After Belonging examined the objects, spaces and territories of our transforming condition of belonging. The global circulation of people, information and goods has destabilized what we understand by residence, questioning spatial permanence, property and identity—a crisis of belonging.
Movement and exchange brings greater accessibility to ever-new commodities and further geographies. However, simultaneously, circulation also promotes growing inequalities for large groups who are kept in precarious states of transit. After Belonging is a thorough analysis of the evolution of global landscapes and societies and considers questions and issues surrounding our ever-changing sense of belonging.
The Triennale examined both our attachment to places and collectivities as well as our relation to the objects we produce, own, share and exchange. It analyzed the architectures entangled in these definitions through a selection of projects, texts and case studies.
Arctic Negotiations,Advanced Design Studio at Columbia University GSAPP, Fall 2015, with Gro Bonesmo
Impermanence is the constant condition of the arctic archipelago of Svalbard. A remote melting pot of cultures, Svalbard’s natural and scientific extremes reveal a sensor of global tendencies. As these landscapes are transforming rapidly, its future belong to all of us. The ice melting in the North redefines accessibility, opening new potential sea routes for commerce, research, resource extractions and tourism. This geopolitical complexity, with its environmental consequences, provided the frame for a studio where these conflicting stakeholders, interests and settlements with its different temporalities, were explored.
In Service of: Culture of Work at Play, Advanced Design Studio at Columbia University GSAPP, Summer 2015, with Phu Hoang
The studio was based on the notion of service and its changing form in architecture, urban and, of course, social domains. Service is defined as the performance of work or activity for another—in cities, it is in the form of high speed broadband internet, hotel concierge information, or even architecture work. In the global capital of New York City, a robust service economy takes many different forms as it continues to replace manufacturing as the city’s main economy. The technologically driven growth of New York’s financial, hospitality, media and creative services has produced a “culture of service” that is simultaneously omnipresent and invisible. New York City, transformed into a service city, physically manifests “work” in the food delivery cold rooms of luxury condominium towers, the communal workspace of boutique hotels, and the Amazon delivery lockers embedded within nameless local delis. The studio investigated this “culture of service” to rethink the definition of work in architecture—in doing so, replace the late-modernist categorization of servant and served program organization.
The research and book “Weather in Climate: Schools,” explores the differences inherent in the term “weather in climate”— arguing, essentially, that weather and climate are not the same. Their temporal, dimensional, and political differences are manifested architecturally in a series of studies for near (weather) and distant (climate) futures. Architecture’s relationship to weather is at the core of this book, which asks: what future learning spaces can foster adaptive relationships to the environment, specifically to the weather? The studies are not conceived of as architectural designs; instead, they are organizational models of schools that change according to the weather and the climate.
Borders, Thesis Project, Columbia University GSAPP, William Ware and Saul Kaplan Fellowship for Excellence in Design, 2015