The first year of the Master of Architecture focused on the disciplinary knowledge of architecture while simultaneously treating the discipline as a contested and uncertain terrain across multiple scales from the architectural detail to infrastructure. In particular, the first semester interrogated and considered specific questions of architecture and its relational conditions at the convergence of modernity and colonialism. The questions point towards the confrontation of environmental, social, and technological changes and the way these manifests in the intersection of bodies, ecologies, the environment, and spatial equity. The second semester of the first year deployed architectural thinking and research to understand architecture as a form of knowledge production while questioning hegemonic epistemologies and systems of knowledge.

Seeking to question the relationship between bodies (individual, social, institutional, etc.) and the spaces and territories that they occupy, this studio works with the goal of producing new opportunities for a more equitable and inclusive idea of the commons. Architecture and its tangential infrastructures, charged and complex sociopolitical devices that simultaneously operate within the fabric of social governance while reproducing it, are not without their informal, heterotopic appropriations and reimaginations from subaltern actors: from the cruising utopias of Christopher Street Pier—which produced an alternative vision for a society in the 70s and 80s which theoretically transcended notions of gender, race, and class within the sites of dilapidated infrastructure—to the contemporaneous, renegade act of temporospatial appropriation of junkspace throughout the city by queer/trans bodies in the practice of underground raving. By disrupting public space and engendering novel methodologies through which it is inhabited, these acts of alternative and defiant placemaking (simultaneously rooted in the logic of pragmatism and romanticism) allow for the restructuring of social relations; they “queer’’ urban infrastructure’s existing hierarchies of property and ownership and aver an unorthodox model of mutual ownership and care of the collective commons.

In this context, the discourse prompted by the semester’s themes of embodiment, mobility, and fugitivity offer a fecund area of interrogation for the studio’s labor: over the course of the semester we turn our attention to our own ontologies of embodied space and knowledge, interrogate and react to/against our quotidian relationship to the built environment and its engendered politics at the scale of the detail, before finally addressing the latent conflicts these politics embody at the scale of the public realm. How can design and research address and reveal complex entanglements and power structures ? And how can architecture reimagine, exacerbate or remediate them?

Modernism dictates that form follows function. But who and what determines function, or need? This formula necessitates a determinative mindset, conceptualizing a singular end user inhabiting a choreographed sequence of spaces, and executed with an industry agreed upon series of “best practices”. In this way, time is frozen at the conceptualization of the project. A building is in itself a work of narrative fiction, a period piece.

Architecture should not be resigned to dominant systems of power. To critique established spatial power dynamics is to advocate for change, not just in a progressive sense, but in adaptation and responsiveness to context. This studio sees built form not as a linear conclusion of a totalizing socioeconomic system, but as a nexus within a multivalent network of economic, social, and environmental vectors in flux. The urban condition is an aggregation of disparate goods and services reflecting competing desires and histories.

Concrete, one of the oldest human construction methods, is a simple composite of lyme, water, and an aggregate (usually sand or gravel). Today, concrete is one of the most plentiful materials on earth—a United Nations report in 2012 estimated that all of the aggregate mined for concrete could form a ring around the Earth 27 meters high and 27 meters wide —yet it’s future in a just transition to a post-carbon world is unclear.

In short, we find concrete at a crossroads of political and ecological imperatives within the discipline of architecture; on the one hand, mitigating the negative externalities of concrete to disadvantaged communities, yet on the other hand, avoiding demolition in order to make the most of the embodied labor and carbon captured in every square inch of concrete.

This studio consider the thorny questions of concrete in New York City. How to remediate concrete’s ills while forestalling excessive demolition? How to leverage existing concrete assets in new ways for local communities? Who has historically felt the negative affects of concrete, and whom has reaped the benefits? How to devise metrics to quantify the embodied labor and carbon costs of concrete in tangible terms? Is there a potential second (or third) act for New York’s concrete assets (buildings, landscapes, infrastructures) to shift their remaining years towards public good?

This studio focused on reoccupying the spatial resultants from the imposition of the Manhattan Bridge over historic neighborhoods and communities.

Focusing on the areas around the landing areas on either side of the Manhattan Bridge, the studio explored the resultant boundary conditions created by the top-down urban planning methods, examining which segments of the population had been cordoned off and de-prioritized by the imposition of this infrastructure. Delving into the history by collecting archival materials of tenement populations of predominantly Jewish and Cantonese communities as well as the erasure of some of the earliest African American schools in New York City.

These same overlooked areas act as present day third spaces where marginal communities can congregate. During repeated site visits, students explored both these overlooked areas, identifying and researching populations such as those in the gray-economy informal market vendors and bike delivery workers as well as vulnerable populations such as elderly population in Chinatown and the unhoused.

Balancing shifting scales, research of these under-served communities was conducted at the human scale through in-person observation. This process driven work which included analog hands-on activities, authoring personal documentary techniques such as material castings, animations, relief models, music, food, and person-to-person interviews.

These authored documents served as the basis for the final outcome of the semester - a series of proposed site interventions, activations, and place of assembly located in and around the odd-shaped lots and spatial off-cuts generated by the marco urban infrastructure.