CIT

SPITZER
SCHOOL of
ARCHI

Y
TECTURE

WO
Architecture

Urban
Design

RKS
Landscape
Architecture

X 2014 to 2017
Sustainability
in the Urban
Environment
 CIT
The Bernard and Anne Spitzer
School of Architecture is deeply
committed to creating a just,

Y
sustainable, and imaginative future
for a rapidly urbanizing planet.
Through innovative research and

WO
interdisciplinary collaboration, the
degree programs in Architecture,
Landscape Architecture, Urban
Design, and Sustainability in the
Urban Environment seek to educate

RKS
a diverse student body to become
engaged professionals, both
reflecting and enriching the complex
communities of local and global
environments. The School acts in
the spirit of the City College of
New York’s historic Ephebic Oath:

X
“To transmit the city, not only
not less, but greater, better,
and more beautiful than it was 2014 to 2017

transmitted to us.”
 CITYWORKS X

Contents: Student Work Contents: Texts

NEW INSTRUMENTALITIES 41
FOR A CITY IN CRISIS: THE CITY
AS INTENT AND METHOD
Julio Salcedo-Fernandez, Chair and Associate Professor
Julio Salcedo-Fernandez proposes pedagogy for an urban world.

CONSTRUCTION TECHNOLOGY: 65
TOWARD A THEORY OF
COMPREHENSIVE DESIGN
Architecture Landscape Christian Volkmann, Associate Professor

9 Architecture Christian Volkmann places technology at the nexus of thought and materiality.

49 TYPECASTING? 87
TEACHING THE STUDIO FOR
DESIGNING SUBURBAN FUTURES
June Williamson, Associate Professor
June Williamson makes a case for building in suburbia.

TRANSIENT SPACES 107

Marina Correia, Adjunct Assistant Professor;
Loukia Tsafoulia, Adjunct Assistant Professor; and
Susan Wines, Adjunct Associate Professor
Marina Correia, Loukia Tsafoulia, and Susan Wines probe the
potential of design for the refugee crisis.

Urban Design Sustainability in the

Preface 4
73 Urban Environment Introduction 6
95 Acknowledgements 115

2 Spitzer School of Architecture City College New York

33
 CITYWORKS X

Preface
I am pleased to present City Works X, the tenth
volume of the Bernard and Anne Spitzer School of
Architecture’s compilation of student work drawn from the
Bachelor of Architecture, Master of Architecture, Master
of Landscape Design, Master of Urban Design, and Master
of Sustainability in the Urban Environment programs. For
its tenth volume, City Works has been conceived of anew.
The student work showcased on the pages that follow is
exemplary instead of exhaustive. The excellence of the
projects demonstrates the hard work of our students
and the dedication of our faculty and staff. The featured
work is also a direct result of the school’s new curriculum,
including a new core studio sequence for BArch students
and advanced studios shared by upper BArch and MArch
students. These curricular changes were led by the faculty
in order to emphasize new directions in architectural
education, trends in the profession, community
engagement, and a trajectory for evidence-based design
and speculation. Finally, these curricular initiatives have
created the opportunity for new sponsored design studios,
a recent initiative begun in the spring 2017 and fall 2018
semesters. In these semesters, the architecture firm
CentraRuddy has sponsored studios for second-year
MArch students focusing on housing on Staten Island’s
north shore. I take enormous pride in sharing the wide
spectrum of work that follows.

Gordon Gebert
Interim Dean
Spitzer School of Architecture

4 Spitzer School of Architecture City College New York 5


Introduction
It has been a few years since the Bernard and Anne
Spitzer School of Architecture has released a new volume
of City Works, the school’s publication of student design
work. While past volumes of the book were comprehensive,
it would have been far too overwhelming for the reader
to sift through the rich backlog of work and take note of
the whirlwind of activity at the school in the past couple
of years—including a revamped Bachelor of Architecture
curriculum, the rebranding of the school’s research center,
the J. Max Bond Center for Urban Futures, under the
leadership of its new director, Shawn Rickenbacker, or the
syrupy pots of honey produced by the bees buzzing on
the school’s roof. A more selective approach has therefore
been taken to present student work in the tenth volume of
City Works—rebranded as CWX. The projects illustrated
and discussed here are threads in a denser tissue of
design practices, pedagogical inquiries, and research
trajectories at the school. The point of showing a series of
individual trajectories is to let distinct speculations about
architectural design stand on their own merit.
In CWX, student work is organized in four
principal sections reflecting the disciplines at the SSA:
architecture, landscape architecture, urban design, and
sustainability in the urban environment. In between
each of these sections are essays written by SSA faculty
members who investigate topical issues concerning
architectural pedagogy. In the first of these essays, “New
Instrumentalities for a City in Crisis,” Department Chair
and Associate Professor Julio Salcedo-Fernandez outlines
a mission for pedagogical diversity as a means to probe the
role of architecture in our rapidly urbanizing world. In the
second essay, “Construction Technology: Toward a Theory
6 Spitzer School of Architecture
CITYWORKS X
of Comprehensive Design,” Associate Professor Christian
Volkmann argues that construction technology must be
grasped at the nexus of its conceptual understanding
and material reality. In the third essay, “Typecasting?
Teaching the Studio for Designing Suburban Futures,”
Associate Professor June Williamson examines suburbia
as a generative site of architectural investigation. Adjunct
Assistant Professor Marina Correia, Adjunct Assistant
Professor Loukia Tsafoulia, and Adjunct Associate
Professor Suzan Wines are the authors of the final essay,
“Transient Spaces.” As part of their broader pedagogical
and curatorial project of the same name, they prompt
architects to ameliorate the spaces and everyday practices
of refugees. Much like the student work featured in CWX,
these essays are not meant to be an all-inclusive statement
of the philosophies and approaches of the school’s faculty;
they are but four possible trajectories. Collectively, the
visual and written speculations about design in CWX are
intended to be a testament to the diversity of our students
and to the multiple points of view at the school.
Sean Weiss, Ph.D.
Assistant Professor
City College New York 7
 CITYWORKS X
CITYWORKS X

8 Spitzer School of Architecture

Architecture
City College New York 9
 Architecture CITYWORKS X

Architecture
At the SSA, the only public school of architecture in courses in technology, structures, visual studies, digital
Manhattan, the study of architecture prepares students to techniques, history, and theory. While the curriculum of
design for the betterment of our shared global community the undergraduate and graduate programs are unique,
and urbanizing world. These convictions stem from our students collaborate in their final year in advanced design
position in Harlem, an urban neighborhood historically studios that examine topical issues in architectural design.
known for its vibrant cultural diversity. Our unique location This section of CWX is divided into twot parts to show the
encourages an awareness and appreciation of a wide range unique contributions of the undergraduate and graduate
of values and perspectives that inspire future architects to programs in architecture.
act as global citizens.
Our architecture curriculum reflects the diversity
of our students, the inventive research of our faculty, and
transdisciplinary collaborations. Students and faculty from
the several disciplines housed in the school mix together
to produce invigorated, reimagined visions for architecture
of today and the future. We prepare students to become
engaged designers and to apply an expansive set of
skills to address pressing social, cultural, environmental,
and professional challenges. With an emphasis on agile
thinking, the architecture programs aim to educate the next
generation of innovators redefining the role of the architect
in the twenty-first century. It is our intention to foster the
widest range of possibilities to prepare students through
a network of a distinguished and accomplished faculty, a
roster of successful alumni, an institutional environment of
great breadth and deep history, and a vibrant and diverse
professional community.
Architectural education at the SSA includes a
professional accredited Bachelor of Architecture Program,
a professional accredited Master of Architecture Program,
and a post-professional Master of Science in Architecture
degree. A rigorous studio-based education is at the
center of these programs and is augmented by required
10 Spitzer School of Architecture City College New York 11
 Architecture CITYWORKS X

BArch Program 1

The Bachelor of Architecture degree is a five-year ac-

credited program that prepares students to become profession-
al architects capable of creating intelligent design solutions in a
variety of scales and environments. Inspired by a commitment
to society and ethical practice, the program has historically
prepared graduates for positions in every facet of architectural
practice, from government agencies and prestigious design
offices to graduate programs. The heartbeat of the program is
a creative studio education, which, through imaginative chal-
lenges and open and collaborative discussion, seeks to promote
a deep knowledge of history and of building technologies, a
facility with the latest digital tools, and an intellectual engage-
ment with architectural design practice. The program uses New
York City as its research lab to craft alternative narratives about
public and private life for increasingly populated urban centers,
while also looking beyond our local context to prepare students 2
for practicing in a rapidly urbanizing world. These urban stories
are steeped in a sustainability that stems from trans-disciplinary
collaboration as the students mix with those in the school’s oth-
er programs including graduate architectural design, landscape
architecture, urban design, and urban sustainability. Students
become strong independent thinkers through an intense three-
year core program, consisting of six thematic studios, including
Craft, Environment, Cities, Histories, Assemblies, and Integra-
tion. This sequence of studios supports two years of elective
study in architectural design, history, and technology. In their
final two years in the program, students enroll in advanced
design studios focusing on topical issues in architectural design
and research, and they have the option to undertake a thesis
project in the fifth year. Collectively, the SSA’s BArch curriculum
prepares students to productively contribute to the practice of 1 Paola Ruiz 2 JuHyun Hwoang
architectural design in the shaping of future cities. Core Studio 1, Fall 2016
with Prof. Pablo de Miguel
Core Studio 1, Fall 2016
with Prof. Phillip Lee

12 Spitzer School of Architecture City College New York 13

 Architecture CITYWORKS X

1 3 4

1 Ngwang Tenzin 2 Chaerin Kim, Brian Ortega, and Gilbert Santana 3 Sarah Chikh Ousman 4 Ashley R. Singh 5 Armita Peirovani and Hyun Pak
Core Studio 2, Spring 2016 Core Studio 2, Spring 2016 and Alexandra Bilinkski Core Studio 3, Fall 2017 Core Studio 5, Fall 2016
with Prof. Nandini Bagchee with Prof. Anathasios Haritos Core Studio 3, Spring 2016 with Prof. Eliana Dotan with Prof. Fabian Llonch
with Prof. Loukia Tsfoulia

14 Spitzer School of Architecture City College New York 15

 Architecture CITYWORKS X

The program
2 4

uses New York City

as its research lab.
1

1 Jasmine Cato 2 Bernadette McCrann and Robert Bahnsen 3 Brett Barshay and Hannah Deegan
Core Studio 4, Spring 2017 Core Studio 6, Spring 2016 Core Studio 6, Spring 2016
with Prof. David Hotson with Prof. Pablo de Miguel with Prof. Pablo de Miguel

16 Spitzer School of Architecture City College New York 17

 Architecture CITYWORKS X

1 3

2 4

1 Wei Zhang and Pei Ying Jang 2 Marta Dominguez 3 Carlos Mo Wu and Jorge Burgos 4 Carlos Mo Wu and Jorge Burgos
Advanced Studio 7, Fall 2015 Advanced Studio 7, Fall 2016 Advanced Studio 8, Spring 2016 Advanced Studio 8, Spring 2016
with Prof. Shawn Rickenbacker with Prof. Anathasios Haritos with Prof. Julio Salcedo with Prof. Julio Salcedo

18 Spitzer School of Architecture City College New York 19

 Architecture CITYWORKS X

1 2

1 Samantha Ong, Juan Vallejo, 2 Samantha Ong, Juan Vallejo, 3 Brett Jun
Daniella Vega Ortiz, and Emir Abdul Emir Daniella Vega Ortiz, and Emir Abdul Emir Advanced Studio 8, Spring 2017
Advanced Studio 8, Spring 2017 Advanced Studio 8, Spring 2017 with Prof. Martin Stigsgaard
with Prof. Loukia Tsfoulia with Prof. Loukia Tsfoulia

20 Spitzer School of Architecture City College New York 21

 Architecture CITYWORKS X

1 2 5

3 4

1 Class Installation 2 Marija Gjorgjievska

Advanced Studio 8, Spring 2017 Advanced Studio 8, Spring 2017
with Prof. Jeremy Edmiston with Prof. Hillary Brown

3 Chaerin Kim 4 Seterotomic Casts: Mold for Plaster Casts

Sterotomic Projections Visual Studies, Spring 2016
Visual Studies, Spring 2016 with Prof. Frank Melendez
with Prof. Frank Melendez

22 Spitzer School of Architecture City College New York 23

 Architecture CITYWORKS X

MArch Program 1

The graduate programs in architecture at the

SSA train students to be agile thinkers—digging deeply into
architectural practice and theory, bridging disciplinary bound-
aries, networking with diverse stakeholders, and working
effectively across multiple scales. Our wide-ranging, re-
search-based curriculum connects the diverse socio-political
contexts of architecture with emerging building technologies
and challenges students to speculate on new modes of living
for a rapidly urbanizing planet. Highlights from this section
of CWX, which includes student work from both our profes-
sional, three-year Master of Architecture and post-profes-
sional, one-year Master of Science in Architecture programs
include Detroit X, a proposal for revitalizing shrinking resi-
dential neighborhoods in Detroit; Resilient Souk, a new urban
marketplace and coastal resiliency infrastructure project
along the shoreline of lower Manhattan; Carbon X-Change, 2
a new kind of cultural center in Midtown Manhattan, which
scrubs polluted air from the city; Parking PLUS, a project
which reclaims 4000 acres of surface parking lots in Long
Island; Shakers Sharing, an incubator for new kinds of in-
tentional communities in Maine; Terra Fluxus, an innovative
public swimming pool carved into the rock of East Harlem
that provides industrial water filtration and power for the
surrounding community; Homeless + Housing, an award-win-
ning project exploring the future of 3D-printed buildings; and
groundbreaking housing proposals in Staten Island from the
CetraRuddy Design Studio in Housing, an ongoing initiative
to partner with distinguished design professionals in the field.
Collectively, this work demonstrates the expanding aptitudes
of the architect today—who must not only invent new ways to
build but also write new programmatic scenarios that antici- 1 Rashidah Green Sherman
Studio 1.1, Fall 2016
2 Jason Ng
Studio 1.1, Fall 2015
pate the future challenges of the discipline. with Prof. Loukia Tsafoulia with Prof. Brad Horn

24 Spitzer School of Architecture City College New York 25

 Architecture CITYWORKS X

1 3

DEMOGRAPHICS
Students
Faculty
Staff
FUNCTION
Sitting
Laying
Relaxing
Waiting
FORM
Extension of concrete retaining wall
Angles based on ergonomics
A play of voids

MATERIAL
Exposed cardboard
Tubes are reusable & recycable
Contains 42% recycled content

CIRCULATION
Between two linear paths

1 Alexandra Chepanova, Wafa Kaddour, 2 Kenia Peralta, Nikitha Menon, 3 Hakan Westergren and Bryan Espinoza 4 David Clark Smith
Sadie Rayne, Nicolas Losi, Olivia Sklyarova, Patrick Muldoon, and Fengjing You Visual Studies, Spring 2016 Studio 1.2, Spring 2017
Brandon Thompson, and Fengjing You Studio 1.1, Fall 2017 with Prof. Elisabetta Terragni with Prof. Brad Horn
Studio 1.1, Fall 2017 with Prof. Loukia Tsafoulia
with Prof. Loukia Tsafoulia

26 Spitzer School of Architecture City College New York 27

 Architecture CITYWORKS X

1 2

1 Indre Barsauskaite 2 Jason Ng

Studio 1.2, Spring 2015 Studio 1.2, Spring 2016
with Prof. Elisabetta Terragni with Prof. Elisabetta Terragni

28 Spitzer School of Architecture City College New York 29

 Architecture CITYWORKS X
1
EAST ELEVATION
1/64” = 1’

Utilize design as
2

Desbrosses

Vestry St.

Laight St.
Watts St.
.

Canal St.
l St

Hubert St
na
Ca

St.
an agent of change.
West St.

PL (0,0)

Phase II
Phase III
Phase I

1
A103

1
The Hudson
River Phase I

1
A102 Master Plan
N 2
1/64” = 1’ - 0”

1 Joseph Arndt, Michelle Atri, and Kathleen Bender 2 William Sloman and Matthew Noonan 3 Kiamesha Robinson and Glenn Bell
Studio 1.3, Fall 2015 Studio 1.3, Fall 2015 Studio 1.3, Fall 2016
with Prof. Martin Stigsgaard with Prof. Ali C. Höcek with Prof. Ali C. Höcek

30 Spitzer School of Architecture City College New York 31

 Architecture CITYWORKS X

1 3

2 4

1 Kathleen Bender 2 Nancy Kelleher, Matthew Shufelt, and Marcos Gasc 3 Marina Santos 4 Hakan Westergren
Studio 1.4, Spring 2016 Studio 1.4, Spring 2017 Studio 1.4, Spring 2017 Studio 1.4, Spring 2017
with Prof. James Khamsi with Prof. Fabian Llonch with Prof. Fabian Llonch with Prof. June Williamson

32 Spitzer School of Architecture City College New York 33

 Architecture CITYWORKS X

1 3 5

2 4

1 Katerina Marcelja 2 Peter Kostelev 3 Valeria Rybyakova and Ryan Kramer 4 Grace Lawal
Advanced Studio, Fall 2016 Advanced Studio, Fall 2017 Advanced Studio, Fall 2015 Advanced Studio, Fall 2017
with Prof. June Williamson with Prof. Brad Horn with Prof. Shawn Rickenbacker with Prof. Brad Horn

34 Spitzer School of Architecture City College New York 35

 Architecture CITYWORKS X

Marcos Gasc
Advanced Studio, Fall 2017
with Prof. Caitlin Swaim

36 Spitzer School of Architecture City College New York 37

 Architecture CITYWORKS X

1 3

2 4 5

1 Miwako Akiyama 2 Yiwei He, Ryan Cerone, and Kyle Mcardle 3 Gabriel Morales 4 Laura Alison, Patrick 5 Cameron Shore, Emma Murray,
Advanced Studio, Fall 2017 Advanced Studio, Fall 2015 Advanced Studio, Fall 2017 Brophy, and Yiwei He and Jeff Kaufman
with Prof. Caitlin Swaim with Prof. Fabian Llonch with Prof. Henry Grosman Advanced Computing, Fall 2015 Advanced Computing, Fall 2016
with Prof. Jonathan Scelsa with Prof. Jonathan Scelsa

38 Spitzer School of Architecture City College New York 39

 CITYWORKS X
Architecture

NEW
INSTRUMENTALITIES
FOR A CITY IN CRISIS:
THE CITY AS INTENT
AND METHOD
Julio Salcedo-Fernandez,
Chair And Associate Professor

40 Spitzer School of Architecture 41

NEW INSTRUMENTALITIES
Urbem disposito non
Consilio Phylum
A Designed City Not
a Design Phylum
At the SSA, our clarity and
direction derive from a newly ad-
opted mission to design a just,
sustainable, and imaginative
future for a rapidly urbanizing
planet. To seek a better urban fu-
ture, we mine the city for its best
traits. We endorse plurality and
hybridity, and we shy from singu-
lar responses. The city becomes
both our intent and method pred-
icated on a model of multiplicity
of concerns and the instruments
that afford their definition. They
provide imaginative resolutions to
reinvigorate an urbanity in crisis.
We are also keenly aware of the
world today and of the often singu-
lar histories and perspectives that
have brought us here. Collectively,
both our mission and our socio-
historical awareness define our
difference.
At times of crisis, stake-
holders may call for a singular,
reactive response to right the
ship. Historically, this has not only
manifested in politics but also in
schools of design. In architectural
pedagogy, some past models in-
clude the Bauhaus’s revolutionary
re-conceptualization of peda-
gogy at the advent of a pervasive
42
industrialization in the 1920s; the
scientification of public schools
of design in the United States
to more closely mirror postwar
positivist pre-occupations and
government funding streams in
the 1960s; Columbia University’s
complete re-cast of pedagogy as
a computational paradigm in the
1990s; and, in the early 2000s,
the University of Pennsylvania’s
transmutation through planning
and abstract design of landscape
architecture as an urban discipline
to address the failed divided mod-
els that begat sprawl and urban
wastelands. I refer to each of these
focused contributions as a peda-
gogical or design phylum—that is,
a solipsistic category of design.
Although they have bestowed the
design disciplines with an oper-
ational range of benefits, most
of them have rendered our urban
condition less complex and less
resilient. The focused benefits of
a single pedagogical phylum have
additional disadvantages, as much
is lost, excluded, and ultimately
wasted. For instance, the possi-
bility of a historical continuum in
design has long been a casualty of
pedagogical phylum models.
At the SSA, we seek to be
equally radical, albeit in a deliber-
ately plural approach in order to
investigate several tracks of in-
quiry. We believe that a school can
be modeled on the city. A city is
plural and hybrid. As Bruno Latour
underscores, urban phenomena
have slippery ontologies; they can
exist as natural and cultural, aes-
thetic and social, infrastructural,
and immaterial. Accordingly, our
school probes for better urban fu-
tures through intertwined strands,
disciplines, and pedagogical phyla.
This radical, multi-pronged
schema of pedagogical phyla
achieves several goals. First, dis-
tinct phenomena and concerns
of design—either in an individual
discipline or across disciplines
—afford distinctly suited design
instruments and means. Second,
the range of means and concerns
provide a constant ground for
evaluation and assessment. In
other words, diverse pedagogies
and concerns productively assess
the successes and shortcomings
of our mission for a better urban
future. Our BArch studio curric-
ulum’s core competencies are
divided into categories such as
“Cities” and “Craft” which provide
students with a range of in-depth
research opportunities to de-
velop knowledge of various design
preoccupations. In addition, our
landscape program’s studios in-
terweave design, social justice,
and ecology, expanding the defini-
tion and understanding of the role
of natural systems in the city.
CITYWORKS X
Why Design?
The SSA is comprised
of architects, landscape
architects, urban designers, and
urban sustainability experts,
forging a trans-disciplinary
environment. We integrate
streams of knowledge from an
array of fields—engineering,
sociology, environmental
sciences, economics—to
define instrumentalities that
provide conducive systems,
structures, forms, and spaces
for a better urban future.
Accordingly, I propose the term
“instrumentality” as a cogent
and effective way to encompass
contingency, design suitability,
application, and expertise. A
design instrumentality is an
episteme and agent of applied
design. These instrumentalities
help enact a particular
environment in terms of its
materiality, performance, spatial
reality, choreography, and
inhabitation.
Collaborations with other
fields of knowledge require
robust instrumentalities in order
to utilize design as an agent of
change. Design instrumentalities
materialize and spatialize these
new transdisciplinary connections;
were it not for design, other
epistemes may not fully render
43
NEW INSTRUMENTALITIES
the city. This was painfully clear
in many of the aforementioned
pedagogical models that rely on a
singular phylum. One may look to
the late 1960s in particular, during
the period of the scientification of
architecture when novel interests
in fields such as sociology
became drivers of design in an
attempt to address the failures
of Modernism. Their lack of a
successful, encompassing design
programs and their associated
instrumentalities, rendered
less performative spaces and
some rather lackluster urban
landscapes.
The chall enges the
city faces a re not only
design c hallenges.
44
How to Help
the City in Crisis?
Having recently recast the
SSA’s curriculum through cultural,
technological, environmental, and
social engagement, we deploy a
newfound design adroitness to
address the different paradigm
shifts that render our cities less
just, plural, safe, entertaining,
productive, and environmentally
proficient. The respective natures
of these challenges are varied:
“Disruptive” digital economies
have impacted the socio-
economic fabric of cities, often
displacing the disenfranchised;
historical and emerging people
and capital flows are creating
radical inequalities in cities; the
changing politics and protocols
of public space are contesting
the right to legitimate or question
power, history, memory, gender,
cultures, and race. As I list multiple
flanks of a city in crisis, I have
saved the greatest challenge for
last: our shared world and climate.
Indeed, as Houston floods, Miami
sinks, and Beijing chokes, the
changes brought about by climate
change and resource management
are already catastrophic.
CITYWORKS X
Why Engagement?
The pedagogical
transformations in previous
design schools were not without
heated debates which resulted
in generations of irreconcilable
camps of thought—turf wars
between different strains of
modernity, post-modernity and
neo-modernity. In debates over
postmodernism, historicists
believed in the symbol, form,
and content of an architectural
language while post-structuralists
chose to destabilize the structure
and communicative role of
architecture language. Afterwards,
the debate shifted to question
45
NEW INSTRUMENTALITIES CITYWORKS X

Collabora tions with

other fields o f knowledge
require robust
instrumenta lities in order
to utilize d esign as an
agent of change.
46 47
NEW INSTRUMENTALITIES CITYWORKS X
CITYWORKS X

critical practices as oblivious to Indeed, the challenges

the nuanced expansive world the city faces are not only
beyond the academy and design. design challenges. Through
In design schools today—in the transdisciplinary collaboration
throngs of the amply described we, as SSA faculty and students,
double crises of the environment can work to identify the objects
and of the ethical, inclusive and subjects of these challenges,
market-economy society—the to research their causes and find
incidences of political upheaval new design instrumentalities to
and contrarian philosophical views address them. For we are now in a
are relatively tame compared with position to salvage and invigorate
earlier models. Paradoxically, we the urban realm.
are undergoing an equal or larger
crisis with far less argumentation
of how to operate. While past
debates were healthy, they were
often presented as a zero-sum
game. Inspired by Latour, we need
to turn to an engagement that,
rather than positing sweeping
ideologies, identifies concerns as
quasi-objects or quasi-subjects
to collectively find broad interest
and shared intent. As designers,
we can develop a research
practice and instrumentalities
to transform these objects of
concern into objects of change.
In this fashion, we can discuss
and evaluate the success of the
design instrumentalities we seek
to deploy, according to how well

Landscape
they address the phenomena
of a city in crisis and target the
myriad forces conspiring to

Architecture
negatively alter its essential virtue
of inclusivity and perhaps its very
existence.

48 City College New York 49

 Landscape Architecture CITYWORKS X

Master of Landscape Architecture

The Master of Landscape Architecture Program of qualitative capacities of urban ground are repre-
aims to prepare students to design environmentally and sented with a proposal for an abandoned nuclear power
socially vibrant landscapes for twenty-first century cities. plant. Designs for urban ecological structures were
Our curriculum supports students’ commitment to design proposed in an ASLA Student Award winning project on
excellence by developing the skills necessary to respond Plant-Based Economies Driving Ecological Renewal in
creatively and ethically to both the anthropogenic and Haiti, as well as in the Rome-Detroit studio, a Red Hook
ecological forces that shape urban centers. Emphasis is Studio, and a series of steel walls for a park in Brownsville
placed on sustainable designs that promote social justice Brooklyn. An examination of the changing perceptions
and equity. Studios explore issues of increasing global- of cultural monuments, led to a proposal to replace the
ization, expanding urbanization, environmental and social Charging Bull in New York City’s financial district with a
system sustainability, the promotion of social and environ- herd of steel origami cattle. The MLA projects section
mental justice, the need for transformed land management concludes with large-scale future city systems planning
practices in response to diminishing natural resources, at JFK airport.
and the mitigation and adaptation to climate change. The
Master of Landscape Architecture Program studios are
a collaborative effort among faculty members, students,
allied programs, and partner institutions. We have devel-
oped applied design and planning research projects for
New York City that have been presented as models for
other cities across the country and around the world.
Recent studio work presented in this section
explores the interface between environmental and social
processes occurring along a spectrum from those driven
more by land-based processes to planning and design
for areas human interactions and material culture domi-
nate the urban realm. We present the following projects
to represent the wide scope of the discipline, beginning
with investigations into landscape tectonics. Studio proj-
ects exploring aspects of urban ecological systems include
Staten Islands’ brownfield marshlands, and a radical revi-
sion of the Battery in Lower Manhattan. Investigations

50 Spitzer School of Architecture City College New York 51

 Landscape Architecture CITYWORKS X

Anna Speidel, “Process of Place”

Studio 1, Fall 2016
with Prof. Counts, Johnson, and Alessi

52 Spitzer School of Architecture City College New York 53

 Landscape Architecture CITYWORKS X

Kate Jirasiritham, “Reclamation” Jacob Fiss Hobart, “Recovering the Battery”

Studio 3, Fall 2016 Studio 2, Spring 2017
with Prof. Seavitt Nordenson with Prof. Hoffman Brandt

54 Spitzer School of Architecture City College New York 55

 Landscape Architecture CITYWORKS X

Christine Facella, “Forests on the Edge” James Carroll, “Rome-Detroit-Concrete”

Studio 6, Spring 2016 Studio 5, Fall 2016
with Prof. Seavitt Nordenson and Seibert with Prof. Terragni

56 Spitzer School of Architecture City College New York 57

 Landscape Architecture CITYWORKS X

Sarah Toth, Red Hook “Filling in the Gaps” Yifan Xing, “Brownsville Park Design”
Studio 2, Spring 2016 Studio 3, Fall 2015
with Prof. Studer and Seamans with Prof. Weintraub

58 Spitzer School of Architecture City College New York 59

 Landscape Architecture CITYWORKS X

Mike Madden, “Nuclear Ground”

Studio 6, Spring 2017
with Prof. Seavitt Nordenson and Seibert

60 Spitzer School of Architecture City College New York 61

 Landscape Architecture CITYWORKS X

Hana Georg, “Herd Mentality” Joint Studio with UD Mid-review “Exhibition Airport 2016”
Studio 2, Spring 2017 Studio 5, Fall 2016
with Prof. Hoffman Brandt with Prof. Hoffman Brandt and Terragni

62 Spitzer School of Architecture City College New York 63

 CITYWORKS X
Landscape Architecture

CONSTRUCTION
TECHNOLOGY:
TOWARD A
THEORY OF
COMPREHENSIVE
DESIGN
Christian Volkmann,
Associate Professor

64 Spitzer School of Architecture 65

CONSTRUCTION TECHNOLOGY
Science need not be called
anything but a collection of
recipes that always work.
All the rest is literature.
—Paul Valéry, Tel Quel (1941)
Paul Valéry’s connection
between science and literature
carries important implications
for understanding construction
technology’s bearing on archi-
tecture. Science and literature
help develop tangible, creative
skill sets. Both encourage
original thinking and, beyond
the academic realm, promise to
develop a satisfying professional
path, and create a better, more
meaningful, and more beautiful
future through shaping the built
environment.
That a thought can actually be
transmitted into material form is a
compelling aspect of architecture.
In that respect, a designer acts as
an inventor, a tinkerer, a bricoleur.
Only what exists can be used to
prove a case. Construction tech-
nology offers an essential design
link between the immaterial and
the material. This objective is
becoming more and more relevant
across multiple perspectives in
contemporary architecture.
In the past decades, our urban
environment—where the building
sector is one of the most powerful
66
generators of economic devel-
opment—has created a growing
sense of weariness and thus
hinders architectural creativity.
The relationship between the
immaterial and the material—
although vital—is often articulated
in the “real world” in ways that are
unsatisfying and discouraging.
Decisions seldom negotiate the
conceptual and the practical with
significant intellectual consid-
eration. The building material
industry encourages this discon-
nection, favoring repetitiveness
in its production and creating
material solutions for which one
system fits all. Today’s landscapes
of social media and the dramatic
societal changes they have engen-
dered also point to a world without
a strong, specific, and immanent
material understanding.
Nevertheless, our admiration
for customization, maker culture,
and artisanal knowledge grows
constantly and sharply contrasts
with the immateriality of our
digital world. The attraction
to making is deeply related
to our experience and search
for an authentic way of being,
connecting our familiarity with
ourselves with the things that
surround us. Accordingly, mate-
riality must be understood as an
approach that merges science and
literature. Valéry’s “recipes that
always work” reflect the principles
that promise success. The “rest”
relates to poetry, our experience of
thought, and specific narratives.
All must be utilized in concert to
create a holistic understanding.
Construction technology must
be learned in ways that connect
a conceptual design narrative to
specific principles of material-
ization. Learning to negotiate the
two, however, is a challenging
task. They must be embraced
permanently in order to develop
literacy in diverse techniques and
their utilization for design skills.
An appropriate technical solution
must be considered in relation
to its conceptual intent. It must
serve the project’s immaterial
idea. To interrelate one to the
other is paramount.
Many design studios address
such comprehensive problems
by concentrating on context
and overall conditions. They
then zoom into a smaller scale
for refinement but still address
program, function, circulation,
public-private patterns or
historic references as part of an
ectoscopic, big-picture inves-
tigation, with rather immaterial
parameters. Accordingly, the
haptic understanding of mate-
riality remains circumscribed.
Construction technologies must
be integrated into design thinking
CITYWORKS X
to merge the material and the
immaterial, and to move beyond
design considerations merely
based in visual logic.
When addressing mate-
riality and concomitant
questions concerning the ways
of making, architecture should
be approached endoscopi-
cally—from the inside out—by
concentrating on assemblies and
how internal relationships interre-
late. In so doing, the subcutaneous
conditions become emphasized.
They have to evolve through
explorations in sections and
dissection. The deepest under-
standing of a subject’s anatomy
develops by using techniques
to deconstruct and reconstruct
an artifact. To develop tangi-
bility in architecture requires
understanding its anatomical
conditions.
The technology sequence in
the BArch and MArch Programs
at the SSA is composed of three
courses:
Construction Technology 1
analyzes basic building systems,
predominantly in wood and
masonry. As part of this course,
students build 1-1/2”=1’-0”
models, addressing the aesthetic
and physical qualities of key
details such as wall-ground,
wall-floor, wall-opening; wall-roof
and corner conditions. The investi-
67
CONSTRUCTION TECHNOLOGY CITYWORKS X

Solar RoofPod and Harlem Garden

for Urban Food at SSA

68 69
CONSTRUCTION TECHNOLOGY
gation negotiates visual effect and
physical translation.
Construction Technology
2 looks more closely at mate-
rial strategies generated by
industrial processes—such as
steel, aluminum, and concrete
fabrication—and utilizes them
architecturally. Here, too, study
models are built, now at an even
more challenging scale of 3”=1’-0”,
concentrating on how particular
methods help create perceivable
material experiences and articula-
tions.
Construction Technology
3 investigates environmental
control, response, and manipu-
lation. In this course, students
develop upon knowledge acquired
in earlier courses to use parametric
tools and to negotiate between the
immaterial and the material. They
generate an adapted design that
responds to measurable impact
and conceptual ideas related to a
specific site. Several scales and
design techniques come together.
The SSA’s design-build
efforts support this strategy. So
far, the Solar RoodPod has been
at the center of these efforts—a
plus-net-energy roof pavilion
presented at the Department of
Energy’s 2011 Solar Decathlon
on the National Mall in Wash-
ington D.C. The RoofPod is now
permanently installed on our
70
CITYWORKS X
That a thought
school’s rooftop. Its ongoing
programming—notably the
expansion of its garden—has
also contributed to these efforts.
can actually
Smaller projects—such as building
furniture including a conference
table for the RoofPod—are testing
this ground in tangible ways.
be transmitted
Through exposure to specific
design-build projects, students
cognitively learn to appreciate and
adopt particular design strategies.
Furthermore, the RoofPod lunch
into material
lecture series brings practitioners
to the school who probe the rela-
tionship between technology and
architecture, exposing students to
form is
a range of conceptual and intellec-
tual investigations.
The use of hands-on forms
of learning is paramount to
a compelling
understanding composition and
results. Our goal is to manipulate
the common and often profane
approach to assemblies, thus
developing more meaningful and
aspect of
uncanny architecture. Skills must
be built that relate to craft and
haptic learning.
Under these conditions,
architecture.
materiality can reveal intelligent
and sensitive knowledge to a
specific architectural problem.
The poetic existence of materiality
is poised to develop undeniable
appeal. Accordingly, technology
contributes to the sophisticated
making of built form.
71
CONSTRUCTION TECHNOLOGY CITYWORKS X
CITYWORKS X

In that
respect,
a designer
acts as
an inventor,
a tinkerer,
a bricoleur.

72
Urban Design
City College New York 73
 Urban Design CITYWORKS X

Master of Urban Design

The Master of Urban Design Program is focused and the CUNY Graduate Center The Master of Urban
on creating new, equitable, beautiful, and sustainable Design Program is intimate and intense. Embedded
forms, practices, and technologies for the city and urban in a school in which each program foregrounds the
life. Committed to both experiment and amelioration, importance of cities and their decisive impact on the
the two-semester program focuses each year first on a fate of the earth, we offer a year of stimulation,
New York City site and, after a research visit, on design camaraderie, invention, and adventure to a remarkably
for a city in a demanding environment abroad. diverse and dedicated group of students.
Believing that there is no grand, unified discourse
of the urban, the program offers wide opportunities to
engage the unparalleled resources of the City University
of New York and New York City, providing a rich variety
of critical perspectives on urbanism.
The program is designed to be completed in
two full-time, sequential semesters. At the core of the
curriculum is the design studio taught by the program
director. This intensely engages a sequence of problems
ranging from abstract studies to work on a large New
York City site to a project in an interestingly stressed city
elsewhere, visited during the semester break. Projects
have addressed sites including the Ecuadorian rainforest,
Belfast, Tianjin, Nicosia, Johannesburg, New Orleans,
Hanoi, Wuhan, Bogota, Tijuana, Biloxi, San Jose, Houston,
and Chicago.
The design studio is the spine of the program
and three additional courses are taken each semester.
These include required courses in urban theory and
metabolism plus two electives each term, chosen from
the remarkable and wide-ranging urban offerings and
distinguished faculty at the SSA and City College, the
Urban Affairs and Planning Program at Hunter College,

74 Spitzer School of Architecture City College New York 75

 Urban Design CITYWORKS X

Creating new,
equitable, beautiful,
and sustainable
forms, practices, and
technologies.

Deniz Celik Raymond Jiminez

Urban Design, Spring 2016 Urban Design, Spring 2016
with Prof. Quilian Riano with Prof. Quilian Riano

76 Spitzer School of Architecture City College New York 77

 Urban Design CITYWORKS X

Elena Tugusheva Vakhtang Nemsadze

Urban Design, Spring 2017 Urban Design, Spring 2017
with Prof. Michael Sorkin with Prof. Michael Sorkin

78 Spitzer School of Architecture City College New York 79

 Urban Design CITYWORKS X

Vakhtang Nemsadze Katelyen Meyer

Urban Design, Spring 2017 Urban Design, Spring 2018
with Prof. Michael Sorkin with Prof. Michael Sorkin

80 Spitzer School of Architecture City College New York 81

 Urban Design CITYWORKS X

Nadia Constantatos Sara Altohamy

Urban Design, Spring 2018 Urban Design, Spring 2018
with Prof. Michael Sorkin with Prof. Michael Sorkin

82 Spitzer School of Architecture City College New York 83

 Urban Design CITYWORKS X

A rich variety of
critical perspectives
on urbanism.

Marcus Wilford Metrophysics Exhibition at the SSA

Urban Design, Spring 2018 Urban Design, Spring 2018
with Prof. Michael Sorkin Prof. Michael Sorkin

84 Spitzer School of Architecture City College New York 85

 CITYWORKS X
Urban Design

TYPECASTING?
TEACHING
THE STUDIO
FOR DESIGNING
SUBURBAN
FUTURES
June Williamson,
Associate Professor

86 Spitzer School of Architecture 87

TYPECASTING?
Why do I site design studios
in “boring,” suburban places? I’m
teaching architecture at the SSA, in
West Harlem, in Manhattan, in New
York City, the largest, greatest city
in the United States! Why go “out
there”? It may make little sense
to those looking through a lens of
“inside” the city versus “outside.”
But the positionality of the “out/
in” frame in metropolitan space is
relative, especially when thinking
through race and class, so much
so that flummoxed commentators
reacting to the aftermath of the 2014
police shooting of Michael Brown
in the St. Louis suburb of Ferguson
described it, illogically, as an “inner
city suburb.” On the flip side, when
chain stores replace local retailers,
critics are quick to decry the
“suburbanization” of Manhattan.
Maybe I site my studios in
suburban places in part because, as
a building architect who is a woman
(whose mother was a steno-typist, a
damn fast one whose nimble fingers
I inherited), I’m already “outside”
anyway.
In the pair of Advanced Studios
that I’ve taught, “ParkingPLUS”
and “RapidTYPING,” each subtitled
“Studio for Designing Suburban
Futures,” I have applied my research
into the ongoing processes of
suburban retrofitting in North
America, that is the reinhabitation,
redevelopment, and regreening of
postwar, auto-oriented development
types – office parks, shopping malls,
big box stores, parking lots – into
new built forms and uses, often
88
CITYWORKS X
more dense, although sometimes
less. The title ParkingPLUS was
borrowed from a design challenge
for professional design teams that
I organized in 2014, with Kaja Kühl,
for the Long Island-based Rauch
Foundation. The design challenge
—four teams, four sites—was a
follow up to the successful Build a
Better Burb “Be Bold” open ideas
competition I’d run previously
(and documented in my 2013 book
Designing Suburban Futures).
Conceptualizing and organizing a
design competition draws deeply
from the same skill set as preparing
the brief and teaching a compelling
studio course.
For the ParkingPLUS studio
at the SSA, students designed
projects for two sites, adjacent to the
Baldwin and Valley Stream stations
on the Long Island Rail Road, each
comprised of acres of greyfields, Map of metropolitan New York sites used for over a decade in
Williamson’s SSA studios and seminars.
i.e. paved surface parking lots. We
partnered with the Nassau County
planning department, selecting sites
in villages identified in a planning
study as most receptive to transit-
adjacent development (the term
transit-oriented is too charged for
Long Island politics—ay, NIMBYs!).
The lines are elevated, which
created excellent opportunities to
design through section. But first,
students needed to understand
parking structure types so that
they could be innovative with them.
Closing a circle of connections,
we learned from parking structure
research produced in a studio at
Northeastern University taught by
89
TYPECASTING?
Tim Love, who as principal of Utile,
Inc. had been lead designer in one
of the ParkingPLUS professional
design teams the year before.
Once the parking structure types
were understood, students could
reorganize horizontal car storage
into vertical configurations,
liberating land area for which
they proposed new uses: housing,
markets, parks, farms, plazas, etc.
The second studio,
RapidTYPING, is ongoing as I write
this essay. The new iteration is
less tethered to the Long Island
design competitions, but is rooted
in the same idea: to understand
generative building types and typo-
morphologies—the description
of urban form based on detailed
classifications of buildings and open
spaces, as well as the processes of
dynamic change that take place
over time as the form is inhabited.
The aim is to both remake places
that are no longer performing well,
by a range of deeply meaningful
measures—environmental, social
justice, human health, economic—
and to use architecturally-informed
investigations to devise and
represent compelling alternatives.
To do this I sought to engage,
together with the students, in a re-
emergent architectural discourse
around generative typology. We
read Guilio Carlo Argan’s pivotal
1963 essay “On the Typology of
Architecture” as well as writings
and lectures by Rafael Moneo,
Anne Vernez Moudon, Brenda Case
Scheer, Bernard Leupen, Christopher
90
CITYWORKS X
Lee, Sam Jacoby, and Jorge Silvetti.
We toured Forest Hills Gardens with
Kate Orff of SCAPE, and received
pragmatic critiques from Elizabeth
Moule, one of the founders of the
Congress for New Urbanism. The
readings reinforced for me the idea
that typo-morphological thinking
never disappeared from the practice
of architecture but has been
somewhat repressed. While openly
acknowledged in New Urbanist
circles, albeit undertheorized, the
workings of typo-morphology
in contemporary architectural
practices had become torturously
hidden, perhaps to maximize
a posture of distancing from
Postmodernism in the 1970s and
1980s.
But to return back to the studio.
The students compiled a lexicon of
terms, and devised for themselves
a typology that they would then RPA advisor and Valley Stream resident David Sabatino leads a
ParkingPLUS studio site tour in Fall 2015.
use to generate model designs of
four mid-scale building types —
double dwelling, four-plex, vertical
stack, and public hall — as well as
a complete street and square or
common. These types were explored
through a “rapid typing” phase in
which I asked students to design and
fully represent one new building, or
street, design per week. Only then, at
mid-semester, did I introduce sites:
three recently decommissioned
Sears store properties in the greater
New York metropolitan area, each
around 25–30 acres. The final phase
is to test the models on one of the
sites by replacing the big boxes and
parking lots with a healthier, multi-
91
TYPECASTING? CITYWORKS X

The aim is to both remake

places that a re no longer
performing we ll ... and to use
architectura lly-informed
investigatio ns to devise
and represen t compelling
altern atives.
92 93
TYPECASTING?
scalar urban infill tissue of buildings,
streets, blocks, lots, and open
spaces. The results of the studios,
I contend, are not boring at all. It’s
challenging work to propose good
fixes for these mistake-places.
As a coda, I’ll note that tracking
the popular relationship of Sears to
architecture and building over the
course of the twentieth century—the
“American century” —is fascinating,
Section through automated parking tower proposed in
ParkingPLUS scheme by Marija Gjorgjievska,
Advanced Studio 7, Fall 2015
94
CITYWORKS X CITYWORKS X
from mail order kit houses shipped
all over the nation up until 1940,
to Craftsman tools for the do-it-
yourselfer and Kenmore appliances
for the homemaker, to the largest
skyscraper in Chicago, to anchor
department stores in suburban malls
and commercial strips from shore to
shore. There is a rich story there to
tell. Maybe I will explore it in a future
publication.
Sustainability
in the Urban
Environment
City College New York 95
 Sustainability in the Urban Environment
Master of Science in Sustainability
in the Urban Environment
The Master of Science in Sustainability in the
Urban Environment Program is an innovative, interdisci-
plinary program offered jointly by the Spitzer School of
Architecture, the Grove School of Engineering, the City
College Science Division, and the Colin Powell School
for Civic and Global Leadership. It draws upon emerging
approaches in the disciplines of architecture, engi-
neering, science, and social sciences. It aims to prepare
students to devise new generations of buildings, urban
infrastructure, and open spaces while considering rapid
urbanization, climate change, resource limitations, and
potential environmental degradation.
Most of the courses in the program are struc-
tured around research, typically conducted in inter-
disciplinary teams. Capstone projects are explicitly
research-oriented. One image shown here explores an
“infrastructural ecology” or the potential beneficial inter-
actions among existing and proposed new urban infra-
structural facilities sited in proximity on Jamaica Bay. The
students calculated potential energy, water and waste
savings (their recovery and reuse) for exchange among:
first, a DEP wastewater treatment plant; second, an MTA
bus depot and repair garage; and third, a proposed DSNY
organic waste recovery facility. The study became the
basic program for a subsequent advanced design studio.
Another project is an 8-week design initiative
undertaken as a case study in sustainability, part of a
seminar by that name. In teams, twenty students devel-
oped integrated design concepts for a closed-loop,
“circular economy” for a modest new community, a
96 Spitzer School of Architecture
CITYWORKS X
development near Fond Parisien, Haiti on Lake Azuei,
a large brackish water body bordering the Dominican
Republic. The program included improvements to water,
sanitation, agriculture, aquaculture, energy production,
employment and promotion of eco-tourism for Fond
Parisien. The focus of the project is three-fold:
1) designing for enhanced agricultural and aquaculture
productivity, including worker housing; 2) envisioning
an eco-industrial park comprised of complementary
commercial and industrial activities that will create local
employment; 3) creating a master plan for the underde-
veloped national park, Le Parc Naturel, Quisqueya, opti-
mizing its existing botanical garden and wildlife refuge,
and including new eco-tourism facilities. The objective
of the project is to maximize systems integration and
exchanges among all the components of the program.
Student Credits
Capstone:
Kohinoor Begum, Stephanie Ingber, Nanette Navarro,
Alvis Yuen (Spring/Fall 2016)
Fond Parisien project, Case Studies in Sustainability
(Spring 2017):
Kathleen Bender, Ting-Han Chung, Evan Craker, Maria
De Domenico, John Delgado, Silas Drewchin, Michael
Duffy, Alan Eisenberg, Abdallah Labib, Jennifer Leone,
Mira Lieman- Sifry, Michael Lugo-pimentel, Jun Nam,
Solomon Oh, Selma Quddus, Jethro Rebollar, Melissa
Santana, Nicole Schmitt, Shika Shah, Cameron Shore,
Elena Tugusheva, Jacline Vargas
City College New York 97
 Sustainability in the Urban Environment CITYWORKS X

Devise new
2

generations of
buildings, urban
infrastructure,
and open space.

1 3

1 Kohinoor Begum, Stephanie Ingber, Nanette Navarro, and Alvis Yuen 2 Diagrammatic Relationships 3 Sanitation System
Capstone, Spring/Fall 2016 Case Studies in Sustainability, Spring 2017 Case Studies in Sustainability, Spring 2017
with Prof. Hillary Brown with Prof. Hillary Brown with Prof. Hillary Brown

98 Spitzer School of Architecture City College New York 99

 Sustainability in the Urban Environment CITYWORKS X

1 3

1 Systems Integration 2 Community Biodigester 3 Upland Agroforestry, Lowland Silvopasture, and Lakou Housing
Case Studies in Sustainability, Spring 2017 Case Studies in Sustainability, Spring 2017 Case Studies in Sustainability, Spring 2017
with Prof. Hillary Brown with Prof. Hillary Brown with Prof. Hillary Brown

100 Spitzer School of Architecture City College New York 101

 CITYWORKS X

New Lakou Housing

Case Studies in Sustainability, Spring 2017
with Prof. Hillary Brown

Spitzer School of Architecture City College New York

 Sustainability in the Urban Environment CITYWORKS X

1 3

1 Existing Site Conditions 2 Site Master Plan 3 Energy Master Plan, 4 Natural Park Master Plan
Case Studies in Sustainability, Spring 2017 Case Studies in Sustainability, Spring 2017 Case Studies in Sustainability, Spring 2017 Case Studies in Sustainability, Spring 2017
with Prof. Hillary Brown with Prof. Hillary Brown with Prof. Hillary Brown with Prof. Hillary Brown

104 Spitzer School of Architecture City College New York 105

 CITYWORKS X
Sustainability in the Urban Environment

TRANSIENT SPACES
Marina Correia,
Adjunct Assistant Professor;
Loukia Tsafoulia,
Adjunct Assistant Professor; and
Suzan Wines,
Adjunct Associate Professor

106 Spitzer School of Architecture 107

TRANSIENT SPACES
At its sharpest, my
hypothesis is that beneath
the country specifics of
diverse global crises lie
emergent systemic trends
shaped by a few very basic
dynamics. For that reason,
empirical research and
conceptual recoding must
happen together.
—Saskia Sassen, Expulsions:
Brutality and Complexity in
the Global Economy (2014)
In a world where economies,
ecologies, ideologies, identities,
and territorial struggles are
no longer defined by borders,
we are all potential refugees.
Transience has become the
predominant mode of existence
in many parts of the world. In
response, planners and architects
are being challenged to create
infrastructural systems and new
spatial structures of unparalleled
resilience and elasticity. Transient
Spaces is a collaborative
curatorial project inspired by the
work of students in Advanced
Design Studios taught by Loukia
Tsafoulia and Suzan Wines at
the SSA in 2017. We believe that
some recurring spatial and social
implications of the students’
work reflect the school’s mission
to promote a just, sustainable,
108
CITYWORKS X
and imaginative future for
our rapidly urbanizing planet.
Transient Spaces was established
as a forum for faculty, students,
and practitioners to explore
the concept of impermanence
in its various social and formal
manifestations. The project
aspires to identify radical tools
and systems for rethinking
disciplinary boundaries and to
construct ideological positions
that embrace an ethics of
economy and precarity as forces
of change and potentiality in the
making and re-making of civic
spaces.
In the advanced design
studio “Transient Spaces:
Building Shelter in Crisis
Contexts,” taught by Adjunct
Assistant Professor Loukia
Tsafoulia, students developed
strategies for disaster response
that show economic and
social sustainability through
community integration strategies
and a systems approach. It
Re-Action, A socially Reflective Approach,
provided alternative ways for Prosfygika Alexandras Complex,
addressing every day, context- by Vionna Wai, Roberto Zhang, Emanuel Gjini,
from Loukia Tsafoulia’s
based issues that are less “Transient Spaces: Building Shelter in Crisis Contexts,”
Advanced Studio 8, Spring 2017
dependent on the global relief
industry.
How can design disrupt
power structures in relief
response? Could our methods
adapt to the ever-increasing
need for sheltering amidst
109
TRANSIENT SPACES
ongoing crisis? How can
architects optimize the capacity
of people in acute need of
protection while ensuring a high
degree of livability and a sense
of community and equality?
Issues of temporality and space
adaptation were investigated.
Tactics of appropriation,
severance, fragmentation, and
cultural identification of urban
space were examined as forces
and reactions in both physical
space and ideological position.
The studio researched four
distinct sites in Athens, Greece
in terms of temporality, ranging
from hyper-temporal hotspots to
refugee camps as well as outside
of camp contexts within dense
urban settings. “Schisto” a former
military camp on the outskirts
of Athens and “Skaramagkas”
a former shipyard facility, are
newly developed camps the size
of small towns hosting people
for an indeterminate amount of
time. In the center of Athens,
Weaving Communities, Transitioning an existing
refugee camp into an integrated community, Schisto Camp, the studio engaged with the
by Juan Vallejo, Emir Abdul-Emir, Daniella Vega-Ortiz, Samantha Ong,
from Loukia Tsafoulia’s “Transient Spaces: Building Shelter in Crisis Contexts,” “Eleonas” Camp, a former
Advanced Studio 8, Spring 2017 industrial neighborhood and
the “Prosfygika Alexandras”
complex, built to host the 1922
Asia Minor disaster refugees.
Students identified new
languages to bridge across the
various actors, organizations, and
operational forces on these sites,
110
CITYWORKS X
by employing new data sets,
mapping flexible infrastructures,
and addressing a persistent lack
of communication that their
research revealed.
To establish bridges
between academic research
and the various professionals
involved in the humanitarian
support mechanisms, the studio
connected with members
from the NGO Danish Refugee
Council, the Greek Ministry
of Immigration Policy, and the
UNHCR. This interdisciplinary
inquiry triggered the Transience
Spaces collaborative project,
as a way to rethink disciplinary
boundaries and as a forum of
scientific, historical, cultural
studies, and creative works
that embody ephemerality and
nuance.
Students’ work submitted
to the international competition
Rethinking The Future
Sustainability Awards 2017 was
awarded in the Urban Design
category.
In the advanced design
studio “The Social Impact
Startup Studio: Tools of
Transition” taught by Adjunct
Associate Professor Suzan Wines,
students applied their spatial and
social planning skills, strategic
thinking, and design acumen to
long-term humanitarian solutions
111
TRANSIENT SPACES CITYWORKS X

Stephanie Salazar and the teachXchange team in Suzan Wines’s

“The Social Impact Startup Studio: Tools of Transition”
Advanced Studio 8, Spring 2017

112 113
TRANSIENT SPACES
that empower specifically
because they are nomadic.
Students designed educational
“tools of transition” to mitigate
the stagnation and suffering
that accompanies protracted
displacement by equipping
people with the capacity to
self-educate. These tools would
provide knowledge, cultivate
useful skills and increase access
to critical information while
empowering and improving
the lives of displaced people
on a daily basis in anticipation
of a productive resettlement.
The goal was to create long-
term solutions to a need that is
often neglected in emergency
situations. Unlike shelter, learning
is easily transportable and
ethically undeniable, making
the investment in educational
tools an essential long-term
contribution to post-crisis
recovery.
The studio operated like
a research and development
lab, leveraging teamwork as an
intrinsic part of the innovation
process while tapping into
resources and expertise across
the CCNY campus and our NGO
consultants. Over the course of
the semester, students identified
a variety of real and critical
114
problems that needed solving
based on their research, meetings
and interviews with consultants,
NGOs, potential customers, and
beneficiaries. The five problems
that the students tackled are
language barriers to education;
clean air and sanitation in
informal settlements; socio-
emotional development and
empowerment through problem
solving skills; cyber-bullying; and
the need for a universal platform
for the exchange of educational
resources among temporary aid
workers in emergency situations.
Students submitted their
proposals to the Zahn Innovation
Center–a startup incubator on
CCNY’s campus, for the 2018
Innovation Challenge and won
three out of four prizes in the
Social Impact category. One team
took second place in the final
stage of the competition.
Transient Spaces is
organized by Loukia Tsafoulia,
Marina Correia and Suzan Wines,
with the vital help from SSA
students, Samantha Ong, Emir
Abdul Emir and Juan Vallejo.
CITYWORKS X
Acknowledgements
Graphic Design
Manuel Miranda Practice
Concept
Cesare Birignani and Julio Salcedo-Fernandez
Managing Editor
Sean Weiss
Editorial Assistant
Mary Gilmartin
We are grateful for the support of Interim
Dean Gordon Gebert and Camille Hall, SSA Director
of Administration and Finance. We would like to thank
Graduate Program Directors Hillary Brown, Denise
Hoffman Brandt, Bradley Horn, and Michael Sorkin for
providing the visual and textual materials showcasing
the graduate programs. Undergraduate Coordinator
Jeremy Edminston graciously provided the text for the
BArch Program. Thanks to Fran Leadon, MUD student
Sara Althohamy, and BArch Student Solomon Oh for
having collected so many of the images included here.
We appreciate the contributions of faculty members
Marina Correia, Julio Salcedo-Fernandez, Loukia
Tsafoulia, Christian Volkmann, June Williamson, and
Suzan Wines who dedicated so much of their time in
writing the essays. Finally, we thank the students of
the SSA for all of their hard work in creating the stellar
projects featured in CWX.
ISBN: 978-1-7327395-0-5
City College New York 115
Acknowledgements CITYWORKS X

The City University of Shawn Ciro Cuono Marcha Johnson Ivan Rosa June Williamson
New York Administration
Rickenbacker Adjunct Assistant Professor Adjunct Professor Adjunct Associate Professor Associate Professor
Director of The J. Max Bond (former faculty) (former faculty)
James B. Milliken Center, Associate Professor
Michael King Susan Wines
Chancellor Eliana Dotan Adjunct Assistant Professor Jonathan Scelsa Adjunct Associate Professor
Michael Sorkin Adjunct Lecturer
Andrew Lavallee
Adjunct Assistant Professor
Farzam Yazdanseta
The City College of Director of the Graduate (former faculty) (former faculty)
New York City Adjunct Professor Adjunct Assistant Professor
Urban Design Program,
University of New York Distinguished Professor
Howard Duffy Brett Seamans (former faculty)
Administration Adjunct Associate Professor Fran Leadon Adjunct Lecturer
(former faculty) Associate Professor (former faculty) Staff and Advisors
Faculty
Dr. Vincent
Alfred Eatman Philip Lee Catherine Seavitt Hannah Borgeson
Boudreau Danae Alessi Adjunct Associate Professor
President Adjunct Lecturer
Adjunct Professor Nordenson Graduate Student Services
Robin Elmslie Osler Quardean Associate Professor Manager
Dr. Tony Liss Venesa Alicea
Interim Provost Adjunct Professor Lewis-Allen Matthew Seibert Carolina Colon
Adjunct Assistant Adjunct Lecturer Lecturer Office Assistant
The City College of New York
Professor, CCNY SSA Alan Feigenberg (former faculty)
Bernard and Anne Spitzer
Architect Licensing Advisor Professor Fabian Llonch Camille Hall
School of Architecture Jacob Alspector Albert Foyo
Associate Professor Meg Studer Director for Finance and
Lecturer Administration
Leadership
Associate Professor Adjunct Professor Ivan Markov (former faculty)
Aybars Asci Peter Gisolfi
Associate Professor Arnaldo Melendez
Caitlin Swaim Admissions and Academic
Gordon A. Gebert Adjunct Assistant Professor Professor Christian Martos Adjunct Lecturer Advisor
Interim Dean, Professor Adjunct Assistant Professor
Ali Askarinejad Domingo Gonzales (former faculty)
Michael Miller
Julio Salcedo- Director of Fabrication Labs, Adjunct Lecturer Frank Melendez Michael Tantala Director of Operations
Adjunct Assistant Professor
Fernandez Henry Grosman
Assistant Professor Adjunct Professor
Chair, Associate Professor Ahu Aydogan Sara Morales
Adjunct Associate Professor Pablo de Miguel Elisabetta Terragni Admissions and Academic
Assistant Professor
Hillary Brown (former faculty) Adjunct Assistant Professor Associate Professor Advisor
Director of M.S. Program Nandini Bagchee Marta Gutman Pinki Mondal Anthony Titus Taida Sainvil
in Stustainability in the Urban Associate Professor Professor Adjunct Professor Library Coordinator
Environment, Professor Adjunct Lecturer
Cesare Birignani Athanasios Haritos Donald Mongitore Loukia Tsafoulia Nilda Sanchez-
Jeremy Edmiston Assistant Professor Adjunct Associate Professor Adjunct Professor
Coordinator of the Bachelor
(former faculty)
Adjunct Assistant Professor Rodriguez
Architecture Program, Lance Jay Brown Matthias Neumann Division Chief of the
Associate Professor Albert Vecerka
Professor Daniel Hauben Adjunct Leturer Adjunct Associate Professor
Architecture Library, Assistant
Professor
Denise Hoffman M.T. Chang Adjunct Lecturer
Irma L. Ostroff
Brandt Christian Volkmann Nicole Smith
Assistant Professor Ali C. Höcek Adjunct Professor Associate Professor
Director of Graduate Adjunct Associate Professor Assistant to the Chair
Timothy M. Collins Andrea Parker
Landscape Architecture Lee Weintraub Erica Wszolek
Program, Associate Professor Adjunct Assistant Professor Leonard Hopper Adjunct Lecturer Associate Professor
Adjunct Professor Executive Associate to the
Bradley Horn Marina Correia Vyjayanthi Rao Dean
Srdjan
Director of Graduate Adjunct Assistant Professor David Hotson Adjunct Lecturer
Architecture Program, (former faculty) Adjunct Professor Jovanovic Weiss
Associate Professor (former faculty)  Quilian Riano Adjunct Associate Professor
Marie Debije Counts Adjunct Lecturer
Adjunct Assistant Professor Andrea Johnson (former faculty)
Sean Weiss
(former faculty) Adjunct Lecturer Assistant Professor

116 Spitzer School of Architecture

 CIT
SPITZER
SCHOOL of
ARCHI
TECTURE

Y
WO
RKS
X 2014 to 2017