This studio examines the Catskills as a landscape already dense with cultural, aesthetic, and ecological meaning. Its identity has been shaped by nineteenth century discourses of the sublime, the Hudson River School, and Transcendentalism. In the absence of European architectural antiquity, American artists like Thomas Cole transformed wilderness into a cultural monument, making mountains and forests vehicles for national identity, spirituality, and environmental consciousness. This lineage, articulated philosophically by Emerson and Thoreau who defined nature as the arena for American spirituality and personal autonomy, moves from overwhelming spectacle toward sustained attention. Landscape reveals itself not merely as scenery but as atmosphere, memory, deep time, and spiritual ground. Dwelling here is an ongoing dialogue with natural reclamation, a condition framed by Georg Simmel’s “The Ruin,” which locates aesthetic equilibrium in the balance between human artifice and entropy.

At the center lies Tremper, an 182-acre site in the Catskills being developed as a mission driven sanctuary where art, ecology, and hospitality converge. The project is grounded in the conviction that community benefit and economic sustainability reinforce each other. Students will design a 35-room wellness retreat, expand an existing art center, and build a multipurpose ecology facility as interdependent typologies. Drawing on Japanese “town as hotel” models, the art center and hotel form a complementary pair. The hotel provides privacy and seclusion, while the art center delivers activation and cultural life, addressing rural hospitality’s chronic off-season emptiness. Ecology sits between them as a bridge, integrating culture, landscape, and human experience into a single system.

The studio embraces total design, carrying interiors, furniture, and objects holistically with architecture. Students will design an integrated object of encounter, such as a piece of furniture, handrail, window detail, or lighting fixture, where the smallest detail carries the same conceptual weight as the largest gesture, echoing Wagner’s Gesamtkunstwerk at site scale.

Readings in aesthetic theory, phenomenology, and Eastern spatial traditions, including the tea ceremony, engawa, ma, and borrowed scenery, frame the interrogation of landscape and dwelling. The studio questions whether communion with nature emerges through tolerated disharmony, drawing on the “savage” as aesthetic imperfection, Boym’s ruinophilia, and Shinohara’s anti-functional spaces.

Two field trips anchor this inquiry. A site visit to the Catskills grounds the studio in atmospheric and cultural reality. A trip to Porto, Portugal, examines works by Távora, Siza, and Souto de Moura, offering critical perspective on how regional traditions are interpreted through modern architectural language. Evaluation considers conceptual depth, design rigor, clarity of expression, and coherence of the final proposal. Active participation in desk critiques, pin-ups, and field trips is required.

This studio is supported by the Kenzō Tange Visiting Chair in Architecture and Urban Design.