Courses
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New York New York
Kersten Geers, David Van Severen
There is a famed anecdotal evidence that designing a tower is easier than designing a chair. The boastful comparison was rather meant to aggrandize architects’…
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Baizo House – Perception Description Representation
On October 8, 1980, New York band Talking Heads released Remain in Light, their fourth album. The album's final track, "The Overload", was written in…
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Percent for Art: A New Museum of Modern Art in Warsaw
In the option studio, we design a new building for the Museum of Modern Art in Warsaw by re-using the structure of a large-scale shopping…
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Nexus of Ecology, Education, and Design – A new School of Design on an Island at Yangtze Estuary
This studio project touches upon two important areas relevant to our collective future— ecology and education. This is a future in which we must change…
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Parisian Knees
There is little doubt that density is reshaping our cities, at a furious pace and with vast implications for urban life. As far-reaching as these…
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Earth Curvature: Context as Material / How to Read Place
Students will craft their own architectural language, guided by personal ethics and an original vision towards a sustainable architecture that also strives to timelessly resonate…
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Forgotten Fort Kongestein
This studio will explore potential new attitudes toward historical preservation, transformation, and adaptive reuse. The location is Fort Kongestein on the Eastern Coast of Ghana,…
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Housing as a Sustainable Common
Throughout the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, architects were the driving force of progress in developing housing typologies that would enable people to live more socially…
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From Within to Without [M1]
This studio will explore the notion of interiority in the public realm by reimagining an existing mid-sized commercial building. As e-commerce, shifting consumer habits, and…
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Second Opportunities in Architecture [M1]
Iñaki Abalos, Renata Sentkiewicz
In its historical context, architecture has demonstrated an extensive capacity for the adaptation of typologies or forms to different sites, programs, and circumstances. In opposition…
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Do-It-Anyway: Place, Tectonics, and Time [M1]
In this studio, students will design and fabricate a sleeping space at one-to-one scale in the period of seven weeks. Why? We are living…
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Transforming the Urban Villa with Private Garden into a Contemporary Typology [M1]
The studio will deal with the strategies for the transformation of a coveted but obsolete architectural type, the urban villa in the park, keeping its…
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Revisiting Utopia: Bio-Based Megastructures in the Texas Desert [M2]
Regine Leibinger, Stefan Sauter, Karen Stein
The social and political tumult of the 1960s prompted a resurgence of utopian architecture. Rising fuel prices, a growing dependence on technology and, in particular,…
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Exploring Collective Bonds: Creating Spaces of Solidarity [M2]
In what way can design serve as a conduit, spanning the gap between heterogeneous groups and binding them through their shared collective endeavors? How do…
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Necessary Architecture [M2]
Our cities are filled with buildings–why more? With our discipline about to split into activists and professionals, we need to find purpose for architecture. We…
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Monumental Affairs [M2]
As architecture and urbanism continues to grapple with exposure from atypical authors the need for constructive examination becomes more pressing. Global terror and dissent typically…
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AQUA INCOGNITA: Designing for extreme climate resilience in Monterrey, MX
Aqua Incognita continues to engage students in grappling with water-resilient urbanization processes, through the design of nature-based [1] reparative actions in the water-scarce region of…
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Island of Enchantment: Atmospheric Grounds
What we believed to be the reliable and predictable nature of the atmosphere made tangible through the phenomena of weather no longer holds true ……
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Beyond Borders Life Abounds
Borders are everywhere: between countries, between populations, between outside & inside, between disciplines, between genders… In early childhood, we see a being in the making,…
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Harnessing The Future; How the Internet’s Digital Infrastructure Influences the Global Landscape
Thomas Oslund, Catherine Murray
Studio Challenge: Digital infrastructure has become the connective tissue of today’s civilization weaving together culture, community, and humanity from a historical compendium of events…
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Biospheric Urbanism – Changing Climates
The Option Studio ‘Biospheric Urbanism’ explores how cities can be made more resilient in the light of the ongoing changes of climate. Conceived as a…
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Mar·gi·na·lia. Marginality and redemption in New York City, alternative landscapes for Rikers Island
Rikers Islands stands as a critical site to investigate scenarios of climate change mitigation, energy transition, community centered models of land regeneration and, eventually, experimenting…
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Detroit Re-Connected: Reparative Mobilities in the Motor City
Ten years ago, Detroit Future City, a citywide strategic framework plan was released, addressing six urban elements including economic prosperity, neighborhoods, land use, city systems,…
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The Rohingya Camps; Permanence in Transition
The Rohingya refugee camps in southeastern Bangladesh host the largest refugee population in the world. The Rohingyas are a Muslim, ethnic-minority people who live in…
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Sao Paulo Reaction: Vacant Infralandscape
Fernando Viegas, Cristiane Muniz
This Option Studio is about dissolving the rigid limits between architecture, landscape and urbanism and it’s about Sao Paulo and its vacant infrastructures. We propose…