sense, what we are testing. But we must demand within this a fully materializable set of relations; those between structure and space, separating and membrane, circulation and site. The issue of architectural autonomy is still central to our discourse.

And yet not. The problem of distribution plays the same role between architectural matter as it does in social relations as algorithmic logics inhabit increasingly sophisticated roles in our lives from social networking to healthcare.

The Combinatorial -- We start with nest-list algorithms, an abstract means of sequencing values, which are then spatially graphed into a network. We take the network and reduce it to two dimensions and create a module. We then take the module in physical (laser cut pieces) and digital form and apply to it variations in folding along continuous and discontinuous axes – a second step in complexity which spatializes it in a new way. Third step in complexity: we develop combinatorial connections for the modules: pt. to pt., edge to edge, surface to surface. This organization takes on more complexity when we combine self-same modules with different folds. We then begin to articulate these problems in terms of sets: tectonic (framing), enclosure (membrane), and space (program/ circulation), and then further elaborate sets of those sets.

Programmatic Flux -- We use Red Hook as a site going through intense development and geological change, where gentrification emerges as one kind of flood and the site’s vulnerability to rising sea levels plays another. We chose health care as an essential problem, and a community health center as our program, as the point of intersection between communal, metropolitan and nationwide changes in policy as an aspect of this “distribution” question. The studio studied patterns of access to health care, education, and demographic shifts using interviews and public outreach. This enabled us to inquire on what level architecture was related to the local community that was in flux.

Peter Macapia, critic

a CJ Rabey b Elyse Handelman c Sandra Berdick

a

c

b

b c

b

Master of Architecture | First Semester

015

GAUD CORE DESIGN

Tracks in the Sand Coney Island, Brooklyn, NY Fundamentals studio proposes a speculation working across a field of active material relationships – water dynamics, temporally dynamic sites – urban sand, and events – wellness. With Tracks in the Sand the studio explicitly deals with the spatial and organizational dynamics evidenced in material traces and capable of provoking possible events, structures, and communications. The studio seeks out the active exchange among these three while speculating on new hierarchies for them; it looks for the ways that a set of distinctions in area may afford opportunities in another.

Traces, here as lines, form minimal units of variable material difference and continuity; their clustering, diffusion, and inflection resonate with the long tradition of the architecture of lineaments. Historically, tracing is linked to the beginnings of both science and art; a gap marks a receding moment where the two bifurcate from a common practice with varying desires. Today as forms of mapping, tracing, visualization, and simulation are shared across multiple areas of thought the exchange from one to another has become increasingly fluid. In the studio the traces become explicitly instrumental, functional, symbolic and afford new possibilities for architectural insight. Individual studio projects search out tease out – the ways that material differences may move and realign with on another, they rethink the role of coincidence and the ways that accident, as well as precise motive inform architecture as discourse and environment.

Coney Island, its beach, boardwalk and exploratory spatial culture – amusement rides provides a heterogeneous field, its sandy, that is to say variable cultural, material field is internalized in the architectural project.

Philip Parker, critic

a Christian Porfido b Leila Thackara c Nicole Livanos

a

a b a

c

Master of Architecture | First Semester

017

GAUD CORE DESIGN

PATCH Coney Island, Brooklyn, NY The fundamentals design studio introduced the students to approaches of form and space-making through the investigation of material potentials, limits, and performance.

This approach to design embraces the notion that new formal and spatial potentials can emerge out of formation and material properties that are not merely solution-based responses to functional requirements and constraints.

Our section initiated the first third material study with the Taxonomy of PASTA: An investigation of pasta. Formal, compositional and spatial properties are manipulated through a range of analog and digital tools and techniques to generate serial unitized proto-architectonic models that explore a range of spatial conditions including negotiations between surface to volume, structure to skin, and enclosure to aperture.

These formal investigations of aggregation and assembly are understood as studies of the potentials of emerging design and fabrication technologies and their role in the production of architecture. Through various techniques of generative drawings these assemblies are studied and interrogated in relation to architectural potentials. wFurther iterations are investigated at both the unit and global scales to generate a range of potentials for inhabitation that will be employed in the project phase of the semester.

In the second half of the semester, students applied their research to the development of an intervention into the realm of an infrastructural project. The premise of the program was how to rebuild New York’s waterfront and beaches after Superstorm Sandy that hit in the fall of 2012. Our site was an empty lot of a former amusement roller coaster located in Coney Island adjacent to the boardwalk. The discoveries made by the students in their site and program research directed their project development by defining the boundaries or territories in which the intervention will operate and by determining the ways in which different users will interface with the new structure. Students developed representational tools and techniques with which to convey their ideas.

Erich Schoenenberger, critic

a Agathe Ceccaldi b Gayoung Lee c Jeremy Hill

a b

c

a

Master of Architecture | First Semester

019

GAUD CORE DESIGN

Hyper-Local Hydraulics Coney Island, Brooklyn, NY This fundamentals studio sought to explore internal architectural logics and their adaptation to contexts, programs and ecologies with an emphasis on procedural design techniques. Students were given a strict material palette that could be mined in an extremely focused way for behavioral tendencies, tectonic transformations, spatial formations, structural logics and the potential for emerging identities based on transformations that both respected and challenged the properties of the material. These transformations were not only formal, geometrical and topological, but were also ultimately meant to be cross-categorical. For example, transformations in form might be catalytic of changes in program, transformations in geometry might transition landscape to building and transformations in topology might provide strategies for flowing and gating from outside to inside, public to private, city to building, boardwalk to envelope and environment to structure.

While the studio emphasized procedural design techniques that used both analog and digital modeling, oscillation between generative and analytical activities and a variety of media, it also challenged students to think of ways in which contemporary architecture must perform more than just a normative set of anthropocentrically focused operations. For example, architecture must now perhaps perform productive and long-term anticipatory roles that are simultaneously ecological and infrastructural such as soil stabilization, hyperlocal surge mitigation, water harvesting and filtration, and other new hydrological roles in urban-aquatic scenarios.

In addition to exploring these emerging roles for architecture, the project also addressed social functions, wellness programs and micro-agricultural plotting that would work their ways through the structures in the form of routes, surfaces and spaces. These more recognizable programmatic roles combined with ecological and infrastructural roles to pressure design techniques employed by the studio to ultimately yield small, complex, agile and diversified proposals that might be alien yet embedded, unlikely yet immanent and fluid yet stable.

Jason Vigneri-Beane, critic

a Brigitte Ngo b Mark Berlinrut c Christopher Ferraiolo

a b

c

c

Master of Architecture | Second Semester

021

GAUD CORE DESIGN

Concepts // Ideas // Steam Brooklyn Heights, Brooklyn, NY “Deleuze effectively pushes to its limits a trajectory inaugurated in the Critique of Judgement, in which Kant explored the role of the imagination freed from the legislation of the understanding.

Four elements of his analysis are particularly relevant to the themes of the Logic of Sensation.

1. Aesthetic Comprehension […]

2. Rhythm […]

3. Chaos […]

4. Force […]”

Daniel W. Smith, Translator’s Introduction, The Logic of Sensation, Gilles Deleuze, 2004 “One recent IBM survey of more than 1,500 CEOs reports that creativity is the single most important leadership competency for enterprises facing the complexity of global commerce today.” - Tom and David Kelley, Creative Confidence, 2013 “STEM Needs a New Letter: Science, technology, engineering, math—and art and design.” In order to bridge the chasm between abstract idea and utility, some educators are advocating for an expansion of the popular STEM acronym— Science, Technology, Engineering, and Math, the list of skills many experts believe more students need. They believe STEM should include the letter ‘A’ for “art and design.”

The STEM to STEAM initiative, the call to integrate the Arts alongside traditional STEM subjects into the primary curriculum of elementary schools, is taken at its source: we investigate the work of a handful of contemporary artists to kick off a series of geometric and morphological studies.

The three moments - Chaos, Rhythm, Force - are considered as mapping material for a patterning system, identifying a combinatory language that defines the role of part to whole, cell to lattice. Their sensory logic progresses into prototypes that articulate programmatic, circulatory and organizational relationships enunciating a primary school pedagogy.

Precedent studies compare distinct traits across several elementary school models and reveal an organizational and formal logic, which is tied to the enfolding of activities in space.

The urban context is investigated to evolve the morphology of the site and expand on the given school program with an addition that interfaces the school with its neighborhood.

Gisela Baurmann, critic

a Elyse Handelman b Christian Porfido c Rawan Yassin

a b

b a

c

c

Master of Architecture | Second Semester

023

GAUD CORE DESIGN

K-5 STE(A)M Elementary School Brooklyn Heights, Brooklyn, NY Teaching and practice are for me equally important aspects of architecture. I do not accept the usual academic division between theory and practice, but rather am interested in a synthesis, a weaving together of the usually separated strands of professional life into a continuous fabric of experience. I understand very well that at its best, architecture is an expression of knowledge, but also that knowledge itself can never be codified or complete. Teaching architecture is not then a matter of passing on knowledge fixed in any form, but of continually re-creating it, and the process goes both ways between teacher and student. Teaching is both dialogue and discourse, which are living things, always in flux, ever expanding and embracing.

I am guided by what the great 20th century composer, conductor and educator Leonard Bernstein said: “Learning and teaching are not exclusive of each other, when I teach I learn when I learn I teach.�

In this design studio, there was openness to diverse ideas which signaled my own desire to learn, a demand that I make on myself as a teacher and builder, and which instructed my students on a life principle that will be crucial to their future work in architecture. The diversity that existed in the student’s work testified to the dialogical, exploratory nature of collaboration in the studio, just as the thoroughness of the development of the work indicated the seriousness with which this exploration was carried out.

The goal of the studio was to help each student to attain the ability to conceive of architecture in a unique way, devoid of any dependence on preconception, current trends or stylizations. It was meant through individual questioning and research, to strengthen their creative process through which meaningful works of architecture evolved that were at once expressive of theoretical positions, technological exploration, programmatic invention and pragmatic concerns.

The studio was also meant to assist each student in developing their own representational personality by exploring diverse methods of presentation and design development including digital investigations, hand drawings, photography and models.

Theoharis David, critic

a Sarah Young b Mark Berlinrut

a

b

b

a

b

Master of Architecture | Second Semester

025

GAUD CORE DESIGN

Elementary School Brooklyn Heights, Brooklyn, NY The studio required the vertical organization of an education program for a math themed elementary school on a highly constrained urban site with significant flooding potential.

The interaction of the community, the susceptibility of the ground floor to flooding and the need to reinforce the identity and purpose of the school were guiding considerations. As this was the first applied problem of the studio sequence, the studio emphasized the development of architectural fundamentals. Site, space, sequence, structure, massing, and environmental response were considered individually and as a holistic assembly.

James Garrison, critic

a Anthony Andrews b Emily Walek c Takuya Toyama

a b

c a c

a

Master of Architecture | Second Semester

027

GAUD CORE DESIGN

Solid Voids Brooklyn Heights, Brooklyn, NY This semester the studio explored the interplay between solidity and its opposite, void, to study how external forces can act upon an object and a building to create spatial urbanizations of built form. We looked at the various processes of carving out and dissolving of solids; the change of state of urban matter; the artistic method of creative destruction to achieve a positive subtraction. We investigated the forces that act upon a site and its development and understood that architecture for school students is the primary pedagogical tool towards an understanding of their place in the world and the potential for creative action to transform that world.

Beginning with the analysis and reformatting of a selection of significant sculpture and paintings of Renaissance and Contemporary Art that have complex spatial readings, the students evolved these ideas into their proposals for a new STEAM School for Brooklyn Heights.

Craig Konyk, critic

a Nina Djurkovic b Kesra Mansuri c Agathe Ceccaldi

a b

c a b

a

Master of Architecture | Second Semester

029

GAUD CORE DESIGN

Active Tension Brooklyn Heights, Brooklyn, NY Given the studio theme, program and larger framework of the semester, this studio placed equal emphasis on CONTEXT being understood simultaneously as: relationships between the school and surrounding site, relationships across school spaces, and of schools in a field of other schools, relationships between space form and mathematical content The studio inquired upon topics within structural mathematics that are relevant to the spatialization and conceptualization of space form, structure and material – focusing on the capacity of learning by subjects through perceived contextualization of concepts as realized and experienced in space form.

As well, the studio section did research that was evocative of possible future programmatic connections across school spaces and between the school and surrounding communities by, among other strategies, integrating contemporary and speculative/extrapolative concepts and forms of classroom interaction.

The design studio experimented with the definition of spatial character by expanding on techniques of subdivision and compartmentalization into more diverse modalities of ‘connection’ and of suggestion of spatial gradient.

The goal was to use this understanding of ‘connection’ across spaces as possible new modes of thinking of the performance of classrooms spaces as sets (space-form relationship to suggestion of program), as well as, to inquire into the possibility of structure and its connectivity to demonstrate (and exercise) mathematical/STEAM concepts (structural mathematics to deeper program).

Carla Leitao, critic a a CJ Rabey b Sandra Berdick

b

a

a

Master of Architecture | Second Semester

031

GAUD CORE DESIGN

An Elementary School with a STEM Lab Focus Brooklyn Heights, Brooklyn, NY This studio began with an exploration of massing strategies in a complex urban context using randomized systems set up using the software package Houdini. Simultaneously, the students engaged in a thorough study of the site conditions-one heavily biased to the needs of an elementary school--and documented the physical, social, and cultural context markers of the Brooklyn site. Students also visited and worked with 5th graders on a design project at the Brooklyn School of Inquiry, an citywide G&T school--the idea here was to inhabit an elementary school for a bit, work in the classroom with the “clients,” and get to know a school in a personal way so that the architecture students would be able to work with the program requirements of a school in a meaningful way.

Students were asked to make a hierarchy of intent with their program distribution, in particular as it relates to a STEM Lab focus for the school design. For many of these first year students this was the first time they had to contend with the allocation of program of this complexity, and it was important that the distribution of individual program elements followed an articulated programmatic intent for the building as a whole.

The studio took the position that first year architecture students, engaging in their first institutional building design, need to, and approached the studio process in two ways. First, they need to walk away with a good sense of how to grapple with that eternal architectural conundrum: do we start with the site or with the program when laying out the architectural components of a building? Students were encouraged to go back and forth between the two, to set up feedback mechanisms for their design process that identified priorities for each, and that then set those priorities against each other in productive, albeit ambiguous ways. Second, the task of the studio teacher was understood as not only teaching what she knows about school design (that’s easy), but to use existing programmatic requirements for an elementary school in NYC as a starting point for provocative arguments that could be made about the space of education. The projects shown here are architectural research into how the formal games (all too familiar in architecture schools) can be used to test architectural expressions (form + program) for the schools of tomorrow.

Maria Sieira, critic

a Kaysey Thomas b Paul Wishinski c Fayad Shahim

a b

c

b

Master of Architecture | Third Semester

033

GAUD CORE DESIGN

Pushed to the Edge of Invention Hallets Point, Astoria, Queens, NY Our generation is enraptured by urban waterfronts. They blend the debonair with the bucolic. We see seagulls hover over barges, smell the salt spray while eating a locally-caught lobster roll. Today’s cosmopolitan flaneur wanders the urban waterfront instead of Benjamin’s arcade or Tati’s modernist plazas.

Nature has returned. The historic structures along the water have been faultlessly restored. A lifestyle devoted to recreation along a city’s aquatic edge has emerged. And yet in spite of this headway, the urban waterfront remains contested ground. Rising sea levels and extreme weather events threaten conventional ideas of livability. Increasing population density poses questions on how waterfronts should be used. Income inequality raises the specter of the urban waterfront as a playground for the affluent. We are remaking the edge while planting outdated models of occupation. There is sufficient debate surrounding the treatment of the edge ranges from the brutalist to the pastoral and yet no one is asking how we create architectural volumes that respect the inimitable realities of a waterfront.

Our studio took the project of multi-family housing along the Queens waterfront as a means to explore the different futures for inhabiting urban waterfronts. Collectivity was our first principle. We have an indefatigable conviction in the possibility to generate new forms of human aggregation through geometric overlap. Proximity, compaction and the greater diversity call for intelligent emulsions of openness amidst the demanding constraints of housing. Our architectural patternmaking was directed at the creation of new spaces of private nature. Like zookeepers in the jungle, we sought to push ourselves beyond the edge of captivity in order to understand how new social habitats can be fostered while still preserving a semblance of civility between our urban species.

Carlos Arnaiz, critic

a Gee-Ana Sánchez-Pérez b Maria Nikolovski c Lauren Miller

a b

c a

b

Master of Architecture | Third Semester

035

GAUD CORE DESIGN

Mixed-Use Housing Hallets Point, Astoria, Queens, NY In this housing studio, students research the physical, environmental, social, and cultural conditions of a NYC urban site, one that currently has some sociopolitical import in New York City. It is both a housing studio and an urban context studio and students examine the urban dwelling unit’s contingencies relative to urban systems and infrastructure.

James Garrison, critic

a Sasimanas Hoonsuwan b Lindsay Schragen c Jeff Bonhomme

a

b

c

Master of Architecture | Third Semester

037

GAUD CORE DESIGN

Mixing Uses Hallets Point, Astoria, Queens, NY The East River waterfront area is currently under intense developmental pressure. Large-scale high-end residential developments threaten the existing eccentric character that defines the waterfront as a creative and innovative locale within the City. The task of this studio’s semester was to envision a creative housing solution that is sympathetic and indeed supportive of the vibrant, messy and often-chaotic present that is the edge condition of Hallets Point/Pots Cove in Astoria, Queens.

This studio took a direct approach to the concept of “Mixed Use” by selecting from a “menu” of site conditions and potential public programs coupled with a mixture of middle class housing options. It is intended that these “mixings” would produce an eclectic and complementary community that is very much a characteristic of New York neighborhoods.

Craig Konyk, critic

a Dan Hoch b Elisa Yi Feng c Christopher Testa

a b

a c

c

Master of Architecture | Third Semester

039

GAUD CORE DESIGN

Housing and the Public Realm Hallets Point, Astoria, Queens, NY The studio focused on the problem of housing from the perspective of the public realm: the formation of “in-between” space outside the unit that establishes transition at all scales, circulatory sequences, the aggregation of group form, and the establishment of new social, interactive space. The public realm is defined as figurative space— systems of linkages, public spaces and mixed-use programs that serve as the circulatory and social armature of the building. Thus, the housing project, along with significant mixed-use programs chosen by individual students, was analogous to the design of the city in miniature—complex organizations that both responded to urban patterns of the context and more specifically, the dynamic forces of a waterfront site, rather than the formation of an architectural object disconnected from the city.

The other significant parameter was to understand the nature of architectural limits as not being fixed, impenetrable enclosures that isolated interior from exterior space, but as a “thickened” space of multiple limits, generating variable degrees of closure, exposure and protection. The concept of façade, rather than being a taut, singular membrane, is rather conceived as spatial systems of mediation, or a performative surface. The façade thus became a field of multiple components that conditions environmental forces, achieving energy conservation and sustainability; a spatial zone of intermediate interior-exterior habitation; and external frames that demarcate possibilities of localized response, unit identity and group scale.

Richard Scherr, critic

a Dane Borda b Dan Tomita c Han Saem Lee

a

a c

b

b

Master of Architecture | Third Semester

041

GAUD CORE DESIGN

Mixed Use Housing Hallets Point, Astoria, Queens, NY In Design Studio 3, students research the physical, environmental, social, and cultural conditions of a NYC urban site, one that currently has some socio-political import in New York City. It is both a housing studio and an urban context studio and students examine the urban dwelling unit’s contingencies relative to urban systems and infrastructure.

The larger context for the project this year is the document ‘Vision 2020: The New York City Comprehensive Waterfront Plan.’ The Bloomberg administration has put in place a 10 year, $3 billion plan to revitalize New York City’s waterfront--over 500 miles of shoreline. The goals of this plan include making the shoreline accessible to the public, using sustainable construction, and providing affordable housing.

Our site and project are situated within these larger NYC urban concerns. The Hallets Point/Pot Cove area in Astoria, Queens, was designated as a proposed redevelopment opportunity in 2010. The city will support rezoning and medium-density residential & mixed use redevelopment as long as it contributes to the overall goal of building public access to the waterfront [page 180 in ‘Vision 2020’]. Establishing this waterfront access for this peninsula on the Hudson River is problematic as the waterfront has multiple owners and access/private property boundaries would need to be negotiated [page 4 of the ‘Queens East River & North Shore Greenway Master Plan.’]

This is an opportunity for a small project that would begin the transformation of the area from low density housing/ manufacturing to medium density housing/mixed use.

Our site is a waterfront site and must include an area that is accessible to the public. Our work on this project should reflect the transitive nature of this redevelopment area: proposals are coming in with development projects of different scales. The issue with an area like this, as Councilman Peter Vallone put it when asked about development in the area, “[the] peninsula needs development, and can’t be left as it is. It has dilapidated warehouses on the waterfront.” But, the 1500 housing units proposals by developers can’t be done without additional infrastructure. As an alternative, the studio worked on proposals that are intermediary, between the full scale development that cannot yet happen without additional infrastructure, and yet starting the process of transforming the site.

Maria Sieira, critic

a Olivia Vien b Asli Baysan c Alexander Cornhill

a

b c

b

b

a

Master of Architecture | Third Semester

043

GAUD CORE DESIGN

Novel Organizational Strategies for Housing Hallets Point, Astoria, Queens, NY The studio focused on the development of novel organizational strategies for housing. We started from the exploration of the space “projecting out of the building”- the space of terraces and balconies- to propose urban novel scenarios and modalities to extend (also inwards) what is generally conceived as an exterior space of the building, becoming part of the general housing concept in relation to the urban context.

Looking through history and classical definitions (“terrazza” and “balcone”) we investigated hybrid typologies and alternative modes of inhabiting this space that will extend outward (or inward) the building.

Regarding the formal methodology proposed, instead of fitting the terrace formally, programmatically and structurally into conventional schema of architectural practice, the studio looked at natural and human-made formations of terraces to get some morphological inspirational motif and also a perceptual codification (color, material, sensorial qualities) that can suit different kinds of programs, becoming a catalyst of social interaction. Parametric design was used not to produce an emulation of natural forms, but as an exploration of novel tectonics.

Realizing the energy efficiency potential of a smart layout of these components, we incorporated concepts of passive energy strategies (passive cooling, green roof systems, vertical gardens...) and integrated renewables (active strategies such as solar photovoltaics, solar thermal power, wind power) within the building design.

Given the site and the general program (housing: 50-100 units), the mixed use component program derived from the research together with the site investigation and was individually proposed by the students.

M. Ludovica Tramontin, critic

a Yin Jia b Monica Wynn c Matt Boker

a b

c b

a

Master of Architecture | Third Semester

045

GAUD CORE DESIGN

Materials and Assemblies What is architecture made of? How is it documented and built?

This course explored critical building concepts of materiality, structure, envelope, environment, life safety and constructability. Precedent and construction documentation studies augmented these discussions and culminated in the design and detailing of a complete exterior wall section, coordinated closely with each student’s design studio project.

The primary objective of the course was to teach the student with a comprehensive conceptual knowledge of building systems to use as a foundation for integrating and applying knowledge developed in Environmental Controls, History & Theory, Structures and Computer Media coursework that can then be applied to designing and detailing actual construction documents.

Karen Brandt + Steven Chang + Frank Lupo + Jessica Young, critics a b c d

Zachary Grzybowski Maria Nikolovski Minji Jung Ulrika Lindell

a

b c

d

b

Zachary Grzybowski + Maria Nikolovski + Danica Selem Kutan Ayata, critic

Master of Architecture

Kutan Ayata Alexandra Barker StĂŠphanie Bayard

Thomas Leeser Erich Schoenenberger

INTEGRATED BUILDING SYSTEMS FACULTY Meta Brunzema Cristobal Correa Bob Kearns Sameer Kumar

Mark Malekshashi Bruce Nichol Elliott Maltby Jeff Thompson

COMMUNITY

DESIGN STUDIO FACULTY

RESEARCH

Alexandra Barker, coordinator

PSPD

In the Master of Architecture fourth semester design studio, students undertook the design of a Comprehensive Architectural Project (CAP). Students worked in groups and were assigned a program of moderate complexity on sites with varying climatic conditions. The projects were brought to a high level of completion and incorporate extensive site and climate analysis, material research, structural and mechanical system design, and the documentation of construction details. The agenda for the studio was to develop a collaborative approach across disciplines that could produce architecture that was able to integrate systems at the scale of the building and make connections to infrastructural networks at the urban scale. To accomplish this, the course was taught concurrently with the Integrated Building Systems seminar (IBS), the culminating course in the technology sequence, where instructors in the disciplines of structural, mechanical, environmental and facade engineering advised students alongside the design instructors in the studio. This year, the project was to design a food production facility in a range of urban climatic regions and cultural contexts. Studio sections designed a brewery in London, a winery in the Napa Valley, a slaughterhouse in Sao Paulo, Brazil, an algae farm in New Orleans, and an aquaponics farm in Detroit.

GAUD

COMPREHENSIVE DESIGN STUDIO

Master of Architecture | Fourth Semester

049

GAUD COMPREHENSIVE DESIGN

Aquaponics Farm Detroit, MI The project for this studio was an urban farm to raise and sell fish and plants using the technique of aquaponics, a combination of aquaculture (fish farming) and hydroponics (water-based plant farming). The project site was at the eastern edge of the downtown region of the city. The students were to consider it a potential urban strategy to address the serious issues facing the city: underutilized land and lack of access to fresh food and vegetables. Detroit is a city with almost one third of its area consisting of vacant land where an estimated 72 percent of the residents live in food deserts.

The studio researched the life cycles of plant and fish species used in aquaponic systems and incorporated climatological, topological and cultural aspects of the city parallel as drivers for their design concepts.

One project incorporated a landscape proposal that would be a component of a proposed waterfront edge park. Another project focused on creating incorporating the aquaponics system into the building’s envelope. Another created a cable net roof that tented over a stepped greenhouse, and the fourth proposal expanded the fish component to incorporate an aquarium into the program of the project.

Alexandra Barker, critic a

b

c

Melissa Braxton + Naomi Levin + Addie Duplissie-Johnson Chang Cheng + Diana Kokoszka + James Maldonado Justin Koziol + Michael Monroe + Mane Nalbandyan

a b

b

c

Master of Architecture | Fourth Semester

051

GAUD COMPREHENSIVE DESIGN

Quasi Objects Yountville, Napa Valley, CA The site for an architectural project can be actively animated as a field of vectors that come to represent forces that elude standard visual access. These vectors can map wind, heat, or moisture for ecological response. They can map the movements of people and populations, economics and policies that circulate over time. They can become suggestive formal diagrams for the folding of landscapes into builtscapes.

At the extreme mode of these contextual interpretations, architecture dissolves into the field. It becomes purely the result of the forces that bear on it naturally and culturally.

A counter position posits architecture as an autonomous object that pushes back on its site and context, (be that site natural or cultural) claiming its identity through an internal logic and clearing a place of difference. This question of autonomy has been raised many times in the history of architecture, and there are many examples of projects both built and unbuilt that have staked their claim against the conditions that surround them. Some of these have been successful provocations, some have been complete disasters.

Both positions are overly simplistic and fraught with problems.

Architecture is both the object in its field and the field that it alters, internally and externally. An interesting alternative is to consider the architectural object as hybrid or “quasi� following the French anthropologist of modernity, Bruno Latour. Autonomy does not necessarily need to stand on historical typology, ideal geometry, or automated procedure.

Architectural objects can be clear in their relations with other entities, objects, places, and people. These relations can be aesthetic, conceptual, social, and ecological. But, at the same time, the architectural object does not need to be subsumed into these relations, as if the whole should be completely conditioned by the sum of all that it relates to. Instead there is always an excess that withdraws and allows the object to stake its independence.

The studio explored a Winery in Yountville, Napa Valley to seek new definitions between the architectural object and the field that enables it.

Kutan Ayata, critic a

b

Zachary Grzybowski + Maria Nikolovski a + Danica Selem b Esteban Garces + Thea Sarkissian + Denise Tang

a

a

Master of Architecture | Fourth Semester

053

GAUD COMPREHENSIVE DESIGN

A Vertical Brewery Hackney, London This CAP studio, taught concurrently with the Integrated Building System seminar, emphasizes the relationships between conceptual ideas taught in the design studio and technical aspects of the studio projects. The close relationship between the two classes gives students the opportunity to engage multiple facets of a programmatically complex building, from the primary structural system to the finish materials, fully developing the project to the level of architectural detailing.

During this semester, students were asked to design a Vertical Brewery in Hackney, London. Hackney, located near the Regent Canal, is an upcoming neighborhood with a long history of factories and production, and the place of Broadway Market, one of the largest markets in London. Concurrently, for multiple reasons, including sustainable and economical, there is a renewed interest for urban vertical factories. Besides its economic benefit, a brewery has social value and the potential to be a welcome part of a community where it can engage and educate the public about a traditional craft technique to a contemporary and sustainable project.

The architectural and urban issues addressing urban manufacturing present not only an exciting design challenge of integrated systems, new technologies and emergent materials, but create a demand for new solutions.

StĂŠphanie Bayard, critic a

b

c

Dane Borda + Alexander Cornhill + Ilir Jorgo Erik Nevala-Lee + Anson Nickel + Dan Tomita Sasimanas Hoonsuwan + Lauren Miller + Taylor LaForge

a b

c b

c

Master of Architecture | Fourth Semester

055

GAUD COMPREHENSIVE DESIGN

Urban Slaughterhouse SĂŁo Paulo, Brazil Manufacturing is slowly being pushed out of urban environments, factories are being turned into shopping, art and entertainment centers everywhere. Increasingly, we are unaware of the way the products we are consuming on a daily basis are produced, manufactured and distributed. We are equally oblivious to the people who are actually making these products, to their work environments, economic, social and cultural contexts and circumstances. We, as a society, created mechanisms of distancing ourselves from these processes and have instituted spatial, social and linguistic layers in order to separate us from processes of discomfort, violence, discrimination, exploitation and abuse. It is not only iPhones or jeans manufactured under extreme conditions in sweatshops in India or China where we are actively looking away from their conditions of coming into being, or hospitals, nursing homes, prisons or psychiatric wards with their conditions of trauma, violence and alienation; It is the every day production of food, one of the most basic and essential things that we are consciously repressing and render invisible.

The slaughterhouse is a place of concealment, hiding violent processes and procedures. We have made the industrialization of violence, the necessary killing of animals for the production of food, into one of the biggest taboos in our culture.

Slaughterhouses all over have become recreational parks (La Villette, Paris), shopping centers (Building 1933, Shanghai) or academic institutions (Cannareggio, Venice). The studio project was an urban slaughterhouse in the city of Sao Paulo, Brazil.

Thomas Leeser, critic a b

c

Yin Jia + Han Saem Lee + Ka Ki Lee Elisa Yi Feng + Lindsay Schragen + Christopher Testa Chia-Yi Huang + Olivia Vien + Monica Wynn

a

c

b

b

c

Master of Architecture | Fourth Semester

057

GAUD COMPREHENSIVE DESIGN

Algaculture New Orleans, LA “Algae are the fastest growing plant organisms in nature and have the ability to convert large amounts of carbon dioxide (CO2) into oxygen.”

Before algae evolved, the earth’s atmosphere had no oxygen but instead consisted of carbon dioxide and methane.

Photosynthetic algae converted carbon dioxide into biomass and released oxygen into the atmosphere. Today, algae still produce 70% of the earth’s oxygen.”

The objective of this studio was to design and develop an urban Algae farm in the midst of the dense downtown New Orleans fabric. The intent of this Algae farm was to bring awareness of food and energy production to the public and to design a signature building of food production. The ability of algae to convert large amounts of Carbon Dioxide into Oxygen, the vibrant dominant colors of algae, as well as the new age food created with algae are challenging aspects both in respect to program as well as form and appearance of such an urban farm.

The studio researched successful signature buildings and product branding with the aim to develop a building that is celebrating a new area in food production. The studio investigated prime examples such as Apple. It is said that ”Apple’s brand is the key to its survival”. With this in mind, the studio thrived to further the promotion of future food production technologies through the architecture of this building.

Further research went into the various algae farming technologies and their needs for natural resources. The adjacency of the site to the Mississippi River and the local climate make it an ideal location for algae farming. With current trends for support of local grown food, the studios’ proposition creates real and valid question. The objective was to investigate the possibilities of (a) a small Algae production and research facility in an urban setting and (b) how to integrate and connect such a facility with the public and the downtown New Orleans live.

Erich Schoenenberger, critic

a Matt Boker + Dan Hoch + Ulrika Lindell b Asli Baysan + Karla Lockhart + Milad Showkatbakhsh

a

a

b

b

a

Maryam Delshad

Sulan Kolatan, critic

Jason Vigneri-Beane, coordinator

DESIGN STUDIO FACULTY Vito Acconci Meta Brunzema Hina Jamelle Sulan Kolatan Thomas Leeser

Peter Macapia Philip Parker David Ruy Henry Smith-Miller

COMMUNITY

For both sets of students, the option studios are an environment in which the important challenges of advanced studio culture may intensify both collectively and individually emerging positions on contemporary design thinking, intelligence and execution.

Accomplished instructors with diverse and progressive interests are invited to lead these intense and exploratory studios that contribute deeply to the evolving identity of the program.

Themes explored in the option studios this year included: elegant formations and digital techniques, synthetic ecologies and architectural innovation, new buildings for changing populations, cultural centers and urban transformation, urban and ecological interfaces, provocative relationships between street and tower, architectural protagonists in world-cultural events, the radicalization of scale, vertical farming and systemic design, digital techniques and complex organizational logics.

RESEARCH

The Graduate Architecture and Urban Design program’s option studios create a progressive environment for (upper-level) first-professional and post-professional students to engage in advanced design research through a number of specially formulated themes in contemporary architectural design research, practice and discourse. For first-professional students, they act as a vehicle to push capabilities accrued throughout the core curriculum through advanced design scenarios. They bring post CAP-studio skills into more speculative venues that are further intensified in relation to advanced electives accessible at this point in the program. For post-professional students they are opportunities to confront new territories and emerging questions in architecture culture in the ascent towards a thesis formulation.

PSPD

ADVANCED OPTION DESIGN STUDIO

GAUD

Master of Architecture + Master of Science in Architecture

M. Arch + M.S. Arch | Fifth + Second Semesters

061

GAUD ADVANCED OPTION DESIGN

A BUILDING YOU MAKE AS YOU USE IT The preliminary premise of this studio is: every architecture, without talking in language to you, tells you how to use it -whereas you can’t, you don’t, tell the architecture what to do, how to be -- it’s the architecture that tells you (the inhabitant, the user, the visitor) how to be, what to do. So you can make little changes, small changes, in the architecture, but you can’t re-do the architecture, you can’t re-build the architecture -- or at least you don’t -- hourly, daily, weekly, monthly, yearly…

But what if…

What if the parts of a building, or the building itself, were: unstable -- unsteady -- mutable… What if they, or it, were: volatile -- unpredictable -- changeable…

What if they, or it, were: irresolute -- undecided -- unsettled -- uncertain…What if they, or it, were: temporary, transitory , impermanent -- ephemeral, passing, fleeting…What if they, or it, were: unfixed, unsettled, shapeless, amorphous...variable -- unpredictable, unaccountable -- fluctuating, alternating, wavering…wayward, wandering, afloat, adrift…

What if they, or it, were: alterable, alternative, modifiable -- ever-changing, many-sided, kaleidoscopic --movable, malleable, fluid --resilient, adaptable, adjustable, flexible, supple…What if it, or they, were: transmutable, transformable, transitional, modifiable -- reformable, renewable…What if it, or they, were: exchangeable, interchangeable, switched, swapped, traded…

The advanced premise of this studio, then, is: design/make a building every part of which can change, or be changed, every moment it exists. No, of course you can’t live up to that premise. But trying to live up to that premise can keep your building living, who cares that you die…

The site can be anywhere, or nowhere. Or the site might have to change as the building changes: each change in the building might need, might demand, a different site.

Vito Acconci, critic

a Jeian Jeong + Ryan Whitby b Greg Mulholland c Sana Iqbal

a

b a

c

M. Arch + M.S. Arch | Fifth + Second Semesters

063

GAUD ADVANCED OPTION DESIGN

Cultivating Coney Island Coney Island, Brooklyn, NY How can we enhance both the evolutionary capacity of the Coney Island peninsula, and the health and resilience of its people?

Proposals from our studio were bold and transformational: Our site analysis showed that superstorms are not the greatest threat to Coney Island - but rather sea level rise, which may increase by 6 feet by 2100. As a result, one team proposed a new elevated boardwalk infrastructure on the ocean side, a multifunctional dam that connects the peninsula to mainland Brooklyn across Coney Island Creek, and a series of inland canals. These improvements will be developed over time, starting with a “LOLA double-dune” beach defense system.

As sea levels rise and eventually submerge the dunes, the new boardwalk will be constructed behind the beach to protect against the rising seas. This flexible boardwalk-defense system will include multiple levels that are designed as technologically-enabled leisure and fitness parcours.

The project “Tuning Rhythms” addresses the mental illnesses that disproportionately affect coastal communities by syncing the rhythms of nature (daylight, seasons, tides, storms etc…) with the rhythms that affect people’s mental and physical wellbeing (hormones, chemical cycles etc...). The neighborhood is re-designed to facilitate festivals - which also counteract seasonal mood swings - while boosting tourism and local jobs. In the long-term, land is elevated through a cut-and-fill strategy that balances land and water.

The proposal “Canal City” not only manages water, but also addresses issues of local economic empowerment, youth leadership skills and tourism. The canals - which will feature floating markets - are connected to water plazas that are surrounded by retail, flexible event areas and public spaces.

Meta Brunzema, critic a b c

Cheyenne Lau Jong Hwa Lee Santiago David + Mario Gonzalez Barrera

a b b

c a

c

M. Arch + M.S. Arch | Fifth + Second Semesters

065

GAUD ADVANCED OPTION DESIGN

Elegant Formations: Mixed Use Tower West Soho, Manhattan, NY Today’s digital techniques allow us to deal with the full complexity of material systems, by offering the tools to create effects that exceed the sum of their parts. Elegant Formations will examine some ways in which this can contribute to the formulation of architecture, utilizing generative techniques for the evaluation of growth patterns and their variation in the development of form.

The act of designing using digital techniques is reliant on a two-way exchange of information. By allowing for positive feedback, these systems become open to opportunities to incorporate responsiveness, contingency, and the accidental in their generative process. Digital techniques circumvent predetermined analytical processes that focus on fixed formal issues such as figure/ground, ideal types, and static program.

Instead, these projects give primacy to FORMations that are in variation, scale-less, accumulative and subject to changes that may shift in part to whole relationships, spatial qualities, and color. In addition, projects using digital techniques incorporate program, space, structure, and enclosure into a singular formation that incorporates a range of experiences and formal variations of gradated intensities.

The explorations of Elegant Formations seek to push beyond the austerities of digital technique, encouraging concerns for refinement and precision to unleash a visual intelligence pertinent for architectural design. The most sophisticated of contemporary projects use this intelligence to achieve nuances within the formal, spatial, and material variation of projects.

The site is on a re-zoned lot on Charlton St between Greenwich Street and Hudson St in West Soho. Catalyzed by new developments in Soho, each student determined and refined the particular program during the course of the semester. The goals for each student was to deal with a range of familiar architectural issues- how to turn a corner, how to add to an existing building, vertical circulation and structure for example. The intended result was a project exhibiting innovative architectural features in variation, produced using topological surfaces and component arrangements with different spatial and material qualities contributing to the development of architecture.

Hina Jamelle, critic

a Alex Lightman + Sean Whalen b Brian Vallario + Elle White c Megan Hurford + Jenna Steinbeck

a

b

c

c

M. Arch + M.S. Arch | Fifth + Second Semesters

067

GAUD ADVANCED OPTION DESIGN

Hu(dson River) Wa(tershed) Boundary Building Hudson River Watershed Edge, NYC In light of emerging knowledge, we now understand that the transformation of urban land-water boundaries in the last century is exacerbating many ecological problems. The modeling and design of new types of material boundaries and the testing of their relative impact on ecological edge problems will be our subject. From this initial phase, we will construct a boundary building as a systemic object, that is an architectural object with its own identity networked into a larger system.

Currently, there are two entities with a permanent focus on the Hudson River: the Hudson River Valley Institute and the Hudson River Foundation. Students will adopt a mode of thinking between culture and nature, and create an amalgamated institutional program of 50,000-100,000 sf. · · ·

Macro Scale Site: Hudson River Watershed Meso Scale Site: Manhattan Edge Micro Scale Site (HuWa Boundary Building Site)

One of the indispensable qualities of ecosystems is their multiscalar structure. Relational functions and influences between different scales are critical to ecosystem health. Like with most other natural features, the many waters disappeared with increasingly accelerated urbanization in the last half of the 20th century. Unlike most other natural features, water cannot be erased, however. This leads to the amazing phenomenon that is an integral but forgotten part of every large Metropolis: rivers run under it. And this is the case with New York.

The attitude toward favoring singular, large scales of space and time at the expense of multi-scales is embedded within the mind-set of the Master Plan. The Master Plan, a “plan of plans”, is focused on large urban features, such as large bodies of water, and fixed time frames over big chunks of time. In combination, this spatio-temporal mono-master scale engenders the kind of rigid structure that is engineered only for specific circumstances, but fails to perform as soon as these circumstances change –or if they never materialize.

If the specifications of the Master Plan are mostly inadequate now, what qualities are we looking for in a conceptual tool to plan complex natural/artificial systems with eco-logic?

Sulan Kolatan, critic

a Shahab Heidari Faroughi b Steph-michelle Komornik c Irem Cabbaroglu

a b

c

b

M. Arch + M.S. Arch | Fifth + Second Semesters

069

GAUD ADVANCED OPTION DESIGN

“PRINTING CITIES” Learning Objectives New technologies have always been the driver as well as the starting point for new concepts in architecture, be it Modernism’s extensive use of glass and steel, or Constructivism’s expression of structural sophistication or Superstudios’, Haus Rucker’s and others embedding of media technology into architecture. These advances have allowed a fundamental rethinking of not only the architectural expression, but also of the role of the architect him or herself.

Recent revolutions in architectural production and thinking have evolved around computational advances and the ability of digital design to a degree previously unknown. The problem presented with these technologies to date has been an increasing split between conception, speculation, graphic and computational representations and the actual manufacturing or fabrication of these newly developed possibilities.

There is, on the other hand, a lot of talk about robotic manufacturing that is quite unlike any previous manufacturing ever developed. 3D printing allows for completely new spatial, formal and procedural concepts in the production of objects. Although these technologies are still nowhere near able to compete with traditional methods of construction, their potential is something this studio will speculate on.

It is not so much an exercise of formal manipulation, but a speculative research and experimentation into the structural and formal logic of possible printing techniques, technologies, and their limitations. The studio will take, at its core, the fact that for the first time we have a technology, a machine, capable of reproducing itself, that can literally print itself with innumerable variations. The new paradigm here is that we are not directly designing a product any longer, but a process a set of relationships geared towards a programmatic goal that may not be bound by the traditional limitations of static relationships, but are enabled by building elements that ARE robots in themselves. Robots, that, given the proper fuel (sand, dirt, recycled waste, etc.) can reproduce according to a logic designed by the architect or maybe even the occupant.

Thomas Leeser, critic

a Dillon Hanratty b Hyeyong Wang c Arielle Lapp

a

b

b

c

a

c

M. Arch + M.S. Arch | Fifth + Second Semesters

071

GAUD ADVANCED OPTION DESIGN

The Garden in the Machine In the early 21st century, we are obsessed with nature and technology, but seldom at the same time. The treehugger is probably also an Iphone hugger, but never on the same day.

We are fascinated by organic systems and mobile networks, the environment and the internet, the Grand Canyon and Hoover Dam. Inevitably, when our cool machines have to be placed in our beloved gardens, problems arise. We may place it away from view or even try to hide it in plain sight with a carefully designed camouflage. (Wasn’t it poignant to see the sky blue patterns on the boxes hiding the reactors at Fukushima?) Our obsession with nature and technology is the cognitive dissonance of our time.

A hard earned lesson of the 20th century is that there is no good way to put the machine in the garden. Perhaps it’s time to try a different strategy and put the garden in the machine.

Maybe H. R. Geiger isn’t so crazy after all in his lust for biomechanical compositions. Take a look at General Dynamics’ Big Dog or General Atomics’ Predator—these aren’t exactly steam engines. The largest civil engineering project in the history of Europe, the Large Hadron Collider is a 27 mile long circle buried 175 meters below the surface of the earth, and its’ purpose is to recreate, in miniature, the Big Bang itself. What kind of machine recreates the birthplace of nature itself? Do you remember the first time you surfed the internet? Do you remember that uncanny sensation of entering into an ocean?

Hold these thoughts as we start the project. Let’s see if we can approach the problem a little differently this time. You will be asked to develop speculative research and designs for a large infrastructural machine (like a hydroelectric dam or a particle accelerator) along with small architectural interventions (like a visitors’ center), but you will be asked to rise above the banalities that always seem to accidentally arise from this situation. Like Palladio’s Villa Rotunda straddling a productive landscape, how might you locate higher architectural ambitions for an architecture that straddles a giant machine?

David Ruy, critic

a Feifei Song b Justin Trudeau c So Jung Nam

a b

b c

c

M. Arch + M.S. Arch | Fifth + Second Semesters

073

GAUD ADVANCED OPTION DESIGN

Water and Culture Brooklyn Navy Yard, NY The studio objective, beyond site and precedent research, was to propose a theoretical approach for the development of the site and its links to extant city resources and culture(s).

Our design exercise involved several dialectics: a physical site and cultural program both seriously challenged by rapidly altering contexts. The permanent has become curiously temporary and the temporary curiously permanent.

The site, a section of a yet, but soon to be developed section of the Brooklyn waterfront, between the Brooklyn Bridge Park and the Brooklyn Navy Yard, at the foot of Vinegar Hill will soon morph from a dis-used 19th and 20th Century toxic industrial wasteland into a new 21st Century community at the edge of the East River. The rising waters of Global Warming now challenge a once thought secure site, a Con-Ed power distribution field.

Just as the Brooklyn Museum and Library were placed and planned to reinforce real estate development at Prospect Park and Grand Army Plaza, our project, a new Contemporary Arts Museum (similar in program development to the currently under construction downtown Whitney) for the burgeoning neighborhoods at the Brooklyn Waterfront is meant to serve as a cultural catalyst and icon for the Contemporary Brooklyn Arts Community.

The role that arts play in society; its creation, its curating, its collection, its display, its appreciation and its preservation are all curious phenomena. Although commodified by patronage and market forces, the fine arts remain elusive and volatile as have the spaces become for their display and consumption.

Contiguous form-finding exercises, site and precedent research and documentation as well visits to metropolitan arts institutions will compliment the studio design effort.

The site enjoys considerable visibility not only from the Manhattan shoreline directly opposite but also very long views upriver to Roosevelt Island and down river to New York Bay. While at Brooklyn’s edge and possibly seen to be a continuation of the Brooklyn Bridge Park, the site is at the nexus of many land side influences; changing uses and populations.

Henry Smith-Miller, critic a b c d

Marsh Lindley Caroline Vickery Peter Deutz Camilo Valencia

a b

a c

d

Master of Architecture | Sixth Semester

075

GAUD ADVANCED OPTION DESIGN

THICK AIR – THIN SKIN – LOOSE BOUNDARIES In the future, maybe a somewhat near future, buildings might no longer be made of surfaces – if they don’t have surfaces, they might not, then, need structure, at least not the kind of structure we’ve gotten used to. Each new building is made of multiple parts, tiny parts, millions of parts: the persons who live in this building can change the look of the building whenever they want. Of course they have to agree on the look they want their building to have. But then again, they don’t have to agree: some might want one look, others another – on & in different places, different floors, different spots in the building, through the building. Remember, the parts of this building – maybe every building, in due time – are supported by air, thick air, the air – once it’s packed & loaded together -- might be the vaporous medium that structures what passes for buildings in this not-so-distant & very imaginable future.

Moving is easy in this imaginable future: because each building now – I mean later, that kind of now -- is made of millions of individual parts, gradated in size but all handleable, if not by 1 person then by 2 or 3…Not all the persons who used to live in this building need move all at once – then again, different groups of persons can move on their own, each group, big or small, separate from the others – they don’t need to agree; each group moves or is moved on its own specific kind of thick or thicker or thinner air.

The site can be anywhere. The building the students are building can change: the functions can change – as the building’s function changes, the look of the building changes…

The look of the building can change because the building is made of tiny parts, millions of parts: the persons who live in this building can change the look of the building whenever they want…Of course, they have to agree on the look the want their building to have…But maybe they don’t have to agree: some can want one look, others can want another-- the different looks can be on & in different places, different spots in the building, through the building. Because the building is made of so many individual parts, gradated in size but all handleable, the building’s site can change whenever its inhabitants want to – if only they could agree, if only they could bargain, one with the other.

Vito Acconci, critic a a Megan Hurford b Greg Molholland

b

a

Master of Architecture | Sixth Semester

077

GAUD ADVANCED OPTION DESIGN

FAX NY - Farming Extreme in New York Newtown Creek, Brooklyn, NY Current designs for agri-tectures seldom rise to the occasion as they place new technologies into old design strategies. A survey of urban agriculture environments, however, points to the potential for an ambiance of surreal beauty where the absence of earth as an element of farming elevates the vegetable patch into a realm of precise abstraction. This un-soiled way of growing comes courtesy of hydroponics and constitutes the majority of urban farming activities. Freed from their connection to the ground, vegetables become objects of contemplation – design elements within larger spatial installations. In these new scenarios, farmers are curators of flora in 3D space.

One of the tasks of the studio then was to consider the vegetables and fruits as occupants of the building in addition to people. The consequences are quite radical in that plants adapt to gravity in ways humans do not with the result of being able to grow in any orientation in space (–and even without gravity to hold them in place). Therefore the range of spatial definitions in this type is much broader than in humans-only environments. Plants typically have two points of orientation, gravity and the sun. What allows them a greater spectrum of spatial occupation is greatly due to the fact that, unlike humans, plants are “anchored” and thus hold on with their roots while adjusting to their orientation. Students were asked to fully exploit the potential for extreme space-making and investigate these parameters in relation to topology.

This new type of farming is experimental and more scientific than standard farming. The adaptation of farming to the 21st century city is a relatively new focus and is very much a work in progress. New techniques and strategies are tested, evaluated and improved to increase effectiveness and gain further insight. Trays, tubes, transparent plastic sheets artfully contain, nurture and display nature’s bounty as never before.

Together with the mostly white interiors they evoke another architectural type, the hyper-clean laboratory space, the opposite of what we are conditioned to assume when thinking of farming.

The majority of the program was dedicated to the necessary elements of a vertical urban farm. Additional programs included a culinary school and restaurant, resident chef/ student housing and a green market and store.

Sulan Kolatan, critic

a Matiss Zemetis b Caroline Vickery c Maryam Delshad

a

b

c

b

Master of Architecture | Sixth Semester

079

GAUD ADVANCED OPTION DESIGN

Living for The City: The End of Streets Part IV Bogota, Beijing, Pyongyan, New York, Paris Will the tower continue to evolve in the 21st century? Will it be formal or spatial novelty? Programmatic transformation?

Technological innovation and rapidity of construction? This studio explores the tower concept by allowing urban political conflicts to engage, to mess with, the tower’s unitary logic by engaging that which it has always erased, the street. Tower designs have proceeded in the last two-decades according to infinite formal possibilities of genetic and morphodynamic coding. But its relation to the polis, to the contradictions that define the polis – social, political, economic – remains patently ignored or caricatured according to utopian of dystopian concepts. The geometry and topology of matter energy relations concerning the city of the 21st century seem to require the persistent insertion of towers despite the fact that there are important social arguments for the discontinuation of the tower typology (its symbolization of neo-liberal economics, globalization of trade, corporate power, and growth of multi-national corporations).

Research focused on local conflicts that define the polis from censorship to economic injustice and the massive rise in homeless families, examining architecture’s relation to political legitimacy. The question becomes: what is the tower as a system of distribution relative to public space and the city? What do we mean by public space? What is its relation to forms of democracy, debate, and conflict?

The next question is: upon what basis do we instrumentalize our design techniques? Here the studio formulated a set of diagrams through software and geometry, which in each case emerged differently, but all of which had one strategic point in common: students tested the geometrical use of a software for a specific architectural function (from structure to circulation) and then converted that geometry into a diagram of distribution where they could link the important social, programmatic, and political problems for both the tower in its vertical and horizontal spatial logic as well as in terms of how the tower engages the street.

Thus means of architectural thinking in this studio were both formal and political, and the emphasis where they relate topologically. This enabled an extremely dynamic potential in problem sets that ranged from crowd-funded live/work tower developments with combined public infrastructure in Bogota, Columbia, to an innovative mental health facility with vertical public parks and gardens in Paris, to a mixed-income housing and luxury apartment spiraling around an interiorized public neighborhood street in New York City, to a public library complex with spaces of dissent in Beijing, China.

Peter Macapia, critic

a Alex Lightman b Sean Whalen c John Torpy

a c

b

c

a

Master of Architecture | Sixth Semester

081

GAUD ADVANCED OPTION DESIGN

Amphibious Boundaries G.W Bridge to the Battery, Hudson River, NY New York City’s shorelines, as the variable, unfixed boundaries between the human populations and wild, other and increasingly intermingled species and habitats makes this a boundary where the human and not are increasingly coevolving and mutually dependent. So a few questions: how can architecture with its current design regimes and ethical positions continue to propose and build from the direction of the land pushing into the water or of the terrestrial blocking and holding back the aquatic? What other actions are available or could be invented in this remarkably fertile time for negotiating the delicate, variable materially dependent lines between the human and the wild? Is there a difference, how is it maintained and how is this prevailing distinction subverted?

Tremendous populations live within the intertidal zones or more broadly within 1 km distance of a shoreline, a mapped edge between land and water. From aquatic to insect to amphibian and reptilian, avian and mammal this exceptionally fragile edge is a site of fertility and sustenance. It is a zone of where terrestrial and aquatic functions, materials and common practices are constantly replenishing.

Philip Parker, critic

a Darion Washington b Brian Vallario c Puja Chand

a b

c

a

Master of Architecture | Sixth Semester

083

GAUD ADVANCED OPTION DESIGN

Mediatek SoHo, Manhattan, NY The Spring Studio, a Mediatek for SoHo, intentionally located on Spring Street, adjacent to the Judd Foundation Building, the former living quarters of the American Sculptor, Donald Judd, now a museum, and the dense retail corridor of Lower Broadway, offered an opportunity to investigate the transformative role that the Arts play in the commercialization of a once “forgotten” neighborhood and the design of a contemporary venue – an “Agitprop” for the creation, curation, conservation, consumption and the public display of the (media) arts.

Henry Smith-Miller, critic

a Elle White b Ryan Whitby c Camilo Valencia

a b

c a

b

Jesi Ling

William Mac Donald, critic

Master of Science in Architecture

DESIGN STUDIO FACULTY Jonas Coersmeier William Mac Donald

Philip Parker Jason Vigneri-Beane

COMMUNITY

Jason Vigneri-Beane, coordinator

RESEARCH

The program questions the multitude of assumptions that lie behind the architectural conventions of program, site, and design methodology in order to create new design processes, strategies, technologies, and conceptions of architecture in a period of rapid change. What is more, the MS ARCH program believes in a strong methodological component to architectural innovation and seeks to provide such a component to students in a variety of ways. The program brings a diverse and international group of students into many provocative discussions and operations currently evolving in the discipline and practice of architecture.

PSPD

The three-semester Master of Science, Architecture Program is an investigative, rigorous, and progressive environment for experimentation and research into advanced architectural design-research and discourse. Option studios, seminars, a range of electives and a thesis sequence are opportunities for both individual and collective work on themes/practices that examine existing assumptions and potential futures in architecture. Some of these studios and courses have looked closely at emergent forms of organization, computational techniques, and parametric design; networks, flows, and collective intelligence; complexity in urban, architectural, and institutional systems; innovative building systems, advanced materials, and digital fabrication techniques; transdisciplinary thinking from scientific models to new forms of media; scenario-planning and near-future thinking; multidimensional agency in architecture and urbanism; globalization, ecology and far-from equilibrium thinking.

GAUD

DESIGN STUDIOS

Master of Science in Architecture | First Semester

087

GAUD DESIGN STUDIOS

Elementary/Intermediate School with Public Library Battery Park, New York City, NY The project polemic investigated a new means of understanding the design of public institutions as open-ended systemic designs as opposed to icons and symbols. These open-ended systems were based on notions of architecture and landscape as recombinative gradations of permanence and temporality. One central question was ‘How can the need and desire for urban public institutions create the opportunity to develop new strategies towards a resilient and adaptive in the coastline for the development of Manhattan?’

The methodology used was to participate fully the in the evolutionary change of the institutions in time. To consider ‘anticipatory architectures’ which are conceived ‘in, with, and through concepts of time’ and their consequence in the built environment. In this case, an elementary and middle school with library, were developed through the deployment of complex adaptive geometric units which uniquely customize collectively/individually in incremental and aggregative formal and spatial systems over time.

The studio was a pilot project whose goal was to develop a reverse feedback relationship between current architectural research in education and the NYC public education system’s crisis for a new school [or several] in Downtown Manhattan.

While working with New York City and State elected officials and political committees including Community Board 1, President Catherine McVay Hughes; The Build Schools Now Board Members, Wendy Chapman and Buxton Midyette; State Senator, Daniel Squadron’s office; Speaker of the New York State Assembly, Sheldon Silver’s office and the Downtown Manhattan Schools Overcrowding Task Force; Council Member Margret Chin’s office; the City Council’s office; Congressman Jerry Nadler’s office; and the Department of Education’s Public Affairs Director, Ben Goodman to address the extraordinary over-crowding in schools in Downtown Manhattan by proposing this particular building site as a case study in order to re-examine progressive learning environments via progressive architectural and urban strategies. In addition to the case studies, one of the results of this studio was the founding a new GAUD research group ‘Design of Innovative Learning Environments’ [DILE] whose focus of inquiry is the relationship between the design of educational and learning environments, architecture, and urbanism. The results of this studio work were presented to the NY State Assemblyman’s School Overcrowding Task Force. This is an ongoing relationship.

William Mac Donald, critic a b c d

Vasudha Mittal Pablo Escudero Farahani Faranak Jesi Ling

a b

c a c

d

Master of Science in Architecture | First Semester

089

GAUD DESIGN STUDIOS

Mutations: Institutional Ecologies Gansevoort Peninsula, Hudson River Park, NY “The term ‘ecology’ is used here because it is the most expressive language currently has to indicate the massive and dynamic interrelation of processes and objects; beings and things, patterns and matter. At the same time, like Schwitters’s scraps and scrag-ends it is a term that obviously has a history.”

Martin Fuller, Media Ecologies In the studio’s speculation the instrument and author share in a quasi-symmetrical relationship, not exactly an equivalent one but one where ultimate authority for production is held in the composition of the author and instrument and more explicitly where both author and instrument are moments in longer intertwined evolutionary strands. They are each the repositories of inexhaustible streams of intelligence and practice. Even at this level the actor and media are already participating in an exchange of energy and information, media are actively participating in the evolution of the population, in our cultural/material life. And in the projects this symmetry starts with the invention and earliest use of technology, we actor, media and milieu coevolve.

Institutional practices and institutional evolution – How do our cultural institutions both public and private evolve and explicitly mutate as new forms of cultural, civic and scientific space. In light of a broad reconsideration of the land / water edge unfolding across a wide swath of New York’s riverfront what architectural scenarios do these propose?

Philip Parker, critic a b c d

Dishan Shah Diana Ruiz Min-Yu Chen Dan Guo

a b

c a d

d

Master of Science in Architecture | Third Semester Thesis

Microclimate Labs Coney Island, Brooklyn, NY By year 2100, the sea level will rise up to 6.6 ft., reshaping the coastline of Coney Island, as well as many coastal areas worldwide. This project emphasized on the idea of projecting future scenarios that can be taken as an opportunity for making of Coney Island a testing ground, readdressing the relationship between man and nature. This would force us to look for new ways of preserving nature and still use it as a source of energy, creating a new architectural language where man is posing questions to nature, and architecture is the recording of nature’s answer embedded in form.

Is it possible to trigger new natural phenomena, i.e. the up growth of new natural ecosystems through form and space? This project pretended to look for an architectural language that enhances the possibility of creating new ways of life through speculative and experimental architectural production.

This synthetic formation was introduced in three different levels on the site, in order to achieve natural growth and program that will allow to buffer stormy seas, slow down the speed of shoreline erosion, offer shelter, nest migratory water birds, absorb much of the surging water in hurricanes, as well as filter, clean and store water.

Foreseeing the flooded scenario in the near future, this project pretended to introduce a man-made infrastructure that, by following some of the functions developed in nature, by re-evaluating form and maximizing surfaces, refuge can be provided for ecological climates and take them to produce sources that create conditions that bring new and lost wildlife back into the peninsula, while trying to readdress a new kind of public space from nature’s perspective, with the help of a facility that collaborates closely between humans and nature: a research lab.

Mario Gonzalez Barrera with Jason Vigneri-Beane + Jonas Coersmeier, critics

091

GAUD DESIGN STUDIOS

Architecture on Urban infrastructure Coney Island, Brooklyn, NY This project deals with architecture on urban infrastructure considering current global agenda and energy resource. This project started with preceding researches about hydropower, Venice Biennale and Coney Island. The process of these researches is to find a common point within those researches.

What was a meaning of Coney Island in architecture design and urban planning in the past time?

As a site for thesis project, the role of Coney Island was the most important subject during the design process. Dreamland in Coney Island was a place where a new technology was introduced to the public. The new rides were made by a new technique which was an experimental architecture. The building and a new technology showed people the dream and the future. In this sense, Coney Island was the place for experimental architecture which shows the agenda and issues at that time.

With the role of Coney Island, this thesis will design an experimental architecture dealing with three questions; what is an agenda or big issue nowadays? How can these issues be expressed in architecture? How can human life be changed by the architecture with these issues?

Yongchun Choi with Jason Vigneri-Beane + Jonas Coersmeier, critics

Master of Science in Architecture | Third Semester Thesis

Synthetic Geography Coney Island, Brooklyn, NY This project was a practice to design within the instructions of the design studio. We are instructed by the program to design a project in Coney Island that incorporates all the above research topics: a project that considers water and its surrounding issues, and acts as a master plan for an expo at the same time. We were allowed to pick our own site and topic of choice.

According to the above discussion, the goal was to recommend a plan to help Coney Island get back to its best shape; an attempt to retrieve the wonderfulness, with focus on the historical identity of the Island. For that purpose, the site was chosen to be located in the historic recreational zone of Coney Island, where all the amusement parks were built from the first day.

The spongy and porous form that was designed for the land creates serves not only as an ecosystem for various types of underwater life, but as a natural aquarium for the public to get to know more about sea creatures. Furthermore, the spongy form is an efficient defensive mechanism against the destructive waves that come from the ocean. In short, the particular form of the land in this project creates a synthetic geography which combines Coney Island’s historic tradition of cutting-edge advancement with its climatic limitations and challenges.

Based on my research on the Berliner 1896 and the Dreamland amusement park in Coney Island, it could be realized that these two major functions (technology and amusement) can work very closely together. Although technology still plays a major role in designing new attractions for theme/ amusement parks, it looks like it’s not presented strongly as an independent subject as it was before. If we take as an example of presenting new technology the baby incubators in dreamland, we can realize that new scientific discoveries are no longer presented in amusement parks. The current study takes this transmission to the next level, and investigates the potential for such multi-function phenomenon. Based on the success of new documentaries and books about new scientific findings, I believe people are still enthusiastic for knowing about new discoveries.

Shahab Heidari Faroughi with Jason Vigneri-Beane + Jonas Coersmeier, critics

093

GAUD DESIGN STUDIOS

Breathing Eco-Park Coney Island, Brooklyn, NY Coney Island was an experimental site for New York as well as a gate for people to escape from the city to forget about their exhausted lives. A highly concentrated area with unusual condi­tions, events, and atmosphere, Coney Island has more unique characteristics than any other city. People can gain unique experiences that cannot be experience from cities in Coney Is­land. Furthermore, the agenda of designer of was experimenting place that provide enjoyment which turn out to be successful. Informal expe­riences gave people unrealistic impression and this is continuing till now. It can be regard as Coney Island constructs their city infrastructure based on the characteristic of utopian city.

Coney Island has some issues. First, Coney Island is in constant danger of in­creasing sea level which has been a disaster for long period of time. In terms of the character­istic of the island, damage from increasing water level is worse than any other area. Second, Coney Island has suffered from its high crime rate. Last, Coney Island Creek is highly polluted. Each issue might be treated easily. However, when this issues are mixed together, the situa­ tion becomes very complex to solve it.

The combina­tion of these issues is not about how to prevent natural disaster like typhoon or conflagration. Thus, way to treat should be different. Also, to treat these complex issues, the way to treat should be cautious. However, with this new de­sign proposal, new approach and these types of disasters can be discovered.

How should be treated like these short period, long period, natural and subsidiary disasters? Also, when Coney Island faces this disaster, what and how can Coney Island deal with these disasters? From the idea of pre- research stud­ies, a direction of designing new idea dealing with Issues in Coney Island can be suggested and elaborated. Based on issues that Coney Island had New design proposal can be one experimental way and prototype like a role of Coney Island in the past.

Yujin Lee with Jason Vigneri-Beane + Jonas Coersmeier, critics

Michalis Skitsas

Kutan Ayata, critic

DESIGN STUDIOS

David Ruy, coordinator

DESIGN STUDIO FACULTY Kutan Ayata Ferda Kolatan David Ruy

COMMUNITY

Intensive and ambitious in its scope, the program is structured around a single urban design project that is continuously developed by each student across three studio semesters. Each studio semester has a specific focus that is supplemented by advanced seminar topics in histories of urban design, urban planning and zoning policies, GIS, and digital design technologies. This year, the program continued its speculative investigation of producing new land masses within the New York City estuary. Students examined the spectacular and problematic opportunities that come with creating new land where none existed before. The geoengineering scenarios considered how this problem might articulate a new kind of architectural ground leading to new urban typologies.

Projects developed extensions of this premise into new real estate economies, new infrastructures, new zoning logics, and perhaps mostly importantly, new experiences. Examining as a precedent, the astonishingly artificial geology of New York City itself, students were asked to consider the profound and paradoxical coherence of a city that is always changing.

RESEARCH

As of 2010, for the first time in human history, the majority of the global population now lives in cities. As noted by the World Health Organization, seven out of ten people will be living in cities by the year 2050. Given the astonishing scale at which urbanization is taking place today, how we are designing our cities is becoming synonymous with how we are designing civilization itself. Mirroring the complexity of the contemporary situation, the program is itself highly international. From all corners of the world, students converge on this program in New York City, a city that remains one of the great laboratories for urban thought and innovation.

PSPD

The Graduate Architecture and Urban Design program is a unique three semester program for students that have already completed a professional degree in architecture. Preparing students to take leadership positions in the 21st century, the program takes into consideration the most urgent questions confronting the design of cities today. Guided by leading design professionals and scholars, students develop powerful contemporary design techniques and a sophisticated conceptual outlook in order to advance new strategies and new possibilities.

GAUD

Master of Science in Architecture and Urban Design

Master of Science in Architecture + Urban Design | First Semester

097

GAUD DESIGN STUDIOS

The 6th Borough East River Estuary Brooklyn, NYC The 6th Borough was an ongoing speculative urban design project, which investigated the transformative potentialities of the East River estuary. A major artery and natural habitat, which connects and separates four of New York’s five existing boroughs, the estuary has often been marginalized within the context of the city. The students proposed design scenarios, which provided new ideas for a future city that fully engaged the immense and unprecedented potential of one of its most vital, diverse, and dynamic elements.

Part city, part infrastructure, part landscape and environment, the estuary escaped any singular categorization and encouraged radical as well as subtle approaches. While specific design solutions are developed for the site, an emphasis is placed on the culturally charged relationships of Nature to Culture, and Ecology to Technology both of which have become particularly relevant within the current cultural discourse.

The studio focused on Newtown Creek which separates Brooklyn from Queens. In the 19th centuries the creek became a major industrial waterway and was surrounded by numerous refineries. In 1972 the creek became infamous for a large oil spill, which contaminated the water and soil both of which are to this day considered to be highly toxic.

Efforts to clean up the creek and the adjacent soil have been part of civic and municipal efforts for years. In 2010, this site was declared a Superfund site opening up federal resources to clean it up and decontaminate. Also on the site is the city’s largest wastewater treatment plant.

The conditions at Newtown Creek enforce further the notion of the Anthropocene, a new and current geologic epoch irrevocably altered by modern civilization through centuries of natural resource exploitations. This new geologic reality is posing fundamental challenges, both conceptually as well as practically, to our conventional definitions of nature, technology, and culture. Inevitably a new and very strange “real” is emerging, a real that cannot be located outside of human activity, but also, one that cannot be fixed, guided, or changed by us any longer. This signals a true paradigm shift and requires a reevaluation of all urban planning and architecture strategies that have formed and informed the modern city.

Ferda Kolatan, critic

a Juan Espinosa + Chong Gao b Rajul Patel c Studio Model

a

b c

a

Master of Science in Architecture + Urban Design | Second Semester

099

GAUD DESIGN STUDIOS

Infrastructural / Architectural Hybrids East River Estuary Brooklyn, NYC City is made of parts, parts that constitute infrastructure, parts that organize circulation and transportation, parts that enable built form, parts that generate landscapes, all towards the establishment of a metropolitan cultural organism. It is in the relationship of these parts amongst each other where new urban conditions begin to emerge. Conventionally, the growth and behavior of these organisms are regulated by top-down zoning procedures wherein design becomes a ‘complying’ afterthought. Recent alternatives to this model produced countless numbers of ‘city as building’ proposals or highly homogeneous and parametrically driven environments where the quality can only be evaluated as the systemic relationship between one part and the next... Both these approaches prove to be overly deterministic strategies and are lacking the diversity desired in urban morphologies despite the variations embedded in them. It is at this critical juncture where infrastructure and architecture must strive for more openended potentials in the way they integrate, hybridize and instigate future growth. The students shifted down in scale to design the infrastructural/architectural DNA of the new GeoUrban condition they developed in the previous semester.

Kutan Ayata, critic

a Cecilia Maier b Maia Muniz Moreno c Michalis Skitsas

a

c b

b

c

Master of Science in Architecture + Urban Design | Third Semester Culmination Project

Extraterritorial Borough East River Estuary Brooklyn, NYC The final purpose of this prototype is to get a much more direct relationship between the city and the river through a sustainable and efficient way of living. Exploring new ways of designing, creates relationships between nature and technology.

The line that divides real from unreal has been erased. These images play with the magical realism, and put the viewer in an unsafe position. The project has been represented from a different perspective, it is shown as a subliminal message and could be taken as a different way of marketing inside architecture.

The human point of view has been shifted to the point of view of other entities within the ecosystem, stressing the blurriness of hierarchies between them and contributing to make the viewer focus on something else but the project.

The model had the same research work that the project would potentially confront with the new ecology that is planned to grow in it, where technology, design and different living and non-living entities interact.

Some parts of the model were carefully designed and planned through computerized machines.

Taking the opposite direction, the plants, which were alive, were carefully planted at first, using no technology at all and treating them as a sculpture.

There was a small amount of artificial plants mixed in the ecosystem, to magnify the relationships between living and inert matter and maximize the idea of a non-hierarchy system based on connections.

During the final stage the vegetation was left alone, so it could grow and develop by itself.

This is an investigation on how to represent connections between infinite characteristics that coexist in an ecosystem, as well as the domain of analysis, which will be always partial.

Representations of the reality will always be subjective and remain incomplete, they will become in the end, another element of a particular ecosystem.

Maia Muniz Moreno with David Ruy, critic

101

GAUD DESIGN STUDIOS

Infrastructural / Architectural Hybrids East River Estuary Brooklyn, NYC This project attempted to piece together an alternative story line, where the city of New York makes an aggressive to confront its ecological and economic realities. The “6th Borough” is a multilayered system, part reef-like hurricane fortification, part infrastructural web, part parceling configuration, extending along Brooklyn’s water edge, absorbing Governor’s island and colonizing the East River.

As a device of urban activation, it accepts a reality where the solidity of land boundaries is inexistent. Instead, it proposes a sectional relationship that is at once engaged, direct and fluctuating. The City’s infrastructural network detaches from the ground and mutates into a self supporting web that weaves above and around the ground and enabling the building envelopes.

The building envelope itself negotiates a complex relationship with the fluctuating datum line. The reference point is the volume’s midsection, where it is penetrated from the infrastructural web. It’s lower regions are extremely rigid and if needed, floodable. The areas extending upwards from the web structure become increasingly slender and extendable, anticipating a future where the changing climate conditions might force a vertical migration of the reef’s inhabitants.

This relationship between reef and building envelope is investigated through a series of model studies that project the building form’s stability, rigidness and potentially cost in the form of heat mapping.

Finally, the project’s faux-history is documented, from its conception to its tumultuous construction process and its questionable impact on the city’s identity, through a series of articles, images and maps.

Michalis Skitsas with David Ruy, critic

Raymond Chen

Jeffrey Johnson, critic

Master of Architecture

SEMINAR FACULTY Robert Cervellione Jeffrey Johnson Christoper Kroner Hart Marlow

Benjamin Martinson Bridget Rice Michael Szivos Jason Vigneri-Beane

COMMUNITY

Philip Parker, Assistant Chair

RESEARCH

Mapping, modeling, animating, scripting, rendering, filmmaking, play into the multiple outputs of printing, cutting, milling, assembling, vacuum forming in an expanding realm of technical expertise in digital production. Computer Media One and Two sought out the linkages among critical, affective, conceptual, and technical action, they seek to establish the multiple modes of intensifying the relations among forms of design practice and architectural ambitions. The core courses proposed for the architect to become both more expert and more aware of the implications embedded in the long history of design media. They anticipated a more nuanced and agile invention and engagement between architecture and media formed in seminars and studios.

PSPD

As much as it seeks out and produces clarity the architectural drawing complicates our relations with architecture and the world in the drawn, rendered, and modeled image. The presumed agency of the architect, representation, production, and generation become entangled in the back and forth, give and take feedback of architecture’s acts of drawing – its media events. Architecture and design media are of course not alone or isolated from other forms of production. Our project in Computer Media continued the long formation of architecture’s development of its working spaces through projects, discussion, lectures and readings. This is where the many linkages among media as an active design instrument, media as a filter or screen of reception, and media as an inhabited territory – a medium become evident and mutually informing. The projects began with investigation of a media apparatus and continue with specific instances of media’s historical relations to architecture and its many forms of production. This work builds in increments toward and intensive collaboration between architect and media where architecture is understood to unfold in a broad, diverse and active media ecology.

GAUD

CORE MEDIA

Master of Architecture | Core Media

105

GAUD CORE MEDIA

Computer Media I Computer Media 1 maintains that our most vital and critical questions in architecture enjoy a lift, an intensification when the media of their inquiry reaches a limit, a threshold of communication, and have to be recalibrated to proceed on an altered track. The course sought to cultivate the necessary agility for the negotiation of the critical leap in the architect’s movement into new forms production when these limits are encountered. It proposed to introduce and reintroduce critical practices, locating specific movements among concepts and object, topologies and tectonics, process and objects, and image and sense in architecture. Projects interrelated historical practices and conventions in forms of artistic practice, scientific representation, cartography and graphic media with contemporary techniques to establish a nuanced participation in the evolution of design intelligence formed in media.

Projects explored in depth the limits of the trace, cut, fold, and projection in a series of computational works beginning with the most clear incision into a thing, extending through its most distant and removed movement and changes. Modes of generation, modeling, rendering, mapping, and animating matter are deployed as instruments with varying effects to be played where they act as participants with the architect in the architecture’s production. Finally, projects recognized the working spaces of architecture as being continuously reformed and intimately linked with the exchange in and among media practices.

Christopher Kroner + Jeffrey Johnson + Benjamin Martinson + Hart Marlow + Bridget Rice + Michael Szivos, critics a b c d e f

LinnĂŠa Moore Brigitte Ngo Jeremy Hill Kaysey Thomas Jason Vayanos Raymond Chen

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Master of Architecture | Core Media

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GAUD CORE MEDIA

Computer Media II Digital considerations of tectonics, kinematics and parametrics established similar yet different forms of engaging systemic architectural constructions consisting of assemblies, collectives, populations and interconnected sets of componentry. Each of these paradigms of modeling provided a mode of conceptualizing designed systems in relation to time, process, performance, differentiation and iterative formation. Consequently, each media explored simultaneously configured and catalyzed an architectural imagination within its specified field that is enhanced and intensified.

Computer Media 2 was organized into two parts. One part developed tectonic/kinematic modeling techniques by using a range of time-based software that included architectural, animation and video platforms. The other part developed tectonic/parametric modeling techniques with architectural, parametric design and representational software with an emphasis on technical proficiency, precision and complex yet legible delivery. Each half of the course concentrated on design media’s capacity to inform behaviors and relationships among constructions wherein strong internal and systemic logics of form and organization become agile enough to be responsive and adaptive to varied external inputs. In addition, both parts of the course contributed heavily to studio culture by fostering students’ capacity to produce efficient models and simulations activated through iteration, generative processes, relational dynamics, cascading change, nested behaviors, feedback loops, productive constraints and complex formations of continuous tectonic change.

The course was heavily invested in methodology, craft, technique and other deeply disciplinary aspects of media and architectural idiom. At the same time, the course also emphasized the public nature of design and presentation by creating multiple opportunities for students to view their work together, as a collective, in shared digital and printed formats ranging from small (monitor) to medium (screen, pin-up) to large (wall-size projection) to disseminated (web-based video sharing).

Robert Cervellione + Christopher Kroner + Hart Marlow + Benjamin Martinson + Jason Vigneri-Beane, critics a b c d e f g

Mark Berlinrut Patrick Toh CJ Rabey Jason Vayanos Leila Thackara Virginia Li Robert Meyerson

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Megan Hurford

Ferda Kolatan, critic

Graduate Architecture + Urban Design

PSPD RESEARCH

The GAUD program offers a range of elective courses concentrating on contemporary approaches to technique and trajectories in history and theory. Courses include content from digital media (scripting, dynamic models, interactive systems) to digitally-driven fabrication technology; representational techniques (film, new media) to innovative structural logics; cross disciplinary models (biology, landscape, emergent systems, legislative constraints) to sociopolitical constructions.

This collection of electives provides an environment that both fosters innovation and deepens knowledge in particular areas of architectural and urban discourse and production.

GAUD

ELECTIVE SEMINARS

COMMUNITY

SEMINAR FACULTY Robert Cervellione Catherine Ingraham Ferda Kolatan Brian Ringley

David Ruy Maria Sieira Michael Szivos Jeffrey Taras

M. Arch, M.S. Arch, M.S. Arch + U.D. | Core Elective

Digital Fabrication Architects continually deploy and employ materials for aesthetic effect, such as lightness, mass, transparency and reflectivity. Schools, architecture offices and for-profit firms maintain material libraries to meet the demands of architects for better, more functional and, especially now, cheaper materials. This class takes off-the-shelf materials as a point of departure and investigates how architects can manipulate, extend, and modify existing materials through design and experimentation with digital fabrication tools, especially the CNC router.

We began the semester with an introduction to digital fabrication, and specifically the use and safe operation of a 3-axis CNC router. Students learned the standard milling tactics offered by contemporary CAM software, such as curve machining and parallel finishing. The students then sought to subvert these stock operations through a productive patterning exercise, in which they explore the interactions between bit geometry, cut path and surface geometry to create an emergent 3-D patterning.

The students then engaged in a mold-making and thermoforming exercise, through which they learn to produce 3-D surface geometry using the CNC mill, and then used those surfaces as molds to thermoform materials such as Corian and acrylic.

The final assignment empowered students to produce a highly considered and finished 3-D surface of their own design employing their recently learned tactic. Students are encouraged to look beyond the material pallet of MDF and Corian used thus far, and to explore options such as plaster, epoxy resins and concrete. Some students went so far as to produce their own hybrid materials by creating custom laminations of plywood and acrylic, or epoxy resin and plywood. Working from a design proposal, through prototypes, and to a finished product, students learned to turn material and budget limitations into design opportunities and produced finished work of a high caliber.

Jeffrey Taras, critic

a Jon Bucholtz b Dan Tomita + Christine Gray c Alex Lightman

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GAUD ELECTIVE SEMINARS

Scripting and Form To design is to impose order. Architecture is the expression of meaningful order in the built environment. Traditionally the systems of order we, as designers, had at our disposal were orders we could execute through hand drawing and drafting – such as the grid or symmetry. With computation, however, the strategies for creating and utilizing ordering systems is greatly expanded. We can learn from and adapt order found in natural systems, or physics, or mathematics. In the end, we may be able create wholly new forms of order based on programmatic rules.

In this class, students used computer programming to explore methods of drawing dynamic, self-organizing, agent-based systems. Students developed digital drawing projects through the effective use of computational models. For example, the C# programming language inside of Rhino Grasshopper is used in the class, software developed as a user-friendly way to learn programming for visual output as well as well as explore various external sources and controls to interact and inform the scripted systems.

Robert Cervellione, critic a a Milad Showkatbakhsh

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M. Arch, M.S. Arch, M.S. Arch + U.D. | Core Elective

113

GAUD ELECTIVE SEMINARS

GAUD ++ Exhibition + Computer Logics [left page] The GAUD++ exhibition is not only a design build project, but also an exercise in curation and organizational strategies.

The brief of the course is to design, fabricate, and curate the Graduate School of Architecture and Urban Design student exhibition.

This year’s exhibition featured architectural models floating on floating platforms. The platforms were suspended by an engineered surface that acted both as a single structural surface and a cloud like filter. The underside of each platform was creating using attenuated cardboard tubes to create a surface that guided visitors to specific locations on the platform where they could view the interior of the surface.

Once inside these viewing zones, visitors were able to view the models at what would be considered street or person level (although a more realistic view, an overlooked vantage point for models). The images of student work from Fall 2013 to Summer 2014 was arranged under the field of cardboard tubes as if they are being projected from the tubes. The work was packed together in clusters showcasing the variety and organic nature of how work is produced within the culture of the school. [right page] Computer Logics pursued various methods through which the role of the designer can shift from “space programming” to “programming space”; the designation of software programs to generate space and form from the rule-based logic inherent in architectural programs, typologies and building code.

Through the use of a native scripting language, students were able to effect the software and their workflow in a more natural way that becomes more responsive to outside conditions.

Students were no longer designing solutions, but systems to produce a variety of solutions. Students approached the objectives from two ends: [1] The use of rule-based algorithms to produce a range of formal strategies and [2] The use of the software’s native scripting language to generate custom tools to adjust those formal strategies.

This course also has a secondary agenda, demystifying the tools of design provided by particular software packages and consequently empowering the designer to invent their own software tools and practices. The majority of 3D software packages are designed for use in the filmmaking industry and have been appropriated by the architectural design profession. These tools have inherent formal biases based on their heritage, and limit the capacity of the designer

Michael Szivos, critic a b c d

GAUD++ Exhibition Justin Koziol Anson Nickel Sharan Suresh

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M. Arch, M.S. Arch, M.S. Arch + U.D. | Core Elective

Computer Aided Construction Integrating parametric software with CNC manufacturing allows designers an unprecedented direct link between the digital model and the physical artifact. This course critically approached the bridge between design computation and fabrication through the concept of thresholds; initially by setting thresholds at which fields of parametric components transform across a part based on functional requirements, and again later by examining the thresholds at which parametric systems and CNC-manufacturability (draft angle, tool reach, etc.) either break down or open up new possibilities/efficiency.

Materiality plays a strong role in the course. Glue-laminated composite materials will be prototyped on the router to push the composite stock to perform (bending, stretching, twisting, etc.) in manners not possible through any individual material within the composite. A single material volume composed as material strata with varying properties means that, at any given moment along the material, there is a direct relationship between cutting depth, material performance, and material aesthetic.

The product of the course was a novel architectural assembly capable of enhancing existing building performance benchmarks (daylighting, ventilation, drainage, acoustics, etc.) while introducing novel categories for evaluation.

Note: Software used is primarily Rhino, Grasshopper, and RhinoCAM, but other applications were used depending upon need/applicability.

Brian Ringley, critic a a Zachary Grzybowski + Matt Boker b Ulrika Lindell + Erik Nevala-Lee

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GAUD ELECTIVE SEMINARS

Augmented Systems Augmented Systems provided a unique insight into the use of digital/physical informational overlays to provide real time data for architectural systems. We learned how to embed and represent metadata, construction, and fabrication data into real world objects through augmented reality systems.

We explored ways to create, control, and visualize the useful metadata that is inherently created with computational design techniques and expose that data to various end users in a friendly and interactive way.

With the ever increasing amount of data being created in today’s computational driven design new modes of controlling, accessing, and visualizing the data will be important in order to maintain the richness and depth of information being generated. This course intended to explore the various current and future new modes of controlling, accessing, and visualizing the data through research, discussion and project based learning.

The class is organized around a various research, discussion, and project based activities to get a full understanding of current methodologies as well as propose new methods for enhancing current approaches.

Robert Cervellione, critic a b c d

Santiago David Milad Showkatbakhsh Jong Hwa Lee Pratt Graduate Architecture + Urban Design QR Code

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M. Arch, M.S. Arch, M.S. Arch + U.D. | History + Theory Seminar

Architecture and Film Students in this course studied film as if it were architecture and then made space with moving images by filming, manipulating, and editing digital shots. The work was the result of a semester long investigation into the constructive nature of a cinematic assembly of images.

We started the semester with a visit to the Museum of the Moving Image, in Queens. The very early artifacts, those that “made still images move” reveal what makes the illusion of movement work: persistence of vision. Examples of these early gadgets are the 1893 phenakistoscope by Eadweard Muybridge and the early kinetoscope films.

We looked at contemporary films through two critical lenses: film as illusion and film as representative of reality; here again two early filmmakers revealed the dual nature of cinema: Méliès and the Lumière brothers. Another historical example relevant to work on contemporary analysis is the work of Eisenstein and his fellow Soviet filmmakers; they are significant in that they changed the nature of filmmaking when they introduced editing.

The requirements for the course were three fold. Students wrote about a given set of questions and research topics.

Students also watched critically significant contemporary films (“Certified Copy,” 2010 by Abbas Kiarostami and “35 Shots of Rum,” 2008 by Claire Denis among others) and later discussed them in class.

The third requirement of the course was a one to two minute film. This was the heart & soul of the course. The stills shown here provide a glimpse into the semester long process of making space with moving images.

Maria Sieira, critic a a b a Jon Bucholtz b Asli Baysan

117

GAUD ELECTIVE SEMINARS

Design Finesse: The Chemical Object Throughout history, humans have appropriated tools and invented new technologies not only to improve their everyday odds of survival and to protect themselves from the elements, but also in order to express their deeply rooted ideas, both material and immaterial, of the world they inhabit. Such ideas, naturally, cannot be expressed in any purely functional causality as they do not obey a logic of practical reason or problem-solving. But it is precisely this autonomy, which has afforded craftsmen, builders, and architects the necessary space to explore their tools and develop techniques that push material properties to their limits and thus enter unprecedented territories. The manifestations of this type of design ethic and approach is what I call “Design Finesse”.

This year’s project was called the “Chemical Object” and drew upon the philosopher Iain Hamilton Grant’s definition of the chemical paradigm. The chemist, according to Grant, understands (and creates) the world materially through processes of making, which then subsequently lead to analysis. Grant advocates this approach in opposition to the physical paradigm, which privileges analysis as the foundation of knowledge. This seminar investigated the potentialities of these ideas in order to arrive at alternative modes of designthinking in which material behavior is substantially integrated into the development of design strategies.

For the first part of the project, students used analog means to create a set of chemical images through techniques of mixing, synthesizing, cooking, freezing, etc. These images were then digitized and transformed into drawings with an emphasis on recognizing and highlighting emerging patterns, structures, shapes, textures, and colors. The second part of the project focused on the translation of the drawings into physical models (objects) through contemporary methods of fabrication. The resulting objects went through multiple analog and digital steps, each of which add new layers of material complexity to them.

Ferda Kolatan, critic

a Megan Hurford b Michalis Skitsas c Jeian Jeong

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M. Arch, M.S. Arch, M.S. Arch + U.D. | History + Theory Seminar

Advanced Representation and Propaganda This elective seminar examined the various modes of architectural representation that have become dominant in contemporary digital culture. The seminar has a dual goal of achieving technical proficiency with contemporary techniques while simultaneously developing agendas of architectural propaganda. Towards these goals, students are introduced to both technical and theoretical concerns with lectures situating current practices within a historical context. Particular attention was given to a genealogy of radical practices from 1968 to 2001, constituting what may be considered a prehistory of digital representational techniques.

With a dual focus on practical techniques and their sometimes hidden theoretical agendas, students individually engage a semester-long project that experiments with extensions to current practices.

David Ruy, critic a a Miranda Rogers + Caroline Vickery b Jon Bucholtz + Mohammed Betatache

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119

GAUD ELECTIVE SEMINARS

Plasticity “Until we have an understanding of these complicated, changing interactions, our attempts to balance extraction of ecosystem resources against sustainability will remain at best naive, at worst disastrous.” —John H. Holland Hidden Order: How Adaptation Builds Complexity “The parasitic behavior of the Jewel Wasp is best understood through its ability to subject its host to a sophisticated neural transformation. The Jewel Wasp’s strange attachment of its offspring to a host also points to millions of years of ecological pressures and adaptation. My sectional exploration attempts to understand the different stages of the Wasp’s plasticity as nature’s first neurosurgeon.” —Camilo Valencia [a] “Though viruses are, in effect, non-living, they demonstrate cognitive skills not unlike an autopoietic living system, particularly in their relationship with host immune systems.

This project investigated this ambiguity in the Human Immunodeficiency Virus and the systems it inhabits.”

—Milad Showkatbakhsh and Matt Boker [b] “When the wolf was removed from Yellowstone there was a nonlinear cascade of catastrophic interactions set off by this removal, the complexity of which is formulaically described

by Holland as the nonlinear interactions between predator and prey. A hunting wolf pack is a fascinating, dynamic and emergent organization that makes use of spatial calculations to corral its prey. The pack, with its flexibility and ability to remain cohesive through complex changes, acts like both an immune system (recognition) and a nervous system (interaction).” —Addie Duplissie-Johnson [c]

Catherine Ingraham, critic

a Camilo Valencia b Matt Boker + Milad Showkatbakhsh c Addie Duplissie-Johnson

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b

Mark Berlinrut

Sulan Kolatan, critic

Graduate Architecture + Urban Design

PROGRAM COORDINATORS + FACULTY Sulan Kolatan Jason Vigneri-Beane

COMMUNITY

Sulan Kolatan + Jason Vigneri-Beane, coordinators

RESEARCH

While the Graduate Architecture and Urban Design program benefits enormously from its New York location as a hub for both local and imported resources it recognizes the importance of operating at sites across the world at the levels of both architectural/urban and global experience. Graduate architecture and urban design students have a range of exposure to explicitly international content and faculty in courses that make excursions to Europe, Asia and South America as short-run features of the coursework. However, in order to give more robust architectural, urban and cultural experiences to students in this period of globalization the GAUD program offers full-immersion study abroad opportunities in Rome and Istanbul. Each program engages a complex of issues that are shaping architectural and urban discourse and practice. At the same time, these issues are understood as part of a trajectory that includes the historical material that is an inextricable presence in these locations. The Rome program includes trips to Florence, Siena and Venice while the Istanbul program also travels to Ephesus and Aphrodisias.

In combination the programs provide a powerful framework for graduate students to deeply engage the materials, practices, events and influences that have catalyzed the development of our discipline.

PSPD

Rome + Istanbul

GAUD

INTERNATIONAL PROGRAMS

M. Arch, M.S. Arch, M.S. Arch + U.D. | International Program

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GAUD INTERNATIONAL PROGRAMS

FIELDING ISTANBUL Istanbul, Turkey Our focus here will be on the two significant factors of the 21st century metropolis: (rapid) change and heterogeneity.

Through the deployment of patch theory and patch methodology, tools borrowed from urban ecology, we will make increasingly finer differentiations between urban patches of the Golden Horn. Unlike architecture, urban ecology does not separate urban complexity into individual systems thereby losing the networking logic underlying it but instead breaks down the totality of the entire urban surface into contiguous but discrete patches. These patches gain their discrete boundaries through their internal homogeneity on one hand and their heterogeneity in relation to neighboring patches on the other. While the separation of urban categories is indebted to modernist thinking, the patch methodology is more attuned to an eco-systemic approach and thus more suitable to the framework of the Istanbul summer program.

The topics of investigation via patch methodology will be water quality, aquatic life, water edge/coastline configuration, waterfront programming/land-use, waterfront architecture, waterfront “practices of everyday life”, land-cover and urban form. We will consult existing ecological, urban and historic data in order to evaluate and re-present these from our uniquely architectural perspective. In addition to current studies and archival data, students will collect pertinent information on their own in the field. As patch boundaries are based on relational criteria and thus subject to definition and scale of inquiry, deriving new ways of visual representation to account for this and other problems to emerge from our singular approach is going to be part of the program’s goal.

The sites selected for this year’s studies are the extreme heat islands shown on ecological maps and clustered outside the byzantine landwalls in the semi-industrial zone of the Yedikule – Zeytinburnu areas. The city’s development in the last 20 years has made this area’s industrial zoning obsolete with much of the surrounding territory emerging as residential neighborhoods. Our goal is to replace these industrial patches with new a new synthetic green-blue crust to reverse heat island formation and increase public space while benefiting public health.

Sulan Kolatan, critic a b c d e

Lauren Kirk Mark Berlinrut Irem Cabbaroglu Group photo Jenny Arizala

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M. Arch, M.S. Arch, M.S. Arch + U.D. | International Program

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GAUD INTERNATIONAL PROGRAMS

DIFFERENTIAL ROME Rome, Italy Rome is an extremely powerful environment through which to study contemporary architectural and urban design principles.

It is a complex construction that has emerged in adaptive, iterative and explosively dynamic ways. Rather than being planned and composed in the traditional ways that one might assume, the city has been, and still is, in a process of constant formation. It proved to be a catalytic landscape for the convergence of population dynamics, commercial flows and geological resources that would set in motion an astonishing amount of cultural activity and physical production. It grew rapidly and then devolved back into ruralization that was still strangely contained with ancient city walls. It grew again in a polycentric way through locally intensified urban meshworks that simultaneously densified and differentiated the physical environment. At multiple scales ranging from regions to zones to infrastructural systems to neighborhoods to piazzas to buildings, the city physically demonstrates accretion, differentiation, adaptation, self-organization, appropriation, heterarchy, flow, decentralization and cascading change.

These terms, and others, form the discursive framework through which we study the city as a system of objects, system of systems and a complex of memes on an extraordinary trajectory from the historical to the contemporary. While Rome was the primary environment of study, our additional visits to the cities and structures of Florence, Siena and Venice offer powerful similarities and differences for deeper understandings of complex architectural and urban thinking.

While it is of deep importance to study this material discursively it was also important for us to study it through contemporary representational techniques. Therefore, the primary course deliverable consists of producing mappings and drawings of the physical and temporal conditions that we study and, in doing so, develop techniques, notational systems and other representational innovations that resonate with the ways in which we deliver our complex projects in the studio based culture of the GAUD program.

Jason Vigneri-Beane, critic a b c d e f

Leila Thackara CJ Rabey Brigitte Ngo Sarah Young Group photo Dmitriy Zemel

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Shayna Cooper + Milad Showkatbakhsh + Christopher Testa + Chris Yu Robert Cervellione, critic

Pratt School of Architecture

Thomas Hanrahan, Dean

FACULTY Meta Brunzema Robert Cervellione

William Mac Donald Jaime Stein

COMMUNITY

Research is not only confined to these centers, but can be found throughout the studios in all of the programs within the school.

The research culture in these pages defines the center of our research activities here at Pratt, but this culture is also a catalyst for a broad range of research activities across the entire school that will only continue to grow in the coming years.

RESEARCH

Broadly, the areas of research in the School of Architecture fall under the headings of urbanism, sustainability, computation and structural / material studies. Specific Graduate Architecture and Urban Design research during the year involved the continuing development of Green Infrastructure improvements on campus, material and software research with Bentley Systems, and consultation with the City Council of New York to solve the problem of overcrowded schools. PrattSIDE continued its ongoing research in assisting underserved communities and the world, and the sustainable aspects of all of this research was displayed in the annual Green Week exhibition.

PSPD

The following pages document the work and activities of our primary research centers and laboratories in the School of Architecture. Some of these centers have been in existence for many years while others are a relatively recent phenomenon.

Nevertheless, the idea of research as a pursuit in the school has been growing exponentially in recent years, and the energy and production of these centers has been growing in importance as well.

GAUD

RESEARCH

Pratt School of Architecture | Research

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RESEARCH

Parametric Form This course concentrates on using Parametric Design and Scripting techniques to create a directed intelligence as way of form finding. The course explores the nature of these complex systems and their impact on design. Using object oriented programming with parametric design tools, we investigate how these emergent systems can feed into the discourse of architecture in order to evaluate new methods of making.

Students developed a deep understanding of adaptive parametric systems. They became familiar with various techniques to create adaptive systems and gain the ability to deeply control the system. Students learned how systems borrowed from nature, mathematics, and physics can be applied to design problems and embed their intelligence into design solutions. Students also explored how parametric thinking can be applied to construction to create buildable systems.

Gen-Z:

Shayna Cooper + Milad Showkatbakhsh + Christopher Testa + Chris Yu

Bi-Lamina: Arielle Lapp + Sang Shin Lee + Matiss Zemitis Alluminatis: Matthew Dennis + Dilan Ozkan + Sharan Suresh Display Facets: Che Chung Lin + Huseyin Kezer + Hyeyong Wang

Robert Cervellione, critic a b c d

Gen-Z Display Facets Alluminatis Bi-Lamina

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Pratt School of Architecture | Research

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RESEARCH

Green Infrastructure After Hurricane Sandy, the City of New York initiated multiple efforts to improve its resiliency: comprehensive planning and reports such as the Stronger more resilient New York (SIRR) have been produced and over $4 billion dollars where awarded by the Department of Housing and Urban Development (HUD) through the Community Development Block Grant Disaster Recovery program (CDBG-DR). However, such efforts have not been equally developed throughout the city. Many water bound and vulnerable communities, such as Bronx Community Board 10, have been ignored with little to no participation in these important planning processes.

As a response to increasing flood hazards from recent years, hundreds of plans and conceptual designs have been proposed to improve coastal resiliency throughout our region.

Instead of starting from scratch and attempt to develop our own solutions, we did extensive research on current proposals and examined which strategies best suited the particular conditions of the waterfront community.

This project strives to document the existing conditions and identify relevant infrastructure, strategies and programs that address coastal resiliency and storm surge flooding specific to Bronx Community Board no. 10. Identify strategies for future development and flood resiliency measures that focus on vulnerable coastal edge protection.

Jaime Stein, director a a Marcel Negret

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Pratt School of Architecture | Research

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RESEARCH

DILE Design of Innovative Learning Environments DILE addresses the extraordinary over-crowding in schools in Downtown Manhattan by proposing building sites and developing learning environments via architectural and urban strategies in GAUD studios. To that end, GAUD has founded a new research group ‘Design of Innovative Learning Environments’ [DILE] whose focus of inquiry is the relationship between the design of educational and learning environments, architecture, and urbanism. GAUD faculty members, Robert Cervellione, Sulan Kolatan, Philip Parker, William MacDonald, Alihan Polat, GAUD staff, Erika Schroeder, and graduate assistants, Sandra Berdick and Addie Duplisse-Johnson have been working with New York City and State elected officials and political committees including Community Board 1, President Catherine McVay Hughes; The Build Schools Now Board Members, Wendy Chapman and Buxton Midyette; State Senator, Daniel Squadron’s office; Speaker of the New York State Assembly, Sheldon Silver’s office and the Downtown Manhattan Schools Overcrowding Task Force; Council Member Margret Chin’s office; the City Council’s office; Congressman Jerry Nadler’s office; and the Department of Education’s Public Affairs Director, Ben Goodman.

TriBeCa Tribune article written by Carl Glassman

a a TriBeCa Trib Online article b DILE Meeting

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Pratt School of Architecture | Research

Green Week Exhibition March 2014 Green Week is an annual event that celebrates sustainabilityrelated work at Pratt and beyond. Since 2007 - during the last week of March, exhibitions, lectures and public events have been held at many venues on the Pratt Campus, with a special focus on showing innovative and sustainable student work.

Green Week is organized by Pratt’s Sustainability Coalition, a group of faculty, administrators, students and staff of Pratt Institute from a variety of disciplines including art, design, architecture, planning, and science, who have been meeting monthly since October 2005. The coalition is dedicated to identifying, interpreting, inspiring, incorporating and instituting ecologically responsible practices into curricula, operations and programs at Pratt Institute. The group meets monthly. For more information, see http://csds.pratt.edu/ about-the-sustainability-coalition/ Each year, the School of Architecture contributes to Green Week with an exhibition of student projects in the Higgins Hall Lobby Gallery and Pit. In 2014, the Higgins Hall Pit exhibition showed innovative designs of sustainable student dormitory buildings by a group of third-year undergraduate architecture students.

The Lobby Gallery featured an exhibition of transdisciplinary student work created under the umbrella of the postHurricane Sandy initiative “RAMP” — Recovery, Adaptation, Mitigation and Planning. RAMP is a suite of studios, classes and public programs that works closely with community partners to address issues of recovery, sustainability and resilience in the face of a changing climate. For more information, see http://ramp.prattpspd.org/ Under the aegis of RAMP, students from four planning and architecture programs collaboratively worked on planning, policy, architecture and urban design solutions for Coney Island and Red Hook, which were severely affected by Superstorm Sandy. The studios and seminars were led by Professors Stuart Pertz, Deborah Gans, Meta Brunzema, Elliot Maltby and Gita Nandan.

Higgins Hall Exhibition Coordinators: Jaime Stein, Meta Brunzema, Brent Porter RAMP Exhibition Design: David Frisco & Andrew Shea

a a Graduate Planning + Graduate Architecture + Undergraduate Architecture Works

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RESEARCH

PrattSIDE PrattSIDE is a student organization that seeks the betterment of underprivileged communities through collaborative efforts to design, build and advocate for schools, homes and more.

Our overall goal is to regenerate and strengthen communities by building efficient and effective environments. These communities join in on a hands-on approach to grassroots implementation that will allow them to maintain their facilities in the future. By providing culturally unique and sustainable facilities, the communities are empowered to achieve that which they need most.

We have developed four international projects, the first is a Women’s Shelter Dormitory, the second is a Vocational Training Center, both located in Kolkata, India. The third is a Primary School located in Mali and coordinated with African Sky. The fourth is an active project located in the Sacred Valley of Peru and is focused on developing a Student Dormitory.

Alongside the non-profit organization Mosqoy, PrattSIDE was designing and building a student dormitory in Cusco, Peru. Due to the increasing rate of tourist infrastructure and industry, many locals have lost income to the factories producing the cheaper faster version of their crafts. Mosqoy is providing education to the younger locals to help them learn the basics for operating some of these tourist infrastructures or other jobs that will help bring income to their families while preserving the local culture. Our goal was to design and build a new dormitory for this growing organization, and provide the students with both their own space and privacy, community spaces that would serve them and all the visitors and volunteers to learn more about the culture of Peru and the efforts of organization itself and finally a commercial space where students could sell and promote original artwork from their region.

Kenneth Mitchell + Lila Tedesco,

Coordinators of PrattSIDE a a Design proposals for a new dormitory in Cusco, Peru

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M. Arch CAP Studio Review

Pratt School of Architecture

RESEARCH COMMUNITY

Philip Parker, Assistant Chair of GAUD

PSPD

Students and faculty in the graduate architecture programs actively participate in and build the communities with the arts, and sciences in exhibition and research venues and in many projects focused on K-12 education, community and environmental justice, advancements in design, imaging and fabrication technologies.

These may span a range of generations as the education programs often do, or they may extend well into the realms of the very concrete issues of the environment as imaging and development projects. They may engage a larger community of citizens and professionals in a global dialogue and collaboration on questions of water and contemporary modes of urbanization as part of our International programs. Collectively, the overlap and resonance of these varied constituencies contributes to a more integral and hopefully active participation of architecture in its many communities.

GAUD

COMMUNITY

Pratt School of Architecture | Community

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COMMUNITY

RAD K-12 [RECLAIM WORKS PROGRAM] Manhattan + Brooklyn, NY Reclaim Works is one sub-project of RAD K-12 occurring each fall and spring semesters. GAUD students participating in this project use STEAM based curriculum to focus on architecture and engineering education as a social practice. Collaborating in small group weekly studio style courses with local middleschool students participants address one physical and spatial challenge in their school’s community that is in need of improvement. Each semester focuses on a new theme of investigation in relation to a school’s community environment, ranging from topics of learning spaces, safety, places for play, etc. Through examinations of place, community, and conversation Pratt’s GAUD students guide middle school partners as they learn to design for a better quality of life.

Through the process of STEAM integrated curriculum including but not limited to acts of research, ideation and building three-dimensional prototypes middle school students act as the architects and engineers as GAUD students guide them through the design process.

This year’s project worked in collaboration with middle school students at the Urban Assembly Unison School participating with Citizen Schools. In collaboration with the Myrtle Avenue Brooklyn Partnership, and the local communities growing concern for pedestrian safety near the underpass of the Brooklyn Queens Expressway at the intersection of Grand Avenue, Reclaim Works participants looked towards their own understanding of “being safe” to conceptualize designs for this location.

Each semester Reclaim Works ends with a final exhibition and critique of the envisioned improvement projects. This year’s final presentation took place at BAM Fisher (Brooklyn Academy of Music) where middle school partners & Pratt graduate students presented extended project proposals to professionals from community-based, public art groups, design firms along with other members of education and design communities. The exhibition and presentation supported the evaluation and assessment of the envisioned projects, as students received feedback from both professionals and community members. With this feedback both Pratt students and the local youth exercised their ability to reflect on their proposals while implementing necessary adjustments. The potential to receive additional funding to continue the development of these envisioned proposals is a possibility and goal for the program.

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GAUD student Lila Tedesco Group photo Visit to Pratt Institute - Higgins Hall GAUD student Dillon Keane Middle School Student’s Work

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Exchanging Contexts: Teaching and Learning Manhattan + Brooklyn, NY Exchanging Contexts is one sub-project of RAD K-12, integrating acts of civic engagement into core curricula. The objective of this practice is two-fold, empowering local youth and giving GAUD students the opportunity to see how their skills in architecture and engineering can be enhanced through a better understanding of the context and people they are affecting. Through this practice GAUD students are placed in the position of educator to learn by doing the dynamics of educational spaces. Currently this model of learning has been developed into the Design Studio: Context and Structures II courses.

Each year during students’ second semester Design Studio: Context (Arch 602), about 60 GAUD students take on a project in New York City that has sociopolitical relevance, challenging them to develop a design project with some complexity. Since 2010, the context explored has been in response to the growing need to address spatial and learning issues in K-12 educational environments that can be supported through architecture and design. Since 2012, the design of the Context Studio (ARCH 602) added the Exchanging Contexts project to include a one-visit partnership with six elementary schools over three boroughs. During school visits M. Arch students are introduced to the school facilities and community and engage with an elementary class by co-teaching a STEAM integrated architectural exercise.

GAUD’s integration of K-12 interest in curriculum continues to be a focus for both students and faculty. Each spring semester since 2011 the M. Arch Structures II course (ARCH 632) curriculum has included a final project to engage NYC public schools. Through a partnership with PENCIL, an organization that partners school principals with Universities etc. to improve school curriculum, Pratt students act as ‘the engineers’ and collaborate with public school students who are designated as ‘the architects’, learning to design together.

This spring semester about 60 GAUD students each worked with eight New Dorp High School students in Staten Island. At the end of the semester students from New Dorp High School were invited to visit Pratt and attend GAUD presentations on their design concepts.

GAUD faculty members involved in this year’s program were Gisela Baurmann, Theo David, Craig Konyk, Carla Leitao, William MacDonald, Philip Parker, and Maria Sieria; ADE’s faculty participating in the program are Aileen Wilson, Youth Programs Coordinator, Tara Kopp, and Youth Programs Educator, Erika Schroeder. a GAUD student Mark Berlinrut b GAUD students Heather Alford + Jenny Arizala + Lauren Kirk c GAUD student Emily Walek d GAUD student Dillon Keane e Second grade students

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Recovery, Adaptation, Mitigation and Planning RAMP In response to Superstorm Sandy, in Spring 2013, the PSPD initiated a multi-year program of coordinated planning and architectural studios/urban labs, workshops and conferences called “Recovery, Adaptation, Mitigation and Planning [RAMP].” At its core, RAMP is working closely with community partners/clients to develop plans and strategies for rebuilding and adaptation. Training sessions and workshops will be offered to complement the technical assistance to be provided in the participatory planning, urban design, architectural and development studios. In addition to students, RAMP workshops are open to practicing design, planning and development professionals, community residents and advocacy groups, and wherever possible undertaken in partnership with other cooperating technical assistance providers, advocacy organizations, professional associations and Community Based Development Organizations.

Community residents must be the foundation of any resiliency strategy. They are part of the team of “first responders” in their neighborhoods. As experts on their communities, and the ones for whom resiliency is most directly relevant, they are central to the development of any resilience strategy in the face of future severe weather events or disruptions of any kind. This is particularly important in low- and moderate-income areas and in communities of color where issues of economic status and race have too often led to exclusion and isolation in decision-making. By including these communities we improve the innovation and quality of resiliency planning, create social capital – an element critical to resiliency - and ensure rooted and on-going buy-in, participation, and government and private sector accountability in the adaptation and mitigation process.

Ron Shiffman, faculty a a RAMP Studios

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Spatial Analysis + Visualization Initiative SAVI Geographic Information Systems (GIS) has caused a revolution in the collection, organization, analysis and presentation of data. GIS allows information to be collected in data form, visualized in spatial form, analyzed and layered in map and ‘infographic’ forms. GIS has the power to inform diverse networks of stakeholders: decision makers, municipal agencies, researchers, artists, community and civic organizations – to understand and visualize complex spatial relationships. Pratt Institute’s Spatial Analysis and Visualization Initiative (SAVI) is a GIS-centered enterprise that aims to create a “commons” for practice-based learning accessible to all Pratt students, faculty and community-based organizations. SAVI promotes a cross-disciplinary, collaborative learning and research community where faculty and students can share projects, ideas, resources and tools via a service center and research lab. Students and faculty across campus will find SAVI beneficial for research projects, studios, course work, theses and art projects.

The Initiative also intends to provide New York City-based nonprofit, civic and community-based planning organizations with access to GIS technical assistance, analysis, training and access to resources that allow independent GIS work.

These groups will be able to efficiently document existing conditions of urban areas, more meaningfully contribute to policy discussions, and create their own visions for improving quality-of-life and sustainability.

SAVI is an independent center under the Office of the Provost with three founding partners: the Programs for Sustainable Planning & Development, the Pratt Center for Community Development, and the graduate Communications Design Department. This cross-disciplinary approach empowers Pratt to expand upon its contribution to the well-being of New York City and its neighborhoods.

Jessie Braden, Director of the Spatial Analysis

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Pratt Center for Community Development The Pratt Center for Community Development occupies a unique niche at Pratt Institute, operating both “outside the gates” of the Institute and firmly within the School of Architecture. It is in many ways an independent non-profit organization and simultaneously an academic department enriched and supported by the Institute’s resources, ideas and energy. In practice, Pratt Center is a “think and do” tank devoted to solving problems relating to the physical and socioeconomic challenges of contemporary urbanism.

For the past 50 year Pratt Center has worked closely with Pratt Institute planning and architecture programs to incubate and further its mission to create a more just, equitable and sustainable city for all New Yorkers. The community groups with whom Pratt Center collaborates are on the front lines of today’s crucial struggles for greater social justice and equity and projects directly confront crises facing low- and moderate-income communities throughout the city. Pratt Institute student interns play a major role in most of the Center’s urban planning and policy projects and are given substantive responsibilities, which may range from conducting community interviews, to producing GIS and zoning analyses, to developing schematic drawings of NYC neighborhoods. The relationship is mutually beneficial: Pratt Center interns have the opportunity to fully engage in vital projects and to witness community-based planning and design in action. Pratt Center benefits greatly from their energy, enthusiasm and fresh perspectives of the Institute’s young scholars.

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Retrofit Standardization Initiative New York State invests millions of dollars annually in energy efficiency financing and marketing programs to encourage residential retrofits, reduce energy consumption, and foster a more sustainable economy. While these programs have enabled hundreds of local residents to green their homes, they remain chronically underutilized in NYC where retrofit implementation lags far behind other parts of the state. For example, New York’s signature residential retrofit program has a market penetration rate well below 1%. Retrofitting half of NYC’s 650,000 small homes would save homeowners $255 million annually and create 1,500 jobs, but thousands of lowand moderate-income residents in communities burdened by energy costs and an outdated building stock have struggled to secure retrofit financing and take part in these programs.

To address this gap in uptake, Pratt Center launched the Retrofit Standardization Initiative, an innovative project to ramp-up residential retrofits through introduction of a simple standard package of five energy efficiency measures that can be implemented in hundreds of thousands of similar small homes. Our on-the-ground experience and data suggest that a standard package can minimize the costs, time, and complications of retrofits by streamlining the energy audit process homeowners are currently required to go through in order to access retrofit financing. With the study phase complete, a pilot to implement the standard package in hundreds of homes is in development with the New York State Energy Research and Development Authority (NYSERDA) for 2015.

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a Final Reviews b 3rd Year M.Arch Studios c Lecture: Bernard Tschumi d Higgins Hall f Lecture: Hernan Diaz Alonso

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a Robotics Shop b Metal Shop c Wood Shop d CNC Shop

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Pratt School of Architecture | Faculty

Graduate Architecture and Urban Design

Erik Ghenoiu Adjunct Associate Professor

William MacDonald Chair

Matthew Herman Visiting Assistant Professor

Philip Parker Assistant Chair

Catherine Ingraham Professor

Vito Acconci Adjunct Associate Professor

Hina Jamelle Visiting Assistant Professor

Nathaniel Stanton Adjunct Associate Professor Michael Szivos Visiting Assistant Professor

Nicholas Agneta Adjunct Associate Professor

Bobby Johnston Adjunct Assistant Professor

Jeffrey Taras Visiting Instructor

William Higgins Visiting Assistant Professor

Maria Aiolova Adjunct Assistant Professor

Robert Kearns Visiting Assistant Professor

Meredith Tenhoor Adjunct Assistant Professor

Jeanne Houck, PhD Visiting Assistant Professor

Gilland Akos Visiting Assistant Professor

Carisima Koenig Visiting Instructor

Scot Teti Visiting Assistant Professor

Anne Hrychuk Visiting Assistant Professor

Jonathan James Alexander Adjunct Assistant Professor

M. Ferda Kolatan Visiting Assistant Professor

Maria Ludovica Tramontin Adjunct Assistant Professor

Keenan Hughes Visiting Assistant Professor

Adrien Allred Adjunct Assistant Professor

A. Sulan Kolatan Adjunct Professor

Nanako Umemoto Adjunct Professor

Georges Jacquemart Visiting Associate Professor

Ramon Carlos Arnaiz Adjunct Assistant Professor

Craig Konyk Adjunct Associate Professor

Jason Vigneri-Beane Adjunct Associate Professor

Ned Kaufman Adjunct Associate Professor

Kutan Ayata Adjunct Assistant Professor

Christopher Kroner Adjunct Associate Professor

Alexandra Barker Adjunct Associate Professor

Sameer Kumar Adjunct Assistant Professor

Elizabeth Barry Adjunct Associate Professor

Wilfried Laufs Adjunct Associate Professor

Gisela Baurmann Visiting Assistant Professor

Thomas Leeser Adjunct Professor

StĂŠphanie Bayard Adjunct Assistant Professor

Carla Leitao Adjunct Assistant Professor

Cole Belmont Visiting Assistant Professor

Qian Liu Visiting Assistant Professor

Karen Brandt Visiting Professor

John Lobell Professor

Christian Bruun Visiting Assistant Professor

Peter Macapia Adjunct Assistant Professor

Meta Brunzema Adjunct Associate Professor

Radhi Majmuder Adjunct Assistant Professor

Vincent Burns Adjunct Assistant Professor

Elliott Maltby Adjunct Associate Professor

Robert Cervellione Visiting Instructor

Hart Marlow Visiting Assistant Professor

Steven Chang Adjunct Assistant Professor

Diana Martinez Visiting Assistant Professor

Jonas Coersmeier Adjunct Associate Professor

Benjamin Martinson Visiting Instructor

Christobal Correa Adjunct Associate Professor

Signe Nielsen Adjunct Professor

Theoharis L. David Professor

Hannibal Newsom Visiting Assistant Professor

Manuel De Landa Adjunct Professor

Brian Ringley Visiting Assistant Professor

Giuliano Fiorenzoli Professor

Alihan Polat Visiting Assistant Professor

Matthew Flannery Adjunct Assistant Professor

Bridget Rice Visiting Assistant Professor

Michelle Fowler Visiting Assistant Professor

David Ruy Associate Professor

Stefanie Feldman Visiting Assistant Professor Patricia Fisher-Olsen Visiting Assistant Professor

Frances Fox Visiting Assistant Professor

Richard Scherr Adjunct Professor

Mike Flynn Visiting Assistant Professor

Deborah Gans Professor

Erich Schoenenberger Adjunct Assistant Professor

Adam Freed Visiting Assistant Professor

James Garrison Adjunct Associate Professor

Paul Segal Adjunct Professor

Adam Friedman Visiting Assistant Professor

James Graham Visiting Assistant Professor

Benjamin Shepherd Adjunct Associate Professor Maria Sieira Adjunct Assistant Instructor Henry Smith-Miller Adjunct Professor

PSPD John Shapiro PSPD Chair, Associate Professor Lisa Ackerman Visiting Assistant Professor Moshe Adler Ph.D Visiting Associate Professor Chelsea Albucher Visiting Assistant Professor Eric Allison Ph.D Adjunct Associate Professor Eve Baron, PhD Visiting Associate Professor Eddie Bautista Visiting Assistant Professor Christine Benedict Visiting Assistant Professor Michael Bobker Visiting Assistant Professor Carlton Brown Visiting Assistant Professor David Burney Visiting Assistant Professor Joan Byron Visiting Assistant Professor Damon Chaky PhD Assistant Professor Carol Clark Visiting Associate Professor Carter Craft Visiting Assistant Professor Ramon Cruz Visiting Assistant Professor

Visiting Assistant Professor

Ben Gibberd Visiting Assistant Professor

Alison Schneider Visiting Assistant Professor

Henry Gifford Visiting Instructor

Ronald Shiffman FAICP FAIA Professor

Eva Hanhardt Adjunct Associate Professor

Toby Snyder Visiting Assistant Professor

Justine Heilner Visiting Assistant Professor

Jaime Stein Coordinator, Environmental Systems Management Program

Martin J. McManus Visiting Assistant Professor Russell Olson Visiting Assistant Professor

Ira Stern Visiting Assistant Professor

Clifford Opurum Visiting Assistant Professor

Gelvin Stevenson, PhD Visiting Associate Professor

Jack Osborn Visiting Associate Professor

Samara F. Swanston JD Visiting Assistant Professor

Sharvil Patel Visiting Assistant Professor

Lacey Tauber Visiting Assistant Professor

Edward D. Re Adjunct Associate Professor

Petra Todorovitch Visiting Assistant Professor

Carol R. Reznikoff Visiting Assistant Professor

Meenakshi Varandani Visiting Assistant Professor

Joseph Tagliaferro Visiting Assistant Professor

Meg Walker Visiting Assistant Professor

Simon Taylor Visiting Assistant Professor

Daniel Hernandez Visiting Assistant Professor

Urvashi Kaul Visiting Assistant Professor Gavin Kearney Visiting Assistant Professor Katie Kendall Visiting Assistant Professor Brad Lander Visiting Associate Professor Frank Lang Visiting Assistant Professor Matthew Lister Visiting Assistant Professor Tina Lund Visiting Assistant Professor Elliot Maltby Adjunct Associate Professor Paul Mankiewicz PhD Visiting Associate Professor Jonathan Martin PhD Adjunct Assistant Professor William Menking Professor Jonathan Meyers Visiting Assistant Professor Norman Mintz Visiting Associate Professor Amy Anderson Nagy Visiting Assistant Professor Gita Nandan Visiting Assistant Professor Christopher Neville Visiting Assistant Professor Signe Nielsen Adjunct Professor Juan Camilo Osorio Visiting Assistant Professor Stuart Pertz Visiting Assistant Professor Theo Prudon, PhD Visiting Assistant Professor David Reiss Visiting Assistant Professor Steven Romalewski Visiting Assistant Professor

Stephen LoGrasso Visiting Assistant Professor Mary Mathews Professor

Edward Perry Winston RA Visiting Assistant Professor Kevin Wolfe RA Visiting Assistant Professor Vicki Weiner Visiting Associate Professor Joseph Weisbord Visiting Assistant Professor Sarah Wick Visiting Assistant Professor Andrew Wiley-Schwartz Visiting Assistant Professor Kevin Wolfe Visiting Assistant Professor Ayse Yonder PhD Professor Arthur Zabarkes Visiting Assistant Professor Catherine Zidar Visiting Assistant Professor

Construction & Facilities Management Harriet Markis CMFM Chair Howard Albert Visiting Assistant Professor Gail Bressler Visiting Assistant Professor Kathleen Dunne Professor Matthias Ebinger Visiting Assistant Professor William E. Henry Visiting Assistant Professor Kent Hikida Associate Professor James G. Howie Adjunct Professor William P. Hudson Visiting Assistant Professor Hillary Lobo

Thomas Hanrahan Dean, Pratt School of Architecture

PRATT INSTITUTE 200 WILLOUGHBY AVENUE BROOKLYN, NY 11205 SCHOOL OF ARCHITECTURE 61 ST. JAMES PL BROOKLYN, NY 11205 TELEPHONE 718-399-4304 www.pratt.edu