Barnard and Columbia Architecture's New Year Show turns campus inside out

Upper West Side NY

15 February, 2022

2:44 PM

Description

Columbia Daily Spectator BY HANA GALLAGHER FEBRUARY 11, 2022, 12:07 PM Technical drawings, sketches, collages, and 3D models currently line the fourth and fifth floors of Barnard's Diana Center and Louise McCagg Gallery as Barnard and Columbia Architecture transformed the space into a dynamic hotspot of architectural design for its annual New Year Show. Exhibitions of campus turned inside out, indoor-outdoor pigeon habitats, and wearable architecture are only a small sample of the vast repertoire of student work on display. Occupying the walls of the fourth and fifth floor of Diana until Feb. 21, the exhibition showcases the work of architecture students from the fall 2021 semester. A collaborative effort by the entire undergraduate architecture department, artists from each studio design course offered in the fall—from the introductory level to the most advanced—have work on display. Stepping out of the elevator on the fourth floor, visitors are greeted by projects created in a section of Architectural Design: Systems and Materials taught by Todd Rouhe, an adjunct assistant professor of architecture at Barnard. Exploring material assemblies, techniques of fabrication, and systems of organization, this introductory studio design course challenges students to develop core skills of architectural analysis and design experimentation. "[The goal is for students to take] both the more intuitive parts of design thinking and the more controlled and dimension[al] parts of it and put them together into a final product," Rouhe said. Rouhe's section of the exhibition features as much of the students' work as could fit in the limited space. Demonstration models, 3D final drawings, sketches, and diagrams from the course's three main projects are scattered throughout the foyer on walls, windows, ledges, and tables. Spread across the windows are the final products of the first project the class undertook, from a prompt which asked students to create what Rouhe calls an "ad hoc assembly" by taking a furniture prototype such as a stool and manipulating it using 3D modeling to reinvent the object. The majority of the works on display are elements taken from Systems and Materials' final project. For this assignment, students were told to turn a building on campus inside out with the intention of installing it in place of the Low Plaza tent. Rouhe considers the concept of inside and outside a fundamental condition of architecture in its most radical form as a mode of transparency. "It's about exposure. You're either exposing the body to the elements, or maybe you're exposing the activities to everybody else, and that has happened a lot in the last year with the pandemic," Rouhe said. Avery Leal Burke-Doyle, CC '24, took Systems and Materials with Rouhe in fall 2021. For his final project, he challenged himself to turn the John Jay dining hall inside out to create a more socially engaging atmosphere: "I wanted to break down the elements of [John Jay]," Burke-Doyle said. "When you walk in, it's crazy and everyone's going everywhere. But if you think about it, this line is going here, this line is going there, and it's all lined up. So a part of what I tried to do with my project was to standardize it." After going through the preliminary process of 3D digital modeling and sketching, Burke-Doyle landed on a demonstration model that consisted of scaled-up dining hall tables linked together to form crisscrossing paths that snaked around each other. A sophisticated series of drawings of this innovation, entitled "Hungry Vines," is pinned up on the wall of the exhibition, accompanied by a small laser-cut 3D model of the proposed pathways and stacked dining tables. The juxtaposition of organic and geometric forms emerged as other students chose to focus on different parts of campus. One student turned Uris Hall inside out by creating a model that incorporates both carved and stacked elements in a complex structure. Another turned the radio station in Lerner Hall inside out by folding elements of the original floorplan through a central point to create a structure that shifted from a more organic manipulation of the floorplan to a more geometric 3D model. Displayed on the fifth floor is art from another introductory studio design class called Architectural Design: Environments and Mediations. Madeline Schwartzman, an adjunct professor of architecture at Barnard, emphasized the importance of creative thinking in the conception and design of her students' projects on display. "I'd like people to think conceptually about things they never thought of and shed the ideas that had been handed to them, so that they can really become good designers," Schwartzman said. According to Schwartzman, taking an architectural design class is a completely different experience than that of many of the other courses offered by different departments at Barnard and Columbia. The way of thinking necessitated by design is entirely different from other academic fields, requiring academic high achievers to adapt to a new mode of thinking. "While anything is hard work, creative stuff is hard because it's not a line. It's not like you can study and do well. I don't know if anything's a straight line, but design is like a wave," she said. For this reason, the first project assigned to students was to create what Schwartzman calls a "field station." Students had to design something that was both architectural and wearable, developed to document a feature of a site chosen by the student. Lolo Dederer, CC '24, initially created a series of cardboard loops to be worn along her arms and legs that were designed to be a filter for the space around her. Using this as a field station to collect data, Dederer found a corner on campus to observe the movements and interactions of students, which became the inspiration for the creation of an "inhabitable wall." Dederer's final design took the form of an organic, open-ended, yet enclosed 3D space shaped by the overlapping flows of movements, displayed in the exhibition as both a digital model superimposed in the corner of campus Dederer observed and as a small physical model. "[The final design aimed to] reinvent the corner and make a space where pods were more fluid and obliterate the corner from any point in the structure," Dederer said. Several of the final projects from Environments and Mediations are also displayed in the exhibition. These include partnered projects where students were assigned to take the "DNA" or essence of an existing building they had analyzed and design an infrastructure for the city based on that. The purpose of this project was to deal with the reality of the city beyond the student population and consider what kinds of infrastructure people in other parts of the city might want. Students dealt with various aspects of the city, from homeless-friendly infrastructure to animal life. Dederer and her partner decided to focus on the role of pigeons in the city and designed a series of habitats specifically for pigeons in an urban setting, blurring the boundaries between the urban and the natural landscape. "We have this idea that in urban spaces there are certain places they belong and certain places they don't, but the thing with pigeons is they just don't care and they'll go anywhere," Dederer said. One of these habitats was called "Vine," which took the form of a long red tube that snaked from the top of a building, in through the windows and out again, all the way down to the bottom, with landing, feeding, and viewing spaces for pigeons along the way. Images from the pigeon's point of view from the habitat are also included in the display. "The idea was to reassert the pigeon in the daily lives of people both inside and outside their apartment, and to allow the pigeon free rein of indoor and outdoor spaces and blur those boundaries between urban and natural in the city," Dederer said. Dederer characterized the creative process as a series of exploratory stages and stressed the importance of not overthinking. "If you think you know what you want to make, then that's definitely not what you're supposed to be making," Dederer said. A common theme that emerged from this exhibition is the collaborative nature of studio work. According to students and professors alike, working together in the studio has fostered a sense of bonding and community throughout the week of iterative design process, culminating in their final projects. Students learned not just from their professors and TAs but from each other. Despite having vastly different styles and design processes, students reported regular consultation and collaboration with one another on their individual projects as an essential element of working in the studio. The significance of collaboration was echoed by Rouhe. "That's part of the tradition in architecture," he said. "I don't know if I would quite say it's by design, but somehow it got implemented." Staff writer Hana Gallagher can be contacted at [email protected]. Follow Spectator on Twitter @ColumbiaSpec. Founded in 1877, the Columbia Daily Spectator is the independent undergraduate newspaper of Columbia University, serving thousands of readers in Morningside Heights, West Harlem, and beyond. Read more at columbiaspectator.com and donate here.