Housing Lab

The housing lab is an GSAPP-wide initiative under the leadership of the Dean’s Office.

The Lab’s work is supported by generous seed funding from the IDC Foundation.

Students
Research assistantships and fellowships at the lab are competitive and processed through the GSAPP application form once or twice per year. We encourage all interested students to respond to the posted positions. For the lab’s first year, research assistants and fellows were appointed in a competitive interview process through nominations from program directors and faculty.

The project assistant program engages students on an hourly basis to support project work. To be considered, any interested student currently enrolled at GSAPP are encouraged to complete a brief application and upload their CV here to join the roster that is consulted on a rolling basis.

Faculty
and mentorship is critical to the lab’s commitment to rigor and research. Interested faculty are encouraged to reach out to facultyaffairs@arch.columbia.edu.

Alums and Professionals
Involvement and support is essential to advancing the Lab’s mission of grounding action-oriented practice. Please reach out to gsappalumni@columbia.edu.


Previous Faculty and Student Affiliates

Graduate Research Assistants (GRA)
2022
Jacob Kackley ‘23 M.Arch; Alisa Nurmansyah, '23 MSUP; Dillon Pinholster '23 MSRED

2021
Bernadette Baird-Zars, '22 PhD, Urban Planning; Jules Kleitman, '22 MArch; Jonathan Marty, '22 MSUP; Danielle Roberts, '22 MSUP

2020-2021
Juan Sebastian Moreno, '21 MSUP Johane Juliana Clermont, '22 MArch/MSRED Eric J. Iglesias, '21 MSRED

2019-2020
Ericka Mina Song, ‘20 MArch
Erin Purcell, ‘20 MSRED

Lab Project Associates Aditi Shetye, '22 MArch Jenna Davis, PhD Candidate Maria (Maru) Perez, '21 MArch, Fall 2019-Spring 2021 Ian Wach, '21 MArch, Fall 2020-Spring 2021 Mariana Hinojosa, MArch/MSUP '21, Summer 2020

Spring 2020 Project Assistants Lanier Hagerty '21, MSUP Kate McNamara ‘20 MArch
Genevieve Mateyko, MArch Student
Angela Sun, MArch Student
Zeineb Sellami '21, MSUP
Hyun Hye Cathy Bae ‘20 PhD
Ochuko Okor, MArch Student
Michael Snidal PhD Candidate
Yousu Jang ‘20 MSRED
Conor Allerton ‘20 MSUP
Hayes Buchanan, MSUP Student
Mark-Henry Decrausaz, MSRED/MArch Student

2021-2022 Faculty Advisors Mario Gooden Cecily King

2020-2021 Faculty Advisors Mario Gooden Lance Freeman

2019-2020 Faculty (Biennale project-focused)
Daisy Ames
Adam Frampton

Members of the GSAPP faculty who contributed their advice and guidance over the past year include:
Ryan Devlin, Visiting Assistant Professor of Urban Planning
Hilary Sample, IDC Professor of Housing Design
Elliott Sclar, Professor Emeritus of Urban Planning
Rich Froehlich, Adjunct Associate Professor of Real Estate Development and Urban Planning
Lance Freeman, Professor of Urban Planning
Anna Puigjaner, Associate Professor of Professional Practice in Architecture
Laura Kurgan, Professor of Architecture
Patrice Derrington, Holliday Associate Professor and Director of the Real Estate Development Program
Andreas Tjeldflaat, Adjunct Assistant Professor of Architecture

Values
From a multidisciplinary perspective, the Lab team seeks to broaden the understandings of housing beyond units that can be paid for. In our initial conception, we advocate for housing that is:

• Accessible: housing should be connected and embedded in quality environments, with access to meaningful services, communities, and opportunities.
  
• Resilient: housing should be constructed and maintained for health and safety, adaptive to disasters and climate change, and an asset securely enmeshed in networks of belonging and appreciation.
  
• Inclusive: housing should be affordable such that a connected, decent, resilient, and beautiful home does not preclude health or food, and is intentionally accessible to the heterogeneity of people and households.
  

(Re) coding Walkups

The Lab team, in conversations with partners, developed the spring 2020 research into a multi-part business plan: “(Re) coding Walkups.” The business plan lays out an integrated case for innovative and feasible interventions in the existing stock of New York City, with a focus on existing walkups that do not receive subsidies but that house low-income households.

More than half of New York City’s multifamily units are in walkups built between 1901-1930, yet over three-quarters of these buildings have not had any major alterations since construction. An initial Lab project traces an ambitious reform – New York’s 1901 ‘New Law’ that regulated light and air for tenements – into findings relevant for contemporary work, part of which was visualized in GSAPP’s participation in the 2020 Venice Biennial. Across the four chapters of the business plan, the interdisciplinary team identified under-examined markets and overlooked space of innovation in design and planning. The interventions deliver substantial improvements for thousands of households–and the city and climate–at relatively little cost.

The business plan has four interlocking components: (1) Transforming buildings through a set of design and financial cases for adding and strengthening ‘space for survival’ along a spectrum of code shifts (2) Activating a network of shared area amenities for resiliency, financially sustained by a set of buildings (3) Demonstrating new models of financial feasibility for more units and (4) Sustaining maintenance and inclusion through possibilities of limited-equity co-ops.  

Each of these project areas developed in close conversations with developers, non-profits, design firms, and city officials and aim to showcase possibilities for new ways of working in housing. The lab prioritizes these conversations and partnerships as crucial to ensuring the relevancy of the lab’s work to practice and larger systemic change.    

Housing for Survival
Housing ‘for survival’ emerged as a concept in early 2020 to focus the Lab’s perspective on climate and socioeconomic equity on the most pragmatic and immediate: what about housing will help households simply stay alive in particular amidst climate change and disasters?

Housing can and should do more, but survival is the starting point. Launching our thinking of housing and space as a right for individual well-being and the collective also drew strongly on the tradition of progressive reform from New York at the turn of the last century, when the right for adequate private space with light and air to combat disease drove the new tenement law (1901), zoning resolution (1916) and multi-family dwelling law (1928). The lab’s work this year seeks to re-center housing again as decent places to survive and live, carrying forward the tradition of these codes, and also provoking change and experimentation in their contents and concepts.

While COVID-19’s impacts only have underscored the importance of our central inquiry of this year: how can we feasibly and imaginatively intervene in the ‘overlooked’ stock–existing unsubsidized walkup multifamily buildings–to expand inclusion, resilience and access?

In cities under quarantine lockdown, the ways that we live and work compress and stretch into new arenas of time, air and meters, and housing is even more visibly at the center of physical survival. Doubled-up and crowded households isolate, work and get sick together. Twenty-four hour occupation transforms the usage and meaning of units and made urban life only more unequal. The networks of spaces and people across buildings and neighborhoods that also form part of ‘home’ are suspended; ‘stay at home’ excludes parts of the home outside the unit. Access to services, food and help is exponentially localized, highlighting and deepening geographic inequalities. Rent or mortgage payments, paid or forgone, compound on tenants and owners. Is anything about housing the same anymore?

Yes: the particularities of the housing crisis continue under brighter contrast. The Lab’s focus on framing housing in terms of access, inclusion and resilience – and the understandings of how housing intersects with climate change – have only become more clearly urgent over the last months. The tangible Lab outputs of this spring – a set of integrated proposals to transform the ‘overlooked’ multifamily walkups of New York City – now have higher stakes, as a result in many ways; most obviously, the affordable, unsubsidized, crowded tenements are also centers of infection, death and economic hardship.