These offices serve as a crucial resource for students, and their location along a primary circulation spine required an innovative use of transparent and translucent materials to keep them visually connected and day lit while still affording the interior spaces some privacy. Acoustically rated windows with varied degrees of transparency were used along the length of the offices to provide light and controlled views to the outside. Interior offices have a related visual treatment, with views of the sky through multiple layers of interior glazing.

The PODs are manufactured and fitted out in an off-site factory and then delivered to site and assembled to create a self-supporting building structure.  The Core Design Team is responsible for developing the design and manufacturing strategy for the prototypical system. Factory, computer controlled production will be utilized to the maximum extent to reduce costs, improve quality and minimize time from conception to reality.  Moving beyond normative means of mass production, the goal is to develop a prototypical responsive system that can produce a variable product.  The system will evolve and develop to become inclusive of many aspects of housing including furnishings, appliances and services moving toward “high performance living.”

Folk art was often produced in small communities around the country reflecting the social and cultural values of the local context unaffected by broader artistic movements. The art objects were often functional and part of everyday life with no pretensions of existing beyond their immediate purpose. The design intention of this residence was to create an environment that would reposition the art not as precious objects in a rarefied museum-like setting but more synthetically in context with the architecture. Various types of shelves were integrated into walls, pockets were built into walls, and openings were formed into cabinets all to create informal settings to store the art on display. Finishes were applied to basic materials (blackened steel, dyed wood, cast in place concrete) that would accentuate their natural properties – these materials would then serve to complement the art and set up episodic scenes to both view the art and choreograph movement through the space.

The focus of the design was a custom graduated perforated ceiling and wall panel system which had the general effect of forming a delicate surface to alleviate the sense of being below ground and the specific effect of forming acoustical zones within the dining room through variable sound absorption.

The integrated design / production process reduced the cost differential between standard and custom produced components allowing the design intentions to respond more specifically to the client and program needs within the given budget. Largely though the ability to streamline the production process of the custom ceiling and wall panels with design drawings that were simultaneously used as cutting paths for the panel fabrication, the project was designed and built in two months.

The NYC HPD Request for Proposals, which had considerable support for innovative housing design, was for the western sector of the site and totaled approximately 100 acres with a target density of 8 units an acre.  The RFP called for the development of market-rate one and two-family houses. The site was owned by the City and was the largest developable tract of land in New York City.  The development was to be a public/private venture in that the housing was to be privately developed market rate housing, the land was donated by the city and the roads and infrastructure subsidized by the state.

This urban design and housing project was commissioned by the Architectural League of New York and Columbia University Graduate School of Architecture as a research proposal in conjunction with an RFP issued by the Housing and Preservation Department for a new housing development in Far Rockaway, New York.