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introduction |
Columbia University's Graduate School of Architecture, Planning, and
Preservation fosters an energetic, wide ranging culture of architectural
research that combines state-of-the art design with state-of-the-art
scholarship. Its parallel programs explore different aspects of one
open-ended field: urban society and its future. The presence of distinct
areas of study within the School enables a critical understanding of
the forces that affect the building of spaces and the making of cities,
encouraging the formulation of original concepts, designs, and policies.
The School aims to develop students' artistic and intellectual abilities
so as to prepare them to deal responsibly and inventively with the issues
challenging urban society today. The School's programs create and test new strategies in a restless exploration that results in an ongoing debate about the roles of the architect, urban designer, preservationist, planner, and developer. Long an international leader in refining the future paths of these disciplines, the School absorbs and contributes to the vitality of New York City's art and culture, its outstanding practitioners and scholars. The advanced architectural design studios represent one of the most thought provoking parts of this school-wide investigation of urban society and its future. Each teacher offers a unique program of design research, and the result of each studio is an intense celebration of architecture's capacity to change the way we think about the world. Mark Wigley, Interim Dean |
 Installation of Sulan Kolatan's class at the Stazione Leopolda, Florence (photos by: Omar Cotza)  Installation of Yehuda Safran's class at the Stazione Leopolda, Florence (photos by: Omar Cotza) |
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| AIA
- Architectural Intelligence Agency Instructor: Sulan Kolatan with Gregory Okshteyn |
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The Living City: Losse Knight In choosing to work with software specifically created for industrial design and for film animation rather than for architectural design, our studio explicitly engages the issue of cross-categorical pollination by problematising it in the design process itself. In this way, the architectural design process is affected by what we call a "productive inadequacy". The design tool is not entirely -but somewhat- inadequate in that it has not been made to address the conventions of architectural design but rather those of another kind of design. It is, as it were, like having to write with a knife. One has to rethink "writing" through the logic of "cutting" to arrive at "carving". The idea of inadequacy as a trigger for inventive and continual categorical transformation is intriguingly presented in Deleuze's description of Vladimir Slepian's Man-becoming-Dog problem. In a similar sense, addressing architectural problems through non-architectural software "uproots" the specified rules of the design process. New rules have to be invented. Insofar as the use of a dog nozzle to tie a shoe produces a complex chimerical system of man-dog categories, the use of simulated effects -to name but one tool of the software- in order to create a building envelop or structure yields a complex chimerical system of architecture-film-product categories. The studio's intent is to introduce computational methodologies into architectural design through the use of self-organizing system software. Play is combined with analytical and speculative thought to diagram and construct architectures without fixed scale but with set rules. Scalability is to be understood as referring to a diagram (set of rules) capable of being translated into many scales and -by extension- contexts. Particularly viable scales and contexts are those where performative affinities to the diagram do already exist. The studio is structured in 5 phases focusing on Investigative Play, Identity Programming, Dynamic Chimerization, Variable Inhabitation and Performative Taxonomy. Special thanks to Professor Paul A. Kruszewski and BGT BioGraphic Technologies, Inc. for generously letting us use AI. Implant software without which this research would not have been possible. |
Sulan
Kolatan is a principal of KOL/MAC Studio in New York. She has taught
at the Graduate School of Architecture, Planning and Preservation at
Columbia University since 1990. She divides her time between teaching,
research and practice -with an emphasis on digital design and production
methodologies. Her work has been presented internationally through publications,
symposia and exhibitions. She frequently lectures and guest-teaches
at some of the most distinguished institutions around the world. The
projects of KOL/MAC Studio are part of the permanent collections of
the MoMA in New York, the DAM in Frankfurt and the FRAC in Orleans. Gregory Okshteyn received a Bachelor of Architecture Degree from Pratt Institute in Brooklyn, New York. Upon receiving a Masters of Science Degree in Advanced Architectural Design from Columbia University in 2003, Okshteyn founded GOstudioS, a new design practice based in New York focusing on architectural conceptualization, dynamic interactive environments, and innovative fabrication techniques. In addition to his practice, Okshteyn currently teaches with Sulan Kolatan at Columbia University’s GSAP. |
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| City-Fragment
in the Hudson River (Fall 01) Instructors: Yehuda Safran, Steven Holl (T.A. Martin Melioransky) |
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Project by Edward Lalonde A city, according to St. Augustine, is a group of people joined together by their love of the same object. The City Fragments studio, in the Fall 2001, was born during the summer when the New York Times published a series of articles in praise of the Hudson Valley. These articles were published in order to draw the attention of the public to the valley's scenery celebrated in the Hudson School of Landscape Painting Above all, these writers indicate that unless an effort is made, the landscape heritage of this region will be forever destroyed, by the greed of entrepreneurs and the need of the local community to raise sufficient revenue from new development. Selecting a site bordering the river, which was for sale at the real estate olfice for some years, we have framed the project in the economic as well as cultural, social and political context. Our site of final choice was located between Rhine Cliff and Hyde Park, a short walk from the Hudson River, with mixed vegetation, wood and rocks. Indeed the contact with the riverside could be made only through a wooden pedestrian bridge above the railway line. We speculated that in the near future with a fast train (France's TGV: Train of Great Speed) this community, about an hour and a half train ride from Manhattan with today's transport, would become reachable in less than an hour. We suggested that a design of high urban density, at that distance from Manhattan, could maintain the landscape intact and offer an urban feel, with the supplementary advantage of providing sufficient revenue to local authorities. In addition, we felt some thought should be given to public amenities, such as cinemas, workshops, cafes, restaurants - not to speak of the employment opportunities within the complex, even though we considered the potential dwellers primarily those among us who are fortunate enough to be able to pursue their chosen profession from a distance. |
Steven
Holl founded Steven Holl Architects in New York in 1976 and Pamphlet
Architecture in 1976. SHA work includes the internationally renowned
KIASMA, New Museum of Contemporary Art (Helsinki, 1998). Current projects
of SHA include the expansion and renovation of the Natural History Museum
of Los Angeles County and a new building for the Department of Art and
Art History at the University of Iowa. SHA work was recently exhibited
at Palladio's Basilica in Vicenza, Vienna's Architektur Zentrum and
American Academy in Rome. Yehuda Emmanuel Safran is director of Theoretical Studies at the Architectural Association and Goldsmith's College, School of Art. He is fellow of the Chicago Institute of Architecture and Urbanism (1989-90) and member of the College International de Philosophie, Paris. He is curator of Adolf Loos Exhibition for the Arts Council of Great Britain (1985) and Frederick Kiesler at the AA (London, 1999), and author of a monograph on Mies van der Rohe (Gustavo Gili, 2000). |
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| City-Fragment
in the Beijing periphery (Fall 02) Instructor: Yehuda Safran (T.A. Carla Leitao) |
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Project by Carla Leitao We will create a new reality of contemporary urban transformation. We will take on board a minimum of general and all-embracing policies, rejecting the idea that the production of laws and regulations is a necessary condition for the transformation of the inhabitation of territory. In the absence of explicit public policies, we can not rely on urban prototypes, or the conventional urban planning which cultivates a constant tension among single building units and the urban fabric in its entirety. It requires no less than the invention of a new urban organism, and new habitation typologies without ignoring the potential and suitability of existing urban materials. The city fragments project in Beijing is conceived as a potential model for dealing with a number of conflicting forces and desires. We believe that architecture can redeem itself by transcending all other conditions, cultivating its own vocabulary, and phrases without precedent could emerge. The idea of the city as the larger, immense city in which we live and work wherever we are, whenever we travel on a train, a plane, or a boat, their availability, is understood as part of city life - this thought creates the phenomenon of the "extended city". Keeping in mind: Plato, Thomas Moore, Rabelais, Fourier as the city itself was and is the first realized human utopia. If we were to propose a new urban organization it entails the understanding of a different mode of occupying the land. Buckminster Fuller coined the expression: spaceship Earth. It entails a "hand book" or a manual for living together, a model of thinking that could multiply without causing the deterioration in either the environment or human organisms. This studio is inspired by the belief that we are capable of responding to emerging new forms of life which require their own specific and necessary communicating vessels in the magnetic field. |
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| Hotel
in Beacon (Spring 03) Instructors: Yehuda Safran, Steven Holl (T.A. Carla Leitao) |
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Project by Carla Leitao Radical software a generation ago gave rise to the works of artists such as Nam June Paik and Dan Graham. The electronic delay, using video as opposed to film, allowed Vito Acconci to produce a mirror like, specular effect. Could we learn from devices in other fields? Could we digitally reimagine, reinvent the "house" or the "hotel," for example? Perhaps such new devices will offer not so much a version of an existing model but an invention that is capable of taking full advantage of an entirely new technology which gives prefabrication a new lease of life. Digital interpretation of materials and construction enables us not only to cut costs in accordance with an industrial mode of production but builds into our thinking a computational dimension which may transform the building processes themselves. The site, on the Hudson River, suggests a design of high urban density, at a short distance from Manhattan, which could maintain the landscape intact and offer an urban feel. This hotel should be conceived as part of the idea of the city not only as an autonomous urban entity, but as the larger, immense city, the extended city. This is not only the geographic locale of out houses and offices, but as extensions other places in which we live and work while we travel, for example, which will be understood as part of urban life. This project could be transformed by the action of a partially autonomous sub-system capable of relatively independent intervention at a certain scale. Our aim is to uncover new connections between the singularity of the human body and the environment as mediated by your proposal. |
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