Representing the School of Architecture, you’ll find a range of projects that differ in their specialty, including experimental structures, sustainability, and curriculum development, but which all exemplify the critical thinking, expertise, and innovation for which the school is renowned.
Farzam Yazdanseta
School of Architecture, Undergraduate Architecture
Geometry served as a key element in the emergence of Iranian architecture, which can only be examined alongside the cultural dimensions from which it emerged. Banned Drawings further demonstrates the relationship between the evolution of Iranian architecture, geometry, and mathematics with the political patterns of the Persian Empire.
Erica Asinas, MS City and Regional Planning ’20
School of Architecture, Graduate Center for Planning and the Environment (GCPE)
Through an existing conditions analysis, participatory research, and local stakeholder engagement of the community, Building Equity through Managed Retreat: A Case Study on Edgemere, Queens, explores solutions for frontline communities by integrating community-driven healing, an economically just transition and reparations in adaptation policy and practice.
Alexandra Barker and Olivia Vien
School of Architecture, Graduate Architecture and Urban Design
Curriculum Development in Architecture for Pratt Young Scholars introduces students to a series of design approaches to conceptualize architectural investigations using the most current techniques and methods of fabrication, and is based on the Pratt GAUD MARCH first semester studio course.
Maria Sieira
School of Architecture, Graduate Architecture and Urban Design
We bring architecture into a middle school math curriculum, and new teaching practices develop into new paradigms for school design. Our focus group consists of 22 young mathematicians in 6th, 7th, and 8th grade.
Duks Koschitz
School of Architecture, Center for Design Research in Architecture
Innovative Construction Assemblies investigates what kind of assembly systems can be developed that are fabricated in 2D and assembled in 3D without scaffolding or form work.
Jeffrey Anderson, Graduate Architecture and Urban Design and Jason C Vigneri-Beane, Undergraduate Architecture
School of Architecture
Local Eyes is an architectural platform that increases environmental awareness by bridging physical and virtual worlds. As a prototype cladding unit that turns architecture into hardware and software for harvesting data, it integrates sensors and augmented reality triggers that relay environmental information to dynamically updated digital visualizations.
Samuel Pressman, MS Sustainable Environmental Systems ’20
School of Architecture, Graduate Center for Planning and the Environment (GCPE)
Money Does Grow on Trees creates a framework for an educational and interactive digital platform to enhance urban well-being via greening land valuation and scaling ecosystem services in communities.
Haresh Lalvani
School of Architecture, Center for Experimental Structures
All matter–oceans, land, atmosphere, humans, animals, plants, food, materials, products, buildings–is made from 118 known chemical elements. These elements are ordered in the periodic table of elements taught worldwide. Over 1000 different periodic tables have been proposed since Mendeleev originated the idea 150 years ago. If nature is one, shouldn’t there be ONE periodic table?
School of Architecture, Center for Experimental Structures
The Center for Experimental Structures explores hydronics architecture, actuated structures, hypersurfaces, minimal surfaces, and other experiments that combine morphology with various building and fabrication technologies, the physical as well as the digital.
Ariane Harrison
Graduate Architecture and Urban Design
Pollinator decline poses a major threat to the global agricultural food supply; yet while honeybee decline is well documented, 90 percent of the planet’s bees are native bees, responsible for 75 percent of non-agricultural pollination globally. Honeyless, hiveless, and stingerless, these primary pollinators provide a vital ecosystem service yet remain poorly understood: their discreet dwelling and diversity make them hard to identify. The Pollinators Pavilion addresses this gap by bringing architecture, machine learning technology, and conservation ecology together to prototype an analogous habitat / field station with an embedded monitoring system using machine learning to automate insect identification of solitary bees.
Niyousha Zaribaf, M.Arch ’21
School of Architecture
Urban Houses Morphogenesis aims to regenerate the urban block through a series of experiments, comprehending and applying the theory of morphogenesis and developing the neighborhood into a space to create a series of computational iterative models, either done in 3D modeling (Rhino) or a scripting environment (Grasshopper). These results are then analyzed and evaluated according to optimum values and referred to as multi-fitness criteria, which will be the evolutionary goal.
Niyousha Zaribaf, M.Arch ’21
School of Architecture
Deteriorated areas in cities sometimes have value, whether social, climatic, geographical, cultural, historical, which cannot be disregarded in designing around them. Urban Housing Redevelopment asks which design strategies should be considered toward housing in these areas?
Meta Brunzema
School of Architecture, Graduate Architecture and Urban Design
In dense and growing cities like New York, meaningful community participation in planning and urban design projects is essential to further equitable and sustainable development. Our team is co-developing a set of interactive digital tools—WE_GENERATE (beta)—that democratize neighborhood planning in Chinatown by empowering citizens to visualize and shape complex urban projects, analyze trade-offs in real-time, and make persuasive data-backed choices that further resilience, preservation, and urban justice.
Hannah Anousheh and Lidia Henderson, MS City and Regional Planning ’20
School of Architecture
Women in Puerto Rico have been on the frontlines of the efforts to change their island from the inside out. Women on the Frontlines of the Resiliency-Building Efforts in Puerto Rico explores several women-led initiatives to transform Puerto Rico into a community-led, just, equitable, and sustainable utopia.
Dale Cohen
School of Architecture, Undergraduate Architecture
Writing Women Architects on Film is a 1-minute student film competition about women architects, defined expansively. This project seeks to demonstrate that women have been vital to the practice of architecture for decades, while radically under recognized.
Ashley Simone
School of Architecture, Undergraduate Architecture
Seed Grantee 2019-2020
[Re]presenting Tarará is a research project that began with the intention of reconstructing the architectural genealogy of Tarará, a small community in Habana del Este, located nineteen km east of central Havana. The project, represented here in photographs that later will be adjoined by text, developed from interviews and site visits that have uncovered details regarding the history, transformation, and contemporary condition of the residential enclave, which was built during the 1940s and 50s for upper-middle-class Cubans and later appropriated by the regime of Fidel Castro before falling into disrepair.
